TL;DR
Lutnick cleared Anthropic to redeploy Mythos 5 to trusted cyber defenders. Fable 5 remains restricted. Talks continue.Lutnick cleared Anthropic to redeploy Mythos 5 to trusted cyber defenders. Fable 5 remains restricted. Talks continue.
The US government has cleared Anthropic to restore access to Mythos 5, its most powerful cybersecurity model, for a select group of trusted partners. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote in a letter to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown that the company’s efforts to address security concerns had “yielded significant progress,” and that the model could be released to “certain trusted partners.” The letter, dated Friday and seen by Bloomberg, does not mention any change to the restrictions on Fable 5, the public-facing version of the same model.
The clearance partially resolves a confrontation that began two weeks ago when the government invoked export controls to force Anthropic to disable both Mythos 5 and Fable 5, citing fears that security guardrails could be circumvented. Anthropic shut off all global access to both models because it could not distinguish foreign nationals from domestic users in real time.
Anthropic said in a statement that Mythos 5 “can be redeployed to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers,” and that it is working to restore their access as quickly as possible. The company said it is “pleased to see this progress” and continues to work with the government to expand Mythos 5 access and make Fable 5 available for general use again.
It remains unclear what steps Anthropic took to satisfy the government’s concerns about jailbreaking. Conversations between the company and the administration are expected to continue over the weekend, with the aim of restoring Fable 5 access soon, according to a person familiar with the matter. Anthropic is also working with the government on a policy framework to handle similar situations in the future.
The negotiations involved senior Anthropic executives, including co-founder Tom Brown, who met with Lutnick and other senior administration officials in recent days, according to Bloomberg. CEO Dario Amodei took a hands-off role in the talks, a move that people close to the discussions said helped reduce friction between the two sides. The approach marks a contrast with Amodei’s direct engagement with the White House earlier this year, when he met with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over the broader Mythos standoff.
The partial restoration arrives on the same day that rival OpenAI limited the release of its own flagship model under similar government pressure, rolling out a preview to partners approved customer by customer by the administration. Together, the two moves suggest the Trump administration is establishing a pattern in which frontier AI models reach the market only through government-managed access lists, at least during an initial window.
Before the shutdown, roughly 200 firms had access to Mythos through Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s invite-only cybersecurity programme, including Apple, Google, Cisco, Nvidia, Microsoft, and JPMorgan Chase. The restriction on Fable 5 means that hundreds of millions of regular users who had access to Anthropic’s most capable public model still cannot use it, weeks after Anthropic had confidentially filed for an IPO at a valuation topping $900 billion.
