Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lifted export controls on both Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 30, Anthropic announced on X. Fable 5 returned to global availability July 1 across Claude.ai and Claude Code, while Mythos 5 had already been partially restored days earlier to a vetted group of more than 100 US organizations. The reversal caps a two-week standoff that began June 12, when the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals, including its own employees, from accessing either model.
Unable to verify user nationality in real time, the company disabled both models globally. The trigger was a jailbreak technique surfaced by Amazon researchers showing that Fable 5 could be prompted to identify software vulnerabilities and, in one instance, produce exploit code. Anthropic disputed the finding's severity, arguing the capability was comparable to what other publicly available models could already do.
"We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities," Anthropic said in its notice to users. "These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass."
Working with the government, Anthropic trained an improved safety classifier that now blocks the specific technique in more than 99 percent of cases. Users whose requests are blocked get redirected to Claude Opus 4.8 instead. In exchange for the lifted controls, Anthropic agreed to proactively detect and address security risks, submit to government testing protocols and release standards for current and future models, and report any observed malicious activity.
A license is no longer required to export the models. The episode marks the most aggressive use of US export control authority against a commercially deployed AI model, a precedent that rippled across the industry. OpenAI delayed its GPT 5.6 release in response to a similar Trump administration request.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took a hands-off role during the Commerce negotiations, according to people familiar with the talks, helping to reduce friction between the two sides. Co-founder Tom Brown and public policy chief Sarah Heck led the discussions in Washington.
The restoration comes weeks after Anthropic confidentially filed an S-1 draft for an IPO, with its latest valuation topping $900 billion. The company also remains locked in a separate legal battle with the Pentagon after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk in March.
Fable 5 users on Pro, Max, Team, and select enterprise plans will receive up to 50 percent extra weekly usage through July 7 as compensation for the disruption.
