White House lifts export control on Anthropic that froze its most advanced models
By Hadas Gold, CNN
(CNN) — The US government has lifted export controls on Anthropic’s most advanced AI models, the company said Tuesday evening.
“We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5,” Anthropic said in a statement. “We’ll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.”
The statement came shortly after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted on social media about lifting export controls on Fable, one of the Anthropic models in question.
“Over the past two weeks, we have worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US Government and strengthen America’s leadership in AI,” Lutnick said in a post on X.
Fable is a version of Anthropic’s most advanced AI model, known as Mythos, but with extra guardrails to make it suitable for public use.
The export ban, and subsequent negotiations between Anthropic and the administration, highlighted much of the continued regulatory uncertainty around AI, even as the technology advances well beyond current rules.
The government said earlier this month that a trusted partner, which CNN learned was Amazon, found a jailbreak, or a way to get around Fable’s guardrails. (Anthropic said at the time the jailbreaks were “simple” and that “other publicly-available models” had similar work-arounds.)
The Commerce Department then issued an export ban requiring the company to suspend all use by foreign nationals — including Anthropic employees themselves — to try to address the risk. Anthropic disabled customer access to both Mythos and Fable as a result.
After Anthropic and the government worked together to address cyber risks, the Commerce Department last week allowed Anthropic to release Mythos to select government-approved entities. Neither Anthropic nor the Commerce Department detailed what changes Anthropic made to Fable to have the export control ban lifted.
Experts say Mythos can exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities at an unprecedented pace. Anthropic limited its release to a group of key partners “to secure the world’s most critical software.”
The White House also requested OpenAI limit the release of its upcoming GPT 5.6 model to a small number of government-approved partners because of its advanced capabilities. OpenAI said at the time they “don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default.”
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