U.S. Eases Anthropic Block, Allowing Mythos 5 for Select Cyber Defenders

The United States government has partially reversed its export block on Anthropic's most powerful models. According to CNN, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick determined that adequate safeguards now allow certain trusted partners to access Claude Mythos 5, Anthropic's strongest cybersecurity model. The company says it can redeploy the model to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers.

The reversal follows a June 12 directive that, citing national-security authorities, ordered Anthropic to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, including the company's own foreign-national employees. Because there is no reliable way to sort hundreds of millions of users by nationality in real time, Anthropic disabled the models for everyone. The company said the government appeared concerned about a way to bypass Fable 5's safety restrictions (a jailbreak), and argued that one narrow potential jailbreak should not justify withdrawing a model used by hundreds of millions of people.

Senior Anthropic staff then met with Commerce officials in Washington, according to The Globe and Mail, and the government sought assurances that the models could not be used against United States interests. The new arrangement resembles the gated structure OpenAI used for GPT-5.6: full capability for a vetted few, restrictions for everyone else.