US lifts export controls on Anthropic’s top AI models following security review

SAN FRANCISCO, July 1 — Anthropic will soon begin restoring access globally to its most powerful AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the US government lifted a restriction on where they could be released, the company said yesterday.

“We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5,” Anthropic posted on X. “We’ll begin restoring access tomorrow.”

Earlier this month, US authorities blocked access to the models on national security grounds.

Just four days ago, the company said it had received authorization from the government to allow a small group of American cybersecurity firms to access Mythos 5.

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said in a June 26 letter to the company that “Anthropic has worked with the US government to address risks associated with the Covered Models,” Politico reported.

The government abruptly forced Anthropic to cut off access to its two cutting-edge artificial intelligence models on June 12 after discovering vulnerabilities in the safeguards put in place to prevent misuse of the tool.

Like Anthropic, rival AI lab OpenAI has also complied with Washington’s requests to restrict its own release of a new, powerful model called GPT-5.6 to a limited set of approved partners.

“This isn’t quite the process that we think is optimal,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Friday in a post on X, alongside an explanation of the GPT-5.6 launch.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, CIA Director John Ratcliffe compared the capabilities of the most advanced artificial intelligence models to nuclear weapons, in a tacit defence of the Trump administration’s recent hard line on controlling the release of the most powerful AI technology.

“In conversations with many of the president’s other national security and economic security advisors, we’re talking about the impact of these frontier AI models,” Ratcliffe said during a speech at the AWS summit in Washington.

“It would be... not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons,” Ratcliffe said. — AFP