Trump Administration Lifts Anthropic AI Restrictions After New Security Safeguard
The Trump administration lifted restrictions on Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models after the company added a security measure meant to block certain restricted capabilities, according to WIRED and Anthropic’s public statements.
WIRED reported that the safeguard blocks users who try to access those capabilities and routes the request to Anthropic’s less-advanced Opus 4.8 model. The new measure was tied to behavior identified after an Amazon report raised concerns about how Fable 5 handled some cybersecurity-related prompts.
The dispute began June 12, when the U.S. government issued an export-control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by foreign nationals. Anthropic said the order forced it to disable access for all users because it could not reliably verify nationality in real time.
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Anthropic said June 30 that the export controls had been lifted and that Fable 5 would return globally July 1. The company also said it trained an improved safety classifier that blocks the specific behavior described in the Amazon report in more than 99% of cases.
The policy consequence is significant. The federal government showed it is willing to use national-security and export-control powers to intervene in frontier AI deployment before models reach broad public use.
Anthropic has pushed back on the premise that the incident justified pulling the models, saying the reported bypass was narrow and did not reveal unique Mythos-level cyber capabilities. Still, the resolution leaves a larger question for AI companies: whether future model launches will require negotiated safety approvals before full release.
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