The Anthropic Fable 5 export controls have been lifted, the company announced on Tuesday, ending a dispute with the Trump administration that had cut off access to its most powerful publicly available AI model for nearly three weeks.
‘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 posted to X. ‘We’ll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon. We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.’
A Dispute Rooted in Jailbreak Fears
The trouble began on 12 June, when the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to suspend access to both Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The directive, issued under the signature of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at 5:21 p.m. ET, required an approved export licence from the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) for any foreign persons, whether inside or outside the United States, to access either model, according to analysis by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Anthropic maintained the order was based on a misunderstanding of a possible Fable 5 ‘jailbreak,’ and company officials travelled to Washington D.C. to try to resolve the issue directly with the White House. In a letter to Anthropic Co-Founder and Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown dated 30 June 2026, Lutnick wrote that the BIS had evaluated the ‘diversion risks now presented’ by Fable 5 and Mythos 5 before withdrawing the controls.
The restoration is not uniform across both models. Fable 5 is being returned to Anthropic’s Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork, while Mythos 5 is being restored only for a vetted set of US organisations, BankInfoSecurity reported.
Mythos 5, the latest update to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, had not been widely released before the suspension. Anthropic had previously said the model’s hacking capabilities were too powerful for a broad public release. In April, the company announced that the first iteration, Claude Mythos Preview, would only go to a select group of companies under what it called Project Glasswing, giving organisations time to bolster their cybersecurity defences.
The Legal Battle Running in Parallel
The export control episode is one front in a broader confrontation between Anthropic and the Trump administration. In March, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth formally labelled Anthropic a supply chain risk, reportedly the first time that designation had ever been publicly applied to a US company. The label is generally reserved for firms affiliated with foreign adversaries, PBS NewsHour reported.
Anthropic filed two separate legal challenges to the designation: a 48-page suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and a narrower suit in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, CBS News reported. The appeals court denied Anthropic’s motion for a stay on 8 April 2026, with a three-judge panel ruling the company had ‘not satisfied the stringent requirements’ for that relief, the New York Times reported.
A federal judge subsequently issued a preliminary injunction pausing Hegseth’s designation. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called it ‘a victory for national security.’ The underlying suit remains ongoing.
An IPO on the Horizon
All of this friction is playing out as Anthropic pushes towards a public listing. On 1 June, the company announced it had confidentially filed a draft S-1, the first formal step towards an initial public offering that could occur as soon as this year.
Yahoo Finance, citing beincrypto.com, reported that Anthropic is targeting a valuation of $1.75 to $1.8 trillion and a raise of up to $75 billion in its IPO, which would rank among the largest in history if achieved. CNBC reported, citing SpaceX’s IPO prospectus, that Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 as part of a disclosed compute deal.
President Donald Trump’s recent AI executive order, which allows leading AI companies to voluntarily let the US government review advanced models up to 30 days before public release, came in the wake of the attention drawn by the Mythos model series.
With access to Fable 5 set to resume and the preliminary injunction pausing the supply chain designation, Anthropic heads into its pre-IPO period with its two most acute government conflicts at least temporarily defused. Whether the district court ultimately rules in the company’s favour on the Pentagon designation will determine whether that reprieve holds.