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US lifts export restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5 model

Shirin Ghaffary and Maggie Eastland, Bloomberg News on

Published in Business News

The U.S. government removed foreign access restrictions on Anthropic PBC’s Fable 5 artificial intelligence model, clearing it for wider distribution after the startup resolved the Trump administration’s safety controls.

The Commerce Department had imposed an export control rule via a private letter on June 12 requiring the company obtain U.S. permission before allowing any foreign national, regardless of location, to access those two models and before it could be sent to any destination worldwide. In response, the AI company disabled its powerful Mythos 5 AI model and Fable 5, a similar model intended for wider release.

Anthropic, in a post on X Tuesday, said it had received notice that Commerce was lifting the curbs on access to both models. Some of the restrictions on Mythos had been eased on June 26.

Anthropic said it would restore access to users beginning Wednesday.

“We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models,” the company said in its post.

The key to reversing the export controls was assuaging White House officials’ concerns about limiting the ability of bad actors to circumvent the models’ guardrails.

 

In a letter to Anthropic viewed by Bloomberg, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Anthropic had pledged to “proactively deter and address security risks associated with the models.”

Though now reversed, the department’s export control directive marked the most significant intervention by the U.S. government to date into an AI venture’s operations and sparked legal questions over whether export controls can be used to regulate AI model access. The consequences may still have last impact, as they spotlighted governance risks for Anthropic just as the company is charting its initial public offering.

The move to relax the restrictions also relieves tension that was weighing on Anthropic’s already-tenuous relationship with the Trump administration. The company is suing the Pentagon after Secretary Pete Hegseth moved in March to designate it a supply-chain risk following a messy and unsuccessful contract renegotiation process.

The easing of the curbs on Fable 5 were reported earlier by Politico and Wired.


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