Anthropic restores access to its most powerful AI models after two-week U.S. government standoff

The AI company announced Tuesday the controls had been relaxed, a shift also confirmed by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who wrote on X the government had spent the past two weeks working with Anthropic to ensure Fable had “alignment” with U.S. interests. 

Access to Fable, as well as to a related model produced by Anthropic called Mythos 5, has been restricted since mid June. The U.S. government first banned the models’ use by foreign nationals, but because the ban applied to users regardless of whether they were inside or outside the U.S., and would have also applied to foreign Anthropic employees, the company quickly announced it would be suspending access for all users. 

The Trump administration said the decision had been taken on national security grounds, fearing the possibility hostile actors could “jailbreak” the models and bypass the built-in guardrails designed to prevent malicious use.

But those restrictions turned out to be short-lived. Last week, the government allowed Anthropic to release its Mythos model to a select group of over 100 U.S.-based companies and federal agencies, partially undoing the restrictions. The move mirrored Anthropic’s own strategy when the powerful models were first released. The company first unveiled Mythos to an exclusive group of users earlier this year, before rolling out Fable, a version with the same underlying capabilities with more guardrails and safety filters designed for general use.

Now that both Mythos and Fable are available again to their respective users, Anthropic has effectively reset the frontier AI model landscape to the same status quo it left behind two weeks ago before the government intervened, although the company’s announcement on Tuesday suggested it would work more closely with the White House moving forward.

Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI startups, with a private-market valuation of roughly $1 trillion, said it would “scale up our government collaboration” and work to develop a “shared industry framework” with the administration and the private sector. The company specifically said it would be working with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to set industry standards of how to assess potential vulnerabilities in frontier models. This system would see security researchers and industry partners using a common scoring system of jailbreak severity, and a shared playbook for how to respond.

As for the government, Anthropic’s announcement suggested it will seek to pre-emptively work through national security concerns and avoid future release delays as happened with Mythos and Fable. The company said it would pre-release frontier models for federal authorities to review and test for weaknesses, and implement dedicated research teams of Anthropic employees to ensure its models would not run afoul of government priorities.

“Our hope is that this collaboration, along with our proposed consensus industry framework, will serve as the basis for systematic rules for the whole industry—and even offer the beginning of a template for effective global coordination on the risks and benefits of AI,” the company wrote.

The announcement represents a reset of sorts of Anthropic’s turbulent relationship with the federal government. The Department of Defense designated the company a “supply chain risk” earlier this year, also on national security grounds, after Anthropic refused to allow the Pentagon use of its models for surveillance or autonomous warfare operations.

The company and the government have since seemed to settle into an uneasy truce. Unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Anthropic’s boss Dario Amodei has been resistant to several of the Trump administration’s demands, including, according to Politico, requests for the company to voluntarily pull Fable off the market.

Anthropic’s willingness to work more closely with the government may signal a thawing. The company still relies heavily on federal contracts, but Anthropic’s incentives to appease the Trump administration likely go beyond its direct business dealings with the government. The San Francisco, Calif. company, which was valued at $965 billion in its most recent funding round in May, recently submitted SEC paperwork for a highly anticipated initial public stock offering. Anthropic is in a tight race with rival OpenAI to list shares and tap public market investors, following the blockbuster SpaceX IPO. Open hostility with the Trump administration could stand in the way of Anthropic’s IPO plans, as would the overhanging risk that the government could step in to turn Anthropic’s models off whenever it sees fit.