U.S. partially reverses Anthropic AI ban for Mythos but keeps Fable 5 off the market

Anthropic says that the U.S. government has finally allowed it to restore Claude Mythos 5. But of course, there's a catch. The rollout is again for a limited set of U.S. organizations that operate and defend critical infrastructure. The company announced this in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

This does not mean that Anthropic's latest frontier models are back to normal availability. Fable 5, which was a tuned version of Mythos 5 for public release, remains unavailable. Anthropic said that it is still working with the government to expand Mythos 5 access and make Fable 5 available again, but there's no timeline.

Reports from Bloomberg and Reuters say that this decision actually came through a letter from the U.S. Commerce Department. According to Reuters, this would allow more than 100 companies and institutions access to Mythos 5.

Reuters also reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s letter removes the need for export licenses for approved companies’ non-US citizen employees, as well as Anthropic’s own non-US citizen employees, while restrictions remain for organizations outside the approved list.

Anthropic isn't alone with this kind of controlled rollout. OpenAI's newest model family, GPT 5.6, was announced just yesterday, but isn't available for everyone yet. In its announcement, OpenAI also said that access to these models is initially limited to a select group of trusted partners and organizations, with broader access planned later this year.

Both of these cases show that frontier AI launches are no longer just ordinary product releases and more like slow and vetted deployments shaped heavily by the U.S. government.