Trump administration to lift restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5

The Trump administration plans to lift export controls on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 AI model as soon as Tuesday night, a U.S. official tells Axios.

Why it matters: The decision, eagerly awaited by AI developers, restores public access to the company's powerful Mythos-class model that had been pulled for security reasons 18 days ago.

Driving the news: Last week, the Trump administration allowed Anthropic to restore access to Mythos 5 for a select group of government-approved organizations.

• Sources also told Axios last week Fable 5 could return as soon as this week.

The big picture: The U.S. government's desired role in regulating and evaluating frontier AI models before release is still up in the air — creating an ad hoc regulatory environment for AI companies.

• It remains unclear what technical or policy changes Anthropic made to address Commerce Department concerns, particularly preventing access by foreign nationals.
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a post on X that his office has "worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US Government and strengthen America's leadership in AI."
• OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.6 only to a small set of approved customers last week after a request from the U.S. government.

Threat level: U.S. officials, allies and leading AI companies have become increasingly concerned that frontier models could be misused to automate sophisticated cyberattacks or accelerate biological weapons development.

• At the same time, China is moving closer to producing its own Mythos competitor while continuing to release open-weight models that rival models like Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8.

What's next: The Trump administration faces an August deadline under a recent executive order to create standardized benchmarks for evaluating the security risks of new AI models.