Trump Administration Allows Anthropic to Release Mythos to Select US Organizations

The US government has eased restrictions on Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 model, permitting the company to restore access to more than 100 US organizations, including large corporations and government agencies, according to a letter obtained by WIRED. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick informed Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown that he had "determined that appropriate safeguards are in place" for Mythos 5 [1]. "Anthropic has worked with the U.S. government to address risks associated with the Covered Models. These efforts have yielded significant progress," Lutnick wrote [1]. The partial reinstatement comes roughly two weeks after the White House sent an export control directive requiring Anthropic to limit foreign national access to the model [1]. Under the revised terms, approved organizations may now extend access to their foreign national employees, as well as Anthropic's foreign national employees [1]. The White House stopped short of permitting a broader rollout and did not address the status of Claude Fable 5, the consumer-facing version of Mythos released with additional safeguards [1]. Lutnick noted that all other requirements from his initial June 12 directive remain in effect [1]. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI members and headquartered in San Francisco, has developed the Claude series of large language models with a focus on AI safety [2]. The company was valued at an estimated $965 billion in May 2026, making it the most valuable pure-play AI company in the world [2]. The Claude model family is trained using "constitutional AI," a technique developed to improve ethical and legal compliance [3]. Anthropic spokesperson Eduardo Maia Silva said the company received notice that Mythos 5, described as its "strongest cybersecurity model, can be redeployed to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers" [1]. "We are working to provision the approved set of providers and restore their access to Mythos 5 as quickly as possible," Silva said, adding that the company continues to work with the government to expand access and "make Fable 5 available for general use again" [1]. The Trump administration developed concerns about Mythos after learning Anthropic shared access with a South Korean telecommunications firm it believed to have ties to China [1]. Amazon and the NSA subsequently raised concerns that Claude Fable 5 could be jailbroken [1]. The episode follows earlier tensions: US federal agencies began phasing out Claude after Anthropic refused to remove contractual prohibitions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, leading the Department of Defense to designate the company a supply chain risk [3]. A federal judge issued a temporary injunction against that designation on March 26, 2026 [3]. OpenAI announced Friday it was delaying the release of its GPT 5.6 models in response to a request from the Trump administration [1]. Dean Ball, head of strategic futures at OpenAI, wrote in a June 16 blog post that the saga has shown frontier AI developers they "need an explicit green light from the government now" [1].