Anthropic says Trump admin. lifted restrictions on powerful Claude AI models

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic said Tuesday the federal government has lifted a set of restrictions on its powerful Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, resolving a weekslong dispute between the Trump administration and the AI company.

Anthropic said in a social media post that it will begin restoring access Wednesday.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote on X that in recent weeks, his team 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."

CBS News has reached out to Anthropic and the Commerce Department for additional details.

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 to the public earlier this month, with safeguards the company said would reduce the risk of it being misused for cyberattacks or other nefarious purposes. It said Mythos 5 — a version with fewer guardrails — would initially be made available to a select group of major companies for testing purposes.

Just days after Fable 5 was released, Anthropic took it down. The company said the federal government had issued export controls that required it to block access to the model by foreign nationals — a broad order that Anthropic said effectively required it to disable the model.

In a statement at the time, Anthropic said the government's concerns appeared to focus on a potential "jailbreak," or a technique for tricking the AI model and bypassing its guardrails. The company argued its safeguards were effective, and called the vulnerabilities discovered using the apparent jailbreak "relatively simple" and replicable with other AI models.

"[We] disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," Anthropic said at the time. "If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers."

Last week, CNBC and The Wall Street Journal reported that the Commerce Department had begun allowing certain companies and government entities to begin using Mythos 5 again, a partial easing of the strict export controls.

The more than two-week-long interruption for Fable 5 and Mythos 5 came as the Trump administration navigates the potential risks posed by artificial intelligence. Fears have mounted that increasingly powerful AI models could be a boon for cybercriminals hunting for software vulnerabilities, but many administration allies are wary of government regulation of the industry.

Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order meant to create a voluntary 30-day review process for the most advanced private AI models, in collaboration with the federal government. Mr. Trump had delayed signing the order, telling reporters he didn't want to "get in the way" of U.S. leadership of the AI industry or risk giving China an edge.

On Tuesday, shortly before Anthropic announced the restrictions were lifted, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles thanked companies that had cooperated with the executive order, including on "advanced model access and guardrail testing and security."

Earlier this year, Anthropic clashed with the Pentagon over the company's push for formal guardrails to prevent the military from using its Claude models — which were deployed in the military's classified systems — to power fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans.

After the two sides failed to reach an agreement, Mr. Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI technology, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled it a "supply chain risk," seeking to stop federal contractors from using Claude for military work. The administration cast Anthropic — long a backer of government oversight of AI — as ideologically motivated.

Anthropic sued, and a federal judge blocked those restrictions, calling them "Orwellian" and an effort to "cripple" the company. The federal government is appealing.