The U.S. government has allowed Anthropic to release its powerful Mythos AI model to some companies and organizations and reviewed licensing requirements after issuing an export ban earlier this month due to national security concerns.
Since the export ban in early June, “Anthropic has been working with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with the affected models,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic in a letter dated Friday.
Given the progress of that work, Lutnick wrote, “We have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to allow certain trusted partners access to the Claude Mythos 5 model.”
The letter does not include permission for Anthropic to release Fable, a less powerful version of Mythos.
“We have received notification from the U.S. government that our strongest cybersecurity model, Mythos 5, can be re-deployed to a small number of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers,” Anthropic said in a statement.
“We are working to provide a set of approved providers and restore access to Mythos 5 as soon as possible. We are pleased to see this progress and will continue to work with the government to expand access to Mythos 5 and make Fable 5 generally available again,” the statement added.
Talks between Anthropic and the government are expected to continue into the weekend, with an eye toward restoring access to Fable, a person familiar with the talks told CNN.
Earlier this month, Anthropic disabled customer access to both Mythos and Fable to comply with a U.S. government order to halt all use by foreign nationals, including Anthropic employees themselves.
The export ban and subsequent negotiations with Anthropic highlighted the lack of a consistent regulatory framework around AI, even as the technology advances rapidly and the United States seeks to stay ahead of global competitors such as China.
Semafor was the first to report the government’s approval for Mythos’ release.
Until recently, the Trump administration has taken a largely hands-off approach to regulating artificial intelligence, aiming to give American companies an advantage over their competitors, especially in China.
But the recent action against Anthropic, along with calls for OpenAI to restrict its latest models, comes after experts have been concerned for months that Mythos could pose a security risk by giving hackers and other bad actors access to AI that can find and exploit vulnerabilities very quickly.
The federal government’s relationship with Anthropic, one of the nation’s largest AI companies, faces other challenges. Earlier this year, the administration effectively blacklisted Anthropic products over disagreements over military uses, labeling it a “supply chain risk.”
Anthropic has sued over that designation and won at least one early victory in an ongoing lawsuit.
