U.S. Commerce Department Clears Anthropic to Deploy Mythos 5 to More Than 100 Companies and Agencies

The U.S. Commerce Department on Friday granted Anthropic permission to release its Claude Mythos 5 model to a group of more than 100 companies and federal agencies, marking a partial resolution to a two-week standoff between the Trump administration and the AI company over its most advanced models.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick conveyed the decision in a letter addressed to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, who has taken the lead in negotiations with the administration in place of CEO Dario Amodei. "I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model," Lutnick wrote, according to the letter, which was viewed by multiple outlets.

The directive also extends access to non-American employees at the approved organizations — a notable concession, given that the original government order had explicitly barred "any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees" from using the models. Anthropic's own non-American staff are included in that expanded access.

Anthropic publicly acknowledged the development in a post on X on Friday, writing: "Since June 12, we've been working closely with the US government to restore access to Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5. Today, the government notified us that Mythos 5, our strongest cybersecurity model, can be redeployed to a set of US organizations that operate and defend critical infrastructure. We're restoring access for these organizations quickly, and we're continuing to work with the government to expand access to Mythos 5 and make Fable 5 available for general use again."

The government's directive did not address Fable 5, the second model caught up in the dispute. Anthropic had pulled both Mythos 5 and Fable 5 earlier this month to comply with an export control order citing "national security authorities." The move came just days after the company announced the pair of models, which it described as state-of-the-art across a range of industry benchmarks.

Fable 5 had been notable in part because it represented the first time Anthropic released such an advanced offering for broad public use, incorporating new safeguards designed to restrict responses in high-risk areas. Both models were pulled after security researchers allegedly demonstrated that those guardrails could be bypassed with relative ease.

Friday's announcement came on the same day that Anthropic rival OpenAI revealed three new models — GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna — under a similar framework, initially limiting access to a "small group of trusted partners" at the government's request. OpenAI said in a blog post that it had previewed the models' capabilities and shared its rollout plans with the government ahead of launch, and that it intends to make the models generally available in the coming weeks.

The contrast with OpenAI underscores the more fraught relationship Anthropic has navigated with the Trump administration. Earlier this year, the Department of Defense declared Anthropic a supply chain risk following a breakdown in negotiations over use of its models — a designation historically applied to foreign adversaries that requires defense contractors to certify they will not use Claude models in military work. Anthropic sued the administration in an effort to reverse that blacklisting, and that litigation remains ongoing.

With Mythos 5 now cleared for a defined set of organizations focused on critical infrastructure, the more consequential question is whether the administration will extend that permission further — and when, or whether, Fable 5 will be permitted to return to general availability.