If you simply can’t cope without Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 AI model—and some actually claim they can’t—you can stop hyperventilating. A new, anonymously sourced report says insiders expect it to be back online this coming week. In addition to Fable 5, Anthropic rescinded access to its Mythos 5 model after the Trump Administration issued its export control directive earlier this month. On Friday, Semafor and CNBC confirmed that Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick had released that model from the constraints of that order. “I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Lutnick wrote in a letter, according to CNBC.
A Saturday report by Axios said insider sources were claiming that the same would soon be true of Fable 5. “I’m told that both Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have helped defuse the fight between the administration and Anthropic,” wrote one Axios reporter in that publication’s dual-bylined story. An anonymous Trump Administration official told them Anthropic “has worked positively with the government.”
Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are models in the same “class.” Two out of three of those models, Mythos Preview and Mythos 5, have only been released to a small number of organizations for the stated purposes of educating them about the purported cybersecurity dangers they pose on one hand, and on the other hand for the purpose of hardening their own cybersecurity measures against similar threats from frontier AI models.
Once again allowing Mythos 5 to be used behind closed doors is a clear step toward the more significant release to the broader public of Fable 5.
When that model was released on June 12, it was immediately controversial for many reasons. Anthropic’s warnings about its cousin, Mythos Preview, had been widely interpreted as a marketing effort, and Fable 5, with its supposed safeguards was treated as the inevitable retail product made available to generate revenue for the company ahead of its impending IPO. At the same time, the aggressive safeguards—which undermined certain legitimate-but-risky capabilities—made smaller organizations who didn’t have excess to Mythos-class models without safeguards feel like an aggrieved underclass.
But when Fable 5 had only been publicly available for about three days, the White House received reports that Fable’s safeguards were easy to bypass, leading to the export control directive. At the time, I characterized this as predictable after Anthropic had treated the release of the Mythos family as a sort of consciousness-raising campaign for the danger of its models. I also contrasted Anthropic’s earlier warnings with its later downplaying of the supposed dangers cited by the government as “minor,” “previously known,” and “relatively simple.”
The government’s directive required Anthropic to prevent users from accessing Mythos-class models if they weren’t American nationals, which, in practical terms, forced Anthropic to simply pull the plug on them. That was about two weeks ago.
White House insiders have claimed that talks were slowed by CEO Dario Amodei’s personality. One anonymous source called him a “weirdo,” and sources also claimed he wasn’t listening well. Valid criticisms or not, Amodei was apparently replaced at the negotiating table by less abrasive Anthropic team members, and communication has reportedly improved.