On June 26, the US Department of Commerce approved Anthropic’s request to resume sales of Cloud Mythos 5 to select US customers, allowing Anthropic to partially rescind its previous export control order. Two weeks before this order, the company was forced to remove two of its most advanced AI products, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, from the market. Meanwhile, Fable 5, the consumer version that relies on the same infrastructure as Mythos 5, remains offline with no set date for its re-release.
The partial reversal of the original export control order changed Anthropic’s competitive landscape at a critical juncture in the company’s growth. Anthropic File a confidential S-1 application on June 1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for its proposed IPO.
Every additional day that these key models are offline allows competitors to fill that void with their own offers. For example, just one day after the original export ban was imposed, Chinese company Zhipu launched the GLM 5.2 open-weight model. According to a report by CNBC Referenced by CryptopolitanZhipu’s token traffic rose faster than any other Chinese model tracked in 2026.
Why has the United States restricted models of anthropocentric myths and legends?
On June 12, the US Department of Commerce issued a directive to Anthropic to block all users outside the United States from accessing Anthropic’s models, including non-US Anthropic employees. Anthropic wasn’t able to ban foreign users fast enough; Therefore, both forms are disabled for all users.
Reasons given by the US government for the ban include cybersecurity concerns regarding ways to break into or bypass Fable 5’s security features to find vulnerabilities in the software. Anthropists publicly disagreed with the government’s position, calling the findings narrow. The company said that other models available for purchase, such as GPT-5.5, developed by OpenAI, can provide similar results in finding vulnerabilities without having to use jailbreaking techniques.
In addition to the jailbreak dispute between Anthropic and the US government, there are broader cybersecurity implications.
During a congressional hearing, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that NSA Director General Joshua Rudd told him that Methos could identify vulnerabilities in almost all classified US computer systems within hours. The NSA also conducted Project Glasswing, a secret effort with anthropological and U.S. intelligence agencies to find and address critical software vulnerabilities, according to AP reporting and previous Cryptopolitan coverage.
A US official later clarified that identifying vulnerabilities within hours did not mean Mythos could exploit them in the same time frame. However, the demonstration gave the administration political cover to act.
What the Ministry of Commerce now allows Mythos 5 to do
According to a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, regarding Anthropic’s models, the company appears to have made “significant progress” toward mitigating risks associated with both the Mythos 5 and Fable 5. The letter is dated June 26 and has been viewed by both Reuters and Edge.
In addition to granting access to the Mythos Model without the need for an export license to certain select U.S. Partners, Anthropic will also be able to provide access to non-U.S. employees of those registered U.S. Partners and its own non-U.S. employees.
A source familiar with the directive told Reuters that there are currently more than 100 companies and organizations approved to use Mythos 5, including a number of Fortune 500 companies.
Anthropic spokeswoman Danielle Giglieri confirmed that the company “received notification from the US government that Mythos 5, our most powerful cybersecurity model, could be redeployed to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers,” according to The Verge.
However, Lutnick’s letter made no mention of a Fable 5 model. A source told Reuters that the US government is moving toward a decision on whether to release Fable 5 to the public, but an expected timeline has not been set.
How did the lockdown help Chinese AI competitors make gains?
The ban on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was very uncomfortable. The models were released on June 9 as Anthropic’s latest and greatest, costing $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. Three days later, they were both forced offline.
Zhipu’s GLM 5.2 was launched to subscribers on June 13, a day after the shutdown. This model, with 744 billion parameters, scored four points from Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and costs about one-fifth of Anthropic’s model, I mentioned Cryptopolitan previously. The full open weights of GLM 5.2 shipped on June 16 under the MIT License, meaning the government can’t retroactively deny anyone access after they download it.
OpenAI has similar limitations, but is softer. The White House has asked OpenAI to provide customers with access to its latest model in a phased format based on government approval from customer to customer.
Axios reported this GPT-5.6 was released under restricted accesswith only about 20 government-approved companies getting limited preview access. This similar portal model will now also be applied to provide access to Mythos 5. Two of the three largest US border laboratories are now operating with the government’s portal requirements.
Why Anthropic’s Government Tensions Matter Ahead of its IPO
Mythos’ suspension was not an isolated event. Throughout most of 2026, Anthropic has had a tense relationship with the United States government. The company will not allow the US military to use its models to conduct local surveillance or operate with fully autonomous weapons; The government responded by placing the company on its national security blacklist. President Trump later changed his mind, telling Axios on June 19 that he no longer considered anthropology a national security risk, an event Covered by Cryptopolitan at that time.
Additionally, on June 10, Anthropic informed the Senate Banking Committee that Alibaba operators executed 28.8 million Cloud transactions across approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April and June 2026. Anthropic described this as the largest attempt to wrest capabilities from Cloud ever, according to Cryptopolitan. Previous distillation attempts have been made by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax.
What happens next for Fable 5 and the rollout of Anthropic
Lutnick’s letter retained all other restrictions set out in the June 12 letter but reserved the right to modify the terms if circumstances required. For Anthropic, the next step is to ensure Fable 5 is available again before the proposed IPO.
And with every day that the model remains unavailable to the public, institutional clients continue to conduct cost-benefit analysis on open-weight alternatives from China that no government restrictions can easily restore.
