Anthropic is close to cutting a deal with the Trump administration that would lift export restrictions on its flagship Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. After weeks of back-and-forth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick now believes the models' safety concerns have been sufficiently addressed and is pushing to remove the controls.
Co-founder Tom Brown has been leading the lobbying effort, meeting with Lutnick and other top officials in recent days. The administration has signaled it will lift the ban once it's satisfied with the models' security. To keep negotiations moving smoothly, CEO Dario Amodei has deliberately stayed out of the room.
Two weeks ago, Lutnick sent Anthropic a warning letter saying Fable 5 and Mythos 5 had vulnerabilities that could be bypassed — essentially jailbroken — and that overseas access should be restricted. That prompted Anthropic to disable global access to both models, but also forced both sides into intense talks. All this comes as Anthropic is quietly preparing an IPO at a valuation north of $900 billion, and the export restrictions have become a compliance headache for its public offering plans.
The scrutiny on frontier models is only widening. OpenAI recently bowed to similar government pressure, delaying the full release of GPT-5.6 and instead offering limited previews to a handful of government-approved partners.