Anthropic nears deal to restore public access to Claude Fable 5

Anthropic’s Fable 5 AI model could be available to the public by next week, according to a report by Axios.

Talks between Anthropic and the US administration are expected to run through the weekend, and a second source told Axios that Anthropic anticipates restoring access soon.

Anthropic’s Fable 5 shutdown unfolded fast

The Commerce Department told Anthropic on June 12 to block all users from outside the US. Anthropic couldn’t set up regional blocks quickly enough, so it took everyone off of both Mythos 5 and Fable 5.

The two AI models run on the same underlying architecture. Some safety features have been taken out of Mythos 5 so that it can be used in certain situations. Fable 5 is the consumer product and is priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, according to Anthropic’s June 9 launch announcement.

The payments company Stripe used Fable 5 to work on a 50-million-line script in just one day. This is faster than what its coders could have done by hand in more than two months of tests, according to Anthropic.

When Fable’s access was revoked on June 12, coders found that automated work had stopped in the middle of a job, and companies rushed to replace it with cheaper Chinese models or competitors’ models.

The American government cited cybersecurity concerns. During a congressional hearing, Senator Mark Warner said NSA Director General Joshua Rudd told him that Mythos could identify weaknesses across almost all US classified systems within hours, according to Cryptopolitan’s earlier reporting.

A US official made it clear that just because Mythos found weaknesses, that didn’t mean it could exploit them right away. Cryptopolitan reported that Anthropic said the government’s findings were too narrow and that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 could find software flaws just as well without hacking methods.

On June 26, the Commerce Department gave Anthropic a partial win. It allowed Mythos 5 to be redeployed to a vetted list of American organizations, with more than 100 companies and institutions cleared, including several Fortune 500 firms, according to a recent report by Cryptopolitan.

The White House asked OpenAI to gate GPT-5.6 access on a customer-by-customer basis with government sign-off, and only ~20 companies got limited preview access, Axios reported. Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the three largest American frontier AI labs, now run under some form of government access controls.

Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1, raising $65 billion at an implied valuation of $965 billion, Cryptopolitan reported.

And the Fable 5 suspension piled on top of a separate controversy. On June 11, Anthropic apologized and reversed a policy that had secretly degraded Fable 5’s output quality on frontier AI research queries without notifying users.

Researchers, including former Anthropic staff, called the approach anti-competitive. The company said future safeguards in that category would be visible to users.

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