Anthropic is restoring general access to its powerful Fable 5 AI model after weekslong negotiations with the Trump administration to lift unprecedented restrictions on the system.
The AI startup said on Tuesday that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls that prompted it to disable access to Fable 5. Anthropic added that it has also restored access to its more advanced Mythos 5 model to a vetted group of organizations after securing US government approval last week.
The dispute began in June after the White House imposed restrictions on the AI models over concerns they could be misused by adversaries for cyberattacks. Anthropic said there had been a misunderstanding over a potential Fable 5 jailbreak and sent senior executives to Washington to negotiate a resolution.
The return of the models, which Anthropic said come with additional safeguards, marks a significant moment in the debate over how governments should regulate frontier AI systems. Here’s what smart people in tech are saying.
Alex Stamos, Stanford University lecturer and former Facebook chief security officer
In a post on X on Wednesday, Alex Stamos called the suspension a “huge own goal for the US,” arguing that restricting American AI models could push cybersecurity companies toward Chinese alternatives and ultimately hurt US competitiveness.
“Security companies and startups that provide services to others will now be driven to use Chinese models,” the former Facebook chief security officer said. “Big win for PRC labs this month.”
He added: “Anthropic’s blog is saying: We have always cared about safety, we did a good job initially, the actual AI experts in USG agreed, we proved it, we will come up with standards so these things are better communicated.”
Dean W. Ball, senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation
Dean W. Ball, a former Trump AI official who is joining OpenAI, welcomed the return of Fable 5 in a Tuesday X post but said important questions remain about what safety commitments Anthropic agreed to and whether the same standards will apply to other frontier AI models.
“This opacity will not lend itself well to a stable, investable, trustworthy industry over time,” Ball wrote. “But USG needn’t figure all this out in a day, and a two-week review timeline is not insane in the grand scheme of things.”
Nevertheless, he said that progress had been made and that it was “worthy of applause”.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box
In a Wednesday X post, Aaron Levie said the resolution could set an important precedent for how future frontier AI models are reviewed, particularly those with advanced coding, cyber, and biosecurity capabilities.
“The only note of caution here would be that there’s a lot of subjectivity that goes into various risks and their actual levels of exploitability in practice,” the Box CEO said.
“We’re likely going to be living with a framework that requires heavy judgment and back and forth between labs and the government for major releases,” he added.
He welcomed Anthropic’s plans for a shared industry framework and closer collaboration with the US government, but cautioned that future reviews will still require significant judgment.
“The best we can hope for is that this is a relatively efficient process,” he wrote.
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