Anthropic moves toward deal with US to lift curbs on AI models

Maggie Eastland, Josh Wingrove and Hadriana Lowenkron, Bloomberg News on Jun 26, 2026

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Anthropic PBC and the Trump administration are moving closer to an agreement that would lift U.S. restrictions on the company’s top two artificial intelligence models after weeks of talks between the two sides over security of the systems, according to people familiar with the matter.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is making progress toward alleviating security concerns that would allow for the removal of the export controls he imposed on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 systems, according to the people. The restrictions could be lifted once officials across the administration give their blessing, they said.

The negotiations have involved senior executives from the company including co-founder Tom Brown, who met with Lutnick and other senior administration officials in recent days, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. U.S. officials have told Anthropic that the restrictions will be lifted once the government’s security concerns have been addressed, the people said.

It’s unclear how quickly the White House and other U.S. agencies, which have taken an active role in shaping AI policy, would grant their approval. A U.S. official said the Commerce Department is working toward a resolution with Anthropic and seeking to ensure the entire administration is aligned on any decision. Anthropic didn’t respond to a request for comment.

An agreement between Anthropic and the U.S. would end a confrontation that erupted when the government abruptly barred the company from giving foreign nationals access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over fears that security guardrails could be circumvented. The order, delivered two weeks ago in a letter from Lutnick to Anthropic, prompted the company to disable all global access to the two systems and touched off intensive talks toward a resolution.

Lutnick’s letter, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg News, represented the most significant intervention by the U.S. government to date into an AI venture’s operations and highlighted emerging concerns surrounding the security of cutting-edge models. It posed a new challenge to Anthropic weeks after the company filed confidentially for an initial public offering, with its latest valuation topping $900 billion.

Since then, the administration has expanded its scrutiny to models from other developers. OpenAI said Friday that it would limit access for a preview version of its GPT-5.6 model to a handful of select, government-approved partners after pressure from the administration to limit its release owing to concerns about its capabilities.

Privately held Anthropic, which has long positioned itself as a more responsible AI developer than its rivals, first shared its Mythos model in April with a limited group of companies and institutions, warning that its ability to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities made it too risky to distribute more widely.

Earlier this month, the company released Fable 5 as the first public-facing version of its Mythos-class model, but with guardrails aimed at containing the full range of its cyber capabilities. Mythos 5, which is a version of Fable 5 without some of the safeguards, was scheduled to be released to a more limited group of institutions for cybersecurity purposes.

The showdown over the two models marked the latest clash between Anthropic and the Trump administration. Anthropic has been embroiled for months in a feud with the Pentagon over extra guardrails the company sought for military use of its AI tools. After contract talks broke down, the Defense Department declared the firm a supply-chain risk in March and is moving to seek other AI providers for the armed forces.

In the negotiations with Commerce over Fable 5 and Mythos 5, Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei has taken a hands-off role, helping to reduce friction between the two sides, according to the people.

It’s also unclear what steps Anthropic would have to take to satisfy the government’s concerns that its possible to “jailbreak” or bypass guardrails on the Fable 5 model. Anthropic had objected to the government’s decision to impose export controls in a blog post announcing that the two systems had been disabled. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

In that post, Anthropic cautioned that it believes that “perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider.”