The Trump administration is close to allowing Anthropic to restore access to its Fable 5 model, which has been offline for 15 days.
Insiders expect the administration's limits on Fable 5 could be lifted as soon as this coming week, and conversations were expected to continue over the weekend as Anthropic expects to restore Fable access soon.
The Commerce Department on Friday allowed Anthropic to restore access to Mythos 5, the company's strongest cybersecurity model, for a limited number of trusted users.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a Friday afternoon letter to Anthropic that the company "has worked with the U.S. government to address risks associated with" Mythos 5 and Fable 5.
The Pentagon and National Security Agency still have to give Fable 5 the green light, and other government agencies have determined Fable 5 can safely return to the wild, leaving the final outcome unpredictable.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Lutnick have helped defuse the fight between the administration and Anthropic, and an administration source said Anthropic "has worked positively with the government."
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security" after he and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei could not agree on how the Pentagon can use Claude.
In early testing highlighted by Anthropic, the payments company Stripe used Fable 5 to overhaul a 50-million-line codebase in a single day, a job that would have taken its engineers more than two months by hand.
Anthropic originally made Fable 5 available at no extra cost on several paid Claude subscription plans through June 22, giving users a short window to test the model before access vanished on June 12.
When access vanished, developers found automated work frozen mid-task and companies raced to swap in rivals, including cheaper Chinese models; it is not yet clear whether Anthropic subscribers will regain free access or whether the model will return behind fees or identity checks.
OpenAI agreed to let the administration screen users of its new model and was allowed to begin a limited preview of GPT‑5.6 on Friday; the company said, "We don't believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them."
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing the administration to codify a process for reviewing new models as envisioned by President Trump in a June 2 executive order, and Anthropic called for "a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts."