The Trump administration on Friday granted Anthropic permission to release its Mythos 5 model to a group of roughly 100 companies and federal agencies, marking a significant thaw in a two-week standoff between the government and the AI company.

The Commerce Department letter addressed to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown granted access after the company suspended both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 in mid-June to comply with an export control directive citing national security authorities.

A spokesperson for the administration said the move came after a rival company reported that it had found it possible to jailbreak Mythos, which shocked the Trump administration. However, Anthropic defended itself by saying the jailbreak was limited and such vulnerabilities exist among their competitors’ publicly available models, like GPT-5.5.

The letter did not authorise Anthropic to give access back to Fable 5. However, there have been expectations that this approval may be available in a matter of days. According to an administration official quoted by Axios, the model should remain inaccessible until the US government's national security system is made impenetrable within the next few weeks.

President Trump in February ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's models after the company refused to agree to the Pentagon's preferred contract terms, which stipulated any AI models purchased could be used "for any lawful purpose". Anthropic sought exemptions from autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance use cases.

The DOD then declared Anthropic a "supply chain risk", a designation historically reserved for foreign adversaries, requiring defence contractors to certify they will not use Anthropic's Claude models in military work.