Enterprise

Trump softens on Anthropic, but Fable 5 and Mythos 5 stay dark worldwide

The president told Axios he no longer sees the AI lab as a national security threat — yet the Commerce Department's June 12 export-control directive remains in force.

By Asher Glick · Enterprise software desk · 2026-06-21 · 3 min read

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0 — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023

President Donald Trump told Axios on June 19 that he no longer views Anthropic or its CEO Dario Amodei as a national security threat, walking away from the G7 summit with the impression that Amodei was “nice” and “smart.” Asked directly by Marc Caputo whether the lab still worried him, Trump said, “Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe.” The Commerce Department’s export-control directive disabling Fable 5 and Mythos 5 worldwide, however, remains in legal force.

That gap between presidential vibes and active federal directive is the whole story.

Anthropic’s newsroom disclosed that the letter landed at 5:21pm ET on June 12, ordering the company to suspend access to both frontier models for any foreign national inside or outside the United States, including its own foreign-national employees. The letter cited no specific concern. To comply, Anthropic had to disable the models for every customer globally. The company called the response disproportionate and warned that applying the same standard industrywide would essentially halt all new model deployments.

Bloomberg confirmed a US official sent the directive and described the move as unprecedented, a reminder to Silicon Valley that Washington has grown willing to exert direct control over the industry. The framing matters more than the trigger. TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker reported that the directive traced back to a private paper from Amazon security researchers describing a guardrail bypass of Fable 5, a finding Luta Security founder Katie Moussouris, who reviewed the paper at Anthropic’s request, said “should never have triggered an export control.” Anthropic had red-teamed the model’s safeguards for “thousands of hours” with the US government and the UK AISI before launch.

Senior Anthropic technical staff were scheduled to meet administration officials this week, per CNBC, to negotiate a rescission. Asked whether he might invoke Defense Production Act emergency powers, Trump told Axios: “I have the power to use a lot of things. But I’m not sure I have to do that.” Anthropic, for its part, said it was “grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible.”

A presidential thaw doesn’t lift an export control. The directive sits where it was placed, and the precedent it set, that one private security paper can ground a frontier model worldwide inside a single afternoon, sits with it.

Sources