June 30 (UPI) — The Trump administration has lifted export restrictions on artificia lintelligence company Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, the company said Tuesday evening.
“We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5,” Anthropic said in a statement, CNN reported. “We’ll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.”
The statement came not long after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted on social media about Anthropic, saying “we have worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the U.S. government and strengthen America’s leadership in AI.”
Anthropic disabled customer access to Fable, a consumer version of its Mythos AI model with more safeguards, and Mythos itself several weeks ago after the export ban June 12. The ban required the company to suspend all use by foreign nationals inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic employees.
In a statement then, Anthropic said its understanding was that “the government it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking,’ Fable 5.”
“We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities,” the company said. “These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.”
The government loosened some of the restrictions on Mythos on Friday, Politico reported.
Anthropic and the U.S. government have had a rocky relationship. Anthropic leaders’ concerns about military and intelligence usage of its products caused issues with the Department of Defense.
President Donald Trump called it a “radical left, woke company” and ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products, while Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, called the company a supply chain risk to national security.
Anthropic has sued the Trump administration to reverse the blacklisting, and that lawsuit is ongoing.
China has added 10 United States-based companies to its export control list and barred government procurement from nearly 50 US companies two weeks after the Pentagon blacklisted some of China’s best-known companies for their alleged ties to the Chinese military.
China’s Ministry of Commerce announced the export order on Monday, barring Chinese companies from exporting “dual-use” items that can be used for civilian or military purposes to the US firms.
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The list of companies includes rare-earth mine operator MP Materials Corp, rare-earth magnet maker USA Rare Earths, and US defence contractors specialising in fields such as aerospace, drones, synthetic-aperture radar, and shipbuilding and repairs.
Under the order, “foreign institutions and individuals worldwide are also prohibited from transferring or providing Chinese dual-use goods to them” while ongoing export transactions must be suspended immediately.
The Commerce Ministry said the export ban had been issued to “safeguard national security and interests and fulfil international obligations such as non-proliferation”.
China’s Ministry of Finance on Monday separately barred Chinese government procurement from 46 companies, including subsidiaries of major US defence contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Atomics and General Dynamics. US-funded, locally registered companies, however, have been given an exemption by the ministry.
Experts described Beijing’s orders as a retaliation, albeit a largely symbolic one, against the US after the Pentagon in early June added about 80 Chinese companies and their subsidiaries to its list of “Entities Identified as Chinese Military Companies Operating in the United States”.
The designation means the Pentagon either believes the companies are owned or controlled by the Chinese military or they are “military-civil fusion contributors”, a term for commercial companies that contribute to China’s military development despite their civilian status.
The updated list includes Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Holdings, search engine giant Baidu and electric automaker BYD, some of China’s largest and best-known companies.
While the order does not bar US companies from doing business with them, it does impact US defence contractors and their future supply chains.
“We can interpret this as a tit-for-tat response, and that fits into China’s playbook any time we’ve seen escalation from the US side in terms of trade and investment tools,” said Nick Marro, global trade lead analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
China-based supply chain consultant Cameron Johnson said the Commerce Ministry’s order mirrors US semiconductor export controls designed to keep the most advanced chips out of Chinese hands.
“They basically say it doesn’t matter where or who you are, you are bound by this regardless of circumstance,” said Johnson, who is also a senior partner at the Shanghai consultancy Tidal Wave Solutions. “Organisations or individuals in any country or region are prohibited from transferring dual-use materials that originated in China.”
He said Beijing’s orders in practice may be hard to enforce and many of the companies named in those orders have already moved their supply chains out of China or begun to “de-risk” their operations there.
Johnson said the wide scope of companies included in Washington’s and Beijing’s directives could be a sign of more to come and may signal a new front in the US-China trade war.
“This is probably just the beginning of the back and forth,” he said. Last year, after returning to the White House for a second term, US President Donald Trump reignited the US-China trade war, leading Washington and Beijing to impose escalating rounds of tariffs on each other.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a trade truce in October, which was extended during a summit between the two leaders in Beijing in May.
Despite promises to “enhance economic cooperation” during the meeting, observers like Singapore-based geopolitical analyst Steve Okun predicted the goodwill may be short-lived.
“The US’s recent closure of chip export loopholes and China’s continuing addition to its export bans show the national security lane remains active in both capitals regardless of the diplomatic niceties at the recent Trump-Xi summit,” Okun told Al Jazeera.
“There is no ‘truce’ in the US-China trade war. Expect further actions from both sides as well on export controls and investment restrictions,” he said.
Dilok Klaisataporn
Japan’s trade deficit significantly decreased to JPY 378.7 billion in May 2026, down from JPY 662.5 billion a year earlier and performing better than the market’s expected JPY 564.6 billion shortfall, the contraction was driven by exports expanding faster than imports.
May 3 (UPI) — Oil exports from the United States have increased by more than 30% the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran started and the Strait of Hormuz was blockaded in response.
The Port of Corpus Christie has overtaken the ports in Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the last few weeks as the two Persian Gulf ports have been cut off from the rest of the world since the Strait has been blockaded.
Over the past two months, the United States has sold more than 250 million barrels of oil to foreign buyers as exports have increased by 30%, from 3.9 million barrels per day in February to 5.2 million barrels per day in April, Bloomberg and CNBC reported.
Experts have warned, however, that domestic oil inventories are depleting stockpiles and there is a question of how long the country will be able to continue replacing oil on the market that is stuck in the Strait.
Although selling oil is good for business, oil producers are struggling to keep up with the demand and it is possible that selling so much could have an add-on effect of pushing gas prices for American consumers even higher than they have gone since the war started.
“Ships are coming to take our oil, but once significant volumes of are leaving the United States, it can be expected that balances will tighten,” Clayton Seigle, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Bloomberg.
“We are digging ourselves a hole in terms of spending down inventories,” he said.
Roughly 20% of global oil supplies pass through the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s shutting of it has caused gas and fuel prices to skyrocket over the last two months, including massive effects on the airline industry, which has seen seen the price of jet fuel double since before the war.
Oil from the United States, Latin America and West Africa could for a short time be a substitute for Middle Eastern oil for countries in Asia, which has been hurt the most, but it is not ideal, Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler, told CNBC.
“Asian markets are buying whatever they can get their hands on, so they’re taking a lot of light sweet [American] crude [oil],” Smith said, but their refineries are optimized for the heavier oil produced in the Middle East.
“It’a hole that can’t be plugged,” Smith told CNBC. “The answer has to be ensuring secure supply from the Middle East.”
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