Anthropic Regains Mythos Access as China’s GLM 5.2 Captures Market Share

Published by James Harris on June 27, 2026June 27, 2026

The U.S. Commerce Department has partially lifted its export-control order on Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, allowing access for more than 100 approved U.S. companies and institutions, including Fortune 500 firms, along with their non-U.S. employees. The consumer-facing Fable 5 remains offline with no confirmed return date.

The partial reversal matters most because of what was happening in the two weeks Mythos and Fable were down. When the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to shut down its two newest AI models on June 12, citing cybersecurity concerns including NSA testimony that Mythos could identify weaknesses across nearly all U.S. classified computer systems within hours, the competitive window it opened closed faster than regulators likely anticipated. One day after the ban, Chinese firm Zhipu launched its open-weight GLM 5.2 model, and GLM 5.2’s benchmark performance placed it in direct competition with models Anthropic had just pulled from the market. According to a CNBC report cited by Cryptopolitan, Zhipu’s token traffic rose faster than any other Chinese model tracked in 2026. The export restrictions on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were framed as national security measures, but their practical effect was a two-week market-share transfer to competitors Anthropic had just outpaced at launch.

Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1. Every day Fable 5 stays offline is a day the IPO roadshow gets harder to run.

The Commerce Department’s letter from Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, dated June 26 and reviewed by both Reuters and The Verge, acknowledged “significant progress” on risk mitigation but made no mention of Fable 5, the version priced for general consumers at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. That asymmetry, enterprise access restored while the public-facing product remains dark, suggests the government’s concern was never purely about the model’s capabilities in the abstract but about who could reach them. The AI private market’s valuation logic increasingly depends on demonstrable revenue scale, which Anthropic cannot build through enterprise-only access to a model that launched three days before it was pulled.

A source told Reuters that the U.S. government is progressing toward a resolution on Fable 5, but no timeline has been set. Given that Anthropic’s IPO preparation is already underway, the pressure to resolve that question is not abstract.