Anthropic is restoring global access to its most powerful generally released AI model yet, Claude Fable 5, today, after the U.S. Department of Commerce last night withdrew the emergency export controls it had issued previously around the model.

The U.S. export control order issued on June 12, 2026, led Anthropic to suspend all global access to both Fable 5 and its less restricted cybersecurity counterpart model Claude Mythos 5, just days after both models were initially introduced.

Now, Fable 5 is once again being made available for users globally across the primary Anthropic ecosystem, including the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. Unfortuantely, when VentureBeat tried to access it in Claude Code on Terminal prior to this article’s publication, it still showed as disabled.

For organizations leveraging cloud hyperscalers, Anthropic says it is moving to re-enable access on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry “as quickly as possible.” So far, VentureBeat’s research has been unable to confirm if the models have been restored on these external cloud hyperscaler platforms yet.

Mythos 5 remains a different case. A letter posted on the social network X allegedly from U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic executive Tom Brown says a license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer of Fable and Mythos.

But Anthropic’s own redeployment post on its website says only that Mythos 5 access has been restored for “a set of US organizations,” following government approval on June 26. The company says it is continuing to coordinate with the government to expand access to broader domestic and international partners in its opt-in cybersecurity testing program, Project Glasswing.

That leaves Mythos 5 in a middle category: legally cleared from the emergency export-control order, but not generally available. The current limit appears to come from Anthropic’s decision to keep Mythos behind a vetted-access model, with the U.S. government still playing a role in approvals, standards and expansion.

Posting on X, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Anthropic and the government had “worked closely” to “analyze and approve Fable 5,” while White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles also posted on X, framing the decision around U.S. AI leadership and deployment speed.

Wiles wrote that the United States is the “undisputed winner in the AI race,” adding that the shared priority is to “get the best tech deployed as quickly and safely as possible.”

The reversal follows concerns from cybersecurity leaders and AI policy experts over the export control order, who argued that the U.S. risked hobbling its own industry while giving Chinese AI labs an opening. Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos called the Fable restriction a “huge own goal for the US,” warning that security companies could be driven toward Chinese models, while other critics said the so-called “ad hoc” regulatory intervention made dependence on U.S. AI platforms look like a strategic liability.

Reminder on Claude Fable 5 pricing

For chief information and technology officers evaluating the return of the model, the deployment comes with distinct structural conditions and significant financial investments.

Anthropic is pricing both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 at $10.00 per million input tokens and $50.00 per million output tokens, the most expensive of all frontier models globally.

However, to incentivize immediate enterprise adoption following the export control order disruption saga, Anthropic is executing a temporary rollout plan through July 7.

For Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise subscriptions, Fable 5 usage will be included at no added cost for up to 50% of a user’s weekly tier allowance.

After July 7, Fable 5 will move to usage credits for those plans. For standard Enterprise seats, there is no included Fable 5 allowance; all usage is billed through credits, and the model will not work for those users unless credits are enabled.

Already, some AI influencers are attempting to offer enterprises and developers guidance on how to maximize their usage of Fable 5 during its 7-day discounted price/subscription included promotion:

Chronology of a Crisis: From Launch to Lockout

The whiplash regulatory cycle surrounding the model underscores the volatility currently facing enterprise software supply chains. The crisis unfolded over a rapid, three-week timeline:

• June 9, 2026: Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Early corporate case studies report major performance gains. For instance, Stripe reports that Fable 5 compressed a codebase-wide migration across a 50-million-line Ruby infrastructure into a single day — a project estimated to take a team more than two months by hand.

• June 12, 2026: At 5:21 PM ET, the U.S. government issues an export-control directive citing national security authorities. The order bans access to the models by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the borders of the United States. Lacking real-time mechanisms to verify user nationality at the API layer, Anthropic is forced to pull the plug for all customers to ensure compliance. Anthropic says access to all other Anthropic models was not affected.

• June 13–25, 2026: Enterprise users and developers face abrupt disruption, forcing workflows that had adopted Fable 5 or Mythos 5 to fall back to older models such as Opus 4.8. Tensions peak as Anthropic publicly objects, arguing that pulling a major commercial model over a narrow jailbreak finding could “essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

• June 26, 2026: The U.S. government allows Anthropic to restore Mythos 5 access to a set of trusted U.S. organizations, partially reversing the June 12 order. Anthropic says it is restoring access for those organizations and continuing to work with the government to expand Mythos 5 access and make Fable 5 generally available again.

• June 30, 2026: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sends a letter withdrawing the June 12 export-control license requirement for both Mythos and Fable. The decision removes the emergency legal block, but Anthropic’s rollout still treats the models differently: Fable 5 returns globally, while Mythos 5 remains limited to approved users through Glasswing and related trusted-access channels.

The Technical Catalyst: The Amazon Vulnerability Report

The swift intervention by the federal government stemmed from a report by Amazon researchers describing a method for bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards. This was a brutal irony for Anthropic, given Amazon was one of the startup’s initial and largest backers to the tune of $8 billion, and the two companies previously collaborated on improving Amazon’s Alexa+ voice assistant.

According to Anthropic, the technique prompted Fable 5 to identify software vulnerabilities; in one case, the model produced code demonstrating how the relevant vulnerability could be exploited.

When the report reached government officials, it triggered alarm regarding the offensive cyber capabilities of public, AI large language models (LLMs). Anthropic countered that the exploit did not tap into unique “Mythos-level” cyber capabilities, noting that its own testing found other models — including Claude Opus 4.8, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, and Moonshot’s Kimi K2.7 — could identify the same vulnerabilities. Anthropic also said every model it tested could produce the same exploit demonstration as Fable 5.

To break the regulatory logjam, Anthropic developed an improved automated safety classifier specifically trained to catch and neutralize the Amazon technique. Tested by the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), the updated classifier successfully halts that specific technique in more than 99% of cases.

Anthropic explicitly warns enterprise clients that this safety enforcement comes at an operational cost. Because the new classifiers require an expanded “safety margin” to catch ambiguous edge cases, benign coding and debugging requests may be flagged more often. When a prompt is blocked by the safety layer, the active session automatically downgrades, routing the request to Opus 4.8.

In a post on X, Thariq Shihipar, a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic working on Claude Code, said that Anthropic is “continuing to refine these safeguards to better distinguish genuine misuse from legitimate requests and reduce false positives.”

Backroom Diplomacy: The Shifting of the Guard

The breakthrough that brought Fable 5 back to commercial markets was as much political as it was technical. According to WIRED, Anthropic initially argued that the administration’s security concerns were overblown and that no frontier model provider could guarantee zero jailbreaks.

That argument frustrated the administration, according to WIRED’s reporting. In recent weeks, Anthropic changed tack, focusing less on the theoretical impossibility of eliminating jailbreaks and more on building stronger safeguards and satisfying the government’s operational concerns.

WIRED reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was recently replaced in meetings by Brown, whom officials liked more personally. Brown is also the addressee of Lutnick’s June 30 Commerce letter.

Under Brown’s guidance, Anthropic appears to have moved from arguing over the absolute limits of model safety to committing to the expanded safeguards and collaboration framework the administration demanded.

The resulting Commerce letter describes several commitments by Anthropic. Under the terms of the clearance, Anthropic has agreed to:

1. Proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models.

2. Work with the U.S. government on protocols, standards and releases for Mythos, Fable and future models.

3. Inform the U.S. government of malicious activity.

Separately, Anthropic says it will expand pre-release government access and evaluation for frontier models, share information rapidly when significant jailbreaks or misuse patterns are identified, dedicate resources to joint government research and work toward a common industry security bar.

The U.S. Commerce Department explicitly reserved the right to re-evaluate these permissions and re-impose license requirements if circumstances change or if Anthropic fails to meet its commitments.

The Sovereign Calculus: Lessons for Enterprise AI

The two-week blackout of Claude Fable 5 exposed the fragility of centralized, closed-API models for modern business infrastructure. It showed that enterprise automation pipelines remain vulnerable to sudden regulatory shifts and vendor compliance mandates.

The tech community’s response highlights a broader push toward hardware and model sovereignty. Following the initial shutdown, prominent tech figures voiced concerns over this centralization. AI founder Alex Finn described the Anthropic freeze as a major “wakeup call,” urging developers to invest heavily in local, open-weights infrastructure to insulate operations from federal volatility. As Finn noted on social media:

“No company or government will EVER be able to take away your local models.”

For enterprise architects, the return of Fable 5 demands a balanced approach to deployment:

• The Frontier Performance Advantage: Utilizing closed models like Fable 5 offers state-of-the-art capabilities across agentic coding, long-context work, document reasoning and multi-step enterprise automation, according to Anthropic’s launch materials and early customer examples.

• The Mitigating Data Trade-Off: Accessing Fable 5 means accepting Anthropic’s mandatory 30-day data retention requirement for covered models. Anthropic says prompts and model completions are retained for at least 30 days by default and then automatically deleted, except when they are part of a safety investigation or must be kept for legal reasons. Highly regulated financial, healthcare and legal groups must evaluate whether this telemetry window complies with their data privacy mandates.

The truth is, enterprises in the U.S. and globally have more options than ever for frontier-class LLMs, especially with the recent launch over the last few months of new, powerful, open weights Chinese alternatives that can be downloaded, run locally or on virtual private clouds, and customized to any enterprise’s liking.

MiniMax M3 pairs frontier-tier coding and agentic performance with a 1 million-token context window and native multimodality. Z.ai’s GLM-5.2’s benchmark results exceed OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 on SWE-bench Pro and several long-horizon coding tests, and near Claude Opus 4.8 on FrontierSWE and MCP-Atlas. Meituan’s LongCat-2.0 is also positioned around enterprise use, with a 1 million-token context window, MIT licensing and strong early developer traction through its Owl Alpha run on OpenRouter — though as we reported, the full weights are still listed as “coming soon.”

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s top domestic rival OpenAI is still struggling to release its latest models broadly due to U.S. government pressure. The company says its newest and most powerful models, GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna — unveiled last week — are starting in a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners after OpenAI previewed the models and their capabilities to the U.S. government and the government requested the rollout be staggered.

OpenAI says it still plans broader availability, but argued in its announcement that this kind of staggered rollout at the government’s request “should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.”

The executive order in question, signed by President Donald J. Trump on June 2, 2026, calls upon various federal agencies to collaborate on a process for benchmarking and assessing capabilities of new AI models to ensure they are safe and appropriate for wide release, a process supposed to take 30 days (which would seem to indicate the agencies are due to provide their process tomorrow, July 2, 2026.)

Frontier model launches are starting to look less like ordinary product releases and more like negotiated deployments shaped by U.S. national security review — a shift that could slow American distribution even as Chinese competitors move aggressively through open-weight and lower-cost channels

To safeguard operations against future regulatory lockouts, enterprise technical leaders are moving toward model-agnostic fallback architectures.

By deploying proxy layers that can dynamically reroute critical production pipelines from proprietary APIs to locally hosted, open-weights alternatives, businesses can leverage top-tier capabilities without exposing themselves to single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities.

Fable 5 is officially back online, but the landscape governing its release has been fundamentally transformed.

Square is launching a new ChatGPT app and Claude plugin, enabling consumers to discover restaurants and seamlessly place orders directly within these AI platforms — and allowing restaurants, in turn, to accept orders from users and their AI agents without any technical capabilities.

Even more helpfully for businesses, Square is processing these AI-driven transactions without charging the traditional marketplace commission fees that have historically squeezed the food and beverage sector.

However, Square is still charging its typical online ordering fees of 3.3% plus $0.30 or 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction for merchants subscribed to the Square Plus and Square Premium plans.

The system pulls straight from the live Square catalog, dynamically mapping items, pricing, complex modifiers, and stock availability so autonomous agents never display out-of-stock inventory.

For enterprise testing and deployment verification, operators can manually audit their digital footprint by using the “@” symbol to invoke the Order by Cash App plugin directly within ChatGPT or connecting it via the Claude extension directory.

Depending on the specific AI tool configuration, customers can either finalize checkout completely inside the chat window via Order by Cash App, or they will be seamlessly redirected to the merchant’s standard online ordering landing page with their chosen items and modifiers already fully populated in the basket.

A more affordable online order system for restaurants

To understand the significance of Square’s move, you have to look at the math that restaurant owners face in 2026. Third-party delivery and ordering apps have fundamentally altered the economics of the restaurant industry.

Currently, the major players—DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub—charge restaurants a hefty premium for visibility and fulfillment. These exorbitant rates exist primarily because delivery aggregators bundle the logistical costs of gig-worker delivery fleets, platform marketing, and search placement into a single revenue-sharing model.

According to recent pricing structures, DoorDash charges restaurants a 15% commission on its “Basic” delivery tier, which climbs to 25% for “Plus” and 30% for its top-tier “Premier” visibility plan. Even pickup orders carry a 6% marketplace fee.

Uber Eats similarly exacts standard delivery marketplace fees ranging from 20% on its “Lite” tier up to 30% for premium placement, with pickup orders costing up to 10% if in-store pricing isn’t strictly validated.

Grubhub echoes these rates, taking between 5% and 20% of the total order value depending on the marketing and delivery package chosen.

On top of these marketplace commissions, platforms still tack on their own payment processing fees—typically around 2.5% to 3.05% plus a fixed cent amount per order.

For an independent restaurant that might only clear a 3% to 9% net profit on a good day, handing over a 25% or 30% commission on a $40 digital order essentially means preparing food at a loss.

Square’s new integration specifically targets this pain point. By tapping into Square’s ChatGPT and Claude integrations, eligible sellers are opted in automatically with no additional setup, no new APIs to build, and, crucially, zero added marketplace fees.

Instead of surrendering a 30% cut to a delivery aggregator, a restaurant discovered through an AI agent only pays Square’s standard online transaction processing fee (which typically sits around 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on a standard plan, with no monthly marketplace commission attached).

Unlike the delivery aggregators, Square’s fee model does not natively subsidize a driver network. Instead, if an AI-generated order requires delivery, Square utilizes a white-label dispatch network that charges a flat courier fee—often around $7 to $10 depending on distance—rather than taxing a percentage of the total basket size. Restaurants can choose to absorb this flat delivery cost or pass it directly to the customer, completely protecting their food margins.

The result is an AI-powered discovery channel that functions like direct, first-party ordering.

How the tech works

Square’s new integration is currently live for U.S.-based Food & Beverage sellers who have an activated Square Online Ordering profile.

The system operates entirely in the background. Sellers manage their discoverability and business information—menus, operating hours, stock levels, and pricing—directly through their existing Square Dashboard.

When a consumer prompts ChatGPT or Claude with a query like, “Find me a specialty coffee shop nearby with a great pour-over and order me a bag of their house roast,” the AI parses the real-time data provided by Square.

Customers can browse the results, make their selections, and finalize the purchase using Order by Cash App, all without leaving the chat interface.

The transaction is then routed instantly into the seller’s existing operational flow, popping up on their Square Point of Sale (POS) and Kitchen Display System just like an in-store or direct-website order.

To help operators track the return on this new channel, the origin of the order is clearly tagged as an AI integration within Square’s backend reporting.

“Consumer behaviors and preferences are constantly evolving, and business owners can easily find themselves playing an impossible game of catch-up,” said Morgan Kuntze, Global Partnerships Lead at Block, Square’s parent company. “Our investment into agentic commerce aims to offload that responsibility by giving operators time back, helping connect them with customers in their communities, and keeping them at the industry’s cutting edge. Modern commerce is moving at a sprint, and we’re building Square to help sellers appear everywhere customers are going.”

Focusing on tech to let restaurants focus on food

During its pilot phase, Square collaborated with Partners Coffee, a Brooklyn-based specialty coffee brand, to refine how AI-driven discovery translates into the real world. For operators like Partners Coffee, the goal isn’t necessarily to become a hyper-digitized storefront, but rather to use digital efficiency to protect the physical experience of the cafe.

“We don’t see coffee as transactional. To us, it’s an opportunity to pause and reflect, a chance to unwind, and a catalyst for connection,” noted Andrew Costaris, Digital VP at Partners Coffee, in a statement provided by Square to VentureBeat. “The last thing we want is for our technology solutions to work against this mission or complicate the customer experience. With agentic commerce and AI tools working in the background, we’re confident knowing that our business is being digitally discovered and is consistently growing in efficiency, while our customers can continue to enjoy a lo-fi, specialty coffee-first environment.”

An AI-driven e-commerce ecosystem

The integration with ChatGPT and Claude is only the first step in Square’s broader agentic commerce strategy. The stakes are high: industry data cited by the company indicates that more than 42% of consumers now use AI tools to assist with shopping tasks like product discovery and comparison. By 2030, analysts project that agentic shoppers could drive nearly $385 billion in U.S. ecommerce spending.

Most small and mid-size businesses simply do not have the developer teams or budgets required to build custom integrations for every new chatbot, voice assistant, or AI hardware device that hits the market. Square wants to serve as that universal connective tissue.

To that end, the company announced it is actively working with Amazon to bring sellers into Alexa+ voice commerce experiences. Furthermore, Square is participating in major regulatory and standards groups—including the AAIF Agentic Commerce Working Group and the W3C Web Payments Working Group—to shape how AI agents and commerce platforms interact at scale.

Particularly notable is Square’s ongoing partnership with Google to co-develop the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) spec for local food ordering. This open standard is designed to allow agents and systems to seamlessly communicate across the entire commerce journey. On Google’s end, UCP enables discovery and checkout across AI Overviews in Search and the Gemini app. As the UCP protocol expands globally, Square plans to roll out these capabilities so that its sellers remain front and center.

For the more than 4.5 million sellers currently using Square, the promise of agentic commerce is clear: a way to capture the next generation of internet traffic without sacrificing the profit margins required to keep their doors open. If Square can successfully route AI orders directly to local business’s POS systems—sidestepping the 30% toll of the delivery aggregators—it could mark a massive shift in how the restaurant industry navigates the modern digital economy.