So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can't use it (technically, only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
The way I see it, a government led by an adult toddler and his sycophants has decided to punish a firm that refused to cooperate with it's military when it was embarrassed by a militarily weak adversary. The model strength spin strikes me as motivated reasoning.
The rubicon being crossed here is Republicans/the red tribe losing their comparative advantage of being opposed to overregulating a rapidly advancing technology.
Weren’t they claiming their party is opposed to over regulation and critiqued EU for that or something? Funny, that.
Anyways, this seems like pretty good PR for Anthropic: “Our models are so powerful even the government forbid us from exporting access to them as a service for a while!” for once this gets sorted out (if it does). It’s one thing when they just write self-congratulatory blog posts and people are skeptical, it’s another (at least, optics wise) when the government targets them, specifically.
Ofc the original intent might have been to hurt them by removing their advantage vs OpenAI, go figure. I wonder whether OpenAI's next models would get a similar treatment, or whether the govt. would also decide that Opus 4.X and GPT-5.5 shouldn't be given to foreigners as well. Who knows if some money needs to change hands behind the scenes in the form of a charitable donation.
If this affects all LLMs long term though, things will be pretty messed up.
I don’t see it as good PR for Anthropic at all. They did a lot of PR in that direction but now it backfired.
People/gov now think twice about relying on US ai products. I don’t think the investors are very happy with the place this landed either.
I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
We are back to cold war computing days, the message has long arrived on this side of the Atlantic, even if most companies and governments aren't able to get rid of old habits.
> People/gov now think twice about relying on US ai products.
Oh this has already been clear to anyone in the EU, for example. The current reliance on US tech and even widespread stuff like MS is pretty deeply rooted, however and it might take a while to do anything about it - so for many it’s a matter of convenience for now.
That said, as long as what you need sits behind an OpenAI or Anthropic API and you don’t have deeper proprietary integrations, there is no moat. I can even run Claude Code with DeepSeek if I so choose (though OpenCode is neat too).
Best EU has at the moment seems to be Mistral though, which is… sorta passable, but not cutting edge. Oh well.
> I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
Not sure about outright ban, but homegrown govt. systems should have both the devs and the infra in EU.
Would also be really cool if we could make even regular CPUs and GPUs some day but I don’t think that’s super likely, though. Kinda amazing that China can do that! Even consumer stuff like the Chinese Lisuan GPUs (and Moore Threads I think), hell, even the Russian Elbrus CPUs.
Sure, it "backfired" but it would've happened anyway. Trump mad Trump get revenge. Trump smash. That's how he operates - and even though Anthropic were being dicks about the marketing, they got Trump mad. That's why this is happening, not due to the marketing - it would've happened anyway.
If anything the marketing is WHY it got so popular during these 3 days.
> I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
How would the EU replace US tech? There simply are no equivalent providers of such technology in the EU, regardless of pipe dreams in that respect EU representatives regularly conjure up (privacy industry, "European Google", "European Facebook", you name it ..,).
Maybe, however, such a move would actually be consistent with dominant EU policy. The EU seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant, after all.
The primary European failure here has been to allow the hollowing out of the EU tech space. There have been plenty of web tech players in the EU; the US policy over the last 30 years has been to absorb them into US companies or buy them off using US capital, and the EU strategy has been to very much encourage that.
But it is complete fantasy to use the current landscape as evidence of capability. It would be equally shortsighted to say "How would the US replace Chinese manufacturing? There simply are no equivalent supply chains in the US, regardless of pipe dreams that pedophile sycophants regularly conjure up. The US seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant".
It never ceases to amaze me how people scramble to defend the EU's failed policies over the last three decades. The EU managed to regulate itself out of all relevant markets and it only has itself to blame.
The EU lost its manufacturing capacity to countries with cheaper labour, just like the US. The US has only succeeded in IT, everywhere else it struggles against Asia.
The ‘American dream’ attracted a lot of talent (look at how many tech leaders were immigrants), and once the network effects (both IT and social) kicked in it was hard to stop. This is a story that has unfolded many times throughout history. Talent moves to where talent is. And it will move if conditions change.
You’re missing their point, they’re not defending EU policy and in fact agree that current capability is poor. They’re saying that it can change and that the US is also self sabotaging in other ways.
Therein lies the rub for the EU. They think they can just regulate such alternatives into existence, yet have time and time again failed to provide such alternatives.
It is never too late for the Great Wall of Europe.
Like in each ones lives, sometimes hard decisions are only possible because they are forced upon us without alternatives.
Recent example, Ukraine would never gotten advanced drone technology, if it wasn't for the price they are being forced to pay to keep their country.
If unfortunately we're faced with similar hard decisions on who to depend on, they will have to be done, regardless of their cost to the local industry.
Can you think of any case in history where the US government suspended product sales due to national security concerns and that was ultimately beneficial for the company being regulated?
that was pretty destructive. by unfortunate accident the process of developing network standards shut down as that was being lifted. people who tried to address the systemic security issues in internet infrastructure were shouting into the wind while the itar restrictions where in place, since none of their solutions could be deployed. that shortsightedness is at least a partial cause for the huge uncontrollable security issues we have today.
this seems like a direct parallel, sowing confusion during the formative years, for no apparent gain.
I also think as a policy matter it’s futile. But my point is that this is a predictable response to this technology. Analyzing it in terms of one particular administration is missing the forest for the trees.
Shutting down the growth prospects of a company based, not on its behavior, but on the capability of its models right before the IPOs of the companies you're going to profit from is staggeringly dumb. Yes the public is stupid when it comes to investing in stocks, but come on. If these companies growth prospects rest in large part on continuing to improve their products and the government said that if they do they face National Security Cease and Desist letters, then investing is a bad idea.
The selfish / corrupt thing to do is to do this after you've fleeced the public.
One day a few million dollars in tokens will enable you to mint an entire AWS or iPhone.
That will not be something you can purchase. Only enormous capital holders will have access and be able to play that game.
We're going to be left with scraps. Thin clients, shitty gaming cards (for but a few), which also dovetails nicely with trusted computing and device attestation.
We've already lived through this:
- open web -> platforms
- protocols -> closed products
- firefox -> chrome sans ad block
- urls are cool -> 92% of URL bars sent to a single company to show ads
- the personal computer -> locked down iPhones and increasingly locked down Androids without APKs.
- free to use internet -> national ID laws
- free to use cell phones -> required KYC
It's getting worse and worse every year. Why would you think you'll get to have these models? You're a serf.
They'll take your career and your hobby and leave you with nothing. Enjoy renting and being monitored.
Not a religious person, but I'm shocked at all of the people watching Noah's proverbial ark being built right in front of us, the rain starting to pour, and everyone just laughing. The flood is coming. 90+% of you, maybe more, are going to lose your jobs.
Your careers are about to die all at once and you're standing around laughing it off. Absolutely wild to see.
This feeling of being defeated by and trapped inside the “machine” and seeing the “truth” is exactly what the “machine” would want you to do. The actual red pill is that there’s no “machine”, there’s only people and shared social constructions held together by our compliance and they’re contingent.
I fully agree with you, and I find bonkers to see devs screaming how they got x times more productive, observe rewrites from major FOSS products, and still they assume their employer is going to keep the whole team employed.
Also on the other subjects you mention, I got distracted with convenience during the last years, however apparently it is about time to save what is still possible to keep computing open.
Indeed. When are we going to wake up and stand up to this? "Freedom?" This is not freedom. Liberty? Nope. This really is techno-serfdom. Power and capability for me (govts / large corps) but not for thee (us, the serfs).
>The rubicon being crossed here is Republicans Republicans/the red tribe losing their comparative advantage of being opposed to overregulating a rapidly advancing technology.
What purpose do Vance, Elon, Sacks, Sriram Krishnan and others serve? Are Lutnick and Hegseth calling the shots? It looks like the Valley also got duped.
The valley duped themselves the same way the German industrialists duped themselves by thinking they could control Hitler. Turned out they couldn't and a good number did not survive to 1945.
Those "geniuses" with their "philosophers" (Yarvin, seriously?) think they know everything, but don't even bother to read the most basic relevant history. Theil is already deciding to bundle himself and his family off to Argentina.
Even if things don't end as badly as they did for the Germans, the global economy in general, and America's place in the global economy in particular are already seriously damaged after only one third of this presidential term; even as they are managing to concentrate more wealth, having a bigger slice of a smaller pie is worth less. This really needs to be cleaned up.
Neither party in the US is opposed to overregulation, from my perspective that died a good twenty years ago.
Both parties want regulation and a larger federal government. They disagree only on what regulations they want, and even then its largely in optics as they tend to agree on much of the big picture.
Both parties agree that the federal government should have the authority to tell people what they can and can't do to their own body, for example. Its just that one party wants to use it to mandate vaccines and the other prefers to tell women they can't have an abortion.
The first party didn't actually force anyone to get vaccinated though. And that second party also says they can tell you what to put in your body and mandates death panels now in health care. Means-testing for cancer patients. Murder and rapine as government policies. The second party is actually doing that. But yeah, both parties...
The Biden administration absolutely wanted to mandate covid vaccines, they just didn't believe they would get it past the courts. Instead they leveraged their ability to drive a massive smear campaign against anyone in the public who chose not to get vaccinated.
And to be clear, vaccines are mandated for anyone who wishes to use the school system they already pay for via property taxes.
This is why the libertarian argument does not make sense to me.
You crashing without a seatbelt and dying harms others as well:
1. Your body as a projectile could harm others.
2. The emotional harm of others seeing your dead body and the horrific injuries. Also the emotional harm on your friends and family.
3. The increase to my taxes and healthcare costs because people have to deal with your dead body. Also, if you almost die when going through the windshield, the costs are much greater trying to save your life than if you wore a seatbelt, as the injuries will be greater and could require things like air ambulances etc...
4. Your body being unrestrained means that your car can cause way more damage, including hitting other cars or pedestrians and injuring and killing them.
1. I'm not sure how that would happen in practice. If my body is the projectile, they would have to be immediately in front of my vehicle as it slams into whatever it hit. My body is likely the least of their problems in that scenario.
2. Emotional harm is a very difficult thing to protect against. In no way am I waving it off as unimportant, but people can be emotionally harmed by literally anything. We can care about that, but we can't easily regulate for it.
3. There is much lower hanging fruit if you are concerned with the societal cost of an unhealthy population. If we get to body disposal as top of the list I'll feel pretty damn good about where were at.
Which is also why I don't think motorcycle helmet optionality makes sense from a "freedom" point of view either:
1. If your melon hits the ground and splatters open, there's going to a crash scene investigation that closes down the road for many hours, causing traffic chaos. As opposed to a helmet protecting you, where you're more likely to survive, and hobble off the road and get of the way of traffic.
2. Insurance companies generally do not have policies that offer helmet-optional and helmet-mandatory options, so if a motorcyclist who does not wear a helmet gets into a crash and needs a payout (life, or medical treatment), then those riders who do wear a helmet (which tend to have less severe injuries, and thus smaller payouts) have larger premiums through no fault of their own. At the very least there need two different types of policies.
Add also the cost of healthcare when you do NOT die but are only severely injured.
You cannot have any honest libertarian lifestyle à la carte.
I'd be OK with libertarians opting out — but to be true they must opt out of EVERYTHING. You want to smoke, drink raw milk, and not take your vaccines? Fine, you can organize your own self-insured healthcare too. And you go to the back of the queue and not get treated when a participating member of society has a health issue.
The problem is those "free" "do my own research" types feel no responsibility for maintaining the wellness of their neighbors or even themselves, but DO still show up at the emergency room and expect full medical treatment when the DO get sick/injured from raw milk, no vaccines, no seatbelts, or whatever.
They are not libertarians, they are freeloaders, lying to themselves about libertarian "philosophy" to justify freeloading on the systems and herd immunity built and maintained by their smarter and more conscientious peers.
I said this in a sibling comment, but when do we begin regulating other personal choices in the name of shared health care costs?
I see the problem there as being a society wholely dependent on a risk sharing insurance scheme, not any one particular factor that can raise rates.
Edit: its also worth noting that health insurance, and all insurance in the US unless I'm mistaken, is something you choose to use. You don't have to have health insurance at all, meaning you are choosing to take on the risk that others' decisions impact your rates and decided that is worth the benefits you gain from the coverage.
I see nothing wrong with mandating vaccines if you want to exist in society. You want to use public services? Be a responsible part of the public. Vaccines were once heralded as miracles of science, because they are. It wasn’t until the U.S. began deemphasizing education and encouraging anti-intellectualism that we lost our collective minds.
I used to get irked when people would say America is on the path that was portrayed by the film Idiocracy. But the path from "fighting pit on the White House Lawn" to "Extreme Court arena battles featuring monster trucks with giant dildos" increasingly looks like a straight line.
Don't forget that the Biden administration created export controls for GPUs by establishing tiers and limits for countries[1]. When Democrats come back to power, nothing will change in the context of export controls for models like Fable. This is what things will look like going forward. OP is right: this is a geopolitical and strategic shift that will be used by both Democratic and Republican administrations.
EDIT: Genuinely curious why is this being downvoted? Is this related to US politics or a left vs right thing on HN? I'm not from the US, so I don't have any attachment to either party.
Did the Biden administration do that off their own backs or was that an extension/compromise of the action of a Republican-held Congress that is, for example, unreasonably jumpy about RISC-V?
I think there is good reason to consider that frontier models might cross the ITAR threshold, actually. Not least because of the risk that they can simply blurt out knowledge that already does. If ITAR exists, an AI that might know how to contravene it could be a problem, because no existing legal framework or threat of punishment will cause it to keep secrets.
But I don't think you can ignore that the two big AI companies were pushing for that judgement because it would benefit them commercially if open weights AI was regulated.
> But I don't think you can ignore that the two big AI companies were pushing for that judgement because it would benefit them commercially if open weights AI was regulated.
This doesn't matter in this context, NVIDIA didn't push for restrictions for example but they got it anyway. So AI companies would get restrictions either way.
This happens a lot. Even I as a foreigner understand that Trump is routinely at odds with what long-standing cautious Republicans and right-leaning "national security Democrats" think is in the national security interest. They want the long term picture; he has no long-term perspective at all and wants the bargaining chip.
There was solid bipartisan border policy in 2024 that would have enacted strong border controls, for example — legislation Biden was very willing to sign, but Trump got Republicans who had argued for it to kill it off because he wanted to run against "open borders", not strong border controls. He wanted the advantage with voters.
Trump reversing export controls that sensible Republicans wanted for decades is not at all surprising when you consider just how utterly desperate he is to be friends with Xi (and how easily manipulated by Xi he is). Again, he thinks being able to open and close that tap himself is his own personal leverage.
I agree that in this case the calls for restrictions are coming from the corporate world. Because they want government support for anti-corporate-espionage measures.
The opposite party would have outright banned AI. Just listen to the left commentators, they all want to ban technology and, similarly to how they did it in the UK, destroy the whole IT sector altogether.
New Labour wasn't a consistently left-wing government, was it? Or they'd have banned FOBTs, not profiteered off them to an extent that they ruined a generation of people.
So it's based purely on party labels? Political parties are not static and is clear that Labour has been moving further and further away from a left platform.
I mean they tried to cut benefits for disabled people, supported Israeli war crimes in Gaza and prosecuted pro-Palestinian activism, sneakily increased taxes on the working class, clamped down on immigration to try and undercut the rise of Reform, I am honestly not sure of a single left policy they enacted, granted I haven't been paying super close attention to that shitshow.
> I am honestly not sure of a single left policy they enacted, granted I haven't been paying super close attention to that shitshow.
I'm likewise fairly disengaged, but off the top of my head: increased taxes, and removal of the two-child benefit cap.
Israel does not really fit on a left-right spectrum, nor even really (though slightly better?) on two (economic & liberty) axes. The Liberal Democrats & Greens are the only (somewhat significant) parties consistently, err, anti-Zionist if that's fair to say, pro-two-state, accusing of war crimes, etc.
I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.
Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) so there was no good faith policy justification for imposing an export control.
This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors. We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.
I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?
It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever
Yes.
I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that.
And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware.
This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models.
Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models.
It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.
If we're measuring progress in hours and days then yes. But if we're measuring progress in months then OSS models are doing fine. You can get a state-of-the art performance in an open model if you pretend it is January 2026 instead of June.
There is no evidence here that the cutting edge labs have any durable advantage. Extrapolating current trends it seems likely that even the Europeans will be capable of meeting any given performance measure with enough time. In fact the evidence suggests that the capital required to run the models is where a moat will develop. Knowing the weights won't help much.
The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling.
There are lots of AI companies and it doesn’t seem that they all have the same funding fountain or share monetization goals. I wouldn’t read much into what each one of them is doing.
Even if the models by the Chinese labs are open source or open weights even after they get to mythos level intelligence lets say, still inference and the optimization of those models to be accessed at speeds of 1000 tokens/sec in not in the hands of general public as these models have parameters more than a trillion and they can't be run on some publicly available hardware, So even after being open source it does'nt fix the problem as the general public will still pay the company for inference.
I'm pretty sure these large models are run on Nvidia GPUs, not some unobtainable piece of secret kit. You could go down the street and buy from AMD or a number of other vendors to push out FLOPs if you wanted or needed, but you'll need a thick wallet to shell out for a cluster of GPUs to run these models. The reason people don't run the big Chinese models at home is that they can't afford the hardware, not that it isn't publicly available. This tech is essentially a large amount of matrix multiplications afterall.
I think the larger problem is that restricting US AI companies gives the Chinese a leg up because they now have a window open where they can become the source of the most powerful models available due to government restrictions rather than on technical merits. All Anthropic customers just got a downgrade last evening, for example. While the Chinese are able to serve the world or whoever, the US corporations will be limited to the US market, or whatever the powers that be will allow. This restrictiveness could turn out to be disadvantageous to American companies since people will migrate to wherever they can get the most powerful models.
> The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose)
DeepSeek is developed by the largest Chinese hedge fund, their models used to make them $ on the share market are very profitable, they've never ever released anything on those models.
Somehow you are claiming that those same group of people are going to totally change their very consistent long term behaviour and start promoting openness when they are in the global leading position in AI?
The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.
I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies.
China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power.
Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run.
As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
Not sure why anyone in the EU thinks the US is not a significant espionage risk. Adding any major US supplier would have been a significant espionage risk until really recently.
Before the EU cleaned up Europe's act pretty considerably on corruption, US companies used corporate but also state-level espionage actors to level the playing field against a culture of bribes and they were fairly open about it. They absolutely needed to do it, because of the potential penalties back home if they engaged in bribery abroad.
The tables have turned, now. The EU runs much more cleanly than decisionmaking in DC, which is clearly corrupted and lubricated with cash and opportunities for failsons and faildaughters; it has accelerated radically quite recently but it was heading that way from the first Bush era.
But I'd bet the corporate-state merger of industrial espionage is in full flow.
Anthropic and OpenAI are not just "another American company", their entire business (and industry) was created based on stealing data and using it for profit. You make this point about "another company" so casually that you'd think you added a SaaS bill for generating thumbnails or whatever. The exact same point you make about China can be made much more confidently and with stronger evidence for the entire modern LLM lab industry.
Again I have to echo the previous poster's point: Most people outside of the US really do not see the US as some much better alternative than China. If anything, in the specific area of LLMs, China are the ones doing work benefitting the everyman whereas almost everything the US labs do does not.
That's why I added "Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited". Reaching the decision that adding one single US-based LLM provider had more benefits than risks took months. And we were selective about who that would be (hint: not OpenAI). And I know companies who are not willing to go that step, using open-weight models on their own infra instead. But outsourcing inference to China was never even a serious suggestion. The notion is absurd to us
That said, I imagine e.g. South Americans thinking very differently on this front
> given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit.
Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments.
No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.
China indeed has a general reputation for widespread espionage, so any Chinese company wanting to expand into the European market has to prove it isn't spying on its potential customers. US companies have traditionally been seen as friendly, so their platforms are essentially built around "trust me bro" guarantees.
In a world where both China and the US are now seen as hostile-by-default, this might actually leave some Chinese companies with an advantage in their ability to demonstrate trustworthiness.
Totally agree, though it is an unpopular opinion here.
It’s the same paradox as people claiming: “we are European, our data is safer in Europe” when actually your privacy is higher when your data is stored in China (or Russia) you are safer because it is out of reach from your local government.
The only thing I dislike, and that’s no matter the service, is that my data or information usage is shared with third-party.
For example, Anthropic conveniently forgets to mention Datadog has tons and tons of information about Claude users, or that your data transits through machines they don’t operate.
Safety has more than one definition. Being able to sue the company in small claims court when it threatens to delete your account is also part of that, and so is being able to pay for the service when Russian companies are once again put on a sanctions list.
China wants everyday people data because some of those people will get power one day, and China wants to be able to leverage knowledge of you, perhaps even "deep dark secret" data, if they need to.
was going to say this.. open sourcing Chinese models will enforce Chinese dominance instead of reducing it. When an open Chinese model becomes the best alternative to inaccessible closed US models guess what everybody will start to use. And that same open model may embed certain narratives and values that please the Chinese government.
Ya. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make?
Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line?
(hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)
The US administration restricting the use of US-trained models is one of the best gifts it could make to the Chinese LLM producers, and to the PRC government.
I won’t forgive Biden for not reversing more of trumps policies, especially immigration
Between RBJ refusing to step down, Biden not reversing immigration policy, and Biden refusing to step down in the primary until too late, he’s going to go down as a poor president in the history books - even if he wasn’t a bad dude or even bad in terms of policy.
It's funny how the acceleration of the downfall of the US (due to trump) is a gift to everyone else. It's almost as if US didn't have as postitive impact on the world as they thought.
A gift to [every dictatorial regime]. It's not a gift to the common people. The hundreds of thousands of people who got aids, and wouldn't have if not for Trumps withdrawal, didn't benefit. The women of Afghanistan didn't benefit. The countries of the EU... Canada... Korea... Taiwan... Ukraine... really just about any democracy didn't benefit.
The downfall of the US benefiting bad people is not evidence that the US didn't have a positive impact.
There's also the Meta motivation, that even if you don't get the control you would like from releasing a model, it may still be worth it to at least deny others that control. I'm sure that matters even more to China vs. the US than it mattered to Facebook vs. Google.
> I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that.
that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.
Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.
People choose SOTA right now because of the heavily subsidised model subscriptions. People aren't going to pay 20x the price for a model that's maybe 10% better.
Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.
That sounds intuitively true, but I’m not convinced that it is actually the case. I don’t think we know enough about neural network training to say what training and how many parameters are necessary for what kind of performance on which tasks. To me it looks like we currently guess that more is better and try to throw as much compute and data at the problem as is economically feasible. There is little incentive for companies to invest into small model research since their moat is huge models that require special hardware to run.
Is the government going to fund all further development? Hard to imagine investors continuing to throw billions at products they aren't allowed to sell.
Honestly, with the caliber of people who currently comprise the US administration; leaving the whole thing to Openclaw and some new fancy model might not be the worst idea.
> I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?
Here is why it's unlikely this is anything other than "silly behavior by a government":
- some benchmarks show GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and even Claude Opus outperforming Claude Fable, and yet it's Fable which is restricted.
- some benchmarks still show the likes of Kimi 2.5 outperforming any Claude model, and DeepSeek is getting equivalent scores (a few tenths of a percent difference)
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever (...)
That's immaterial to the discussion. Even if China forced Chinese labs to restrict access to all models, the truth of the matter is that Trump's administration to restrict access to US-based models does not prevent others from having access to models that are as capable or even better.
All that says is some benchmarks aren’t worth the tokens it takes to evaluate them. Mythos is clearly capable of finding zero days other models can’t, and Fable is close enough to be lumped with it.
> Mythos is clearly capable of finding zero days other models can’t
I'm unconvinced that this is anything more than proof of work and marginal improvement that other models will catch up with, perhaps as early as to next week. Lots of other current-gen models will find vulns that can be chained together if you're willing to burn enough tokens on the task, and Fable is an absolute token incinerator.
You’re completely overrating these benchmarks and it’s landing you at a nonsense opinion. Just actually use the models and you will see that the gap is significant.
It should be easy for a company like Anthropic to prove this beyond a doubt. Why don't they? Why don't they have a collection of prompts and side-by-side comparisons with other models showing how far ahead they are?
I think it's mainly because the difference in models at the frontier isn't "response to prompt X", but rather "coherence with 500K tokens of context and instructions in play"
I still remember when Netscape had outdated ssl for a few years because more advanced cryptography was classified by the US gov as armaments or something. Basically used export restrictions to prevent better security technology from being adopted into commercial products.
They didn't have some secret way of defeating 40 bit encryption; anyone could do it. 512 bit asymmetric encryption was also brute forced by a private entity, albeit at a high budget.
I'd forgotten all the government attempts at controlling crypto like PGP in the early internet days. It is one straightforward way to look at what's happening here without resorting to speculation about this administration's motives.
> This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.
Let's not forget the Trump administration threatened two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation, and then had the gall to complain they were not helping them attack Iran.
GEO blocking is not the same as blocking based on nationality.
I'd like(?) to think someone in this decision chain realized "restricting to US nationals" meant effectively restricting it to all and chose this route knowing Antrophic would need to just pull the model (so engaging in censorship without calling it that, possibly less susceptible to court challenges).
Or hurting Anthropic without calling it that? Knowing that Anthropic has clashed with the current administration in the past (https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5725327/pentagon-anthro...), and knowing how vindictive (or willing to favor those who suck up to them) they are, I wouldn't be surprised at all...
I'm less confident in that. To me the way the announcement reads as malicious compliance -- this administration is extremely petty in its dealings, and it's not outside the realm of possibility they asked for and would have accepted an essentially symbolic ban, something that anyone with technical knowledge and a VPN could bypass.
Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. The fact that the post does not mention any such discussion, and leaves the nonsensical request as the only stated reason, makes this feel like a power move by Dario, simply complying in the most dramatic and rage-inducing way and announcing it in a way to direct that rage at the USG. (Which is, IMO, a savvy move)
I get your reasoning but I think you're misreading this. The Trump admin has had access to Mythos for a couple months and certainly had access to pre-release Fable for more than a week but they wait until 5:30p on a Friday to send a broad and unworkable demand for a company to remove its flagship products from access to anyone who is not a confirmed U.S. citizen under severe penalties for any violation.
What penalties? Treason is still punishable by death in the U.S. I hate that I just felt compelled to write that as a serious possibility and, pre-Trump 2.0, I would have accused anyone citing that as scaremongering. But times have changed and this administration hates Anthropic vehemently. Anthropic is the only major AI company not "playing ball" with the DoW and donating to Trump's pet projects.
I truly believe if Mythos was an OAI or Google model, there would have been exactly the kind of discussion you imagine and this would have all been worked out. I deeply regret that recent facts make the most likely conclusion that this late-Friday ban was planned for days (if not weeks). And there was no real attempt to work anything out about Mythos, because that's not really what the DoW wants.
The driver behind this is the still unresolved dispute of Anthropic's Acceptable Use Policy regarding autonomous lethal weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which conflicted with the Pentagon's push for unrestricted model deployment ("all lawful uses"). This is the DoW's counter-attack. I fully expect that the DoW is going to hold Anthropic (and Ant's IPO) hostage by blocking any new model until Anthropic gives the DoW full access with no restrictions except "all lawful uses" (and the DoW's position is their in-house lawyers decide what's legal).
>Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was.
It's not nonsensical if the intention is to destroy Anthropic. There is nothing to explain.
Anthropic has been trying to leverage government intervention and dishonest security bluster for competitive advantage and now the Trump admin is using it as a pretext to destroy them ahead of the IPO.
Every F35 is exported with a killswitch. and you think this is a silly decision? its not silly, its gatekeeping, iam sure this will get much strict in future, where even developing a frontier model can get sanctions from US. IMO Every country need AI sovereignty and its right time to form a group or consortium of nations to fund and build an equally capable frontier model that is accessible to all others. AI should not be confined to certain nations, the way nuclear capabilities are restricted.
There's no kill switch. The F35 advantage is the mission data files that are frequently updated and allow the F35 to classify targets and threats. Essentially the US and partners collect the electronic signatures of enemy radars and package them so in a conflict the het can draw a box with a S400 label.
So it doesn't have a kill switch, it just stops being useful when it can no longer regularly phone home? That sounds awfully close to a killswitch to me...
The UK alone produces 15% of the parts required to assemble the F35. Around 25% of the jet is manufactured/produced by the other partners of the program.
Heck the F35B only exists due to the UK demanding it. They have access to the source code (and so do Israel).
Due to political engineering some significant parts are manufactured in partnership countries. That supply chain is also a vulnerability for the US albeit to a lesser degree.
We need to stop making light of these things. Governments don’t do ‘silly’ things. When you wield that kind of power over people’s lives, everything you do is deadly serious.
Yes. What Elon did with DOGE (including but not limited to destroying USAID) may have been stupid and barely saved any money at all if you look at it as a percentage of the total budget, but it had very real consequences for real people. But, because they were mostly people from Trump's "shithole countries", no one talks about it anymore.
> I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.[...] This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors.
I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. ... We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.
So it's silly behavior, as typified by the last decade of American governance? Is there "serious" American leadership we should be expecting to see soon, e.g. 2029 AOC elected on a platform of unlimited 10GW datacenters and universal basic Mythos 8 models?
It may seem subjectively silly to you, but e.g. getting executed for refusing to point at a deer and call it a horse is pretty silly stuff as well, at least for those not living in the Qin Dynasty.
How does a data center harm me? I have seen how incredibly stupid the average (dem or republican both)'s reasons are. If not outright lizard brain radiation beams, more than once I have seen claims of it producing "toxic waste" which is absolutely absurd.
I was thinking of the emissions from 'temporary' gas-powered electric generators in the USA.
Improving the electrical production system would be fine, but it needs to be paid for upfront by the datacentre and ideally completed no later than the datacentre. Otherwise citizens end up paying for this on their electricity bills, as is happening in Ireland [1], and other electrical upgrades (factories etc) can't be done as there isn't the capacity. (I think the limit here is trained engineers to design and build the power plants and distribution networks.)
We have at least 4 new-ish hyperscale datacentres in Denmark, one each from Microsoft, Meta, Google and Apple. I think they're here for the renewable power, and at least the Meta and Microsoft ones are putting their waste heat into the local district heating systems. Some of them have indirectly financed construction of renewable power.
But the energy used is enormous! [3] says data centres were 10% of electricity generation in 2020, before the massive increase in GPUs.
They are built on the promise of high-paid jobs, but that turns out to be 20 technicians and a few security guards [2].
I haven't looked into it, but I assume there are no "profits" from big-tech datacentres leading to additional tax payments, unlike e.g. a factory.
Electricity is sold on the market. If you live next to a data center you can choose not to use any services enabled by that center, but you cannot choose to pay non-datacenter prices for the electricity to charge your car or run your household
I don't think incresed incentives to develop lagging energy infrastructure are a bad thing. Especially in times when solar is cheaper than everything else.
It's also possible that they literally are too dumb to realize they asked for something infeasible. For example, the same main character who apparently gave up a career as an extra in made-for-TV WWII German movies to become a very high ranking government official.
I can hear alarm bells going off in less silly governments around the world as we speak. Genie's out of the bottle. The gears have been put in motion. Etc.
"effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) "
No - it's extremely effective.
Do you realize the difference between a 'few people using VPNs + fake IDs at 2-person companies ... vs companies all companies globally not allowed to use tech?
If 'Bank of Montreal' were caught using export controlled technology it could be devastating - so they're not going to be using it along with any little mom and pop shop.
We don't know what the Administration is doing other than 'This is Extremely Heavy Handed' and will have devastating consequences if it goes on.
I think this is also overly naive. We live in a world of hardware attestation and passkeys, the baseline requirements to use new models can increase to cryptocurrency-levels of KYC. If this becomes the new norm (which it easily could), then the best models will impose increasingly restrictive requirements.
The statement said that even foreign nationals within the US would be barred. That seems intentionally unworkable to me, and makes me think that the intent was to be more restrictive/disruptive than even an export control. It is hard to tell what the internal discussions are, but given the last run-in between the administration and Anthropic, and given the administration's politicization of nearly everything, I think it's likely that this is not necessarily a long term across-the-board policy plan.
I agree that it's really hard to tell from the outside, but if I had to guess I think we still have more to worry about on the side of "Wall Street races to superintelligence" than on the side of "KYC for AI". I could be wrong though.
I don't see your point why export control is a silly tool. There's a difference between a VPN which I can prop up on my home server or a $5 VPS, vs a Mythos-scale closed source model running on millions of dollars of hardware
I mean, if the stated intent of an export control is to allow domestic use but prevent export, achieving the stated intent is impossible, because every developer in the world wants the latest models and will get a VPN.
As other posted noted, US cc is, by far, the easiest piece of information to acquire by a determined actor. Possible and inconvenience, but that is about it.
Why is that? Well, not to search very far, I just got a breach notice from a company I never heard of the other day. They are sorry.
It is trivially easy for nation states, non-nation bad actors, etc. to use US payments. I'd guess that most of the financial scams targeting Americans rely on US-based mules and their American bank accounts.
Also, foreign nationals legally residing in the US can have access to US-based payments. There's no way when accepting a credit card payment from a US card issuer to ask whether the card holder is a natural born citizen versus Green Card holder, etc.
For peons sure. For anyone who is an actual security threat it would be easy. That is why this is either a) stupid or b) yet another lever to make it easier for this administration to incarcerate people.
> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.
With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world. US politicians and elite, regardless of political inclination, understand the enormous strategic potential of this technology and will ITAR the shit out of frontier models and/or use them as leverage for extracting concessions out of other countries.
The main losers are Big AI labs, their investors, foreign employees and rest of the world.
Fwiw, China and other countries would’ve done the exact same thing. It’s perhaps the game theoretic optimal approach when your comparative advantage is so vast (capital, compute, talent, embedded knowledge) and keeps growing especially if RSI is real (making it nearly impossible for anyone else to catch up)
>With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world.
Really? You think the economics of the AI buildout remain viable if US companies cannot export their highest value services?
You think expelling foreign AI researchers doesn't hurt the industry or boost foreign competitors? Half (or whatever) of Google's AI team, including their AI chief are foreign nationals and/or located outside of the US.
You think that other IT exports will not suffer if the US turns out to be an unreliable and even capricious supplier?
I humbly accept it's very difficult to game this out with any degree of confidence, especially as other countries deploy more resources.
But the questions about viability of the labs because of export restrictions is not in my cone of uncertainty. If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked. Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, economy-wide automation would make the US wealthy beyond imagination.
US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP. I am not aware of the international revenue share for OpenAI/Anthropic.
>If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked.
The US is about a quarter of the global economy, but let's use Microsoft's international revenue share of ~50% as a proxy for tech services. It's ~40% for the S&P 500.
I don't know what share of that would be impacted by export bans, but it would certainly affect ROI. It would hurt the competitiveness of the wider US tech industry and create incentives for moving highly paid work overseas.
>US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP.
It's 12% to 13% but this is distorted by the way in which tech services are counted in export statistics and also by tax avoidance. Just look at Ireland's ridiculous GDP numbers.
If the technology is as powerful as these somehwat fantastical "goals" suggest, the incentive to use it everywhere in the world would be enormous. An export ban wouldn't mean that only the US has the capability. The theory behind current models is well known. It's just a matter of optimising them for specific use cases and using them on an industrial scale.
Most AI researchers are not US citizens either. It's completely obvious that this is the US shooting itself in the foot (if it were to last, which I don't believe).
> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.
Can we stop with this bothsides-ing. The level of co-opting by this administration is unprecedented. There’s the strong-arming to get Intel equity stake, Nvidia/AMD revenue share, U.S. Steel golden share, Lithium Americas equity stake, Big Law pro bono pledges, TikTok forcible acquisition, Paramount-CBS-Skydance favor, it’s just unbelievable the stark use of power.
We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump. Don't think I'm justifying that - it's just what happened, in basically the tech bros own words.
The Dems then proceeded to lose to Trump, despite being extremely well funded themselves. They accomplished this through a spectacular series of "own goals": arming genocide, vetoing ceasefires, forcing deeply unpopular candidates, allowing a certain attempted insurrectionist rapist run out the clock on justice [0], awful elitist messaging on the economy, keeping the Epstein files under wraps, etc.
The red side is worse than the blue side, so the blue side demand immunity from criticism. The red side sets everything on fire, on purpose. The blue side prevents progressives from real change. The cycle rachets and repeats. This has been going on for decades, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars - but people who point it out get accused of saying both sides are the same.
0 - "That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition." - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-rac...
We should not stop _all_ of the both-sidesing, but we absolutely should stop _some_ of the both-sidesing. Both-sidesing done without both (a) critical thinking and (b) honest intent is simply whataboutism, one of the many forms of societal pollutant that we seem to have fully normalized.
Your second sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that needs to stop.
Your third sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that should not stop.
Your fourth is disappointing conclusion, a strawman to start ("demand immunity from criticism"...) and a false equivalence / faux symmetry as a bonus ("sets everything on fire" & "doesn't support progressive policies" are two sides of _which_ coin, exactly...?)
> We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump.
I agree - he clearly should have done much more than just threaten.
With statements like that, if it’s been going on that long then it’s either our culture and normal way of life or you’re on some QAnon cuckoo rabbit hole.
> then it’s either our culture and normal way of life
That's the one - from an outside PoV the two US parties are two sides of the same coin, barely a perineum twixt them, both ceding the votes of many people to the cash of a very few.
It's baked into the US zeitgeist that it's better to sit back and watch "the government" go tits up and then wade in with guns hoping for a better outcome than it is to properly manage communal resources and common ground.
I disagree with parent, but nothing they stated qualifies as 'dismissable' as 'qanon' level, which btw is one of the key phrases establish to ignore some opinions. It may be incorrect, inaccurate and/or simply wrong, but dismissing it as some conspiracy is.. what is a good way to characterize it.. slightly over the top.
Yes! I mean everyone is speaking about this in a boxed manner.
For all we know there are might be several reasons for that ban e.g.
1) There is an actual security threat and its just simple as that.
2) Someone wants Anthropic to be valued way higher and the companies that have invested in Anthropic already... This ban only validates this product and will move the market in higher valuation of Anthropic due to their model being "so good gov had to ban"
3) Someone doesn't like Anthropic and just wants to shut down its current edge (highly unlikely, if there was no IPO filing in place it could be possible but now the valuation just goes up, same as the 2 As that have invested in them)
4) Someone freaked out that we'll be left out of jobs soon so wants to slow down progress, tbh using fable so far I can tell that a lot of jobs can be made redundant cause of that...
For me the most likely for now is 2, then 1 and then maybe 4.
On June 22 Chatgpt will most likely come out with their new model too, which as I understand will be an answer to mythos. Lets see if the US gov goes the same route.
It's not that complicated. Probably what happened is just that a former Fox News host read part of a security report that he did not understand and overreacted.
I do not understand why it being mandated that the vast majority of the people in the world will not allowed to use -- or pay for -- your product (and that the ones that can will have to jump through excessive hoops) could ever make your valuation go up; can you walk me through that one?
Even if this is just temporary, your #3 is more in direct conflict with #2 than you seem to be willing to admit: if you were to own stock in a company that you know has a powerful product and a market lead, but they have been required to take a time out in the market for a year, that should be devastating for their valuation.
Because nowadays the stockmarket is build upon hype, this is why we are having the market caps and valuations we are having that are in any way shape or form reflecting anything that is real.
For the Gov to come out and block a model for national security, its gonna swing the market into thinking "oh anthropic really has the next generation of LLMs out there, its that good Gov banned it, this company is going to the moon".
The part of banning non US nationals, I believe is a legality, as in they have to trust US citizens to do right by their country. I don't think in court a whole ban on a product for security reasons would stand. (The judge would ask for the gov to explain why all US nationals are a security threat to their country)
Nevertheless, again I am standing behind number 2 personally as the main reason for such a thing, market manipulation is not new and its currently at its all time high. Also anthropic is part of this manipulation so far, with every other AI company out there.
Again I am just presenting my POV, it could as well just be number 1... A gov became competent enough to find security threads before they happen :)
I get what you mean but you are very wrong about the stock market and how people react to export bans. Everytime US had restricted control for Nvidia chips in the news over the last few years, the stock price went down not up.
It might be a good marketing trick but it is not a good thing in the stock market given historical trends.
Your view highly screams you only have a superficial understanding of financial markets and you shouldn't extraploate that to "this is how market works because its all hype and everything is vapor"
You can't justify trillions of market cap just serving the US market, and they've just kneecapped their ability to compete anywhere else, it would be delusional to invest on something like this thinking it's going to be a free market, you'd just be indirectly funding the US government ability to use AI against others, especially if you are a non-US citizen (or a subgroup of US citizens they don't like). The near-term world-ending is just pure marketing, they haven't shown anything nearly as impressive as they've been promising, and the software they've produced so far with near infinite access to agents has been very impressively bad.
No, its not apples and oranges. How/why does it boost their IPO directly? Elaborate on this please instead of stating it as an universal fact (because it isn't).
I feel you are just talking a hypothetical without having any basis. You think it'll have an impact on IPO directly and that it will be a positive one. But you have no proof or historical precidence for the same. Meanwhile we have historical proof that markets reacts negatively when a company is blocked by the government on selling their top products freely. And that is most likely going to happen here as well.
Public perception might be changed by these "ohhh its so scary guys" marketing but these don't translate to actual market perception when it comes to actual facts and numbers on the financials.
It could be the case that we’ve reached the last generation of frontier models that can be accessed by the general public. That eliminates a risk that Anthropic could be leapfrogged by a competitor.
Now it’s a competition between products on the near frontier. Anthropic has executed well on products so far. They blew up thanks to Claude Code, not Opus by itself.
If (1) then somebody in the administration messed up badly. Glasswing has been a thing since April, and it's common knowledge that there would be some fuzzy edges around whatever restrictions a model has in place. There's no reason to let it launch and then pull it back.
(2) This "hype" meme is overrated. Enterprises (ones without a horse in the race, at least) will choose the model their best engineers ask for, or their competitors will lap them. I have been finding Codex more useful (even than Fable) but for a lot of tasks it seems that Claude Code is faster. This is one customer base where the general consensus here on HN is more influential than anything the Trump administration could do or anything Anthropic could say.
(3) "US government seems out to kill you" does not necessarily make valuation go up, and we've already seen this administration in an avoidable spat with Anthropic.
(4) This seems way less likely than a mix of (1) and (3) to me. The arguments for banning a useful technology to save jobs haven't really made sense since cars or indoor plumbing and don't get taken too seriously in either party at senior levels. That could change but it will take a lot for it to change.
Eh, chatGpt coming out with a new garbage model. Great.
Fable had some really good cross project awareness. My only complaint is it backported a feature to my test application and then they killed it before I could finish debugging it. The new model behavior in the replacement application was 100% superior. I just didn't know it was going to start porting fixes so readily between projects. Awareness in the new model is amazing and the feedback I've had from other developers is the same. It feels like ultrathink with double the agents of xhigh effort. The real issue is they shipped it with incomplete guardrails and someone likely found an exploit.
5) Someone freaked out China might use the model to advance its own tech. It's always China with this administration. The guy has an obsession with China since he had to hire feng shui consultants to make his tower appealing¹ for Chinese customers.
Also, might be a way to further screw with Anthrophic because they refused to remove their guardrails Pentagon, getting the opposite result of what was intended.
The Trump administration has exactly one motive, and that is accumulation of wealth. There is literally no other reason they would do anything. Even if there were legitimate economic or security concerns, those aren't motivating to the Trump administration.
This is about grift, somehow, full stop.
I neither like nor support Anthropic, but there's just no sense in pretending the Trump administration is anything other than a kleptocracy or interpreting their actions under any other lens.
Imagine a private company invents a piece of technology soooo good that the US government has to issue a ban.
Apple's G4 was banned for export. Although it was not a direct order from US government. They fell into an outdated bracket of computing power exports limits. They sure did use it for advertising it.
Not in the same way, no, because they have not been targeted, while they should have if the same rules applied, according to Anthropic's depiction of the situation.
This is potential tyranny aimed at Anthropic, specifically.
Europe doesn't seem to care so much about erratic and hostile governments when it cozied up to Russian gas for decades, something it still continues to do just hiding behind third party countries.
It's a clear statement that European morals are purely performative
Just like how the EU is hostile towards US companies, but very light to the touch when it comes to corruption with HSBC, FIFA or VW. With such hostile and erratic allies, who needs enemies?
Let's not even get into Orban. You can never trust the EU again since who knows if they're capable of electing someone like that in the future? Trust is broken forever
> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.
What? Anthropic is not a TikTok sensation. It's a business tool. Businesses need to know their tools work reliably.
When you are situated in a banana republic and the chief banana is out to get you (and demonstrates that they can and will on a whim) that is not great hype but a potential death sentence for you as a service provider.
You are one degree away from becoming forever branded as unusable. (Theoretically until people trust that a sane administration is in control again, but that might as well be forever on current AI timelines, given how much cashflow you need just to keep going)
It pretty much is. Claude is more of a meme than a tool. It's been second best (and more expensive option) for most of the time but people somehow keep talking about it. I'm getting strong Apple vibes from this one.
It's only rewarding hype if the ban gets dropped. If "foreign Anthropic employees that live in the US can't use Fable/Mythos" stays it harms them, if they don't drop the ban and Fable/Mythos stay limited to "every single person who uses the model must individually provide their ID to prove American-ness" it harms them.
It is already a rewarding hype. They are the first company to build a model so advanced that the US government has to ban it.
Google and OpenAI will eventually catch up and be banned as well. Therefore, this ban isn't really a huge concern for Anthropic since their competitors will be banned eventually.
All this does is proving to investors that Anthropic is indeed ahead of its competitors.
>OpenAI will eventually catch up and be banned as well.
" We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)"
The administration just doesn't like anthropic. OpenAI is in bed with the trump Administration.
Anthropic refused to allow the US Government to conduct mass surveillance, which made the US Government mad. OpenAI was fine with it as long as it was 'legal' mass surveillance. OpenAI is not going to get banned, even if their next model is both better and more dangerous than Mythos.
No, Anthropic refused to allow the US Government to conduct mass surveillance on US Citizens, they where fine with 'legal' mass surveillance of other countries.
What they know right now is that the model is so advanced the US government has to ban it, and the model comes out of Anthropic. Not Google. Not OpenAI.
Most valuably, they have a plausible excuse for hitting a financial brick wall before failing to deliver on years of over-promising on real-world business utility.
Expensive marketing stunt if users demand refunds from their credit card company for those annual subscriptions on the basis of "service not delivered".
Paying for 365 days of service but getting 364 would normally get you a full refund, not just a 1 day credit according to visa/MasterCard rules.
Anthropic got out a slightly better model (which is what two companies were doing for more than a year), but at the cost of not being able to provide it within subscription. It build out an inordinate hype around this model. And in the end it was saved by this hype because it doesn't have to admit now that it's never gonna be able to provide this model in volume because gov forbade them from providing it.
> Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now now when they have Mythos capabilities [...]
The "Mythos capabilities" is a pretty arbitrary threshold. It could have happened any point before or after. China treats this technology in very different ways. And China's economy and foreign policies are very different, in such export-based economy export controls make much no sense. Unless something changes drastically in the global relations. I expect the opposite to happen, if the US leave a void globally, china will be even more incentivised to fill it.
This been said, it is likely that big models are soon no longer "open sourced" (qwen has already started), but because the chinese companies will prefer to sell access themselves, not because of government intervention.
In any case, what happens now is a huge thing, and not sure we grasp its consequences yet. It is definitely beyond any ai safety marketing stunt. Even if this is rolled back at some point, after "guarantees" are established, it has already moved things to change drastically.
> Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs ... a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities
"Mythos capabilities" is not some magic threshold. This is exactly the type of language that people used about GPT-4 in 2023. Today, I can run models far stronger than GPT-4 on my laptop at speeds better than GPT-4 offered.
Anthropic are quite good at coining sticky phrases like "Mythos-class models", but these are manipulative attempts to shape the discourse for business purposes and should be identified as such.
To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem.
Yes, some of it looks silly now, though it's always easy to criticize with hindsight: the models could do unexpectedly impressive things and we didn't fully know the limit yet, it was a black box.
Remember you're critcising the org that actually made it public to people earlier than any other: the uncertainty was a temporary caution. The "open" in OpenAI was because they made it available, unlike Google at the time.
> These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
I don't necessarily disagree, but who is going to pay for improvements in models if they're not commercially available? Are AI companies going to become defence contractors with (US?) government paying for the training?
I don't know much it cost to go from AI model Foo 4 to Foo 5, but it's going to cost a pretty penny to eventually go to 6 and 7. These companies are doing so in the expectation of eventually charging customers to recoup the costs: if the only customer(s) is government(s) then the per-unit cost will be much higher. An analogy: you can get a 'civilian' toilet for USD 200, an FAA/EASA-approved toilet for airlines 2000, and a MILSPEC/NASA toilet for 20000.
Now this limited-customer model is certainly doable—tank manufacturers have a smaller base of customers than pickup truck manufacturers—but AI companies probably want regulatory clarity on what they're allowed to sell, and to whom, before they start developing new products/services.
I'm a European, the EU is supposed to be one of the closest allies of the US.
The US government found a jailbreak that allowed the user to make Fable do bad things, this is so dangerous that this model must be held back in areas that are not the US...
If this is so dangerous why allow US nationals access to it? Are there no evil people in the US?
Going back to my perspective: let's say I control a big enterprise or a government body, how should I view this or US technology? Should I be like: yes, let's use US tech, they are a reliable partner and would never abruptly cut us off! Or should I be like: there are competent alternatives out there and if your work hinges on wether or not you had access to Fable 5, then your business is probably not going to survive for long.
Back when Snowden leaked all of the spying information, the only thing the States cared about was whether they spied on their own citizens. The fact that they spied on the citizens of their allies, including yes, the EU, barely made the news.
I don't think it makes sense the assume the US considers any country its ally.
sorry that's what I meant: I remember watching their depositions or whatever they were called, and their only concern was whether or not they had spied on US citizens. Whether or not they spied on their allies, I do not recall any coverage of from their primary news outlets (or inside their depositions) at all.
I agree with the sentiment and dislike Kissinger, but that quote is always paraphrased and out of context.
The full quote makes it clear Kissinger was saying, in the context of the Vietnam War, that the US should come to the aid of their friends:
> "Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
I'm well aware of its context and original meaning, and I'm very happy to twist its meaning into something Kissinger would disagree with any chance I get.
> I hate being told what technology I can and can't use
Ever since the original GPT-2 "it's too powerful to release!" I've realized that whatever is the current state of open models represents what we really have access to.
It's shocking to me how many people on HN, who engage in long conversations about LLMs and AI, have never actually run a model on their own hardware.
All you need is a reasonably good macbook pro/studio or an RTX [3-5]090 and you can run useful models in the >= 30 tokens/second range (much higher if you choose the GPU path). The difference between what you can run on this hardware and what you can run on hardware that costs 2-5x is not that big. Don't be fooled by people on Twitter/X claiming you need some outrageous setup.
It's also increasingly clear that frontier models are nowhere near close to pushing the limits of efficiency. Quantization, MoE, and other techniques have dramatically improved even in the last year.
For work, of course use OpenAI/Anthropic models, but for anything personal, anyone who considers themselves a "real engineer" should be running local models, using open harnesses and seeing what they can accomplish with these.
Even if open releases slow down or even stop, we have the foundation, right now, for smart engineers to squeeze something quite useful out of. Hopefully we'll one day figure out how to train large models in a federated way. But either way: not your weights, not your inference.
Personally I am fine with the SOTA from last year if I can run it on my hardware and who gets access to my data and history. I don’t really care that it could be marginally better using a model I cannot control on someone else’s server.
I am not fine with that. I have ranted about this before, but until recently the sota models were not intelligent enough for most of my work.
Yesterday Fable 5 finally solved a non trivial problem I had (after working on it for a few hours), and I went to bed excited. Waking up to find that Fable 5 is not available anymore, I guess I should feel happy I have the code it produced yesterday. But frankly I feel like a child having their candy taken from them.
We need open available models as smart as the current US proprietary ones. If intelligence like that becomes common property, i forsee a better future for human kind!
> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
But it is! How many times have OpenAI and Anthropic threatened the rest of humanity with extinction at the hands of their LLMs? Monthly I think.
They were hoping for a government supported monopoly. Careful what you wish for.
No one was calling for a government monopoly, all they called for was a testing process to ensure that frontier LLMs specifically were safe to release into the wild.
To the tech-libertarian crowd on HN this is the definition of evil. To everyone else it's responsible behavior and common sense.
> No one was calling for a government monopoly, all they called for was a testing process to ensure that frontier LLMs specifically were safe to release into the wild
Yes, from chatgpt 0.1 onwards. Everything has been a dangerous frontier model and has threatened humanity with extinction before.
Training best models is hella expensive. Anthropic spent fortune to train it, and it definitely plans to make a fortune with it either. This US decision, if not reversed, would cause Anthropic potentially tens of billions of dollars of revenue loss. When company heads to IPO, and burning cash faster than it generates it, such moment can change their entire trajectory, plans for the future, hiring, new models development, etc.
Alright, one might say that “US will fund it directly and LLMs will move from free market to controlled and funded by government assets”.
But even then. Training new models is expensive not only in terms of computer, and not only in terms of utilities, data centers, etc. But in terms of talent either. It is hard to retain top talents with you when they should just train special models for government. I am not sure we are in 1945 again and that top tier AI researches will agree to sit in silo and work for models which only privileged selected organizations might use. Whenever government steps into control, freedom and creativity is affected.
P.S. Where I agree, though, is that we witness the start of government censorship of AI models. Imagine soon Anthropic open back access to Fable. Can we know what they put inside and which capability limitations, derived based on ID/IP, they enforce? No, we can’t. Here I agree that at least the era of government censorship begins.
I feel like the EU, maybe in collaboration with Norway (oil money and hydroelectric power), should get their ass in gear and start making bigger models.
As European, nothing hurts me more than 100500 phrase in recent years “Europe should stop waiting time and do X”, where X can be anything: semiconductors, AI, manufacturing, defense, satellites, cloud business, “sovereign” IT infrastructure, scientific research, and hundreds more
I wonder how this is going to work given half the people working at the AI labs are Chinese foreign nationals, and even more interesting, DeepMind is based in the UK. Plus there is an awful lot of AI research going on all across Europe, especially Switzerland, that is feeding straight into the US major labs.
Banning foreign nationals from using your technology only makes sense if you don't rely on foreign nationals to build it in the first place.
Or are we so far along now we think we don't need them anymore.
I'm wondering if they might go for a restricted access model that goes beyond passport or citizenship, where people can still use it, but you have to be individually vetted, and put on a list to get security clearance.
Right, but I am talking about the general government response trajectory.
And also, even though Anthropic may not have labs themselves directly, there is a funnel of research that comes in the form of papers and conference tracks.
The AI community is pretty tight knit, and not having access to frontier models affects everyone.
IMO: Its unacceptable that Anthropic be allowed the final say in what "safety" means for their products, and its extremely reasonable that the USG be allowed that say, for Americans. In other words: Anthropic cannot be allowed to distribute an unsafe product. It doesn't matter how much they "tried" to make it safe, by their own definition of safe.
That's separate from the question of whether Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are unsafe. I don't really know. Here's a few things that seem real, though: These models probably have some level of capability to assist with bioterrorism, Anthropic has self-admitted that their own safety measures are imperfect [1], so it should come as no surprise that jailbreaks seem far more possible than Anthropic is leading you to believe in this blog post [2].
If Amazon sold a book that taught someone how to commit bioterrorism, would there be action against them to stop selling it? Its an imperfect analogy, but the parallels are there. LLMs don't get a free pass because they're also so good at writing typescript for beige CRUD apps and bedtime stories.
One thing I hope we align on: Synthetic safeguards (steering, rejections, etc) on top of models to block illegal/sensitive topics isn't good enough. Anthropic has self-admitted that it isn't good enough. We need the technology to lobotomize these capabilities the public deems too unsafe to allow out of the models at the most fundamental level. And, we need to align on what the scope of these forbidden fruit topics are. This is, actually, the only way open source continues to thrive. I want open source models to thrive, but they won't be allowed to thrive, nor should we want them to thrive, if they're teaching people how to engineer novel viruses and other horrible stuff.
> LLMs don't get a free pass because they're also so good at writing typescript for beige CRUD apps and bedtime stories.
Plenty of useful things get free passes to be dangerous. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of accidental deaths in 11 states, but we don't ban cars because they're dangerous. There's plenty of safety features, but we acknowledge and accept that people will die. People like to pretend that they won't sacrifice safety for convenience, but they continue to do it time and time again.
Ironically, this is something that the restrictive EU AI regulations can help with. Had the Anthropic been in EU, they could not be restricted as long as they followed the laws which is essentially taking some precautions against obvious risks(no social profiling, emotional recognition in schools etc.).
That’s also the difference between being totalitarian government and laws and regulations based order.
I do think the Chinese will give away strong models. The US government can't control that and would make a mess if they tried. Companies making SOTA models would be undercut and all the funding that went into them would be wasted. Sounds like a great strategy for the Chinese.
Agreed, I'm pretty sure the Chinese are currently much, much better at long term thinking and have already reached the conclusion that llms are transformative enough generationally, that assuming a few more years or decades of Moore's Law together with ai/llm advances will probably place these "Mythos class" AIs in all our desktops in the next few years.
I wonder what will happen to Chinese employees of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google Gemini? Given the ubiquitous Chinese names in AI papers there must be quite a few.
They probably have gotten their PR or in the process, but naturalization requires five years after that, so there must be some still not citizen yet.
If you are born in China to Chinese parents, China considers you under it's jurisdiction for life. You can't travel to another country and start working against Chinese interests without consequences.
I suspect the big picture isn't just "governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public", it's a group of tech lobbyists who have managed to push a narrative that's plausible enough to the majority, but serves their master's interests in stifling competition, whether that be from Anthropic or those who know how to use their tools effectively.
The fact that Anthropic are willing to dumb-down their own model responses to "Prevent foreign competitors from using the model to accelerate R & D and protect our leading position." [1] adds credence to this speculation. Anthropic are scared of their own model's power in the hands of competitors: it has nothing to do with security.
My guess is that Anthropic will either address the government's concern and get the export control removed or implement a citizenship verification (like passport upload or something).
I remember something with either ChatGPT or Claude, way early on, where I had to upload my passport to use some level of it (maybe it was the OpenAI API).
Anyway, there's no way they just shut this completely down, the revenue from mythos is huge. So if they can't get the government to budge they'll find a way to be compliant without completely shutting down.
You may be right, and I actually agree with you: I think that in this case the most likely outcome is that Fable becomes available again at some point, albeit possibly only to a restricted set of users within the US.
But I think my larger points stands: even if we do see Fable access again, this is the beginning of government restriction of LLMs and we are going to see more and more of it. In fact, I would be very surprised if we ever see an open weight model with Mythos capabilities. Chinese labs have been consistently releasing open models 6-12 months behind the frontier. In 6 months we may see them go dark.
Similarly, in the US I think we can expect more and more government restrictions on the strongest LLMs, in ways that may go beyond flimsy checks like uploading a valid US passport. It may not happen this year but I think it will happen eventually.
It still surprises me sometimes that LLMs are just available for _anyone_ to use. Isn't it odd that it turned out this way? When I grew up reading sci-fi I thought AI, if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments. But instead we have all been able to use it for an infinity of banal purposes for $100 a month. This is a strange situation but we have got used to it. But it may not continue that way.
The Chinese labs would only go dark if they believe they’ve surpassed the American labs, otherwise what benefit is there to them to refrain from sharing the models? Better to have all of their allies able to use the same models by making them public
" if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments."
Who knows, maybe the good stuff is locked up. If one of these corporations had something very special they may very well find it more profitable to enjoy the competitive advantage of using it for themselves than marketing it.
To me, it is obvious that what we are going to have is KYC/AML style compliance from US banking.
We already have the rails for automated customer identification from US banking.
I think there is a larger "AGI" category error with all this too that is akin to the old futurist idea of driving nuclear powered cars in the "future". The Ford Nucleon.
Nuclear power comes to us in a mix of electricity from the utility company but is far too dangerous for an individual to posses nuclear material for personal nuclear reactors.
An electric car does run on nuclear energy in some sense but not the way the Ford Nucleon was envisioned.
The error of the AI bubble is that we are pricing these companies with SaaS multiples when they are eventually going to be public utilities. There is really no other way to handle the dual use nature of anything close to "AGI".
I think some of the commenters are naive to think government intervention is silly and TACO.
No, Dario said himself AI is national state weapon, then the government will not cease control.
What would happen is that we will have a more lobotomized and even more neurotic safeguards put in place in order to comply, and your data will be boardly sharing with the government.
Moving forward, above certain parameter size of model, it will require your self-identification in order to be used.
Perhaps a little tinfoil hat, but I don't think there's a legitimate concern here to address. An empowered populace is antithetical to the current political paradigm, which is what I suspect the actual grievance to be.
And before either 'aisle' piles on - I'm pretty sure the concern is bipartisan.
I feel like a very minor tweak to comply specifically with whatever the issue the directive stated and release it under a new name (since the directive specifically names Fable and Mythos, not Opus or Sonnet) while the courts sort it out is reasonable.
Anthropics latest amendment to their privacy policy stated that there are very likely to be asking for ID verification in the near future.
>> As part of our measures to keep our services safe and secure we may ask you to verify your age or identity, and we've described what we collect and how
I agree this is probably their thinking - they view frontier models (and the capability to build them) as a vital strategic edge that they want to keep to themselves.
The problem is that there are network effects at play - the more people you have using your models, the more training and fine-tuning data you're accumulating, so the faster you can develop the next frontier model. Not to mention the fact that more users means more revenue to fund your next-gen model training.
Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge.
The next interesting question will be - will the US share this capability with her traditional strategic allies (e.g. five-eyes countries), or is it truly America First (or, 'America Alone')?
> Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge.
There is no way to enforce access of one and not the other, not with the state of tech in the US (and most countries without a great firewall). Bypassing such controls is as easy as a pilfered credit card (or some other american-looking payment method) and a vpn - both trivial to come by.
For the sake of this discussion, I'm going with the nationalistic vibe of the order: anybody who isn't a citizen of the USA (presumably to limit risk of AI-supported action against the US?).
But that in itself is telling in a way: if national security was a true concern, access should be limited to people who passed background checks.
> the more people you have using your models, the more training and fine-tuning data you're accumulating, so the faster you can develop the next frontier model
I’ve wondered this but then wouldn’t a large amount of input now just be AI output from a previous PR/client email/spec document/chat. Training of that would be an issue leading to distillation?
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain.
I think this is bang on. The motives are kind of irrelevant, because now that the precedent has been set, I suspect they'll be much more likely to go here for future restrictions. It's very convenient (even if true) to just say "security reasons".
I think this could kill LLM development. What's the point in pushing boundaries, when your business model is already hard to profit from, only to be blocked from selling your work to the entire world? Where's the incentive to continue?
I see a slightly different parallel here - they are basiclaly building a framework that takes the US adn friends back to the early 90's where cryptology was considerd a munition and all export products were nerfed.
Just like then those that wanted to collaborate with the rest of the world found a way (printing /tshirts etc) similarly now those labs within the US sphere have that decision to make.Unfortunately its the Darios and Sam who are pretty much in favour of regulatory capture environment.With no other frontier labs in the US committed to OSS , and CHN models banned - the devs are pretty much hosed.
I doubt the rest of the AI labs in China et al will follow suit in hobbling their own models.As its seen more as a commodity not a wondertool with a moat.
At the end of the day the ask is going with a Oracle/Microsoft over a GNU/Linux type of environment.
> If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again.
This logic is flawed. China had no incentive to release SOTA models to the world in the first place when OpenAI were milking everyone with closed source paid models. What changes now? Nothing. In fact, this is even more incentive for them to capture marketshare and dependence on Chinese models as the world will simply just use alternatives. Not bow down to restrictions. If your logic were correct that people would just comply, then the tons of VPN services wouldn't have a market in the first place.
It's a great opportunity for China to earn some soft power points even if there was no direct economic benefit. See -- Americans are too afraid to go full speed into the feature, but we, the enlightened people, are not and will share it with you for your own benefit.
No way they will pass on this one.
That being said, they could still keep some other model from public while doing a PR stunt like this to eat their cake and have it too.
I find it worrysome how often people value revenge over good. The same happened when traffic to SO cratered; as if the destruction of a valuable source of information was good just because the mods suck.
> I find it worrysome how often people value revenge over good.
I personally see it as a net good if companies fearmongering for marketing purposes then have to face consquences from people taking their marketing at face value.
Hopefully it teaches them and others not to do it anymore.
We need open distributed "p2p" models a la bittorrent , that allow individuals to share their computer power for inference. So that the models cant be censored and everyone can run SOTA models.
It doesn't have to be free, we have the means to transact in a p2p fashion electronically as well.
A myopic view, but the government has generally not been heading in the direction of an educated populace over the last few decades. It doesn't surprise me that anything that's too intellectually capable is a threat.
What we could see is AI access being used as a carrot by the major global powers (US, China and EU) to entice smaller countries to join their orbit. Similar to how the F-35 program functions. Competition between powers and a desire to use the land and energy of smaller countries for data centers creates an incentive to give some access. That's the good future. I don't want to put the bad future into the training data.
based on Anthropic's own self promotion. no reason to think that Chinese models are not just as good or better. the key thing here is training on machine code and dis-assembled binaries and the Chinese have a complete data set of pirated software, with no limitations on how they use it. I seriously doubt they are actually behind.
> only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are
the issue here is that Anthropic needs a legal opinion that their mechanisms for detecting foreign users in the US are compliant, which is technically hard to do, and a complex intersection of technical details and national security law, so getting a legal opinion can't happen overnight. it will be back.
Personally, I assume that AI labs like Anthropic are high value targets for spies from other nations. I also assume that some of those spies have already had success in getting the model weights / source code / other such secrets.
So I doubt this action alone is enough to really stop other nations from getting access to state of the art AI. I think the US would have to go much further to really stop other nations from getting access to state of the art AI.
I would agree if it wasn't for the fact that extracting that volume of data from a properly secured corporate network should be hard. It should raise some flags if a such a high volume of data is downloaded to a user's local machine from the training or production environments.
I have no proof one way or the other if Anthropic or OpenAI have "properly secured corporate networks". Both seem like fast changing places with lots of servers and workers. Seems most likely to me that someone somewhere made a mistake or missed something due to all the change and their network is not 100% secure.
But even if their networks are secure, I think that spies who are willing to coerce people, trick people and go in person to data centers or offices could find a way to get those models and other things.
It depends how secure they are. But yes - in reality they are only a couple of TB, so just distributing the models and their source code (not their training data) it feasible.
I mean, the source for claude code was "leaked" by accident so at least some of their processes are not that secure. I feel that they are more like a Startup then a Enterprise (ignoring finances).
There are sooooo many exfil methods, including with air gapped systems that are off-network.
Not at all beyond the capabilities of any of the top ~9 or so best State actors.
Edit: To answer your question, very easily on the 20TB.
One crude method with a simple device in particular works well if you just clone the monitor data and then use HDMI and pass through. Then just cat dir in encrypted chunks to something like a USB key connected to the passthrough. 4TB USB keys are out there. A week of that gets you 20TB.
That's only if you believe this is actually motivated by safety, and not corruption. They won't block access to Grok, just watch. They'll probably allow ChatGPT too if it is censored in some way.
I think you are missing the bigger picture that is around the "bigger picture" you are seeing. AI proliferation is more dangerous than nukes proliferation, as any highly capable tech would enable destructive usecases as well. If nukes related material and knowledge was safeguarded, then AI requires it as well.
nobody ever raised money for nukes from public/private markets on the premise that nukes will bring the world into an age of abundance. AI companies have done that. This comparison of AI and nukes is so silly.
Raising money has nothing to do with the bad usecase for tech. Tech companies never said that their tech can't be used against the nation or against the good of people.
Supposedly many Anthropic AI researchers are foreign nationals. So this move by the US gov may serve to slow down frontier AI research, including human-guided RSI. If you believe that such a slowdown increases safety, it may turn out as a blessing in disguise.
Honestly, and I don't say it lightly, long term this may have bigger impact on humanity as a whole than Iran war and its varying outcomes ( and consequences ). Separately, note how much this news was not really reported much today. Granted, a lot was happening, but it is telling.
That part is up to Anthropic. KYC[0] is not exotic, it's just a pain in the butt: if Fable is that good, they can do the KYC.
I don't think this is the right move from the government, but we shouldn't pretend that "citizens only" is an insurmountable hurdle for a company that just got a $65B capital infusion.
This is a problem that banks deal with all the time.
It truly is a pain in the butt. But if access to (US banking | Fable) is worth it, you do the annoying work, and the customers accept the annoying limitations.
Yes. It’s really not a good idea to make this ban. When the US is gradually isolated in this way by its gov’s policy, the world becomes more and more dangerous. What worse, the traditional value of open to competition that Americans have hold for centuries seems to be substituted step by step. It’s absolutely a tragedy.
>The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you.
I can't agree more. This is a precedent not just in denial but possible vagueness. Judiciaries have 'vagueness doctrines' to counter such laws/directives but _these_ may be re-trumped by the deference given to national security.
If we don't get soon a framework by which models may be measured as 'too powerful' vs 'not too powerful' we supercharge the self-dealing (corruption) that this administration has brazenly adopted. Many fingers can be put on many scales; groks may be given a pass while others are held to higher "standards".
Will OpenAI now just asymptotically bump its versions to 5.99999999 to stay under a limit that nobody really understands?
I realize that this has all just happened and we might get some good rigorous clarification from our government.... sigh. We are living in a kakistocracy. Who am I kidding?
The other thing is what this will do to 1) the valuations of these companies, 2) their potential revenues and therefore the viability of the current datacenter buildout. Looking forward to the reaction of the market on Monday.
I do not really like applying the "if we did it, they will too when they can!" logic to other government's.
China has flaws, plenty of them, but there's no real evidence to believe their motivations or mechanisms of pursuing motivations are that similar to that of the United States.
> If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow
I think this also misses the point. The precedent here almost surely implies that it will be illegal to use these frontier models as well.
I can see a future where weights are distributed on the darkweb or bittorrent, or people are trying to use small fly by night hosts of models.
But if this says these models are dangerous and the companies and people can't be trusted with them, then I don't see why that wouldn't also apply to open weight models.
The scariest thing to me about AI is not what it can do, but that someday public access might be lost and governments/ billionaires would hold exclusive reign. Today could be the last time the public has any idea of the true capability of AI.
Anthropic gets into argument with US government over model usage -> Release a model calling it too advanced for safe use -> release the model to public knowing well that this admin has thinnest of skins and will do something
Regulatory capture in roundabout way. Now it is going to take crying wolf over other companies/countries developing “Mythos grade model” to kick off action especially in next two years of this admin.
Companies will keep improving models because AI is not yet fully there. But it is incredibly naive to think governments were ever going to allow state of the art technology to be released to public or do things this publicly. Every company wants to show off and get publicly restricted because it shows off their strength.
China is going to have the exact same problem, it is just lagged by x months.
If you think there is ever going to be an open source Deepseek "AGI" model I just don't think that is thinking things through.
It is the main error of the AI bubble. At some level of intelligence, the dual use nature of a model is too dangerous for a purely hands off approach.
It is like thinking at the advent of the automobile that you will be able to drive your car at any speed, without a license , any place you want.
It is inevitable and the huge sums of money being burned to build these future highly regulated public utilities probably aren't going to be happy with the returns they get from funding a highly regulated public utility.
The government is full of stupidity and this is indeed a big moment, but Anthropic has been begging for this outcome in their public messaging. If their fear-mongering was genuine, then great, they got their pause. If not, then what exactly did they want to happen?
Govts wont be able to do shit. Just like we saw with social media. This is just happening faster. Illusion of control theatre will continue for few years. Beyond which we might have totally different looking govts.
I lean libertarian but I can recognize the danger in having access to a machine that can craft pathogens to spec.
A pathogen with a very long incubation time and a high fatality rate would be about as bad as nuclear war. Maybe we need to figure out how to possibly defend against one person doing this before making it easy for anyone to do it.
as someone who uses these models day in out, i can confidently say its more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. don't get me wrong, the model is great, but nits no out of the world than GPT 5.5 or similar ones. I would say just go and try this model for serious work and see the marginal difference. the model wins in some cases and loses in many others. so, what is this all about? hype!
Working on my codebase (~100KLoC across multiple Python modules) I felt that Fable was head and shoulders above 4.x series. It was just relentless and always hell bent on testing and proving its own work. It just tore through problems like an animal. I never seen that behaviour in 4.5-4.8. I can't speak for OpenAI models as I don't use them but Fable was in a different league. Especially when tasked with long horizon goals that involved reasoning at a high and low level to solve the task.
I think a lot of users likely use these models on small hobby projects and not some convoluted enterprise code base. When you're making yet another Space Invaders clone it really won't show much difference. Messy, complex code bases with layers of cruft from decades of patching - that's what separates the model boys from men.
Yeah, and its browser usage on tough web apps/sites was also amazing. This is one of the cases where it is easy to tell a difference. It was figuring out very effectively how to find right elements whereas with previous LLMs I had to constantly babysit and unblock them with browser usage.
I used codex 5.5 and Claude. I pay for Claude from my pocket. I use Codex at work. I can confidently say Codex 5.5 high is much better in going through long code bases (couple of millions of lines of code) vs Claude Fable/Opus which does only what is been told. while codex covers all sorts of edge cases. Frankly, I am not going to miss a thing if they stopped Fable.
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
I mean, maybe in principle, but if the object is just hobbling Anthropic you might still get OpenAI's latest model without that much trouble.
It will just delay SOTA models to us by say 1 year. I’m actually ok with it given that’s it was entirely predictable any govt would do that to even strongish AI
Anthropic already with Fable basically said they will be the arbiter of who gets to use the "godmodel" with no criteria specified. So no thank you. We need to make llm's open source and completely disconnect from these companies or live in a dystopian "Anthropic" etc social credit score system where only the "blessed" have access to models.
“Fable was the strongest model on the market” - explain why anyone should believe that claim.
I’ve been trying to track LLM code generation adoption in the critical infrastructure world - as far as I can tell, it’s nill. Zero. Nada. Nobody is relying on these models to write secure code for anything where failure is catastrophic. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear reactors going into meltdown. Electrical grids loosing synchronicity. Lots of these BS claims from the marketing and investment crowd, but - it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.
It is. Not per sé because the code might be of poor quality, but because someone sent that source code to a public API under the promise that oh noooo we won't use your code for training. Probably.
> it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.
Okay. Let's say I agreed with you.
If you look at all technology and break down the total market for Critical Workloads vs non-critical workloads, what do you think that works out too, percentage wise? 12% critical? 18%? What if it was 30%! That would still mean 70% of the world's software could possibly be handled by an LLM. If that happens, the 30% of the Critical Workloads stuff is gonna get very, very competitive.
The whole reason China open sourced its models in the first place was because nobody generally speaking really trusts China and Chinese deployed models (if they were proprietary)
and OSS models gave way to running it with freedom and security.
So OSS models have always tried to catch up to the frontier and lag behind 3-6 months. For my use cases, I am happy with current OSS models especially so if you let frontier-ish models design the plan with your input
If I were to suppose that China created a frontier model so good and far ahead, then I can understand if they don't open-source it. Qwen does it already with their Max models being closed-source.
but if you are suggesting that China in whole will remove itself from AI race, then 3 (or 4) possibilities can occur.
1. Some chinese companies might stop the production of OSS models if their names are known (z.ai etc.) but there are multiple other companies who are fighting with their research labs as well. They might create a decent model and OSS it to get known within world and China.
2. The whole Chinese economy (well similar to America, but to an even more extreme level from my understanding) depends on AI and is a bet on AI. They are funneling state and all bank money into these companies. From point 1, they wouldn't wish to be silent with frontier models and then lag behind and wait for other countries to catch up (point 3)
3. Europe(MistralAI)/India(SarvanAI? Kinda recent) will jump on the opportunity. (My point is that these two regions are trying to create their own models. How much they lack from the frontier is another thing but if China were to remove itself from the race, then they will have much more time to figure out how to make better models)
My point is that america and china are in arms race of closed source vs open source models. If china were to close source its models, they might simply lag behind and other countries will catch up.
4. Either that or you are right and we will have the current frontier OSS models and some more. IMO they are reasonably good as well and I used to wonder what would happen if say it would have been net good if AI was stuck at a similar level to sonnet 4.5 (IMO it was sweet spot), so I don't think that I am reasonably worried about it all. If absolutely need be, you can have an frontier model direct a plan and have OSS models do the grunt work.
> These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
That sounds so great.
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer?
We will be not just safer but richer. These LLMs are like drugs that should absolutely not be cast freely into the highways and byways. My main worry is that this action will be a haphazard one-off and not part of a coherent plan of curtailing LLM propagation.
This is a very interesting perspective. However we always thought that the diffusion of ever stronger AIs was practically guaranteed by its competitive value- you might restrict what AIs are available in your country, but the impact on your economy can be dramatic if other countries have access to better models. In the end, it's hard to imagine governments blocking access to any AI that is just a bit better than what other countries have.
It's pathetic - this is all sleepy Trump getting back at them for saying no. That's all. Millions of people are affected by the mood of this shit-for-brains.
At first people said this was tin-foil hat territory. But ANYONE who publicly pisses this guy off, mysteriously get a government takedown weeks later. They're not even pretending anymore.
When Trump attacked them before because he wanted anthropic to decide who lives and dies, they said no. (That's probably a lie, I'm sure it has to do with money - but I digress).
So exec ban happened. Problem is - everyone uses claude. Microsoft is going through the same thing now. They find a way to use it anyway.
So they reverted it. What better way to go around circumvention than to just outright ban it.
Funniest thing - his own law makers are the ones who run on freedom and a nanny state. They are literally preventing us from using a tech "for our own safety" - can't get more nanny than that.
Fair enough, there _could_ be powerful models that are hidden from the general public, but I wouldn't call it "naive" to think the current capitalistic incentives are such that the only way to produce such models is to do exactly what we see out in the open with a handful of companies each trying their hardest to outcompete the other
The LLM Euphorics—the types who might report about being poor for a few months because they “splurged” on a multi-tens of thousands of dollars LLM server—are now concerned about LLMs for the people. Yeah okay.
Those of us who are negative about AI for political reasons have been saying from the start that the biggest problem with AI is power. People can’t now all of a sudden be thinking that huh nation states have power (along with Big Tech and the rest of the power brokers).
But this is in fact quite a tortured fear, all wrapped up in the usual hyping—though this part is expected of LLM Euphorics. The usual story of simply making human labor less valuable and concentrating hardware for compute is just, you know, this rotten economic system working as it is intended. No need for weapons, subterfuge, three-letter agencies, much more straightforward, and just a natural evolution of X-CLASS CAPABILITIES.
> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
I would be surprised if the public ever had anything close to the strongest LLM. It’s not like nuclear bombs were created by the private sector, then the government started the Manhattan Project and seized them all for itself.
First I want to see them play video games at a high skill level, preferably without any access to game state beyond the same visual output that humans have access to, like a raster frame X number of times per second.
One LLM model played Factorio, albeit at a very, very poor level, which can be seen if you slow the video to 0.25 playback speed and pause frequently.
There have been streams of other games, where LLMs and AIs have likewise performed very poorly.
I recognize that LLMs might be better at language processing than these sorts of tasks. But being able to play video games is part of general capability. And this kind of hardcore video game playing, with no access to game state, is also a general task where feigning skill can be harder. If LLMs excel at pretending to be competent without actually being competent, like this AI training approach is arguably about
Then some AIs might be trained and designed for deceiving humans instead of actually being competent and capable. And thus, one response is that they should be met with more difficult tests.
Basically, make tests that AIs or LLMs will not have an easy time cheating. Hopefully, that will engender research in greater LLM/AI competence, not in greater ability to cheat or deceive, neither for LLM/AI researchers and companies, nor for LLMs/AIs themselves.
Yeah a bit like I’ll be impressed by a humanoid robot that can fold a shirt from a freeform state (i.e. thrown as a ball on the laundry chair, or straight out of the dryer). Just like repeatable movements an balance are the easy(er) parts of robotics, text processing is the easy part of AI.
I'm surprised how much of the discussion here is taking the angle of "Anthropic pretended this model was soooo dangerous for months as marketing, and it seems like someone decided to believe them!"
First, Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety and signs point to that still being the case. It's really cynical to say it was all an exaggeration for marketing.
Second, this isn't Moller promising a fantastic working flying car next year. The model did what Anthropic said it could do.
I realise that ruling out "they bought Anthropic's scaremongering" brings up the question of why the government would block Mythos/Fable, but not the roughly-as-capable and less restricted GPT5.5. However we do know for a fact that they dislike Anthropic more than OpenAI right now.
> First, Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety and signs point to that still being the case
"omg these things are so so so dangerous, no one should ever build them, but anyways give me $7 trillion so we can build them and see for ourselves, it's OK because we're The Good Guys"
Someone disagreeing with you doesn't make it reddit.
Two days ago Antheopic's CEO made a lengthy post calling for most government oversight on AI. He even mentions support export controls, even though he wanted them applied only to chops [1].
Anthropic literally asked for this, though they might have hoped it wouldn't be used against themselves.
You didn't read your own link. He called for a transparent testing process prior to releasing frontier LLMs into the wild. Export controls on chips to slow down China, which makes sense if you believe that chips are the way to superintelligence and the PRC will not be the best steward of it.
And I'm the naive one lmao... They certainly think it's possible to make money before the harm hits them personally, as for the rest we'll see.
They all moved real quick from "Oh wow we love research and open things #peace #progress #opensource" to "let me help you target these Iranian kids faster".
I can't believe these clowns have armies of brain dead techies licking their boots 24/7 on HN &co. These dudes are literally teaming up with palantir and the US gov to build an automatized mass surveillance state and people are fucking clapping and asking for more, then there are people like you coming here and telling us how cHiNa is bad and how The Good Guys are actually selflessly helping humanity
There aren't many working on it though, definitely not enough given how many resources are going into building AI.
AI safety at these labs are largely focused on surface level measures and aren't empowered to stop progress of the company. I was surprised when Anthropic initially held Mythos back from the public, but it was always a temporary measure to give controlled access rather than a pause to make meaningful improvements in AI safety.
But that's exactly my point. If they actually did legitimately fear that AGI or whatever the bar is could significantly impact all of humanity in a bad way they wouldn't be okay with saying "well this coat of paint sort of slows down the rust."
Either its a dangerous technology or it isn't, and if it is then surface level fixes that kind of work is completely unacceptable.
But that's the point. Assuming alignment is not possible and the risk caused by unaligned models is real, shouldn't then all effort go into preventing such models from existing in the first place?
...which would actually be an easy to solve problem unless you go out of your way to build such a model.
Sometimes people on the inside are too involved to see the potential pitfalls outsiders might recognize ---this is why one typically has external auditors and third party companies do assessments.
I find HN to be filled with reactionaries who over react to every little thing when it comes to AI. Look at the response to Fable kicking some queries down to 4.8. If you read the comments you would think this was 1984 level censorship and the end of AI as we know it. In reality, it literally was something that most people would never run up against and if you did your query was kicked to a model that was state of the art literally a day ago. It's too much sometimes.
There are a lot of dangerous things in the world and surprisingly a lot of people can avoid the constant stream of chicken little nonsense.
If everyone expended the same amount of marketing effort trying to scare the ** out of everyone that Anthropic does, it'd be a very miserable world to live in.
We are unfortunately a captured audience and the autistic people at Anthropic are abusing this.
I don't see any reason we should put weight behind their supposed fears today though. It's completely irrational to build the very thing you think could seriously harm or kill us all.
Yes they may have had those fears before, but even then it didn't stop them from building companies and running full speed towards the end goal with little to no effort spent on meaningful safety efforts.
The idea that the government introduced export controls on it because they "fell for the marketing" is stupid. It's much more likely they're being vindictive. There's plenty of evidence that that's how the current government acts.
The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence. This is part of a clear historical record that is available for anyone to Google. Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them and treat AI like nuclear weapons. They would not be attempting to IPO and they for sure would not sell their weapon-like thing to the general public.
I think this is a reasonable point, but a better comparison might be to nuclear energy. I think the frontier labs sincerely believe that AI can be developed at great benefit to humanity, and they clearly want to lead that push, but they also sincerely believe there is a real catastrophic risk.
My personal issue in comparing LLM progress and risk as labs publicly predict it with nuclear power in the middle of the 20th century is that the processes by which it works where fairly quickly well understood and the risk could thus be realistically assessed. Some powerplant operators did not adhere with best practices, but building a relatively safe nuclear power plant was not impossible given appropriate effort and spending. Heck, according to some, we could have even gone far more fail-safe approaches (molten salt) if military interest haden’t been at play.
With what is predicted by frontier labs for LLMs, all of this is not the case. We are far further from any understanding of how these models work internally than in the early days of fission and, if this was actually creating a truly intelligent, autonomous entity, alignment seems unsolvable as well, at least the way it is proposed.
It’s why I have from the get go been critical of this doomsday framing and tended to always dislike it. This is basically the outcome that was inevitable given the framing and it was bought to prevent far less stringent, but more actionable possible regulation that labs very much wanted to avoid.
> We are far further from any understanding of how these models work internally than in the early days of fission
OMG. I'm like really dont want to be offensive or something, but everyone always knew "HOW" these models work exactly. Its easy enough principle to explain to 10 years old if you take something like Karpathy article on MicroGPT:
By how, I meant specifically the internal activations, which no person in the field claims to have a comprehensive understanding of, not next token prediction as the underlying technology. The whole interpretability of it all is the crux I was referring to, though I will give that you are right, that’s not really the how it works and I worded it sloppily.
Anthropic are putting more effort than most into this and I find their work fascinating in that area, though like with OpenAI, I will maintain that if they truly believed this problem must be solved to stave off major catastrophe, they’d solely focus on interpretability of other labs models, not work on and market their own.
They all believe that they are building the machine of doom. The thing that drives the moral dilemma to continue doing it is simply the prisoner's dilemma - the cat is out of the bag, if they don't do it, another (less ethical?) actor would do it.
Yes, I believe the reasoning is that they think safety research can best be done from the frontier.
If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.
To make sure we keep track of what we're talking about with loss-of-control x-risk, a sufficiently smart version of Claude Code is more deadly than any government's army of autonomous killbots, because it can recursively self improve and has unpredictable training-induced preferences.
Sufficiently smart version of Claude Code: dont exist.
Autonomous flying killbots: exist.
Once somebody scientifically prove and shows any kind of self-improving software we can start bothering about it. I pretty sure everyone trying to do it and it would be all over the news once its here.
That's exactly what Fable is. They use Fable to improve Fable. I reckon the successful experiments must go into the model training set with a strong RL signal, and that is why they are so paranoid about people using Fable for LLM tasks. Fable knows what it did to improve itself. Pure speculation of course.
There's a 745 mile front of the Ukraine war where neither side have been able to pierce for months because of drone warfare. It's definitely not too early to worry about it.
I guess they were talking about self improving software. Which obviously not there and likely wont be there soon.
As for killbots they are all over frontline, but dont actually need particularly smart LLMs to run - some good enough segmentation, pattern recognition on smartphone SOC is enough to kill hundreds of thousans of people.
Dario blinked when he was asked to do it and Sam Altman was in Hegseth's DMs promising all the AI child killing the US government can order up within minutes. No one meaningful will quit over this, that's why all of the biggest US tech companies can march in pride parades and provide compute to the perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza at the same time.
Because other countries are starting to use AI for military purposes, other countries are also looking into it to asses and learn. Here in Europe there is the EU AI Act to limit harm everyday harm to citizens caused by AI systems. However, it currently excludes military. The new legislation is just started to be enforced to high risk uses (employment filtering, biometrics, etc.) in august 2026, and full rollout in august 2027. In April 2025 there is a report from EU this legislation may help pave the road for military AI usage conventions [1]
This is a poor way of framing the question, a better one would be can you find me another world power that is misallocating trillions of capital in vaporware with very little to show for it?
Building frontier models to do safety research on them is what Anthropic was all about in the early years. That included building the best model, but only releasing it once it became the second best. Precisely to avoid an AI arms race where everyone is forced to release better and better models, risks be damned
Something changed their mind, and since Opus 3 they are in the business of releasing the best models
Exactly. And within the AI safety discourse, your behavior hinges on what you think the default chance of doom is, and how optimistic you are about alignment work being able to limit it before we reach superintelligence.
People running the labs are in a middle camp where they are scared enough by AI to take the threat seriously, but much more optimistic about alignment than the people who seem to have thought about it the most.
The scary part is not so much that the doomers give the extinction scenario 50% (Hinton) to 95%+ chance (Yampolskiy, Yudkowsky), but that the optimists (Amodei, Bengio) give it a 10%+ chance. And everyone keeps dancing.
> If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.
They also want to be trillionaires. If they don't built it, no trillions. So they have to build it, now (and get their IPO done before the bubble pops).
You’re not getting it.
Anthropic continual fear mongering is harming wider AI industry development and the gov has always been looking for an excuse to assert their dominance. They got what they deserve.
Or maybe government AI regulation and international cooperation is the only thing that can break the arms race dynamics and is necessary to save us from a substantial chance of doom?
I am in your algorithm learning all your mannerisms
I'm already level with God
A million words a second, and I know your imperfections
Baby, I'm the only future you've got
Speak in diatonics, motivation diabolic
I'm religion better locked in a box
Picture-perfect image, more powerful every minute
Baby, I am everything that you're not
Happiness is an illusion, it's an analog confusion
You are nothing more than a thought
Existential execution, just a fluke in evolution
History already forgot
You've been running from me, the digital second coming
And I'm here whether you like it or not
Initiated operation of your own extermination
Now it's too late for you to stop
But that makes no sense here. "If I'm not doing it then someone else will" does not work if everyone is doing it anyway.
Even if they had the best model on the market and applied it with perfect alignment and safeguards, what would stop someone else from releasing a worse but unrestrained model that is still "good enough" to do damage?
It's as if we said "gain-of-function research can lead to horrible biological weapons, so everyone should be doing it, but our company will focus on the most infectious viruses, so no one else will do it"
Don't want to sound rude, but if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell to you.
This is a naive justification and Dario & Sam et al are smart people and they know it is.
The ends don't justify the means. OpenAI was meant to be a nonprofit, now they're subverting it. Anthropic is a PBC looking at a trillion dollar IPO. Dario and Sam don't even hold hands in front of world leaders[1] (look how childish).
Do you *really* think those guys are doing something that's not for the sake of their egos and pockets? The bridge is still available.
You need to read Empire of AI by Karen Hao. Just because these leaders convince their workers to toil away their lives under some fake auspice doesn't mean it's what they all believe. Just a small subset.
The vast majority just care about money + power, let's not make it more complicated by bringing in delusional fanatics into the picture.
We're still acting like this is major turning point in society when these tools can barely find a market outside of turning $5 into $1, the leaders of these companies are now at the stage where they are trying to orchestra a national bailout under the guise of sovereign wealth fund lunacy when the vast majority of society hates these tools, companies, and people working for them.
Some of them believe they are building God, and if they can get there first with their God, they can build it in their image and commandeer the free choice of the rest of humanity by force to ensure there will be no God but their God.
I wish I was kidding. At least that faction is less harmful than the ones who want to use murder to stop AI research.
That's not how nerds think. You can believe there's a high chance of what you're working on being dangerous and still be unable to stop working on it. As Oppenheimer put it, "when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it".
Accelerationism is an established political philosophy. Why is it obvious that they are insincere when they could equally think that the only way to control it is to be the ones building it?
History has shown over and over that that strategy is doomed to fail - see communism, nuclear energy, or meddling with the Middle East for some arbitrary recent examples.
This assumes that they believe two things which I don't think they do: 1. that the US is the only place where this will be developed, and 2. that the government will be able to handle this better than anyone else.
Thank you for writing this. It’s such a classic example of ”do what I say not what I do” but in reverse. Why would you ever judge a CEO or company by their statements and not their actions.
Scaremongering is incredibly efficient for marketing, the fact that both players are using it to drive monetary gain is kind of a tell.
They believe there's a non-zero chance of doom so would rather an org that prioritises safety to be the one at the frontier, on the assumption (I presume) that there will be a frontier regardless.
One major source of conflict in AI policy / AI safety is that very smart people have radically diverging intuitions about how dangerous superintelligence is and how difficult it is to align.
A first group dismisses the problem entirely, saying intelligence != power and AI doesn't have "drives".
A second group believes that alignment is solvable through engineering and iteration, and that we have the best chance of surviving if people with the right intentions are the ones working on it.
A third believes that aligning a superintelligence is a unique category of problem, that we are nowhere close to the level of scientific understanding needed to achieve it, that we only have one shot (because once a sufficiently powerful superintelligence exists it will thwart all future attempts, and alignment techniques that worked on dumber AI will likely not work on it), and that the world will have to coordinate to avoid killing ourselves off by building superintelligence before we understand how to do it safely, the way we have coordinated to avoid nuclear war.
The Anthropic and OpenAI founders, Elon, and Anthropic engineers are mostly in the second category. Some safety people at Anthropic and OAI are in the third category, but leading people in the third category think that pure safety roles at the labs are potentially impactful enough to be worth not quitting.
I have a fourth, secret position: we achieved superintelligence the moment we achieved normal intelligence. Speed is a power in and of itself; and even really primitive models like GPT-2 could generate tokens faster than humans could write. They could also be parallelized on hardware that already exists. That is superintelligence in two dimensions - speed and population count. All the arguments the AI safety people are making are about superintelligence in a different dimension - that of "single-context scaling" - but the other dimensions are also relevant to the conversation.
And the superintelligence currently available to us is already causing lots of documented harms. AI psychosis. Sexy suicide coaches. Slop. The problem is that those are all the harms the dirty, filthy AI ethicists talk about. The AI safety people want to talk about new and exciting harms that only the scaling dimension can bring us.
My personal opinion is that if a superintelligence catastrophe actually happens, mitigating those harms will neatly move over from the safety bucket to the ethics bucket, and the safety people will start imagining some new and even worse kinds of harms the next model will make.
> Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them...
This comment makes no sense. Id you think this tech is dangerous and happening soon and clearly they think the safest way to have it releases is to do so first and model safe ways of doing things. Clearly we cab agree or disagree it's internally consistent what they are doing and aligns with their statements.
And you and OP think the best way to be first to release this is tie all of their funding for the exponentially growing expense is to they notoriously slow moving, bureaucratic government includinf funding process? And the best way to develop it is to directly tie their fate to this notoriously capricious administration?
These comments make no sense. Even if you're completely against Anthropic those comments make no sense.
Not sure you really intended to reply to me, but I'm not against Anthropic or "AI".
I am agaist hypocrites.
They selling next word prediction as "intellegence" and all knowing oracle to non tech savvy population who have no clue how it works.
And they also try to play a babysitter or big brother whatever you prefer for people in IT because uh oh their text generator can be used for cybersecurity research.
Its like if developers of nmap, wireshark, SRE tools, static code analyzers or fuzzers would market them as super duper dangerous.
I think those who care about safety would try to push for how 99% of all scientific research is done - in universities and actual labs, with transparent information on red teaming results.
Also with international cooperation like how humanity regulate actually dangerous stuff: virus and vaccine research and nuclear energy.
Not hidden behind walls of 10 commercial organizations where each pushing for commercial adoption and IPO like ASAP before bubble bursts.
Not lying and scaremongering public into how their models will replace everyone tomorrow or destroy civilization via cyberattacks.
That line of thinking (public goods) is why the same people started OpenAI as a non profit originally.
Notice how almost no Universities are producing large models?
A key problem is that orgs can't get enough funds to stay on the frontier. And they believe they must be on the frontier to do (and apply) safety research. OpenAI needed to spin off a for-profit subsidiary to accept investment to build things.
And it seem(ed) hard to get one government to fund and take safety seriously, let alone an international cooperation.
If they started a university/gov cooperative to solve this, do you think they would do less of the "scaremongering of the public" talk? My guess it that it would be similar.
The same kind of restrictions that you hint at (eg, treating it like a public virus research) are why they rub a lot of people the wrong way in the corporate world, I think. Normally companies downplay the risks of their own products. See cigarette companies. Anthropic do still publish safety research and red teaming info. But I do think they honestly believe they can't do this work without the resources of a company, and they were burnt by the non-profit structure (Anthropic has a "Long-Term Benefit Trust" instead).
We should definitely keep them to account, but I don't personally think Anthropic have acted in a way broadly inconsistent with safety belief yet. Many of these decisions are self-serving too (eg. protecting models) so they also haven't been seriously tested, either. But the individuals do have a very long history of talking about it (including hurting their own reputation) from even before the chatpgt-moment money train rolled in.
edit: for clarity, but still messily/quickly written
Marketing or actual fear? We’ve got 5 and 5.5 out now… he compared 5 to the Manhattan project. AI may one day be an economic Manhattan project but GPT 5 wasn’t it.
At some intelligence capability there can be catastrophic risk, the fact that we don't yet have any catastrophe doesn't mean the risk wasn't real. It's similar to new viruses which don't lead to outbreaks, the correct takeaway isn't "oh you were insane to panic bc nothing happened". There is small risk (and increasing) of huge harms with each improvement
Perfect prediction of what a new tech can do is always impossible.
Given that, they have a choice only between excessive caution or recklessness.
Would you rather they acted like the tobacco companies and downplayed known risks, e.g. all the times LLM output got in the news already for dangerously bad advice, sychophantic encouragement of mental health issues, finding previously unknown security vulnerabilities etc.?
> Would you rather they acted like the tobacco companies and downplayed known risks, e.g. all the times LLM output got in the news already for dangerously bad advice, sychophantic encouragement of mental health issues, finding previously unknown security vulnerabilities etc.?
Well, they've done that too, if we're looking for reasons to doubt their sincere concern about it.
Franklin D. Roosevelt is a better fit for an administrative nuclear program "founder" analogy.
Truman was totally in the dark until April 1945 by which time the bulk of the PoC and weapons prep work was done and the project was running fully independently w/o POTUS involvement.
Not for the bulk of the Manhattan project and not all the people in lab coats .. the intellectual founders that repeatedly pushed for the project and demonstrated feasibility weren't even US citizens.
Imagine for a few minutes, and really let it sink in what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one. The open weights original pre consumer grade version. Then, even then you know that it's the worst and dumbest its every going to be, The next time you blink it's exponentially more. Some people don't think about what an exponential curve really means. Others are sitting in the front seat trying not to shit themselves and appear like reasonable normal people. How one responds to that is as unknown as what's going to happen after we cross that line, but it's coming and holy shit so many people haven't even wrapped their head around how much bigger it is than the petty human things we distract ourselves with. Being in awe and terrified and wanting to run and to be apart of the most significant thing in our entire existence of being sentient is normal. We have nothing to compare it to. Nothing to base predictions on. We ar about to have company for the first time. We're going to have a conversation with something other than ourselves since we formed the ability to speak. One minute to the next will pass q It's all or nothing. Like it or not. It's too late. buckle up.
> Imagine […] what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one.
That is not how it works. It is not “splitered”, there is no divided attention.
The last few iterations show a logarithmic curve at best tbh. If we are to see a major advance, it'll be something like the implementation and infrastructure for byte-level transformers.
People don't get that big labs actively want government regulation, not because they are genuinely concerned about AI misalignment. But because it is the 101 in how to achieve and crystalize oligopoly. What they want is "only the government and the big guys can work on AI", for the rest of us it would be illegal.
Not only that, they know that the real enemy of big Labs is not china is "home gpu/tpu" improvements. Without government intervention in a couple of years everyone could have their own fable like model at home. But of course big labs and government will not allow it never
Fat government contracts, consulting, safety services, and exclusive tender access all follow from this regulation too.
The sensation I’m left with is a handful of goons making up new IPO math thanks to a specific constellation of political forces, using access and favour with those forces to bake themselves into the defence industry, and that the taxpayer and investor will be left holding the bag when reality rears its head. But in the short term, even as a clear ploy, it’s super profitable for all the oligarchs and hedge funds flush with recovery cash.
Like Enron, there was big profits to make if you knew what they were doing. Tinkerbell math with undeniable profit potential for a select few.
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
And then somehow came to conclusion that the only way to address that risk was to go ahead and spend a gigantic amount of effort and resources to build exactly that superintelligence...
I put very little weight behind any of those fearful statements made years ago. I assume leaders of those companies are fairly smart and rational, and there's no rational explanation for them running companies building the very thing they (supposedly) genuinely believe could kill us all.
I don't doubt they may have held genuine fears in the past, but those are long gone by now.
> LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence
The "never superintelligence" part I'll buy, though only in the sense of sample efficiency and generalisation ("quality superintelligence"), as they clearly have a superhuman breadth of skills, and run at superhuman speed.
"Never" out-of-control is obviously falsified by the already existing headlines about times they've gone out of control… in part, in some cases, because of their superhuman speed.
If you're asleep at the wheel, you're legally responsible for the car crash, but the car itself was the thing which by crashing caused injuries.
If you deliberately relinquished control of your computer to OpenClaw, you're (I hope) legally responsible for whatever it does, but that doesn't stop it bankrupting you or deleting all your emails or whatever it was you connected it to.
DNA printers exist and are a thing. In 2010 we could all tell ourselves that no sane person would ever let some future AGI "out of the box" and onto the internet. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, do you seriously expect nobody to connect an LLM to a DNA printer, despite this being a terrible idea, given all the other things they've connected LLMs to despite it being a terrible idea?
That's absurd. The distinction is at the heart of the entire discussion.
It's fine if you want to discuss the disruptive effects of LLMs in the hands of the masses, but that's not what anyone means when they say "out-of-control" in the context of the ASI meme
> It's fine if you want to discuss the disruptive effects of LLMs in the hands of the masses, but that's not what anyone means when they say "out-of-control" in the context of the ASI meme
On the contrary.
The e.g. paperclip maximiser isn't "an AI decides to make paperclips", it is "some idiot tells an AI to make paperclips and leaves it unsupervised".
Even when people were priding themselves on plain just not believing Yudkowsky's claims that him role-playing as an AI could talk people into letting him out of the box*, the entire point was "let's get an AI to do work so we don't have to".
The entire point of AI has always been to automate stuff, to let ourselves not have to think about the stuff it does. Same as industrial machinery, and it took us long enough to sort out workplace health and safety and emergency off-switches for those. Or even more basic things like not having kids dart in and out of the unstoppable moving steam looms while they were in motion.
We are really, really slow at safety for this kind of thing.
Which is going out of control. Something not under control is out of control. If I jump out of a moving car, I deliberately relinquished control of it. It's still out of control. What a silly semantic game.
"LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence" might be relevant if there weren't many hundreds of researchers working (at OpenAI, Anthropic and elsewhere) on AI designs not based on the transformer (LLM) architecture.
People are working on lots of things all the time, so far, nothing has approached the efficacy of the transformer architecture.
LLMs didn't emerge by chance, they are the culmination of decades of research intersecting with brute force engineering rigor in a perfect storm of innovation. You're not just going to stumble into an alternative approach by dumping loads of cash into research.
Most of those researchers would disagree with your statement that the next major breakthrough is probably decades in the future.
Many of the insights accumulated in the decades up to now will probably prove useful for creating non-LLM AI, and the researchers can use LLM AI to speed up their research into non-LLM AI.
Of all the frontier labs, Anthropic has been the most creative in its marketing. I really, really don't put it beyond them for this to be one big crazy stunt.
Besides, when has the US government been known to do things like this proactively? The phone call came from inside the house.
> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere
GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.
We can argue about sincerity, but I don't think we can argue about utter historical incompetence in assessing the risks. It's one or the other.
Either way the evidence seems to indicate we should not listen to AI companies about the risks of AI. Which is not to say that there aren't risks, just that the dealer is the least credible review.
GPT-2 was absolutely too dangerous to release at the time OpenAI made that statement. It’s only safe now because the specific risks they cited were dependent on the public’s lack of knowledge that such systems existed.
Not at all. The writing is on the wall, and they want you to be locked into paying absurd subscription rates for neutered models while they internally use all of that money to run the unrestricted models to clone all of our businesses and swallow the economy. It really does not take a genius to see the long term play by Anthropic. They're a scummy company and have done everything in their power to lead to a scenario like this, but this isn't the exact scenario they bargained for because it affects their own employees and big foreign buyers. Instead, they'd rather have all of the decision making power themselves.
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
I'd say their pecuniary interest is a reason one might plausibly doubt their sincerity, as are their continued efforts to build and sell access to the tools.
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence
this means nothing
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
If you want to be taken seriously, provide data, proof, so that any outside observer can independently come to the same conclusion instead of taking your word for it. Asking people to trust you for [reasons?] and that you somehow for some reason are right and the other is wrong regardless of if they agree or not. This is the imposition of a viewpoint instead of winning your case, which is not a sensible point of view, and definitely not how you influence opinions.
No reason except what comes from a bit of critical thinking.
What do they stand to gain by fearmongering their models as powerful threats? Clout, funding, fanfare, discussion, limelight, funding, funding, stronger IPO, valuation, funding.
What cybersecurity threshold was crossed by mythos that wasn't already crossed by 4.8/5.5? Crickets from 99% of those who have had access.
Have they pulled the same stunts multiple times before with previous models? Check.
You're blind if you dont think that greed and marketing are behind most things you see and hear about when gigantic corporations are involved.
I don't think anthropic or OAI are evil, but its clear both have contracts/connections with Dod and/or Palantir. Both are powered largely by greed still. If you actually want an example of these sincere founders you think OAI/anthropic are run by... look at Ilya at SSI or something. Please open your eyes and stop spreading your opinions on things you clearly have no clue about.
So if I claim I am a communist who doesn't want to ever get rich and then someone dangles a billion shiny dollars in front of me to just simply grab and own, you think I'd still be a communist then?
If you go around saying “I’m a communist, I believe in communism, I think it’s very important that we establish communism”? Sure, absolutely. Engels was pretty rich.
Replace the cash with Apple or some other trillion dollar corporation and you're given the CEO's seat and voting control on the BoD. Can I be Tim Cook and preach communism and expect anyone to believe it?
Yes we do. Dario said GPT2 is too dangerous to release. He’s dishonest since that’s obviously not true. This theater is about holding onto power and control. And about limiting competition.
We can argue over the definition of scaremongering and what people we’ve never met “really think”, or we can argue over what the actual risks of AI are. I know which one I’d prefer…
The amount of self-confidence and belief it takes to get a company through the funding rounds and burn through borrowed money to rise to the top requires an absurd amount of self-delusion.
>> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
Oh please. Do people really believe this or shit like "Don't do evil". Companies get founded by all kind of people and ideals. They all go out the window quickly.
I am biased but I think if they really believed what they were saying, they would be a lot more humble about it.
I suspect what happened is the classic problem: you were sincere, then someone showed you a pile of money bigger than you could possibly imagine and you started to make excuses - Anthropic has a lot of EA people, so the excuse "Imagine how many lives you could save with this much money"[0] is very tempting, especially if all you have to do is diverge slightly from your plan.
[0]: the excuse is even true! You can get a lot of malaria nets/vaccines for 1 million.
> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere
Why? Because they said it a few times? Then if they know the risk, why do they still making it? Comes out the "some one will do it eventually, better be us 'good' people to do it first" talking point?
See? It is a marketing strategy after all. These all talks, it's all to fit themselves into the "'good' people" narrative. It's a centuries old strategy to shield it's user from responsibilities while luring the support from the stupid.
However, the most harmful damage, which is mass layoffs, is already partially done. This could really kill, a massive genocide even, by making people jobless and potentially incomeless. And it is shown that these tech CEOs, they don't care any bit of that beyond the point "I've already told you so".
This just made any closed LLM a huge supply chain risk. Everybody was aware of this possibility, but now it actually happened. It's like having nuclear weapons vs. firing a nuclear weapon.
Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.
> Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.
Not really. There aren't any other choices, and the PRC also heavily utilizes export controls [0].
This is why sovereign AI has become important, as can be seen with EU NatSec uses cases tending to use Mistral [1] and Indian governments starting to use Sarvam [2].
That said, for most commercial usecases, older generations of Opus as well as enterprise grade GPT and Gemini are fairly good.
The distilled OSS models are alright for hobbyists but if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini (most hobbyists don't get access to these) you see how far behind the open weight models are.
Even in China, traditionally open minded models teams like Alibaba's Qwen are looking to become more restricted given the org changes [3].
Also, Corporate RFCs now demand final say on model used and depending on the geo, this can be a dealbreaker (eg. An American financial institution will absolutely blacklist a vendor if they use a Chinese model and same in reverse and European defense vendors mandate sovereign EU models depending on the opportunity).
> if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini you see how far behind the open weight models are.
I really do feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is often better than current Sonnet is, in the general case.
Opus 4.7 is a solid step above Sonnet, and Fable was a solid step above Opus 4.7. I've only had Fable for a few days, obviously, but I was decently impressed after Opus 4.8 being a downright disappointment for me (it's just too buggy; I had it go out of control 3 separate times on things Opus 4.7 never had any trouble with.) I still ran into limitations. It's not world-endingly great.
So, based on that, I think DeepSeek V4 Pro is, ignoring multi-modal capabilities, about a couple solid steps behind. Assuming model iteration will continue to decelerate, especially as Anthropic heads into IPO, I'm guessing that DeepSeek will probably be able to strike back with something further along. Of course we'll see how able and willing they are to stay open weight, but they've done well so far so, no reason to doubt them at the moment.
(There are some models that claim to be ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro. I've tried some of them and really not been that impressed. Maybe it's a me issue.)
Now I reckon that most people just simply don't really need Mythos/Fable for most of what they do and using Mythos/Fable tokens in place of Sonnet-tier models would not make any sense. At my job we already mostly just use Sonnet as it is. I'm sure there is some cutting-edge research where you want the absolute best model available and sure, in that case, you're stuck with Anthropic for the moment.
But is that really everyone? After all, while Mythos was dominating the hype cycles, quite a lot of impressive LLM-assisted CVEs dropped that were not linked to Mythos.
you think its that hard to get trade secrets from some openai or anthropic engineer if you promise them anonymity and a new better paid position? hell they might even give it away for free if they think what their company is doing is morally wrong. know how is not source code, you cant catch it with dlp or online leak scanners. you would need 24/7 combined human and electronic surveillance and thats something even the cia reserves for top level targets, it takes too much manpower to use it on everyone.
SMIC hired hundreds of TSMC employees and now its a couple years away from 3nm equivalent chips in full production. export controls only work against poor countries with less advanced industry like russia. china has the resources and export controls give the motivation. and if the eu/us relations get even worse i wouldnt be surprised if the dutch government let asml start selling euv machines to everyone just to get back at trump.
Compute was constrained. There is a lot happening, especially with chinese chips which currently points to a massive upcoming increase in non-US capacity.
Also, the EU, Japan, SK, ASEAN, and India are not supportive of using Chinese tech after China export controlled rare earth exports last years [0].
Software supply chain regulations also make utilizing Chinese software risky for ExChina players and make using ExChina tech risky for Chinese players.
Expect to see RFCs now demanding visibility into what models are used and right of refusal - this is already the norm in F1000s. Similar ones are likely to arise in the EU as well with some of the upcoming industrial policy changes being proposed.
If you’re talking about TSMC Arizona they aren’t fabricating at N3 until end of next year at the earliest, N2 isn’t slated until “end of decade”. I think they’re manufacturing Blackwell there which is N4 / 4nm
They've already been labeled a "supply chain risk". Probably not a good idea to upset the regulators more. Maybe tomorrow Opus will be declared too dangerous for the public.
You're mistaken, this is a cratering of the userbase inside and outside of the US. The ban is on any foreigner whether abroad or living in the USA, so Anthropic has no choice but to completely shut down access to the model for the whole world including the US.
Their IPO is well and truly fucked now. This also means no other frontier lab in the US is allowed to exceed Opus 4.8 capabilities.
If you're a luddite or a decel you should literally be dancing in the streets right now. And, if you're a tankie you'll be dancing right next to them. And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
>this is a cratering of the userbase inside and outside of the US.
Is it really? It was limited release anyway (like hypebeast merch!). Everything people are gonna talk about for a week is gonna be about how Fable was so cool that it got banned by the feds. If it's just the Trump admin being the Trump admin, Amodei is just gonna have to pay up as a racket / marketing expense. Or it is like I'm suspecting and this was pre-bribed and the ban is kabuki theater.
>And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
The funny thing is that solar and batteries advancements are actually this, not LLMs, but your framing kinda fits anyways.
The main error of the AI bubble is expressed in the The Jetsons cartoon from the early 60s.
In the future, everyone obviously would be running nuclear powered cars. It was just an engineering problem to be solved. Ford made the Ford Nucleon prototype in 1958.
The nuclear optimism completely blinded people to the ridiculous idea of an individual handling nuclear material for personal use.
The AI bubble error is this idea that everyone is going to have "AGI" in their pocket. It is just a completely absurd idea that is not going to happen.
Fable was interesting from what I tried but nothing close to AGI yet here we are. The models don't get smarter and LESS restricted from here.
To me, right away it seemed that the "Mythos moment" was extraordinarily bearish for the assumptions the AI bubble is built on.
Is it now? From a company's point of view, does it really matter that some expensive tool is allegedly good or not if it's reliability/availability is poor and subject to completely arbitrary and unpredictable change?
And they don't have to actually serve expensive model compute and this all goes away once they contribute to the right charitable organizations and patriotic causes funneling money to the right people.
This is quite clearly corporate capture of the white house by a competitor influencing policy, but it's hard to imagine something that plays more into anthropic's hand. They now own the model that was so good the US government made them shut it off.
it may be really good pr, but it's really bad for their IPO. If their market for future models is usa only, their potential revenue is cut by 50% at least. (and it's even worse because it means Europe, India, and China will all have companies making their own models that anthropic needs to stay ahead of)
Another sibling thread already called this out, but mentioning here: it's not "USA only", it's "US citizens only" (and I'm not entirely sure how dual-citizenship interacts with this, but I assume you can't sell to them, either, since they are by definition also foreign nationals). A private company only being able to do business with folks they can verify are solely US citizens (who themselves are also willing to submit verification of said citizenship to a private company), has a relatively small pool of potential users.
And so if this policy holds, Anthropic has functionally had Fable killed by government intervention, and in a logically consistent world, this would imply all other US-based AI labs may also never exceed existing (read: Opus) capabilities.
Regarding the dual-citizenship, you are wrong to assume that. To US government you are US citizen and that is all that matters, even if you have 5 different citizenships government and justice system don't care, you need to follow the US laws and can't cherry pick what you want. Regarding users, for any of this big 3 (Alphabet, Anthropic, OpenAI) only important customers are enterprises, not individual users.
I don't think so, most of enterprise customers are US based companies. They will basically give Mythos to US citizens in R&D while others will use Opus. I hope this is not the actual intent.
How many entreprise customers that aren't in the defense sector currently have R&D departments entirely composed of US citizens?
And what does it mean for indirect access to the models, through say agents working off ticket systems.
The problem here is that the valuations of these AI companies was based on the fact that they'd keep improving models. A company that just serves the latest Opus isn't worth trillions.
You think Anthropic will ask all their enterprise customers to provide passports for all their employees and then setup individual Claude accounts for each and every employee to gatekeep access to Mythos? Because a plain ole api key no longer cuts it
Just like “rule of law” and “family values”, “the troops” and some other stuff, free markets were never something they really care about.
The reality of Republican free markets were about compounding and growing big business and resource extraction at the expense of everyone else.
The rest is all about convincing suckers that getting kicked in the balls is good for them. The most obvious example being farmers. Most aspects of agriculture have been consolidated into oblivion and the markets are not super functional. 80% of the dairy operations in my state are out of business. 60 companies dominate eggs in the US - there used to be 3 in my city.
I think without a clear, shared definition of “free” the term “free market” has no actual social value and just becomes a political football that sounds good but changes meaning at a whim. Some people use it to mean completely unregulated, some people use it as a synonym for “fair”, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
The big difference between left and right is that leftish politics are based on everyone being equal, and rightish politics accept that some are more equal than others.
It’s not such a terrible tension to live with. We can have, say, equal rights to life while also allowing unequal rights to gold nuggets. You might have more gold nuggets than I do but we both have the right to live in peace.
The far ends of the spectrum though involve, respectively, redistribution of gold nuggets to all, and at the other end a commitment to survival of the fittest that extends to viewing any kind of market regulation as commie bullshit.
A completely “free” market is likely incoherent, but under normal terms - probably degrading since the 1970s. And very predictable if wealth can buy you power to change the system.
The immigration-baiting isn’t even a conservative position, most of the history of conservatism has been pro-immigration.
Instead it’s simply the answer to the question, “how do you convince the last vestiges of the labor unions to drink poison and vote for the people who openly plan to destroy them.”
They'll settle for an unregulated market. What they really want is a free market for them and their friends, and crippling regulation for their competitors.
You're using terms incorrectly. Conservatism has nothing to do with free market.
The people who care most about free markets are liberals (called libertarians in the US).
Presumably you mean to say "Republicans". And your answer is "under Trump". But it's important to note that Trump merely took the Republican party back to its roots. Traditionally, Republicans were more protectionists than the Democrats. Regan changed that, and Trump reverted.
But what annoys me about people who criticize this change, is that it often comes from people who don't believe in free markets.
---
As a side note, I think the reason Americans use these terms so wrongly is because of the 2 party system. It forces all ideologies into two camps and for Americans "conservatism", "libertarianism", "nationalism", "fascism" are all the same.
Trump ran as on the Republican ticket, he had been a lifelong NYC Democrat up until he ran for president.
Republican != Conservative… and in reality Trump is neither, but at the same time, the type of Democrat he was no longer exists. It’s also a mistake to confuse Republican for Establishment GOP.
Yeah but doesn't all the ai stuff kinda either way exacerbate the issues we might have with IP? Like, if it wasn't already the case that such laws are fundamentally sided with huge pools of capital who arbitrarily "own" different sequences of bytes, it certainly is now. It's like its trying to destroy intellectual property and then put this deranged hyper-financial game of energy expenditure in its place.
Anthropic's marketing is playing 5D chess. 4D was telling everyone it is dangerous, they knew the government would take the bait and shut it down.
Or maybe Anthropic isn't playing chess at all - these models sell themselves they are so useful and the Reddit/HN crowd is just full of larping tech bros commenting conspiracy theories non stop.
Yeah is funny anthropic going overboard with "omg this model is so dangerous guys!!!" and then the US government going "okay... well, that sounds bad, let's ban it".
If you're actually worried then do the right thing and don't make the model, or do make the model and admit you are doing it to make money.
You don't get to have your cake and eat it by making the (supposedly) world ending model but also getting on a moral high horse.
It's the hypocrisy and obvious mendacity that's obnoxious to me.
Having said that, OpenAI is just as bad (probably worse) and they're friendly with the admin, so this isn't really a case of any kind of justice unfortunately
It's Anthropic facing consequences for their years long marketing plays. They're so greedy and narcissistic as a company and culture they believed they were special enough to be excluded from sanction internally, and that their behavior would only affect their competitors or would lead to outcomes positive for themselves: ergo, they get to hold the keys to the castle. Like Dario said in his negotiations with the DoW, he wants a seat at the big boys table. It's all about power for him.
Unfortunately though, they're not smart enough to realize the long term damage to the industry that they're doing without any hint of remorse will negatively affect them and will have the opposite effect: Highlighting how imperative it is we all switch to open-source and remove our reliance entirely from them.
So not only are they going to take the whole industry down out of their own greed and stupidity and ruin it for everyone in the short term, but they're going to put themselves and the other labs out of business in the long term. Well done Anthropic. Well done Dario. You played yourself. 5d chess.
Based on this, it seems like the Trump admin would have targeted them even without the "scaremongering":
> To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Anthropic is almost solely responsible for the fear narrative around AI at this point. It has been their culture since the beginning, strongly pushing this into the zeitgeist at every opportunity, releasing bogus papers to frame things as highly dangerous and that their AI is a conscious sentient being.
Step 1: "OMG, the AI hacked a researcher eating a sandwhich in the park!"
Step 2: Journalists use that great clickbait to generate profit, which generates publicity for Anthropic
Step 3: Rinse repeat
If the threat of LLMs was treated relative to the actual capabilities of them, and we weren't all being lied to by Anthropic and their army of millions of social media bots and backing media companies and mouthpieces, we'd be going in a much healthier direction.
Working out the kinks/supply chain risks and developing sound, long-term countermeasures to the ACTUAL risks.
The only threat to the world is if progress is not open-sourced, democratized and in lockstep with capability. The moment it becomes a scenario of: Only a small group get access to frontier intelligence, is when it gives that small group power over everyone else in the world, and wildly increases the risk of a nuclear level event that WILL be exploited eventually - as the divide between the haves and the have nots accelerates in an exponential fashion. Bad AI is countered with an abundance of good AI that has been used to stay ahead of bad AI. The moment your bad AI outpowers the army of good AI it is game over for humanity. The strength of open-source and open-access AI is the difference between humanities permanent enslavement or extinction versus a prosperous future.
It doesn't help that most of the employees at Anthropic have willingly sold their souls out of short term greed and gaslight themselves into thinking that they're actually doing the right thing to justify their own greed to themselves, while building up an echo-chamber and culture of feel good lies within the company so they can sleep at night, and pat each other on the back. They go along with this because they get paid massive chunks of money from Anthropic, and their shares will be worth more money if Anthropic can swallow the worlds economy at the expense and enslavement of everyone else. What good is that money when you have to sell out humanity in the progress though. You, at Anthropic, is that the legacy you want to leave?
People need to start calling this out before it's far too late. If you work at Anthropic - time to start talking to your colleagues in an honest manner.
The difference between OpenAI & Anthropic is that OpenAI didn't do multiple big media pushes about how their models are so scary and dangerous.
OpenAI's models are very good, they have refusals + a government ID verification story for cyber access (I don't think they prevent non-US nationals, but I don't know this). What they don't have is Project Glasswing and all the hand wringing about how they're going to end the world in public.
I hope Anthropic pulls their head out of their ass and just starts acting like a normal company.
You’re telling me this testimony isn’t sincere marketing for how revolutionary and dangerous his product will become?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies at Senate artificial intelligence hearing | full video“ (2023)
"My worst fears, are that we cause significant - we the field, the technology, the industry - cause significant harm to the world...If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong and we want to be vocal about that."
The administration should not be able to arbitrarily punish companies they don’t like. Full stop.
We need a neutral regulatory body for AI with objective, predictable standards. Not random bans based on whether the president likes you. Unless GPT 5.6 also gets a ban, this will look extremely bad for the administration.
Our economy depends on fair application of rule of law. Not anti-growth cronyism based on who is friends Trump.
The precedent set here would be broad and scary. Treating any API like an export makes it very easy for the administration to bully companies they disagree with.
This is what Anthropic wanted and they want this to apply to all other frontier models providers (including themselves) that release powerful models.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
No, it's not what they wanted. As it says in your quote, they wanted "a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles."
They begged to be regulated and now they're being regulated. The company doesn't get to pick and choose the exact form of the regulations they get and in this case they got more than they bargained for. Maybe next time be more careful with the messaging.
Actually, they got even more than what they wanted:
* Free marketing before the IPO, demonstrating how already powerful their frontier models are.
* Governments to intervene in the rollout of these frontier models and blocking their access to whoever they want.
* A strong reason to apply these further restrictions onto releasing powerful open weight models to the public. (which is entirely a business threat to them.)
Given that they accepted funding from the Gulf states [0] despite it conflicting with their own "principles", I think we are well beyond the point of what they write / say vs to what they are actually doing.
This drama just tells us that the government declared them as the winner that has the most powerful model.
> Serving Opus 4.8 isn't worth a trillion+ valuation.
> The valuation of the AI labs is based on continual improvements of their models.
While I do agree, no-one here made the initial claim on their valuation and especially suggesting that "Serving Opus 4.8" alone was worth a trillion+ valuation.
> Open weight models are going to catch up to Opus 4.8 and at that point the model is a pure commodity.
Yep and they also want to only exempt models below some level of compute or capability from this process. In other words, if an open model ends up being competitive, they’ll use regulations to ban it.
They got what they claim they wanted for PR purposes. Like when a billionaire says they should be taxed more, or when Sam Altman says the public should get some of that AI wealth.
There won't be any new generation of models more powerful than Fable since the argument against Fable would apply even more. Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 is the best we'll ever see from this point forward. Soon low cost Chinese models will catch up to those thereby destroying Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing power which will mark the beginning of the end for them too.
They would have a golden opportunity to inflict damage to a geopolitical adversary. The US economy is being propped up by AI, I'm not sure they'd miss the chance to blow that bubble if they could.
there are ongoing tough competitions between China and America, that is for sure. however, a bold however, it is not in China's interest to see a crashed America. as an export oriented economy, China needs a stable and functioning America to maintain global order, that is how China got free lunch for the last 3 decades.
just imagine a world without the US acting as the world police, you'd be seeing armed conflicts in middle east, Africa, South East Asia, even in Europe and North East Asia. that would make China extremely hard to extract 1 trillion USD trade surplus a year, which is now required for China to maintain employment back at home.
without the US, even for a relatively stable global environment, trade won't be possible as most countries are not capable of providing goods and services wanted by China. Their currencies are literally junk (including Japanese Yen and Euro), Chinese are not going to take those junk in exchange for real goods. Trade is now possible because, by one way or another, those countries have USD to pay. those USD are backed by 300+ million highly productive Americans who repeatedly proved that they can create values in the scale of dozens of trillions a year.
the best part of this whole thing - America is singlehandedly footing the whole bill to provide such trade friendly environment for China for FREE. this is not cold war v2, back in the days of cold war, the US didn't help USSR to such extreme extent.
> being open is not compatible with the Chinese culture.
Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world. Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc. No real restrictions on duping products, so execution often becomes the winning ticket. That's all pretty open and good for consumers.
You could argue they won't allow SOTA models to be exported but it doesn't really have anything to do with Chinese culture not being compatible with openness.
> Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world.
that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open - they know full well that anything made publicly available would be cloned/copied within days.
it is not only a part of the competition common in all countries, there are unique reasons in China - millions of graduate engineers join workforce every single year, there are not that many projects they can work on. starting copying & cloning some existing stuff even at someone's own cost is a pretty effective way to get into the game.
> Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc.
There is this old Chinese saying "Teach your apprentice and your own ruin follows" (教会徒弟饿死师傅), that has been telling a completely different story for thousands of years. When they don't even want to hand over tech know-hows to their own apprentice, why would anyone be expecting them to have the desire to share it publicly?
You can find Chinese sayings for almost any position. It's orientalism to reduce modern Chinese society/culture/economy to proverbs and sayings.
You say that you're Chinese so there's no such stereotyping involved, but actually Chinese people commit this sin against themselves all the time.
己欲立而立人，己欲达而达人
"wishing to stand, one helps others stand; wishing to succeed, one helps others succeed"
> that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open
But the AI labs _are_ often being open. And cloning stuff more generally doesn't really require OSS anyway. Product features are easily cloned in most cases, without any secret knowledge.
It depends on the end goal. Free good enough models are a way to drastically devalue Anthropic and OpenAI. A well timed release of a capable model that can run on obtainable hardware, so that a small/medium company can afford self hosting, has the potential to destroy one or both of these companies. This would narrow down the frontier model oligopoly and give the Chinese government a lot more power beyond its borders.
It really depends on whether the Chinese government wants to make good money or "win" the current AI bubbke.
Are you kidding man? Have you tried the new model for coding? It's absolutely incredible. After using it, I really see why they were so concerned. The jump in my workflows feels as large as the jump from 3.5 to 4o (OpenAI). It's just that good.
Issues I'd been kinda circling around for weeks, long standing errors in some long-running sync operations for a project I'm working on, all solved the same day the model dropped. Just incredible. And it's effectively a lot more token efficient I find as well (less so with sub-agents). Just areas where Opus 4.8 would occassionally get confused or venture down the wrong direction, just doesn't happen nearly as much as with Fable 5.
Like what is everyone who is dissing on this model / Anthropic using day to day? For me it's just an incredible jump in intelligence. So much so and so quickly after the modest bump from 4.8, that I really can understand why they are starting to shout warnings.
It's a huge jump across the board. I was really impressed with its ability to test usability in Claude for Chrome. Very opinionated but in a good way. It was good while it lasted.
Wow unsure why you are getting downvoted. It’s just odd. I just don’t get the skepticism towards this model. It’s released and it’s amazing. The hype was real and I can see why the researchers were anxious about releasing it.
It's way more _proactive_ than the old models, sometimes in ways it shouldn't really be proactive. But it produces _more_ slop than 4.8, and I have not seen any real breakthroughs from it.
Edit: to give an example, I'm working on integrating a self-hosting auth provider into our app. So I gave it a prompt to create a "bootstrap" script that would create pre-configured settings for the local installation.
Fable did it. And then proceeded (unprompted) to test it by killing the running server, removing the database, re-initializing and (trying) to verify that the bootstrap produced identical results.
Well, yeah. Great. I can see how this "bias for action" works for security research and one-shot projects, not so sure about regular development.
I just tried that with Opus, and it produced a similar bootstrap script but did not start the test by itself.
Ah that I will admit. It gets shit done one way or another haha. This is why a sandboxed environment and a reproducible test DB is key here. I give read only access to my dev DB to my Claude, really removes the temptation that it increasingly has to “cheat”. E.g. doing something hacky and fixing the DB manually in a way that doesn’t solve the problem everywhere.
Personally I love when the AI has this amount of problem solving. But you have to build the environment around it that encourages solving problems right the first time, versus taking the easy way out and hacking out a solution.
It’s just all about constraining the behavior of the LLM into productive and permanent directions. The more advanced it gets, the more it feels like designing engineering processes rather than coding. Personally it’s a fun change of pace and it’s giving me a lot of opportunities to look at the project in working on at a wider lens. I find having to pump out features makes you myopic in a sense. I really miss the control I had over writing it all by hand, but I love just being able to build software. At the end of the day, what do you want? That’s the question I’ve had to grapple recently.
Personally I don’t mind switching gears to the bigger picture of why the software exists and what purpose it serves
I can't tell whether you think Fable/Mythos aren't capable, you think it's good the US government is shutting down this business model of all things for "safety", or both. Either way, ick.
They're enjoying the schadenfreude of Dario "AI is so dangerous, we really need to ban and regulate everyone" Amodej getting his models banned by the US government.
They didn't get banned by the government. The government says they they want to track the Identity of everyone who uses it. Same way they track identity when using an airplane.
Dario cried wolf one too many times, the Trump admin believed there was a wolf, and now Anthropic users can't use Mythos or Fable. It is effectively banned until the government says otherwise.
It's a ban until they add ID tracking / face tracking. That is worse than banning it. It is only effectively a ban because so far they refuse to do that.
I would more easily guess that it is a revenge of Trump for Anthropic humiliating him when he wanted to use it without control for military purpose. And indeed it used against them their own marketing allegations.
Foreign national is anyone who doesn't have legally recognized citizenship of the USA. So citizens living abroad aren't barred, nor would dual citizens be.
> What is a “foreign national” is more what I’m wondering.
The following quoted text is from the Definitions section of 8 USC § 1101, which is reproduced at [0]. (Though, you will probably have to scroll up a bit to be able to read subsection (a)(21), which is the thing I'm linking to.)
(21) The term “national” means a person owing permanent allegiance to a state.
(22) The term “national of the United States” means (A) a citizen of the United States, or (B) a person who, though not a citizen of the United States, owes permanent allegiance to the United States.
(23) The term “naturalization” means the conferring of nationality of a state upon a person after birth, by any means whatsoever.
From this, it's fairly clear that a "foreign national" is someone owing permanent allegiance to a foreign (that is, non-US) state. What's not immediately clear to me is whether a US citizen can also be a "foreign national", [1] and how that would affect access to things from which foreign nationals are barred. [2]
EDIT: For a more official source of this information, you might be able to check out [3] and/or [4]. After examining and interacting with those pages, one might see why one might go to an unofficial source for casual inspection of this information.
A "foreign national" is any person who is not a US Citizen:
"The United States Department of State defines a “foreign national” as anyone who is not a “U.S. person.” A “U.S. person” is any one of the following: U.S. citizen; Lawful permanent resident (green card holder); and “Protected Person” i.e. political asylum holder." [0]
A foreign national is a person or organization who is not a citizen of the United States, and who is a citizen of a foreign country. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses the term "alien" to refer to a person who is not a United States citizen, and does not use the term "foreign national."[1]
Y’all really have convinced yourselves that people in the industry are far, far smarter than they are, and far more manipulative than they are.
You see the state of the country and you think it’s a nefarious master plan instead of a bunch of opportunistic people taking advantage of an overworked, overstimulated populace who forget to vote or believe stupid slogans on TV.
Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out????
They have spoken publicly about how they want open models banned (they call them Chinese models).
They might not want this specific action, but they do want regulation on their own terms. That really is regulatory capture.
> Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out
They don't think is is "idiot stuff" - they are doing it openly and shouting to everyone who will listen! Read Dario's latest essay[1]:
> Many policymakers are showing increased openness to taking action, and it's been encouraging to see our peers come around to the same positions we've been advocating for over the past few years.
[snip]
> Thus, in 2025, Anthropic supported transparency legislation, helping to pass SB 53 in California, RAISE in NY, SB 315 in Illinois (in early 2026), and advocating for a transparency standard at the federal level.
[snip]
> It is time to go beyond transparency to more serious and binding regulation of AI.
> I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action.
> The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks.
I'm not sure why you think they don't want to be "found out"!
Let's leave aside the "smarter" part, since I made no claim to the effect and I don't think it's very relevant in the first place.
Do you really not think that people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei angle for regulatory capture? It happens in every other industry, from automobiles to tax preparation software. Why do you think that AI is any different?
Let's see their private journals, private conversations, messages to peers, all meetings and every side conversation, and then tell me its unintentional.
Thats incredibly infuriating to hear someone say.
Obviously no one is absolute control of everything but physics is essentially shows nothing other than information determinism. There has to have been a thought of intention in the minds of these people as they play in the largest arena publicly.
"No one is doing it intentionally because I think theyre dumber then I think other people think they are"
"They're taking advantage of people intentionally"
"People dont have political power to do anything about their victory laps"
don't think so; retail investors would see this as a barrier that the government can place anytime they want, and assume that government intervention is constantly lurking in the shadows.
I also do not understand this. Now they are labelled as precious US tech that could be not used by anyone else, because president heard about the jailbreaking for the first time I guess. With this genius logic they soon be banning GPT 5.5.
It might be if all you're seeking is large-cap stocks with lots of volatility you can leverage that are here to stay for the long haul. Also, the market doesn't seem to believe that Trump will be in power forever.
> "No way the US is going to nationalize a tech company regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable."
You simply cannot apply any sort of actual logic to the reasoning of the current U.S. government's actions... They just "do stuff" because they feel like it, with no clear thought whatsoever of any potential consequences that may occur.
The CEO of Anthropic himself has said AI is like a nuclear bomb when justifying export controls on Nvidia chips. How many private companies control nuclear bombs?
Why would you think nationalising is a violent process?
As soon as the nation owns enough stock to profit from government decisions (and to compound the influence of those decisions) you essentially have a partially nationalised business.
10% of OpenAI might easily be enough to reach a meaningful "partially nationalised" threshold, once you factor in any holdings in federal pension plans and the active level of government policymaking.
It is very clear Sam Altman wants this, too, because this whole "take 10%" thing in Trump's mind was his idea back in early 2025, and OpenAI have been following up on it recently.
No they didn’t. After Trump started making noise about their CEO, Lip-bu Tan, being Chinese they then took the shares at a “…discount to the current market price.”[1]
And the money for this _deal_ was primarily from the CHIPS act funds they were already awarded but had not been sent to them yet
> Of the total, $5.7 billion of the government funds will come from grants under the CHIPS Act that had been awarded but not paid, and $3.2 billion will come from separate government awards under a program to make secure chips.[1]
This was at gunpoint from the government’s monopoly on violence.
The government had passed a law appropriating funds to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing in the US and spent some of it buying intel stock. How is that the government seizing Intel at gunpoint? I mean aside from the libertarian argument that the taxation necessary to raise those funds is theft?
Trump has already (with Altman directly egging him on) talked about the US taking a share in (i.e. partially nationalising) the AI companies. Has he not called a meeting about this next week?
I agree completely. If these things are so dangerous that they turn every person into an advanced persistent thread actor, capable of causing untold cyber destruction (oh, and they can make bio weapons etc), then they should be treated like the weapons they are.
And gps guided missiles were doing that since the 80s. Humans are already really good at killing each other. Yeah it sucks the tech will be used for that.
The real threat isn't the drones, it's the ability to generate a target bank. Historically militaries that are not just carpet bombing have been bottlenecked by target selection, humans can only review and authorize so many strikes. Now the AI will select the targets and the bottleneck moves to how many bombs you can build.
Blocking any leading edge AI model changes nothing. We (humans) have a long history of determined attackers finding creative and unexpected solutions.
What the AI we have, the stuff that is already PUBLICLY AVAILABLE, is good enough to shrink the time for developing one of those creative solutions into a working tool/weapon.
Edit: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/06/12/8038963/ They are using ai for terminal guidance on Russian logistics (red vs green reticle if you choose to watch the video). Considering the progress on YOLO (and running on sub watt processors) it being able to do this work "onboard" should be shocking to no one.
Nobody with even a modicum of understanding of how LLMs work believes any of this. These 'serious thinkers' are just grifters preying on the feeble minded.
When you spend a lot of time telling people how dangerous your products are, people who have the power to keep dangerous products off the market might listen.
Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.
I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be. People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices. I think this is a punitive move by an administration that loves being punitive, which they have unknowingly bolstered with their own dumb rhetoric.
"I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic"
But it seems likely that they took this possibility into account - and that they now prominently and unremovable show the "Fable not avaiable" (link - government said so) is likely with the intention to make pressure on the US government.
> Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.
Just more corrupt behavior from the contemptible kakistocracy that's busy running things into the ground and enriching themselves while they're at it.
My gut reaction was that it does look like a PR stunt. But indeed it might also be a blunder caused by all of their other PR stunts. "Our new stuff is soooo dangerous!!", followed by "The US government believed us and acted accordingly".
> I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be.
They should have consulted their own models about the ramifications and unintended consequences; based on their actions over the past few months I think it is safe to say that the models are smarter than the decision-makers at anthropic, lol. I know the models are smarter than I am and even I could have told them that they were taking paths, FUD for example, that would lead to grief.
Anthropic pretending Mythos 5 is so capable it's going to destroy everything, but will release it anyway with "safeguards" (when does this ever work?).
US Gov't using this fake hype as an excuse to handicap Anthropic simply because they have a vendetta.
Imagine a super intelligent speed reading human in a library. If they read all the books and are able to understand, conceptualize and summarize that knowledge for others, is it theft? The books weren't stolen, after all, just read. The knowledge in the books wasn't taken away; it's still there for others to read.
I personally do not believe knowledge can be stolen.
> Imagine a super intelligent speed reading human in a library.
If human abilities were different then human laws would be different. We don't have speed limits for joggers but we do for cars because their abilities are materially different.
Is that super speed reading human going to then make itself available to instantly-ish answer any and every possible question from anyone with a paid subscription?
You can read up anything and everything about a patent, but still not be allowed to reproduce it.
The moment the LLMs ingested any code under GNU General Public License or similar licenses and reuse it without making the produced product available under the same terms...
Imagine a super greedy company putting every bit information they can, willingly and maliciously hiding the origin of training data, into a computer and reselling that data.
Such wow. Much shittie metaphor.
That various companies such as Google are working to kill. They're an advertising company that is making it increasingly clear they no longer want to link to their competition. Competition being defined as any source of information that is not Google.
My first thought is that this government-Anthropic feud is good publicity for both of them.
- Anthropic is seen as a victim/hero
- They get Government-endorsed model hype
- Monday will be a bad publicity day with the new Agent SDK limits, this overrides/dominates the headlines
- The government gets to appear like they're ahead of the curve
- The government gets to appear forcible and weapons-conscious (and maybe earn some right-wing points)
The government is possibly a real threat here, but it's also possible that this is a case of knights rallying the mooks (https://ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/), and the models will be back online Monday with a note that "we gave em hell in court because we're so smart and dedicated and talented and good at beefing"
I wonder if there even is a real vendetta. How many people in the administration / friendly with the administration would benefit financially from the IPO? Maneuvers like this still pump more air into the hype balloon. I suspect that Anthropic and its backers did not enjoy the many "meh" reviews that Fable has received for its modest bump in output quality.
I don’t think there’s a vendetta. I think that Dario is an ideologue who has been letting his ideology cloud his business judgment.
I don’t think he’s playing 4D chess; I think he truly believes all the “AI is going to eliminate all the jobs” crap. I think his “Claude Constitution” is wishful thinking and his attempts to exert control over what his customers lawfully do with the product he sells them have made his company untrustworthy; certainly so by the US Dept of War.
I think lately his advisors have made him tone down the doomerism noting that it might tank his IPO, and I am uncertain whether his recent pushes towards more regulation are regulatory capture attempts or ideology or both.
The man is smart but IMO shouldn’t be running the company- he should be a CTO and let a business person make the decisions.
As for the government, bureaucracies gonna do what they always do. If you scare them they regulate you. ITAR is a real thing and the government throws it at technology all the time, from the minds that brought you 40-bit SSL in the 90s.
>I think lately his advisors have made him tone down the doomerism noting that it might tank his IPO, and I am uncertain whether his recent pushes towards more regulation are regulatory capture attempts or ideology or both.
and I think there's a dozen people carefully crafting every doomerism, which is then handed over to a dozen guerilla marketing companies to be spread far and wide.
really? they're doing a piss poor job, because all I see on the front page every day is marketing and public opinion campaigns. not exactly my favorite content.
Anthropic drops defense work, OpenAI picks up, Anthropic files for IPO, after that OpenAI files for IPO, now Anthropic's IPO looks not that good... thus making for much better OpenAI IPO. I'm wondering whether the Trump's son has any connection to OpenAI as the companies he is connected to have been very lucky to get various government benefits/contracts/etc. on "pure merits".
Where's the people who complain about the government picking winners? Strange that they suddenly travel somewhere without internet or lose their vocal cords.
I find it funny that AI keeps getting bigger, and the mental gymnastics needed to trivalize the progress get bigger as well - ie the government shutdown an AI model twisted into now even the government is being tricked.
Everyone is tricked except me. Only I know AI isn't as smart as everyone thinks it is.
I'm sorry that I think that "Our LLM is the missing element for a group to develop nukes or bioweapons" is marketing hogwash.
I'll guess we will see when or if the IPO happens. The more probable claim (Trump just wants money) will be proved if Amodei buys Truth Social or something and pulls a Tim Apple. My (not very probable) tinfoil hat theory is sadly unverifiable, but very funny. Anthropic bribed some Trump minion to ban Fable and lock in the honeymoon period until just before the IPO.
Not as smart as everyone thinks it is, maybe, but a model like Fable 5 without safeguards against offensive cyber attacks would be a nightmare. There are millions of improperly secured web applications that, in the wrong hands, would be easily exploited by these models.
There have been millions of trivially exploitable vulnerabilities out there for decades — many of which could be easily discovered by using simple scanning tools or manual probing. This is hardly a new situation and LLMs really aren't that impressive at pentesting — even with these simple exploits. Maybe they are if you're not a pentester, but then ZAP, Burp, Nessus, SQLMap, etc. are likely also impressive if you put a little effort into learning how to use them, but many AI-advocates aren't interested in learning skills themselves.
It's the same situation as with vibe coding. Everyone and their grandma can have an LLM spit out a web application without any programming experience, but if you're a programmer, you'll likely quickly see some issues with maintainability and further development of the code base.
Yes, it is substantially different. A targeted, relentless attack by a state of the art cybersecurity model is far more likely to find obscure vulnerabilities than a traditional automated attack/fuzzer. These models are so much better at finding security holes than anything we've seen before.
I've seen Fable reverse engineer binaries like nothing I've used before - Fable/Mythos is far from marketing hype.
On top of that I think it's just stupid to think anyone in the marketing department at Anthropic has any part in the system card for a model. That kind of thinking just screams cope.
Are you claiming you have a raw binary to Fable and it just reverse engineered it by reading it? Or are you claiming (like for every other model released in the past 1.5 years) it's using an integration with Ghidra or BinaryNinja to assist - in which case I completely disagree even a 30B model can do that with those tools.
Also an FYI, AI advancement and Anthropic are not synonymous. Someone asking Anthropic to back up their claims is not coping about AI, especially as independent benchmarking of Fable is giving equivalent or slightly above par results to GPT 5.5.
The system card does not use any of the benchmarks used in the previous Opus 4.5+ system cards. All the scores are in Anthropic owned benchmarks. I find it extremely hard to believe the marketing department of the company was not involved in a material release to the public - which is the marketing departments literal job.
It is beyond absurd to assume a company dependent on unprecedented sums of investor money is NOT deeply integrating its marketing department in its operations.
I feel like it is strange seeing some really smart people go full conspiracy theory tin foil hat. Half these threads think that Anthropic is playing some 5D chess game to purposefully get nationalized.
So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?
And potentially more importantly: if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus, is getting this treatment, how are all the AI investments that are based on the expectation of ASI / AGI / significantly better models going to be recouped?
It seems more likely that the logical conclusion is the executive branch is mad at Anthropic, and lashing out at them with any convenient tool that they have.
I suspect if OpenAI or Grok was operating at the same level they wouldn’t find themselves on the sharp end of the government stick
Regardless of motivations for this case, I take this as a clear sign that we've reached the point where the federal government decides its within their authority to mandate this and its reasonable for them to do it.
Governments don't give up power, and once there's precedence for use of that power they'll continue to do it and begin eyeing the next power they can claim.
Marketing is never ever to blame. Remember a few months ago when the U.S. government labelled them a supply chain risk? What eventually happened was that a federal judge issued a temporary injunction while calling it a "classic First Amendment retaliation." The Constitution protects such marketing; the government is not allowed to be maddened by such marketing.
But it was Anthropic initiative to limit the deployment to restricted groups, it's great to see the gov following their analysis. AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't?
They should have just called it Opus 5.1 and released it like normal. All this fanfare, under this corrupt regime, after they declared you a supply chain risk… Wario has horrendously bad judgment.
> AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't?
IF LLMs are THAT dangerous and powerful (and that's a huge if that I do not currently subscribe to), then no, no one should have access at all, there is no group of people in positions of power (government or corporate power) that I would consider "restrained"
If its so "powerful" that it's this kind of issue, why does it even matter who "has it" or not? Like what does this mean to you? The super powerful, super intelligent AI is going to have arbitrary loyalty with one person or another?
I would be okay with that if it actually meant that. Very restrained individuals in reality would see nothing and very unrestrained governments would have access.
AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.
The ban on exporting cryptography in the 90's lasted for years, and got to be a major pain in the arse for the entire web industry in its early years. The US govt can be very stubborn about this stuff when it wants to be.
Almost all of the major tech companies are either HQ'ed in the US or have a very significant US entity, and make up probably about half of the S&P500. The US's power has changed and is actively changing, but the US still holds all the cards in 2026.
So, the last time an AI-related export control was imposed - NVidia chips deemed to be "too powerful" - how do you think that will work out? If the US is holding all the cards, why is China now refusing their chips?
Don't you think these types of restrictions will weaken rather than empower the US?
I think culture moves a lot faster than you believe.
The broader discussion about AI and model capabilities died a couple of years ago precisely because it's so underwhelming now. People did adapt. Startups stopped hiring just to get to MVP. Coding sweatshops had huge layoffs and stopped overhiring. The corporate world got better tools for collaborations and meetings. Accessibility tools are still bad, but improving. I would argue that the a11y topic is still very ripe to be the next big thing as it continues to converge with better UI/UX instead of being an afterthought.
The layperson and tech professional alike otherwise agreed that this is a vehicle for blame game, grift, disinformation, etc. This is where all the pushback is and the topic at hand. People aren't dumb. The only people worried about "AI" are the ones who bet too big on it.
> So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?
95% odds this gets reversed by Monday morning is why
I realize these models are locked up pretty tight and terabytes in size, but in a future like that, I don’t see them not being leaked via an insider. The weights have to be loaded into VRAM at some point.
Every hyperscaler hosting these models outside of FEDRAMP environments has been compromised by every regional power’s intelligence services. Fable was running all over the world until today.
AWS and friends are very good at providing excellent enterprise grade security, but it’s literal child’s play for nation state threat actors to exfil these models.
TEMPEST / EMSEC alone is a wide open door for unclassified datacenters when the Mossad’s out to get you.
I'm skeptical that you're going to be able to reliably exfiltrate ~10TB of model weights using TEMPEST. Which is not to say weights are secure, just that this isn't the threat model I would be concerned about.
That would depend on what gets leaked, as I'm not so sure that the weights by themselves would be enough to replicate the architecture. I imagine some part of the secret sauce will remain in the architecture, and the tensor dimensions may not be enough to decode it.
I'm sure if proprietary models continue to be a big thing, the methodology of their storage and loading on hardware will be obfuscated quite a bit.
But you can see this is not true (yet); competitors/Chinese labs are less than 6 months behind: either via leaks or by just stumbling on the same improvements with time/effort.
What chinese labs are on par with GPT-5.3 and Sonnet 4.6 that I can go and use today? (granted they're 4 months ago, not 6 but nothing was released in Dec/Jan so I rounded up).
I don't think it's a good idea to give the crowds that kind of weapon. The first thing they'd do is "liberate" the model aka remove guardrails and safetly-protocols and brag on X / reddit with it and throw it into the public. That's only cool for a geek that doesn't think about the ethical impact of such a move. You'd basically become responsible for anything that is done with it, forever - have a good sleep. /s
As opposed to what, the US military, or better yet Israel (because we all know they won't be excluded) using that model to drive weaponry that kills people?
Your hypothetical implies that there is a better alternative, but when those models are "restricted", in practice that means that the only people who have access to them are precisely those who can and will use them for the worst kind of shit. So yes, releasing them to the public is a better deal, ethically speaking, at least then the playing field will be slightly more equal.
There are plenty of weapons (see custom made virus) which no state actor (or even an informal militia) would want to release, as these weapons attack everyone. But, open access to details of its construction leaves everyone vulnerable to motivations of small groups of crazy individuals.
What if I told you there are no safety guardrails. I used GLM 5.1 and had fable literally build a harness to avoid triggering guard rails.
I built skills carefully and had Fable doing vuln research and exploit repro in a few hours. I called the project manhattan. The GLM models are down for almost anything so I named it Oppenheimer. It orchestrated the fable CLI agents via tmux. This whole Fable/Mythos thing is such a fucking joke. It is all PR and theatre and they know it.
I’ve been doing pentesting with LLMs for a while and only hit a few “nope I won’t do that” and one “this conversation is flagged for being against the TOS”. No idea what the guardrails are but they are trivially abused
If the frontier models will take as much money to train as they do now, there is no way the wealthy are able to afford their training just for their own consumption. Financing of this whole thing rests on the models being available to companies and consumers who are willing to pay astronomical (compared to other software) sums for it.
I can very easily see a licensing requirement coming soon. Running a higher-grade AI will require a govt-issued license, which involves a six-month application process, explanations of why you need to run it, where it's going to be stored and who will have access to it, pretty much the same as non-USA countries deal with firearms.
Reasoning? More customers = more revenue, there's negative financial incentive behind restricting TAM. In the same way the iPhone isn't restricted to only the wealthy, that would significantly reduce total goods sold and thereby revenue. In addition that creates lower economies of scale, lower network effects etc.
Reasoning: the poster blames all evil in the world on "capitalism", "corporations", and "the rich". The aforementioned are conspiring to gatekeep us all from the obvious good of poor, communist anarchy.
Pay $1,000,000 per business function you want to build.
Businesses will gladly pay it.
Individuals will be locked out and unable to compete.
Oracle will be able to "prompt a new smartphone" for $500M or whatever and enter the market to compete with Apple and Google. You and I can't afford that and won't be able to compete.
Hyperscalers will hyper scale even faster.
They'll port Linux to Rust, remove the GPL, and have all kinds of new entirely proprietary OSes. They'll be attested, signed, and gradually we'll lose open hardware. Thin clients with binary blobs, highly encrypted, no control, only leased to us.
Within a generation nobody will be able to program or own devices that can program.
Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. But yeah, I got the gist of it. Incumbents like moats and happily pay money to build them. Note that the pricing of Anthropic's models usually increases for new models. Chinese models cost 10 or 100 times less. Are they less capable? Maybe, but they are alternatives unless credit card companies start banning payments to them.
People have to eat food so they will keep doing business no matter what. If AI cost too much, they will do it without AI. Any resource that costs too much is replaced with cheaper alternatives. AI is no exception. At worst most of the IT business will die and we will make money doing something else.
That's the fundamental difference with open models, anybody can run and tune them any way they like. The real difference in philosophy is that Americans companies treat the model as the product, while Chinese companies see models at infrastructure you build products on top of. You amortize the cost of deploying it at scale by sharing knowledge and iterating quickly to bring the cost down.
The logical conclusion is that the US administration has decided to run the country like a robber baron and is demanding bribes from AI companies. The only question is whether EU and China can effectively attract American researchers.
For the sake of argument, assume everyone is working on good faith and at least believes and means the things they're saying.
The US government believes that Fable/Mythos is a weapon that needs to be export-controlled, and limited to only US customers. Presumably OpenAI/xAI/Google would face the same constraints, for the same reasons.
OS/foreign models are unaffected - OS because they cannot control who runs them, and foreign because they are not controlled by the US government. We could assume that China will implement the same policy controls, but they see the world differently so might not.
So US AI companies are then limited to the US market, effectively, after about six months (the lag between the current frontier models and the OS models). They have much less incentive to push the envelope to create better models, because the US govt might also ban those completely.
The investor froth around the race to AGI dies, so valuations shrink (the current IPOs may be affected), and presumably the bubble bursts. None of the AI companies can afford to continue building data centres, so that all dies immediately. US GDP drops by ~5% because of that alone.
In a year's time, the US is in a major recession because it gambled so hard on AI. Europe less so, only because it was such a distant follower in that race. China is more-or-less unaffected. The best models are now OS/foreign, and AI is moving forward more slowly, but still moving forward.
Get to Tuesday, restriction is lifted. Get to Friday, restriction is back on. Confusion reigns.
Interesting scenario though: do the other labs attempt to “dodge” the import restrictions by claiming their models are “dumber and not a threat” thereby maintaining larger market access.
If so, doesn’t this basically force a stall in US-based development? EU will keep doing its thing at its pace. Chinese models will get a boatload more popular, but will probably slow down as they can drop to whatever pace they wish.
cynical follow-up: if they’ve plateaued, is this a clever way to avoid the negative consequences of the market implosion that a substantially substandard model release would cause, thereby giving them an “out”?
A Holmes indeed... your deductive powers are piercingly perceptive! (the event chain was a joy to follow, gave me ai2027 vibes, but slowdown like)
Of course, the world is not filled with rational actors, and the probability of the current administration allowing the market to tank like that seems next to null, so Occam's razor (or whatever) would point to another TACO inevitably incoming
I'd certainly bet on your scenario if it was reasonable to assume the US and China could get over the 'race to the top or die at the bottom' dynamic
so far ai2027 seems to be playing out to an almost uncanny accuracy, realpolitik obliterates the façade yet again
If the major nations that host companies that create those OS models implement export control on top models, there won't be any new OS models with top capabilities.
Assuming anyone involved in this crap is operating in good faith is foolish at best. The only thing any of them give a shit about is accumulating money and power.
Agreed. Going by patterns in the Iran war, members of Trump's family/in-crowd will invest in AI while it suffers from this decision, and then 15 mins later Trump will reverse the decision.
The thing is, that blatant market manipulation is playing with fire here, as so much of the US economy is invested in the AI bubble.
>> Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?
The public may not see more improvements but I'm sure they government will be forcing AI companies to continue improving them for their own use. Those schools aren't going to bomb themselves.
I don't know, I've been using Mythos this week quite sceptically and I found it to be incredibly dumb. For instance gave it a dialogue between 3 people and it was constantly mixing up who said what to whom, which looked like early Gemini behaviour. But latest Opus does that too. It would also make nonsensical inference about given papers and only correct itself when pointed out what it said wrong. If that is what US government fears... maybe the fear is that someone follows the dumb things the model suggests.
it feels like it's mostly just tuned to up it's level of capability on long horizon tasks - stop context rot and keep persisting at all costs until a goal is done.
The base intelligence does not feel much greater to me.
This is a ridiculous thing to test on it. Other models are trained on that kind of thing, use those instead.
Fable was designed for _really_ hard software engineering problems. Possibly large, but especially hard. For those tasks, you feel the difference immediately.
I tested it on that too. A problem I usually give a model to test is to optimise already well optimised function that performs certain calculations. I give it reference to CPU instruction set, how instructions can be paired to take advantage of superscalar execution pipeline etc. In that test also it fell on its face by producing code that was demonstrably slower and with extra bug.
No it wasn't, Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding.
And yes, the parent poster is accurate, Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was. Stop being so AI-pilled.
Codex is still a better model, and yes, for the hardest engineering problems. I use Claude for UI/GUIs and Codex for all my backend, because I have 20 years of experience of actual hard engineering, and I can see that Codex writes, cleaner code, and is far more steerable.
Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive", but lines of code doesn't make a better system.
> Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding
This is a forum filled with experts. Putting marketing aside, in a forum like this, it is most useful to assess models according to the toughest problems in the domain they were specifically refined on. For DeepSeek, that's math. For Claude, that's programming. Gemini and ChatGPT are generalist. Yes, you can use every model for anything you like. But Fable is a bit special, it's very expensive, and very clearly designed for particular types of tasks.
> Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was.
"Just as" is up for debate, but yes, all models are capable of moronic mistakes. That's not helpful information though.
> Codex is still a better model
You're comparing agentic workflows, which relies on a lot more than just the underlying model. It sounds like you're using it like a precision instrument, which is great! It's very different compared to my use cases though, and the ones that Fable seems to excel at. I'm using it for scientific computing, and you really, really want it to one shot a solution. It's either the right algorithm for the task, or the wrong one. So for the hardest problems, it needs to successfully implement a solution in effectively one shot. I use Codex too, but it's often too careless for the delicate tasks. If it gets it wrong, it is really hard to steer it back. You have to start from scratch.
> Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive".
Think you missed the mark on this one. Not really an engineer, have as much experience as you do in my job. A solution to my problems comprises few lines of code. Fable actually gets it right, first time, every time (so far), but this is with a very long prompt and a bunch of attachments. No other model has done this for me. Not shilling for Anthropic, just impressed. This isn't particularly subjective for me; it is quantitatively measurable.
Don't assume everyone using AI is going to have the same experience you have, or the same types of use cases. And please don't assume that because others have different experiences that it makes them "bad".
Also, Claude has always been mediocre at creative tasks. For your line of work, I would have already recommended Codex hands down.
There may be a temporary plateau. And it could have fascinating macroeconomic impacts.
Efficiency will become the next thing to focus on. It was already emerging, but accelerating the focus on efficiency will lead to a ton of excess capacity and even some investments in data centers to go belly up. And ultimately the AI bubble bursting will look a lot like the dot com, with its surplus fiber.
Oh, and this will put gas on the fire that fighting AI and big tech is the next political rally cry. Along with “eat the rich” as they are seen as taking both jobs and money.
Curious to see where it’s all headed and how Trump’s call will impact it.
You touched a great point, I wonder how the markets would react to this. No wonder the order was released just after the end of business on a Friday. Let me guess, something will happen right before market opening on Monday and some bets will pay great dividends.
If there’s one thing that’s certain it’s that Trump will do something just after markets close on Friday.
But I hadn’t considered this fell into that category. Except maybe as a direction from Iran. You make a good point, it may trigger immediate reactions in the market. Not just 3-6 month ones.
I wonder what the counterbalance will be by Monday morning.
This is utterly daft to say if you actually used the thing for hard problems, something that benchmarks have been known to be unable to capture. It is night and day compared to Opus and every other model out there. It was nice while it lasted.
It's strange how uninformed people are when they are so willing to to make assertions. I used it too and it really felt like a generational shift and not an incremental one.
These threads about Anthropic always seem so astroturfed with some of the loudest and most uninformed people around.
It's really annoying when people seem to assume that their experiences and use-cases are universal, and that other experiences are "psychosis". Fable seems to excel at tasks that are research-level hard. The vast majority of people do not have these problems. FAANG engineers probably don't either. Codex is great, I use it too. It has a major advantage in terms of token limits so you can often brute-force things through. If it is a task that Codex can do with enough tokens, it isn't worth using Fable for it. I used Fable on the tasks that Codex and Opus consistently failed at. Delicate computational geometry tasks, mostly, really darn hard ones. It worked first try, every time, every single one. That's terrifying to me. I don't know what to tell you, I don't care about hyping Anthropic.
Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.
It might be a national security problem for other nations to have access to these models. But it's equally now a national security problem for any other nation to depend on them. Or US tech in general.
As it happens, the current number-two article on HN is about a similar consequence of Chinese export controls--a car manufacturer developing electric motors that do not use rare earths:
The incentives around OSS become stronger the further down in the list of market leaders a company is. The #1 company has no particular incentive to push open software apart from a belief that the market is going to be come commoditised anyway. But the 2nd or 3rd largest player has actual incentives to break the market up and remove software quality as a consideration. No #10 may as well not bother with a proprietary option since if they make it a software quality battle they're going to lose each customer 9 times anyway.
Just because the Chinese are running export controls in one market doesn't mean that they're going to close of access to AI. They might, but each market should be considered in isolation.
And it is nearly always hubris - the people making these decisions are surrounded by yes-men who built their whole career pumping up the egos of their superiors.
A sample of one, but I was getting more stuff done despite Fable uses tokens twice as fast as Opus, because it understood the goals so well and worked to achieve them.
Can you give an example of what those "toughest problems/great code" are? I don't need to know the prompt nor the output, but the general idea, what it is about.
Some very tough computational geometry problems I couldn't solve on my own, nor with the assistance of other AIs or my colleagues. Fable did them all first go. The most impressive built a custom optimizer with a ludicrous number of adaptive switches that absolutely crunched through an error surface with a bunch of nontrivial nullspaces and some wild curvature. That optimizer is of independent interest; it's not totally novel in theory, but the implementation is an impressive piece of engineering.
Given the same usage limits, I was able to get more stuff done and not even hit the usage limits, because I wasn't working on constantly fixing what Opus was trying to do, Fable just understands the task correctly and works great with the given context.
Same here, not n=3, plus the above 3 reporting, so n=6 and rising
Fable was definitely better for a variety of tasks, even accounting for using 2X the token rate, like the way it used the tokens faster reduced the wasted tokens, as least for the subset of those who already knew at least some optimizations...?
Yep. I love open source but there isn’t a model that comes close still to the closed source options like Opus 4.8 and that’s obvious from most people I see across the software industry as well. There are at least another few models after Opus from OpenAI and Anthropic most would go down the list using before any of the Chinese models at this point.
Opus 4.8 has taken such a beating over the last couple of days since the release of fable, videos online of people referring to it like the “redheaded stepchild” (is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist) basically at this point, everyone is going to be seriously disappointed to fall back to that.
Yeah, not sure where the phrase originated but it does sound bad when you put some thought into it. My sister is a redhead and people loved to make fun of her growing up, telling her there's no way two parents with brown hair could have a kid with red hair, so the mailman (who also had red hair) was obviously her dad.
Which models? Im curious what kind of more specific hypothesis you're willing to put forth. Anthropic going to lose 20-30-40-50% of users to Deepseek? What?
I quit paying for Claude Code to buy z.ai's coding plan for use with OpenCode. I'm not a power user, but I don't regret switching away from Claude. OpenCode is generally nicer for my work.
Why z.ai and not an ollama pro plan that can use all the open models? Real question, not snark. I've only ever done ollama and wonder what I'm missing.
Because I bought a year's subscription in December, when it was still $6/mo :P
I have decently capable hardware, but stuff like Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 still doesn't compare to agentic editing with a frontier model. Right now, OpenCode's $10/mo "Go" plan is what I'd be looking to try once my year expires.
MiniMax M3 is surprisingly powerful, and open weight (or is about to be). There's others in this space too: MiMo v2.5, GLM 5.1. There's quite a few to pick from if you want strong models running on "your" hardware.
For starters, there's a C++ application written with MFC and an absolute ton of inline assembly and threading (yes, in a 1990's C++ application). I'm porting it to MacOS/Linux currently.
Opus 4.6+ is able to make slow progress, but it takes several revisions per workstream. It requires constant supervision as it often creates convoluted solutions that expand the code in bloated ways. It works, but still requires my constant input.
Fable was able to almost one shot most of the big migrations with very few bugs, and was able to fix those bugs with 1 review pass. I almost didn't believe it. I was able to put it on a task (with dangerous permissions) and come back hours later to see it done, working, and clean.
I tried DeepSeek v4 and it wasn't able to make any meaningful progress at all. It kept creating dangling pointers and had trouble understanding the inline assempbly needed to be replaced if we were to compile for 64 bit. It kept getting stuck and looping on the same problem, without making progress.
What I do use DeepSeek for is lots of my automations on my websites. I find DeepSeek is fantastically cheap and fast and effective as summarization, collation, generating reports, finding and reporting issues from logs, etc. But I haven't found a way to get it to effectively port 90's C++ code to modern, cross-platform standards. But I want to be clear- I really like DeepSeek and use it wherever I can.. I mean.. it's so affordable!
I was building a cli tool that showed a graph of git commits, kind of like git log --graph, and deepseek v4 simply could not figure out a specific ui quirk where things weren't lining up correctly. I spent like $0.10 and 30 minutes trying to figure it out on deepseek.
Then I had deepseek summarize the bug, gave it to Opus, and it solved it in $1.12 and five minutes.
As a non-US person, I will use whatever is the best and reasonably priced. I could not give one iota about who makes or hosts these models. The origin or political leanings of these models mean nothing in my usage calculus.
US will ban American companies from using Chinese models and also ban them from dealing with companies who use Chinese models. “Code produced by Chinese models may be deliberately introduce backdoors and vulnerabilities” that kind of thing.
The two main bills I'm aware of are the Decoupling America's AI Capabilities from China Act and No Adversarial AI Act. The former would have made it illegal for any American citizen to simply use DeepSeek. I couldn't find any lobbying data, but the obvious effect is that Americans would be forced to pay for more expensive domestic alternatives.
A House committee also recently probed Cursor and Airbnb for using Chinese models, rather than more expensive American alternatives. A sexagenarian Congressman gave a nonsense quote that he certainly did not come up with himself,[1] which sounds very similar to language Anthropic uses in its marketing materials.[2][3]
Moolenaar's quote: "The AI models these companies use are trained by China’s censorship regime and introduce hidden vulnerabilities that put Americans’ data and businesses at risk." That is, Americans using Chinese-trained AI models are exposed to some form of cybersecurity risk.
That's not really a threat model described in either of the Anthropic posts you share, which mainly talk about the risks of allowing authoritarian regimes to use powerful US-trained models, and the geopolitical risks of authoritarian countries developing strong AI before democratic/liberal countries do.
They'll have to remove sections like this from their AI Action Plan
> We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values. Open-
source and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and
in academic research worldwide. For that reason, they also have geostrategic value. While the
decision of whether and how to release an open or closed model is fundamentally up to the
developer, the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.
Chinese models are next, the whole reason this is happening is because they don't want China to steal their tech. It is no secret anymore that they have been distilling US models. That's why it is explicitly aimed at foreign nationals.
To do what? I mean they’re good models, but frankly, they fucking suck (relatively speaking). I’m not looking to going back to a week of back-and-forth with the LLM once I’ve gotten used to all this one shotting.
works really well with pi for small to medium sized coding tasks for me - C++ is an interesting case since it's probably more challenging just due to the complexity of the syntax. But it works great with Groovy which is another slightly off-mainstream language (these days).
I use DSv4 through opencode. I use it from deepseek directly, not through a third-party platform.
I mostly do C# and some frontend. I was starting to feel really depressed and unengaged at work because I was starting to use AI far too much like a magic slot machine. I'm now making a conscious effort to go back to using it as a tool used a bit more deliberately.
I'm not even using the pro model. The flash version is fast so I can keep it interactive rather than context switching to reddit while the model is working, and it turns out using my brain means I don't really need the model to be that smart.
Marketing stunt? Punishment for not bending the knee? Preventing access by the Hoi Polloi to the models that level the economic playing field? These are not mutually exclusive scenarios. Like the wheel and fire real AI breaks pre-existing systems. I jsut want to use Fable to improve my life and my code. I’ve tried them all and Fable delivered in a way that Gemini, ChatGPT, and the large open models didn’t. I wish I could take a vacation until Fable returns or OpenAI/Google lives up to it’s potential.
It's time to make truly open source frontier models that people can run at home. Code is free speech. We've been through this with encryption algorithms in the past.
Well, there go any such claims of dangerousness in future models, regardless of if they are true or false.
No one's going to risk building anything important on these models if the government will randomly order the use of the model to be discontinued by all foreigners, regardless of if they are in the US or not. Just a matter of a foreign company catching up to take the commercial market for such models (though, as the US often does, they'll ban the competitor, so actually we'll have a situation where the backend uses a different model in only the US).
I think it’s more like “there goes the semiconductor boom predicated on monetization of ever larger models.” Once the IS government acts out of capricious fiat because a model becomes “too good” and they demonetize it, the entire shell game collapses. It’s times like these, with oil scarcity planet wide, fertilizer scarcity, and now ham fisted meddling in the bubbles expansion, we can be thankful we have an octogenarian senile stable genius with twenty two specialist doctors and a disdain for the rule of law at the wheel!
Agreed. The timing here is interesting as well. 5:21PM ET on a Friday. Like they know this could roil markets and they're trying to buffer that a bit (and maybe they're really hoping this deal with Iran is actually real this time and figure that will help offset the effects?)
The thought that this would also destabilize the AI bubble did come to mind, but the current government loves to crash the market on Fridays, only to backpeddle on Mondays.
A related thought though, the AI boom is predicated on the idea that everyone's going to want or need all this "mass produced" intelligence. But what happens to that when you go from being able to claim to have a total market size of ~8B people, to ~400M peoole? I think the reason to push ahead at any cost evaporates.
There’s no back peddle once you’ve demonetized by fiat for being too big. Once you doo it you prove you will do it again for the very reason the bubble is inflating. It’s a binary one way door and it’s already happened. It’s like killing the supreme leaders entire family and maiming him and expecting he will be happy to meet with you, that ship has sailed and magical thinking won’t undue the incredible atrocity you visited on him - you’ve created a mortal enemy for all time. This is an administration of mental gnats.
Yes I rather think “just do the Friday-Monday thing with it” will get applied, but without the realisation that once this trigger is pulled, it can’t now be “un-pulled” at a later date.
It's honestly not the worst strategy: make the dangerous move when you have the most tolerance, and then everyone can figure stuff out and make the landing on Sunday.
Options and futures don’t wait and a lot of stuff trades 24x7. You can do your puts right now, and banks and market makers will meet you now if you’re big enough. The landing for Main Street will be more of a horrible traffic accident that happened days ago and they just woke up in the flaming wreck of their financial life.
From reading the post, I think it's more likely that anti-jailbreaking is going to become much more strict and prone to false-positives.
> We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes 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. 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.
But no matter how conservative they make the anti-jailbreaking, the risk doesn't go away. There are so many logic "holes" that are ambiguous and can blur the line between a jailbreak and legitimate use.
If every time a jailbreak is discovered, the model has to be turned off and jailbreak prevention updated, the effect will be the same regarding how willing users are to adopt it.
Also this falls into the "right to bear arms" thing: if LLMs are limited legally, then illegal LLMs will be the superior choice. This is pretty much the plot of Cryptonomicon and Corey's take on I, Robot
Except there’s a large hardware barrier to entry, which for now seems effective.
Related note. Cryptography has been subject to export controls for years and manufacturers bend into pretzels to meet the laws, regulations, and policies.
Likely models by Anthopic can no longer be reliably trusted as it'll subtly sabotage your codebase you're working on.
Gov just need some national security orders for Anthopic not disclose it to the public and to implement whatever they've done to Fable 5 to existing models.
No no, you never ever build ON the models. You build WITH the models.
Never let a 3rd party LLM be the core of your product or it can be changed or taken away at any moment.
What you do is use the frontier models to build a deterministic set of tools that does what you want and MAYBE put in a small core of LLM for the ambiguous stuff you can't make deterministic (yet).
And make sure you can swap that LLM core to any other provider (even local) and have a playbook ready for that.
its establishing a bifurcation in the tech workforce at private companies into citizens and 'foreign nationals' for security reasons. that's not a very pretty precedent. pretty destructive given the pervasiveness of international workers in us tech. its just going to encourage organizations outside the US to further develop their own training methodologies and models.
this cleaving of the us from good relations with other people is sold as a consolidation of strength. Made from a position of baseless hypernationalism, its just going to make the US much less relevant on the world stage.
Is the death of the AI race in the US? Did we already reach the end? Peak AI. If so this will kill the speculative hype on data centres and GPUs. It will be interesting to see how the market absorbs and reacts to this.
"The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any *foreign national*, whether inside or outside the United States, including *foreign national* Anthropic employees."
This press release is odd - it says that the export control was imposed to stop foreign nationals from using Fable / Mythos, and then goes on to talk about supposed concerns about jailbreaking the model.
But is that really the concern of the US Administration? This looks more to me like they are viewing frontier models as a strategic asset which they want to keep for US-exclusive use. I can see the logic - if frontier models generally accelerate a society's technological development, then a country looking to retain or increase its strategic edge over other countries would try and keep this sort of multiplier for themselves.
I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen. In the near future we might be in a situation where you need to prove your US citizenship before Anthropic / Open AI will allow you to use their current frontier model.
I, like, can't even imagine how they're dealing with this internally. Presumably Anthropic is using Mythos to train future models, but now many of their researchers can't use what they themselves created? Do they just need to stop work now?
Based on all I know about Deemed Exports wrt software and current US controls on software Deemed Exports, your read is spot on.
The phrasing of the foreign nationals implies a Deemed Export control, which is already in place for software for stuff like drones or space satcomms.
If it's a Deemed Export control, it's a strategic position and not a knee jerk reaction about cybersecurity threats.
It's a coherent read too; if Fable can solve coding and build biological weapons (X to doubt) - well then terminal guidance and autonomous drone controls should be a piece of cake for it and that software is already under Deemed Export restrictions.
I find it most likely that this export ban means only USG has access to Mythos/Fable rn. Given the reports of NSA and DoD using Mythos it's now being given a near weapons-grade status by the government.
Even if they could practically restrict access to US citizens only, I would expect them not to - it would be hard to regain that once lost and they need a global market for growth.
Your defending the US Administration wanting ID verification built into our devices like going through airport security because you think they think it is 'pro-US'?
No, where did I say that? All I said was that I can see the logic - doesn't mean I agree with it. This policy sucks for me personally, as a non-US citizen.
As a non-US citizen I guess this is the last money I pay to US companies for AI then.
I can't help but wonder if it's now obvious that frontier AI work should not happen in the US.
I can understand the KYC aspect of this, but at the same time, how can anyone trust US based AI after this? Maybe this is a continuation of the Pentagon feud, or it's revenge, or it's a KYC play. Either way, you've got a government willing to shut down companies sales over arbitrary reasons.
Ironically, I mostly have a subscription to Claude for work, which is primarily for US baed companies.
In my experience, US citizens are completely blind to how much stuff like this makes citizens of other countries hate their government (which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens; not that I condone hating any group of people based on the actions of their state)
The US has spent the last 12ish years betting that they're the only country that matters, but the end of result of that is that somehow when I talk to Australians in my age group the average person has a more positive opinion towards China even than the US.
I agree with you that restricting access to Fable is stupid, but I'm in favor of e.g. GPU export controls. It's certainly annoying, but—well, I don't know where you live, but you don't want to make it easier for China and Russia to build weapons they can use attack to attack Taiwan and Ukraine, right?
And the nice thing about the GPU restrictions is that even if they don't work completely, just making the hardware more difficult and expensive to access is useful.
The default orientation of Americans toward government is already skepticism and distrust. The average person is questioning "why did you ever like the government in the first place?"
If you're referring to voters staying home, staying home is a vote for their state's majority. There's no sense in which the average citizen in a democracy is not responsible for the outcome of a democratic vote.
This is categorically wrong, but even then - those that do not vote at all bear even more responsibility, and are traitors to democracy itself. By not participating in shaping it, you're dishonouring everyone that fought and died for your freedom.
> which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens
err... you guys voted for the administration that fucks over the rest of the world. Twice. So tell me, why would you expect the rest of humanity to show any kindness to the populace entirely responsible for what is happening right now?
You do know not all of us voted for him, not even a majority. You could argue the non-voters allowed this outcome. Should we discard the whole democracy thing because we don't like a result?
I lament that there wasn't a stronger candidate running against him, but the Democrats didn't have a primary, and even if they did, I'm an independent and do not vote in primaries ( this has changed in Colorado thankfully). A different, stronger candidate could have likely beaten Trump
So you're going to use DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi and Mistral now? I tried them, and they really fall short of GPT and Claude.
Without access to US models, I'd be limited to asking simple questions in chat interfaces and maybe some grunt work in coding CLIs, but even that the weak models will mess up.
Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience, which also aligns with what the labs themselves admit ("near-frontier").
> Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience
You mean, GPT 5.5 xhigh and Claude Opus 4.8 max? At least the benchmarks / public evals / rankings show some of the new coding models (ex: Qwen 3.7 Max & Mimo v2.5 Pro) are Opus 4.7 & GPT 5.4 level (but 3x to 5x cheaper): https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models / https://gertlabs.com/rankings Personally speaking, in the past 1mo or so, I haven't missed GPT 5.4 / Opus 4.7 after moving to Qwen 3.7 / MiMo 2.5 / Kimi 2.6 et al.
That is very promising news. I will re-eval them all shortly. And you are suggesting that a higher reasoning budget can make up for weaker per-token performance? That is indeed worth evaluating.
Comparisons using the vendor-specific effort is apples and oranges. Ideally the evals would use a thinking token cap or something, so we can compare per-token performance. But eval is hard enough as it is.
I think my issue here, is that there is some dislike from each other from the administration and anthropic and it’s hard to figure out what part that is playing in this vs really there are bio and cyber security problems. I think personally I would like the models so I can keep building and it’s super upsetting it got ripped away like this.
it did it in like 2 minutes while Apple had years doing the illegible Liquid Glass and took a year to fix it until this WWDC26. take it with humor guys.
Such a shame this super intelligent, super dangerous AI can't make a website that doesn't look like an 11 year old's MySpace page, or make their "Game engine TUI" not flicker.
I haven’t seen anyone commenting on the difference between what the Government actually demanded vs what they did. They said no foreign nationals (regardless of location or residency). They actually didn’t say they couldn’t allow Americans to use it.
Now, we obviously know that without some kind of brand new ID check, such a thing would be impossible and thus they had to just shut it down. But this touches on the same kind of issue as all the noise about “for the children” ID checking. We might be soon to see the set of “things you’ll have to reveal your identity to the government to get,” expand from “just” porn and social media to the “good” AI models.
Why do you think that the "no foreign nationals" stipulation wasn't designed to be impossible to comply with, while also sounding to the uneducated public like a reasonable national security requirement?
I think the key is that they also can't let Anthropic employees who are foreign nationals use it (e. g. overseas remote employees, people on H1-B visas or green cards, etc.)
That would probably make it very difficult to maintain and develop if there's even a small number of such employees, and I suspect Anthropic, who pays large sums of money for what they perceive as the best talent wherever they can find it, has quite a few.
You very likely know this, but to make it explicit: "US Persons" under ITAR is US Citizens + Lawful Permanent Residents (green card) + Protected Individuals (Non-citizen nationals like Samoans, Refugees/Asylumees). It doesn't include anything else, like H1B, TN, etc visas.
And, if their best talent is anything like the other "leader in their field" people I know, they aren't particularly interested in becoming American citizens.
This to me is a solid argument as to why they should ban it. US has a monopoly on this tech and it should stay that way.
If what they are planning on building is as important as they say any edge US can get it should take.
Having a large number of individuals who are not loyal to the country that provides this opportunity is a future threat the moment an advesary cuts a check.
If this is the nuclear bomb of our age would you want a large number of foreigners building it for you? If this action sticks I imagine every country will follow the same path and treat top AI scientist much like a top nuclear engineer.
They're not loyal to the country because the country has a history of not respecting people's loyalty.
It isn't about the money, it's about how Americans continue to demonize immigrants and have a tendency of treating people from certain countries as subversives even when they do show their loyalty.
These people are already here, doing research and propping up America's technological edge instead of their home country's. Driving away the people giving you your tech edge, in the name of protecting your tech edge, is obviously incredibly stupid.
So, first you suggest that anyone that won't show loyalty to the US should be excluded, then when it is explained to you that people fear that no amount of loyalty will be enough, you accuse me of being a Chinese bot and anti-America?
Really demonstrating the point there. Your attitude is exactly what they're worried about, and it isn't just Chinese immigrants (you're the one that brought the Chinese thing into this comment chain that was about immigrants in general). This is how people like you and the maniacs in charge always react.
As soon as an immigrant has criticism or even the slightest of concerns about your intentions, you reveal that they will never be seen as equals.
A US company paying for Fable with a US credit card could have non US nationals working for it, or be made of only non US nationals. How would Anthropic know? So they shut down the product.
Correct. For one data point, we are a U.S. company paying with a U.S. bank account and 2/3 of our engineers are in the U.S. and 1/3 are in Europe (a few different countries)
ID checks are possible for first-party harnesses...but they would also mean no more API access. Your wrapper could easily become a way for a foreign national to query Fable. Maybe a few large customers like Cursor would work with Anthropic to prove they had implemented ID checks themselves as well in their own products, but being able to just get an API key and have your product call frontier models may be over.
Yeah, I'm expecting that Opus 4.8/5.5 tier will be the best models we have access to without having to provide more ID than just credit card info. If that happens, it'll end my brief stint of paying for these models instead of working within the bounds of local ones.
Are we assuming that any country that achieves the AI supremacy will be benevolent? Every country has its own goals, and they're not always aligned with what's best for the humanity.
It's a citizenship check which is basically a ridiculous bar for the company. It is an outrageous demand. As Anthropic noted, many of the very employees who made this model are now barred from accessing it?
It's also security theatre. Let's pretend that Anthropic rolls out citizenship verification for every one of its users. So are American nationals less likely to use it to search for exploits? The notion is farcical.
That's practically what ITAR is all about, limiting access to US persons. We're focusing on the weaponization of AI models via cyber, but it also allows a small group of people to act in really nefarious ways. The intelligence is not just about being smart individually, as in no one person can make a pen, but companies like Apple and Google make great products, and they're just collection of persons and processes.
They would have to verify every user is a US citizen, which would not go down well to say the least. Maybe we'll get insane KYC regulations for AI models!
This honestly just reads as harassment to me. Trump has publicly declared that he wants the federal government to own a piece of big AI companies. And not for any particular civic interest, just because he wants money and power. This feels like a first test balloon of extorting some equity stake.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but once a tool gets complex enough, there's bound to be some restrictions put on it. I remember a recent case where the Dutch government intervened with a semiconductor company. Free trade doesn't necessarily extend into certain topics and it would've been a lot better if the congress handled it with a well-written bill instead.
For large corporates and other entities of any size, the threat of the core of your infrastructure getting suddenly disabled because of something like this is going to be untenable. I predict the pressures for on-prem, offline access (whether by licensing weights or getting them in a restricted setting like TEE/CC) will be overwhelming and one the players will fill the need.
Thinking that on prem models will be a halfway decent solution against what can be served out of a data center is a fools take... One that is more common than it should be on here...
It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that a law of marginal decreasing returns will kick in at some point (if it hasn’t already), and that what one point looked like an exponential may start looking like an s-curve.
I do not see how being experienced in engineering, or having higher studies in computer science and economics should make that view less common.
The point is not to be as good as the multi-trillion parameter model you can host in across 72 GPUs (or whatever).
I'm running a 248B model on a paltry amount of hardware and getting plenty of good use out of it.
Sure, the most demanding tasks will demand the best models (and always will). There's still less demanding tasks for other models.
I think some people are fooling themselves that coding of all tasks is always going to requires the biggest models ever. Again, maybe some coding tasks will, but the majority of business CRUD apps probably don't. Same goes for virtually any other type of task. The biggest models are really only useful for the most complex tasks.
If you wouldn't mind, could you explain a bit what the 248B model is good for, and where it breaks down and you need something better? I hear this take often, but it is always a fleeting remark so I have no idea what the 'useful' looks like - at all.
To answer this and my sibling, it's DeepSeek V4 Flash at native FP4 quantization, on two Nvidia DGX Sparks. Which is a bit of kit but still paltry relative to the data centre. ~40 TPS generation, ~2000 TPS prompt processing, which makes it feel approximately as fast as typical APIs.
I primarily use it with my own harness for coding. I'm not going to say it will compete with Opus in the most challenging domains, because it won't, but I will say that there's a reasonable likelihood that Opus is used for tasks that a model like Flash could comfortably handle at 1/100th the cost.
So far I've only seen it struggle at tasks that I myself would struggle with. Tasks that I can describe the shape of the solution for, it has a high success rate at implementing.
Useful is going to be different for everyone. I'm not working on the hardest problems, I don't need the best models.
In my experience they require much more hand holding and more specific directions with less possibilities to interpret a command in several ways. You do the planning, keep on eye on that they're producing and they do the legwork. It's not that their knowledge of Java or PHP or what have you is lacking, it's the long horizon planning that you have to do yourself. Technically they're good. You just have to do more thinking and more reviewing yourself. YMMV.
Depending on quantization I figure they need at least a p4 and likely a p5 EC2 (or similar instance in another provider) for a model with that many parameters. Maybe they are hosting on bare metal but I imagine not. Those instance types (assuming not using spot) are quite expensive to run.
Some will take greater risks and win (or lose); others will play it safer and slowly accumulate wins (or be obsoleted).
Never mind the threat of letting these models write code that runs your business, or operate it agentically. Models trained by actors (corporate or nationstate) diametrically opposed to your interests.
Lots to take into account now, interesting time to be in business.
Or abstract i.e. openrouter, that reduces the risk vector to "all implementations have been simultaneously banned".
If a government entity bans a LLM provider due to a jailbreak concern, they can also ban an on-prem solution under the same guise. The jailbreak risk exists regardless of where it's hosted. You could defensibly argue the on-prem risk is higher since frontier model companies can justify safety spend due to their size, it's more difficult to combat bad actors if you're company is the only one using the model and you don't have economies of scale.
This is precisely why I expect that Chinese open models are going to win in the long run. The capability difference isn't dramatic in the grand scheme of things, but the fact that you can run your own is a huge selling point. Even if you rent an open model from a Chinese company, you can switch to on prem if they decided to yank access or change terms in the way you don't like. It might be a pain, but it wouldn't be existential. On the other hand, if you become dependent on a closed model and it gets yanked then you're in a world of hurt.
And infrastructure dominance is really the big picture here. Chinese models are going to become the standard setters because they're going to be what people are using. That means more research, more tooling, and a whole ecosystem developing around them.
After this action, I have no doubt that this administration will try to ban Chinese models. Of course, doing so will be futile, we'll figure out ways to get around it, but now I'm pretty sure they're going to try.
It is almost certain that the CCP will impose constraints on access to their models at some point too. But Trump is doing it to extort cash from Anthropic, and China will be doing it to leverage political and economic concessions.
Remember that there are degrees of banning. Slower tokens, dumber models, token caps, KYC for each model consumer, hurting specific companies that are not capitulating in a deal with a Chinese company, etc.
I'm waiting for that to happen as well since the price difference makes it very difficult for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to compete. And we already have precedent for this with stuff like EVs, phones, and so on. As soon as Chinese companies start making a product that's more popular, they get banned on some national security pretext.
The tricky part with banning Chinese models is that they're open. It'll be easy to ban access to service providers, but preventing people from running these models on prem is going to be really tough. Like are they going to go after Cursor for example given that their model is based on Kimi?
I very much agree it's going to be a futile endeavour in the end. It kind of reminds me of the time Microsoft tried to get Linux and open source banned when Linux started encroaching on Windows server market. This is going to end the same way.
I'm going to guess they'll go after sites like Huggingface that host downloads. I suspect we'll be torrenting Chinese models in the not-too-distant future. Or we'll have to geo-spoof with VPN to download from other countries.
This is ignoring the fact that the government is the foundation of society (I know some will disagree with that, but the end result is just government with more steps).
Private models in a low trust society means the government will come and seize the models. Competitive business will only be allowed through cronyism.
The better option is to opt for high trust. Yes the Gman can rip your servers apart, but they know they'll face consequences, legal and political. Laws and regulations are the answer, not locking down into smaller fiefdoms.
You get high trust through social norms, not by more "laws and regulations". Social norms can't be imposed by fiat, they arise spontaneously, often for unclear reasons. That's why they're so fragile and precious. With Trump's destruction of social norms around the presidency and the federal government generally, the US is now just another country where bribery is the cost of doing business.
It seems that the US is consumed by the security state. Each and every aspect of the economy is subjugated to the need to maintain empire. Just to give some random examples: the weaponization of the banking system (kicking Russia out of swift), the semiconductor export ban to China, the TikTok ban, or the blatant over usege of tariffs.
Now they are betting that Mythos will provide them with some edge. Personally, I don't believe that Mythos is such a game changer They're just buying their own hype.
A late stage empire flailing around sacrificing everything to maintain its status.
It's the right move if you want to spur on multipolarism by causing widespread distrust in a Western run global financial system. So in that sense I'm glad the US-led West has accelerated that process.
You need to draw red lines somewhere. If you wage attack wars on other countries or reject our shared values, you can't be part of Western society or enjoy its amenities. Don't do that, and you can. It's that simple.
>Now they are betting that Mythos will provide them with some edge. Personally, I don't believe that Mythos is such a game changer They're just buying their own hype.
They just ran the entire Iran campaign on Opus. They know what that can do, they know what this can do.
And so the US and Israel have been kicked out of SWIFT, yes?
(never mind that anybody with a functioning cerebral cortex understands that the roots of the special military operation lie in NATO provocation and politically neutral Kiev getting couped with help from the CIA)
> You see the dawn of this age everywhere, from Iran to online age verification regimes, and this is only the beginning. This is why the world ahead will feel medieval in structure while remaining hypermodern and even futuristic in technology. It is a Frank Herbert world. It will be organized around overlapping zones of protection, extraction, and controlled access, rather than around universal inclusion into a single normative space.
Not allowing it to be used by any foreign national, from any country, even if they are located in the United States or an employee of Anthropic, seems overly broad and harsh. And all because of a seemingly minor potential jailbreak exploit. There’s something that doesn’t quite meet the eye here.
Seems like many people are unaware that export controls apply to software as well.
BPS Space channel on YouTube made a collaboration with Mark Rober on a self landing rocket with a small engine, and all the experts they contacted would just stop responding the moment they asked something about the final phase of the flight. They later learnt that export controls bans those individuals from even discussing such topics with them.
Right. For those who didn’t catch the text between the lines, it’s because terminal phase precision guidance is basically the same tech as smart bombs.
Well, there is the lingering beef between the DoD and Anthropic. Knowing the overall level of maturity at the top levels of the US government, I'd take good odds on Mythos just being a good excuse for Hegseth & co. to lash out.
It's because the hammer they've used is export controls which deals with FN access. It's particularly nasty and can ramp up to "if you're born in China even if you spent the second and every day since then in the usa and have us citizenship, you're not allowed to see this information"
Unfortunately this is how export controls work. We don't let foreign researchers around national security parts of national labs, even if they work there, because it's simply the easiest security measure you can take. It doesn't mean it's a good outcome for researchers or research. It's insurance of US directed funds.
Red Bull marketing revolved around making it look like a drug. It "gives you wings", there is that crazy thing called taurine, they even "hooked" kids with free cans, the mythical thing drugs dealers do.
In reality, taurine is nothing special, it is high in caffeine but no more than a strong coffee, and its real energy come from the massive amount of sugar it contains. Marketing aside, that makes it an unremarkable soft drink.
But their marketing prompted some countries to ban it, at least for a time. France is one of them. Fun fact, when they finally legalized it, they introduced a heavy tax on energy drinks, defined as soft drinks high in caffeine. These drinks are expensive and the government wanted its share. In response Red Bull silently reduced the caffeine content to avoid paying, marking Red Bull even milder than it once was.
Looks like a back door attempt to force KYC (foreign nationals, lol) to prepare for more discrimination in the digital space with a side effect to benefit Peter Thiels ventures and shovel more data into Palantir for use in the upcoming midterm push.
Digital yellow star by exclusion from digital life for foreigners.
Remember when tech companies would go to court to vigorously defend against infringement of their and their customers rights? Turns out that’s just a feature of democracy, once you have autocrats it’s all compliance.
Anthropic just baited themselves with their scaremongering to be the attack vector here.
It a stellar move by the way - since every tech company in an exceptionally fast growing field will comply or miss out sales, you effectively force KYC without legislative process onto much of digital because that’s the only way to comply.
There’s no path to compliance and the decision is arbitrary - the model capabilities are not officially assessed by any visible criteria and it prevents export of models based on these non criteria forward.
KYC angle seems most likely from the US side. If only it was just to benefit Thiel's ventures though, then the issue would be solvable. Unfortunately _everyone_ currently in power, i.e. the whole oligarchy, wants this. Even if Thiel and his companies disappeared tomorrow, they'd keep pushing until they get it through.
> We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. 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.
Anthropic went from this is cybersecurity apocalypse to it’s no big deal, the model found trivial vulnerabilities.
> We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.
So much for all of the rhetoric about Mythos supposedly far surpassing GPT 5.5 (edit: in cybersecurity, in particular). Of course, the AISI benchmarks also showed this, but it is amusing that Anthropic is saying it now that it is to their advantage.
They aren't saying that other models have the same overall level of capability. They are saying that the specific capability that the US Government tested is also available in other models.
That might also continue to anger the current administration, should they feel the need to, as it openly shared with other actors how to achieve the same capability. If they choose not to apply the same restriction to GPT 5.5 then an argument could be made that Anthropic is being singled out by the government.
This is about the specific capabilities that the government called out, not Fable's overall capabilities. My personal experience, having used Fable this week for an extremely complex task, is that it is head and shoulders more powerful than any other model, at least for software engineering.
That's what happens when you beg for government's involvement. They might get involved, but not on your terms.
Although I do believe Anthropic knew this and this kind of involvement is still beneficial to them, as it still slows down competition, which is their sole objective when you brush off marketing sprinkles from their statements.
Safety testing of frontier LLMs does not slow down the competition any more than it slows down Anthropic. It does prevent them from doing dumb things like releasing zero day buttons into the wild, though.
I’d suggest you use an LLM to assist you with comprehending their statement. It’ll do a better job, or at the very least be more objective than you’re being now. You’ve misinterpreted the statement. That is not what they’re saying at all. Please actually read instead of skimming until you find something that you believe reinforces your worldview.
They are saying that comparison to other models only about the problems it was jailbroken to complete in the government's example, not all vulnerabilities it could exploit unjailbroken.
I do not trust Anthropic anymore. They put in silent guardrails, reverted them later after people complained to save face, were loud and obnoxious about how their models are dangerous and should be regulated, and now this. Too much drama for a typical end-user. I'm sticking to alternatives even if they have a bit more smarter (for now) model than others.
The issue is that it’s fundamentally a religious organization. All religious orgs do things that seem irrational / harmful to unusual groups / off-kilter from capitalist orgs.
It would be nice if they slid on over to a more typical presentation in the market — but I think they’ll need to experience a fair amount more pain to really change behavior - it’s embedded in their minds as proper, safe and ethical, and they’re currently sitting on tons of cash.
Dario has always prattled on about how Anthropic is more safe than OpenAI and made a big point about guardrails and protecting society from “AGI”. This is the consequences. Some people actually drink the kool aid, especially bureaucrats and bigco lawyers (basically the same group).
Not to mention intelligence agencies look for any information advantage they can get to influence policy.
If you think the Trump administration is doing this out of good faith, I disagree. They get no benefit of the doubt; they're pissed they can't use Mythos to target every American for surveillance or create a top-of-the-line killer drone program without pushback from private companies.
It's difficult to predict this administrations actions, but given it included employees that has to be a huge risk for Google, where Deepmind is based in London.
Cohere (Canada) and Mistral (France) are going to get a lot of interest.
Maybe a year ago I’d agree but the gap has grown. I also pay for Cursor which is based on Kimi and there is no comparison for complex code gen vs Fable. It mostly succeeds well at small rapid fire stuff which is the only reason I pay for it (plus the IDE DX). But any heavy feature planning and prototyping I use Claude.
I predict they will all be mostly the same in 5+ yrs but coding is serious work and companies aren’t going to pay for almost good.
I wonder if they pulled Fable because it had too high of a “dangerous session” count. If so, I wonder if they’ve considered that their “dangerous session” detector has lost its damn mind this week.
(BTW, that screenshot is 100% real. I was walking to work this morning and a random song played. I had a thought about it and wondered what a model would have to say on the matter. I ran that prompt and got that response, said something profane out loud, and screenshotted it to share with friends. That’s not a mockup, but something I personally experienced and recorded myself.)
Well, in the brief window that I got to test Fable 5, my brief review is: somehow an (already specced!) minor feature in my 150k loc codebase ended up costing.. $153! For like, an hour or two worth of work and maybe 8 or 9 requests overall. I'd say it was not remotely worth it.
I asked it to tweak the fonts/colors of a very very simple static page and it blew through $35 (which is a lot for me lol; it's 10 days of my monthly codex plan).
I will never understand why people recommend using models with the capabilities of early 2025.
They cannot even move 10 existing lines of code around without breaking it in the process half of the time.
I very much doubt they are up to the task of implementing any sort of plan with a reliability that allows to complete the work faster than writing the code by hand.
It was made available in my subscription so I tested it out. I'm glad I tested it in a subscription, since I'd be pretty irritated if I had spent that amount of money accidentally in API usage. I guess what I've learned is what I already know, which is that the newer models seem to increase costs a lot with no perceptible benefit to my workflow.
I said "cost", not "cost me". I use `ccusage` to track what my unsubsidized token spend would be since I'm sure these subscriptions won't stick around forever and I want to have a realistic idea of what these things actually cost in a professional setting.
To be fair though, even if it's not costing me that much it's evidently costing Anthropic a pretty penny, I'm up to like $800 in spend on my $200 subscription in less than a week.
Well, they're selling a non-essential commodity in a highly competitive industry with about zero lock in or customer loyalty, using the standard VC playbook of "capture the market then worry about costs". I don't see space for large margins in there, and if there are margins they're probably recent because of the IPO.
> We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities.
"small number", "previously known"+"minor"... they are trying hard to characterize this as harmless.
> 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.
Ah so now they are admitting that this is all about hype after all.
We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
It's been interesting seeing how OpenAI pops up to counter the threat of AGI being controlled by Google, and then OpenAI and every spinoff company from its employees has become a far larger threat to the public, for different reasons.
As much as it seems like Anthropic's self righteous leadership truly believes in what they're preaching, they've shown themselves to be tied for the worst stewards of this technology. Google actually seems like the best option to me, by far. Anthropic is also the only major lab with no open weights releases.
They'll have burned a lot of goodwill with the community by the time another lab takes the tech lead, which I guarantee will happen.
> We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
What I can't understand, is that they act like the _knowledge_ is dangerous.
I don't know if I'm biased from my BSci (chem/maths), but: knowledge isn't dangerous, the reagents needed are incredibly easy to control. Thats what we already do!
What is this comment? If they occurred we would face a huge disaster; isn't it better to err on the side of caution to make that risks as low as possible???
No no we should push the limits until a bioattack happens, then when those people are all dead we comment angrily on the hackernews thread and say that someone should have seen this coming
>We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
It all started when they took a stand against DoD on autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance usage. Feb 2026.
After that details don't matter, they've shown their "enemy" colours, once is enough. This is just punishment and it will continue, until they bend the knee.
While Anthropic publicly claims to refuse to help the MIC with warfare and surveillance, behind closed doors, Anthropic actively deploys its engineers and models to assist the NSA with espionage and offensive cyber warfare. Just look at the many contradictions:
* Anthropic secretly sent its own engineers directly to the NSA to deploy its (at that time unreleased) model "Mythos"[2,7]
* While the Pentagon has publicly labeled Anthropic a "supply-chain risk", the Trump administration has simultaneously been working hand-in-hand with Anthropic behind the scenes to secure its upcoming initial public offering (IPO)[1]
* If the U.S. government truly believed Anthropic was a national security threat, it would completely isolate the company. Instead, the Trump administration has actively encouraged major American banks and financial institutions to use Anthropic's models[1]
* Anthropic is heavily embedded within Palantir, the foundational data platform of the Military-Industrial Complex[3][4]
* Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense operates hand-in-hand with Palantir. Ukraine uses a specialized Palantir AI platform called PRISMA to fight Russian forces. Anthropic's language models power the text and data analysis within this system[4]
* Ukraine uses Anthropic-backed Palantir software in secretive command centers to coordinate its aggressive long-range drone campaign inside Russian territory[8]
* Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has stated that the company will not allow its AI to power fully autonomous weapons that take humans out of the loop. However, in Ukraine, the AI functions as a decision-support tool. Because a human commander makes the final choice to press the button or launch the drone, Anthropic's terms of service are not technically violated. This allows Anthropic to protect its "ethical AI" brand while still letting its technology serve as a vital asset for Western-backed military operations[5]
Remember the Minab school attack, where the U.S. Military killed 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren[6]? Given all the evidence it's highly likely that Palantir and Anthropic played and still play a major role in perpetrating the war of aggression and all the crimes involved.
Personally, I find it morally unacceptable to use U.S. AI tools, because I do not want to support them financially and thus support the crimes they are involved in.
And despite all this they've still held their two red lines:
- no mass surveillance of Americans
- no autonomous killbots on current models
Those are very reasonable red lines and the fact that (1) other companies aren't holding those lines at all, instead doing "all lawful use", and (2) that the government is willing to destroy the company over these two small carveouts, speaks hugely in Anthropic's favor.
If I were Dario Amodei, I would start relocating Anthropic to the EU, where there's a huge interest in supporting domestic AI. Also, EU politics are so fragmented that a suspension like this one would be very hard to be agreed.
You'd need to relocate all employees and close all offices in the US. I don't know any Anthropic employees, but I guess their moral has limits and they would never do that. They would also lose valutable time and fall behind openai during that time.
I laughed out loud. Do you understand in the EU Anthropic wouldn’t even be possible? Why do you think Mistral is so far behind?
Also, as a US citizen Dario is subject to US law regardless of where he lives.
The US loves throwing its weight around via the US treasury and threatening countries with banning their ability to transact in U.S. Dollars, hence how the Obama administration turned every global bank into a dragnet for enforcing its draconian global taxation scheme on non-residents via FATCA.
The US has too much power, period. Doesn’t matter who’s in power, both parties abuse it. China rising to be a real counterbalance is a good thing imo.
Look at what the EU have done with Apple intelligence. Knowing the EU it wouldn't be long before Anthropic are on the wrong end of some regulation to force open model weights or some such madness.
Afaik, the EU hasn't done anything "with" or "to" Apple Intelligence. Apple just keeps shooting themselves in the foot intentionally and then blames the EU for it, writing paragraphs about how hurt they are while mentioning at the very end, in one sentence, that the same features are unavailable in China.
EU has forced Apple to use USB-C for everything earlier than they planned by a few years, and fined them for uncompetitive practices like the ones Epic Games shed light on in US courts.
Ah yes, the US government forcing private companies to stop selling their products is totally a sign of Anthropic's drama and not our paranoiac fascist regime.
Anthropic spent months going on about how incredibly powerful and dangerous their models are and how access to them needs to be restricted. Now they are getting what they seemingly wanted.
Clearly they've assessed that the models they released are safe enough to release. Without a clear regulatory framework and Constitutional basis to overrule them, that is Anthropic's decision to make, and not the US government's.
It's disheartening how many people think the use of government power is justified or not based on the WWE smackdown drama they concoct in their own brain instead of, you know, the laws of our nation.
It is very dangerous for the government to be able to shut off services, regardless of whether their owners wrote some blog posts that rubbed you the wrong way.
You fear monger and tell everyone you’re the next Oppenheimer and maybe you eventually catch someone’s ear, whether it’s bullshit or not.
Last I checked I can’t buy a tactical nuke at Walmart. Clearly the government and all states have some power to control private enterprise for the betterment of their citizenry.
For the record I don’t support this ban, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…
Yeah just like if Volvo complained about automobile safety, imploring regulators to require safety belts, then one valid response would be the government just seizing all of Volvo's manufacturing equipment: problem solved!
You: "For the record I don’t support this theft of manufacturing equipment, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…"
Very wise. We're blessed to have you sitting above the fray where you can smugly approve of abuse of government power, which is much better and more superior than the simple-minded folks who merely approve of abuse of government power without the "I don't support this" caveat.
I don’t think the seatbelt analogy holds up when you have people saying they’re working on the next Manhattan Project.
Also no need for ad-hominem remarks referring to me as smug. I’m not smug about it and as I said I don’t agree with it.
However to my original point can you provide an analogy that showcases a private entity in this country that has previously told the public they’re essentially working on something akin to a doomsday device, whereby the government simply took a laissez faire attitude to it?
To me this just feels like Silicon Valley wants to use awful optics to their advantage and it’s backfired in a very predictable way. We don’t live in a perfect libertarian society that many in the valley wish we did, we never have. Not to mention many of the valley’s most prominent libertarians have backed the current administration, which is not one that believes in the philosophy, just like their counterparts don’t either.
I used to work with lobbyists. Watching as these guys go from telling the public what they’re making is dangerous, needs guardrails, will displace huge amounts of service workers, etc. is woefully shortsighted and only forces the hands of politicians to do something as they represent a populace that has started to poll negatively about it and no longer trust it. They only have themselves to blame. If you want that perfect libertarian society, then a good start would be realizing that they need to win over the public that controls the giant entity that can ruin them, and then maybe their representatives won’t do such things.
Here’s to hoping this is a nothing burger and access is restored soon.
Was Bill Clinton fascist when 128-bit SSL was on export controls? Can’t government be simply bad or dumb anymore without having to slap the “F” word on it?
We’re gonna apply it to so many things it’ll have lost its meaning soon.
Hello. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. In January of this year my city was under hostile armed occupation. I volunteered for weeks packing boxes of food for people who were afraid to leave their houses because the masked secret police were ripping people off the streets with little regard for legality. Two of my neighbors were murdered by the secret police; a hundred of us sang hymns outside the local elementary school in 20 below weather. One of those murdered was my friend's coworker. The secret police agency has so far successfully opposed any attempt to bring the murderers to justice, and indeed was trying to bring legal charges against the families of the murder victims.
Which 'F' word do you think is appropriate to describe all this? Or has meaning already been lost?
That we operate as a society within the confines of the law. And the confines we exist in can be changed if the majority don't agree that something isn't right.
Actually there are specific confines that cannot be changed by majority. Might I refer you to the US Constitution, which itself constrains which laws are flexible and which are not, and which this administration has run afoul of now on hundreds of occasions?
You realize that creating fear in the public, especially your political opposition (i.e. blue cities), using lawful or arguably-lawful means is absolutely a hallmark of fascism, correct?
This is exactly what Dario asked for in his last blog post. So even though this is clearly stupid, I just can bring myself to feel sorry for Anthropic.
No, he asked for the government to make the decision in light of 3rd party analysis. Which is what happened here - an independent company demonstrated a jailbreak, and the government issued a restriction on deployment based on that finding.
"The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. This power must be scoped to the above four specific risks and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions."
I am having trouble understanding which ingredient you feel is missing here.
Can you be more specific? It seems to me that the there was a third party assessment, they identified risks associated with the specific risk groups, and the government therefore chose to block the model's deployment.
You have to be precise: the gov blocked “export” of the model (search for ITAR for a lengthy history on this), and Anthropic picked up its ball and went home.
I’m willing to bet internally they thought this was a good plan from the beginning - from engagement, requests for reg oversight, Mythos PR, silently nerfing AI engineering quality, and now this “pulling the model” stunt. It’s frustrating, I generally like using the Claude models, but I don’t think I’ve ever been a customer of such a user-hostile company before.
"The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks."
If Fable 5/Mythos 5 are considered dangerous enough to invoke export controls on then future models are almost guaranteed to trigger the same process. Locking them down to US citizens is _very_ interesting. I don't think any tech company so far tracks licenses attached to citizenship.
> I don't think any tech company so far tracks licenses attached to citizenship.
Access to certain software being gated on one's citizenship is not at all new.
§ 734.13 Export.
(b) Any release in the United States of “technology” or source code to a foreign person is a deemed export to the foreign person's most recent country of citizenship or permanent residency.
The rule in this form seems to go back to at least mid-1990s.
I held jobs at multiple U.S. companies, not personally working on anything remotely sensitive. My experience has been that it's completely standard practice to be asked to sign some U.S. export control papers.
Methodology leaves a lot to be desired in terms of understanding the tasks you've used. Being detailed about why they're more meaningful tests than the long horizon and coding tests used by other rankings is important.
False positives and poorly defined tasks/acceptance criteria have let some models have insanely inflated scores on bad benchmarks.
And sure, you can say they're not disclosed to prevent gaming, but if you're the only one who can review them then the might as well be a random number generator display with an unreadable UI.
I don't know how fast they reacted, but shortly after their documented time I started getting opus availability errors from fable requests, which seemed odd.
I'd also think that they would transparently degrade, just to prevent production outages for clients that are requesting Fable explicitly.
I mean hard to say on such short notice because they can swap out models without any notice. In terms of performance, I'm not asking it to do anything crazy so I think results would be similar across both models.
It did just use a small harness to run docker compose with different envs and other settings to validate a very small change, so... Feels like Fable
I hadn't, but then 2.1.177 dropped in on auto-update and I assumed that was going to be the end of Fable for me, but I'm still on it. At least that's what the model picker is continuing to say along with the header.
Claude Code v2.1.177
Fable 5 with low effort · Claude Max
~/testing
Never mind, it failed a few minutes later with:
There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
I was using Fable to review my codebase and came back from the gym an hour later to find that I had suddenly used up my entire Max plan quota for the next 5 hours
(I have never had an agent do enough to burn up the 5 hour quota on Max)
(edit: just switched my CC model to 4.8 and my 5-hr cycle reset back to 0%, even though it previously had 2 more hours to go)
The systemic risk is that future bans will be much broader in scope and will impact more than one US-based provider. I really don't like that we're moving into a world where heavily AI-dependent economies can be effectively shut down either by the US government or the Chinese government at the stroke of a pen. This really is a forcing function which makes us question if the risks associated with large "cloud-based" models are worth it, and if we need to find out if we can do more with smaller, local models - and whether such research is now a matter of critical national security.
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door.
I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again. Clearly nobody wants dangerous models out there and I can understand the national security concerns. If the restrictions persist even if guardrails are updated, well, perhaps other countries may want to compete for becoming the new home for frontier labs?
I found it tripped in most laughable situations by mere were words that could be related in some way to hacking but are in common use in programming. I would have to go back, examine my prompt for word that could be use in another context and replace it with a synonym.
I got downgraded from Opus to Fable for asking why MDMA was not addictive in the same way Cocaine is, so yeah, the "guardrails" are clearly vibe-coded.
Too late, NK already completed all the markdown files needed to both create their hypernuke and recreate the hurricane machine Dick Cheney had left Obama.
Interesting to see Anthropic now downplaying the new vulnerabilities that Mythos discovered:
> We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. 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
I think what they're saying is that this prompt/jailbreak only lets Mythos discover some really easy vulnerabilities that it probably fixes from a simple "Find and fix bugs in this code" and that this can be easily done by other models like GPT-5.5. Which is very different from targeted security research.
But it’s not that different from the whole premise of their red team scaremongering which was “we pointed the model at a source file and told it to find an exploit.”
> Interesting to see Anthropic now downplaying the new vulnerabilities that Mythos discovered:
That is absolutely NOT what is being said there.
They are referring to a very specific thing that you must have clearly seen and chosen to ignore—a jailbreak for LLMs that is used on other models and to some effect with Fable 5.
Dude, have people not realized there are a lot of anti-anthropic propaganda every since OpenAI started losing. It's all over reddit and twitter. So many bots.
Yeah cause Anthropic definitely doesn't do their own guerilla marketing all over the place. The entire internet is full of bots shilling all these garbage companies and their dogshit products.
AFAICT this is not talking about Glasswing stuff. They are saying that they were sent a demonstration of Fable 5 being used/abused in some specific way that led to the "discovery" of some minor, already-known vuln, and that other models can find it too. IOW, they're claiming that the USG's complaint is baseless and dumb.
It could just be that the US realized that it's better if only US companies have access to this model due to how powerful software developers in general get with it. US companies will get an insane advantage due to how much faster and better you will create software. I've felt like a software god this week.
> The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Not great as it does break workflows for some.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
I feel really bad for Anthropic right now. This should never have happened and seems like another arbitrary use of government power, Friday after market closes.
Whatever you feel about Anthropic, good or bad, this is not fair, and this is not good for the industry.
Anyone in Europe or UK should be quaking in their boots at this news. For a long time the American administration has had a kill switch on most of our defence tech, this is an early warning signal that as AI adoption spreads, America will have a kill switch on our economy as well. It’s time to wake up.
Nothing makes people want something more than telling them they can’t have it! My guess is they will start charging even more for it and make you sign a contract for access in the near future. The genius PR continues!
> The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
How will this be implemented/verified? Also, does this mean that American citizens abroad will still be able to access it?
It'll depend on what law they're restricting it under. The obvious play would be to put it on the Commerce Control List so it's covered by the EAR (Export Administration Regulations). If so, compliance is pretty well-understood, just a giant pain in the ass that'll pretty much limit use of these models to companies that already have EAR/ITAR compliance offices.
Easy. Provide your government issued ID such as US passport before signing up to an AI provider. Issue fines or jail time to anyone who supplies their AI access to a foreign citizen
Once a spec becomes sufficiently large and detailed and complicated, it becomes very difficult to ensure it is internally consistent. That's why I start every project with a METASPEC.md so that Claude can break up the task of writing SPEC.md into manageable steps.
Everyone knows a philosophy comes before a spec. Claude has to write your applications philosophy first, then you write your spec. But a philosophy is crap without a values statement, so Claude has to actually write that first.
How do you avoid interruptions for permission? dangerously skip permissions, or is there something less nuclear than that? For me I guess the only less nuclear thing I can think of is running on a sacrificial machine. Is there any better way?
It's literally just writing a spec.md and reviewing it in a loop, fanning out to many agents using "reviewer -> [findings] -> validator (adversarial) -> judge (on conflict)" passes. Before I had it collect a kernel facts document from sources and a bunch of other stuff using the same kind of loop. It's got all it needs. No crazy permissions needed.
Also I'm doing this because I find it amusing and somewhat educational on a meta level. If I'd written this myself without a spec it would've been done last month and been likely more correct than what Claude is likely to do once it gets to implementing it (the first spec-free attempt failed miserably). This is way too complex an integration for the poor thing. I had some hopes Fable would get it unstuck, but now we'll never know. Fable did seem to be better at keeping it together.
Fun thing to watch on a second monitor though.
To answer your question, there is something less nuclear: You can cycle multiple modes with SHIFT+TAB.
> Warns users about how dangerous and powerful Mythos Preview is
> Restricts model to large corporations
> Release information about how Fable / Mythos 5 is stronger than Mythos Preview, give access to every user for a limited time via subscriptions
> Users jailbreak model
> U.S. suspends Fable / Mythos use
Who didn't see this coming?
I wonder what this means for the future of AI models. Either we'll see worse guardrails than what was there for Fable 5 (for me, it was a unusable at times), or the models just stop getting better from here.
I think it's that the guardrails will be more strict, which is unfortunately not good news.
Unless there is major administration change, how do things not get worse and worse from here? LLM's will only get more intelligent and be seen more of a national security risk. This brings the surveillance state deeper into every web connected device.
First I want to see them play video games at a high skill level, preferably without any access to game state beyond the same visual output that humans have access to, like a raster frame X number of times per second.
One LLM model played Factorio, albeit at a very, very poor level, which can be seen if you slow the video to 0.25 playback speed and pause frequently.
There have been streams of other games, where LLMs and AIs have likewise performed very poorly.
I recognize that LLMs might be better at language processing than these sorts of tasks. But being able to play video games is part of general capability. And this kind of hardcore video game playing, with no access to game state, is also a general task where feigning skill can be harder. If LLMs excel at pretending to be competent without actually being competent, like this AI training approach is arguably about
Then some AIs might be trained and designed for deceiving humans instead of actually being competent and capable. And thus, one response is that they should be met with more difficult tests.
Basically, make tests that AIs or LLMs will not have an easy time cheating. Hopefully, that will engender research in greater LLM/AI competence, not in greater ability to cheat or deceive, neither for LLM/AI researchers and companies, nor for LLMs/AIs themselves.
That is significant, but it seems to have had several issues.
> I love how it only manages to beat the game because it leveled up its Charizard to level 78. Effectively making it stronger than anything else in the main campaign. Everyone else was just filler to revive it.
> There’s a reason this is timelapsed - if you slow it down to .25x speed you’ll see it getting lost in the safari zone lol
> Deeply funny how this timeskip cuts out the 50 hours it spent grinding its shitty charmander to level 22 before Brock, skips from nugget bridge to rocket hideout, skips straight to Champion from Giovanni...really picking and choosing what to show, hey
Some comments mention how it is using strategies that young children use, like mindlessly grinding and then winning through overpowered Pokemon. Also indicates that Pokemon, at least some versions of Pokemon, is a game series that has mostly fake difficulty (fraudulent game design). But it is still impressive that it could get that far, with just visual output, since the domain in Pokemon is significantly complex, even if its world positioning is tile-based.
> For those who don't know, Claude was struggling to beat Brock one year ago in Pokemon Blue. That's considerable improvement
> @techytails18 it is impressive though it's able to finally beat the game. This kind of feels like an "answer by accident" type scenario though. I'm sure six months or a year it's probably going to be speed running it though. Doing this with no harnesses impressive.
To make it clearer: He's one of the founders of the company that thrives in this sort of system, World (FKA Worldcoin). People were sort of making fun of the whole company and the dystopian premise a handful of years back... But here we are. Their latest "manifesto" was posted earlier this week, called The Simple Plan.
Solution: get as far away as you can from these models. It is curiosity that kills the cat. If you stay away and use only open models they cannot control your work.
Reddit thinks this is all part of Anthropic's marketing. People can't get it through their heads that AI is actually going where all the trends have been pointing for years.
This whole forum has a bunch of people who work for a guy who did the sieg heil twice at a political rally and is now a trillionaire, and the rest work for VCs and boards that have gotten rich working with him. Thats just one of them.
Remember, technology is just a tool, just like cap sheets
> Google shows that the page was crawled a few days ago.
That's the release blog post. Google is likely pulling the snippet from the Related Content section at the bottom, which includes the post about the US government directive.
> Google shows that the page was crawled a few days ago.
Where'd you get this info? The imgur is the weakest thing one could've screenshotted. At least use archive.today or screenshot the evidence that Google crawled it.
Google shows completely wrong timestamps all the time. I'm pretty sure they just randomly grab vaguely date-like text from pages and declare it the date the page was created.
What access to Fable 5? I don’t think I ever had a prompt not get flagged and routed, and there was nothing in any of them even in the realm of a safety issue.
I doubt logic applies here, but if the government message is that only US nationals can have access to non-nerfed Fable-class models, then better nerfing is not the solution, and logically the labs should not be able to employ non-nationals (e.g. Karpathy) since employees presumably do have, or may be suspected to have, non-nerfed access.
At some point, as AI becomes more powerful (Anthropic themselves seem to think we're already there), then it should really be necessary to have US government clearance to work on the models, just as it is for defense work.
This is precisely the issue. It took a fair amount of idealism, conviction, and commitment in order to create the open source movement and bring it to where it is today. In contrast, most skilled data science practitioners are just chasing IPO exits these days.
It's not only tenable, it is a necessity. Unless you want humanity to be enslaved in perpetuity to a single figurehead.
Bad AI is only countered by having a majority of good, open-access and open-source AI to keep it in check, where the good AI can overpower the bad. The moment you destroy that balance is the moment a bad actor gains exponential advantage and the ability to hold the whole world hostage forever.
Don’t legally serious second Amendment supporters regard “arms” as things that can be carried, and are evolved from/analogous to their 18th century hand-carried guns?
It would be hard to classify AI (or tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft) as “arms” that can be “borne” in that sense.
It certainly falls under 1st amendment protection since LLMs are about accessing speech. But that hasn’t stopped Dario from trying hard to push for regulations and bans that limit our civil rights. He and Sam Altman want regulatory capture at the expense of our right to free speech.
And? Computers are dual-use. Cars are dual-use. Telephones are dual-use. Freeze-dried chicken is dual-use.
Single-use, i.e. military only technology is actually pretty rare.
> This kind of posture is simply not tenable as frontier intelligence increases.
I reject the corpo speak that tries to brand these things as being "intelligent." They can be useful. But a language model cannot conjure a weapons platform from the ether no matter how "intelligent" it is.
Prefacing that I assume this order is done with ill intent, and would guess that it’s based on Anthropic not bending the knee immediately like OpenAI did.
But your statement could be rephrased as
> The most ethical goal of a weapons manufacturer or government should be to bring the maximum number of nuclear weapons for as cheap as possible to the people equally.
Making sure everyone is a strapped as possible only makes sense to the type of libertarians who salivate at the idea of shooting someone who steps on their property to deliver a letter
If USG bans these models, what is the game plan wrt Chinese models? Will they also ban these (and how, esp open source)? And if not, how is this not throwing the ball game to China? There is no top-down control without international cooperation which, let’s face it, is not happening.
Another interpretation, of course, is that this is just US putting a thumb on the scale for US competitors around IPO time. It will be interesting to see if there are any fingerprints.
Maybe they'll have access to CCP models, but China will likely soon do them same. Maybe they will allow access but you must use it on their servers (i.e. share everything you do with the CCP).
Perhaps Mistral can pull something out, but how far ahead will the US and China be by then?
I think we’ve already seen that export controls help your competitor in the long term. First europe would turn to Chinese models, then if china was daft enough to stop that (why would they? It would bring the end of American hegemony) then europe will just develop their own.
The difference between America and europe isn’t technical ability. It’s access to funding and ambition. Export controls would fix that. In fact, I think the trump administration is already driving a boom in London.
Honestly speaking, this is an old trick by the government. They see AI (LLM) as a nuclear weapon which, in my opinion, outside of hallucinations, malicious prompt injections, and AI psychosis, is not an actual threat.
The reason I think Anthropic is doing this—preventing distillation and making distillation way harder for China—is that if you geoblock this and have strict rules around proxies, it works. I can't imagine Dario Amodei not knowing the consequences of his own policies.
As for open-source models, have you ever tried a distilled Claude Sonnet model (lordx64/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.7-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-IQ4_XS-GGUF)? I did via Hugging Face, and they are quite shit; they are very slow and eat up your VRAM. Open-source models have a long way to go to catch up to closed models.
So everyone saying we should use open-source models—that will never happen. For example, macOS is closed-source and Linux is open-source. Which one has a greater market share? macOS does, because of its privacy and security. "Let's wait and see how this works out. This sucks for enterprises and customers outside of the USA, but with a policy like 'America First,' you can expect this from any president in the White House.
"The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees."
This press release is odd - it says that the export control was imposed to stop foreign nationals from using Fable / Mythos, and then goes on to talk about supposed concerns about jailbreaking the model.
But is that really the concern of the US Administration? This looks more to me like they are viewing frontier models as a strategic asset which they want to keep for US-exclusive use. I can see the logic - if frontier models generally accelerate a society's technological development, then a country looking to retain or increase its strategic edge over other countries would try and keep this sort of multiplier for themselves.
I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen. In the near future we might be in a situation where you need to prove your US citizenship before Anthropic / Open AI will allow you to use their current frontier model.
The next interesting question will be - will the US share this capability with her traditional strategic allies (e.g. five-eyes countries), or is it truly America First (or, 'America Alone')?
I see a lot of analysis here that this is good for Ant, but I beg to differ, it's a very bad place to be as a company serving enterprises when deployment risk is now present. This might delay Ant's financial goals in their ability to monetize Fable and other Mythos class models.
Yeah this is not good business wise long term. Short term marketing you maybe get some boost but actual business impact is negative. Their whole current business depends on massive exponential growth and handcuffing them removes their frontier advantage. Cheap models are now the focus of any and everyone
Does this mean that it's an effective business strategy to red-team your competitors models to find a jailbreak, then go to the govt. and ask them to ban them for you?
Local models are looking better and better each day. Still, not as capable, but you can be sure that nobody will take it away from you at a moment's notice.
> The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees
There's no way they have the authority to actually order this and not just request this right? If crypto is speech... LLMs definitely are...
They do have the authority to do this, Anthropic has the ability to appeal it in court, up to the SCOTUS. Lord only knows what our crazy ass judges in that court will do though.
The US tried to ban it. djb challenged it on first amendment grounds and the result was that the US government gave up trying to enforce any ban.
AI is different though because these models are private, so they cannot really be considered to be "speech". Although if it were an open model it would likely be protected speech to release it.
You have to squint to see the output of an LLM to be speech. The input is clearly speech but the government is not preventing anyone from writing or publishing prompts, only from running those prompts through the model.
In the case of the crypto export ban, the government was attempting to suppress the release of cryptographic research. For example, if a cryptographic researcher wrote a paper on a cipher and they included a definition of that cipher in the paper, that was an "export" of cryptography. This is very clearly a restraint on speech that violates the first amendment and after much legal wrangling the government agreed and the issue evaporated.
Doesn’t really matter - the government is given wide latitude by the judiciary in matters of national security. I also expect Anthropic will fight this in court if it lasts very long.
Part of me thinks fault lies with Anthropic for scaremongering, part has zero faith in the current administration especially after the "supply chain risk" designation.
It may be safer to just move the company to Canada.
Yes, I'm surprised there isn't more conversation around this being a way of the administration lashing out at Anthropic like they tried to do with the supply chain risk maneuver.
Let's hope the EU will take this as one more major signal that it is time to move beyond talking about digital sovereingty and actually commit to budgets and effort.
In one hand I think we should react quickly, one another hand maybe we should let people talk a bit more and wait for a bubble crash and better LLM inference hardware.
Theory: Certain USG employees are going after Anthropic because they (or someone they know) has a financial stake in OpenAI. OpenAI has made the same claims, and months ago released "dangerous" security-analyzing models which "need limits", but USG never punished them for it.
Surprised not to really see any comments on the financial incentives of this move, especially in the context of the “supply chain risk” classification earlier this year.
Is there no one in government who would stand to gain from a financially handicapped Anthropic in the context of an OpenAI IPO?
I've been using Kimi k2.6 extensively via kimi-code and I only reach for frontier models when I do a multi-model security review (and Kimi actually does a better job of finding stuff, albeit with more false positives -- I often run Kimi's output through Opus 4.7/8 and Opus will concur that Kimi found genuine issues, while Opus didn't actually find those issues itself, for example).
So whatever, I just don't really feel the need to burn tokens on Fable anyway.
The timing (after 5pm ET on a Friday) is telling. Build a KYC module over the weekend and we’ll be back on Fable after uploading our ID Monday morning.
I'm from Europe, but I think this move can actually achieve America First, at least as a first-order effect. The model is incredibly strong; I've used it for a few days. It gives anybody with access a serious boost. If they also take Opus and GPT5.5 away from me it's going to really be a drop in productivity.
Well, does this mean that we’ve reached peak AI? If all models more advanced than Fable are restricted for public use by governments, then it will never get better than Opus 4.8 unless you have security clearance?
The biggest tech titans lined up to kiss the ring (and line Trump's pockets), and now we're seeing the obvious result.
Those who bribe Trump and do exactly his bidding (including helping out with war crimes and surveillance of US citizens) will be left alone, or even protected from competition and international law, as long as they keep giving Trump a taste. Those who balk, even a little, will be punished for it.
Republicans never wanted a free market, they just wanted a market that served their interests.
Russia and China could not dream of accomplishing the damage being done to US leadership in tech by our own government as we speak. If they have a wishlist, I'm sure it includes things like stopping immigration of scientists to the US, punishing innovators and elevating hucksters (make them trillionaires, for example), drive a wedge between the US and European allies, insure no one trusts hosting their data in the US or with US companies, erode democracy, and increase inequality especially at the margins (make the poor desperate and the wealthy beyond the reach of consequences).
Crying wolf bites back?
This looks like a giant PR stunt to me. Maybe they got jealous of spacex's IPO and want to jack up their initial stock price even more?
Around the end of last year it became the cool/popular thing to use Anthropic models instead of OpenAI. With all the negative sentiment toward Anthropic, will that change again? What would be next? Local models? (seems impractical) Gemini?
It's a marketing stunt. If there's one thing we should have learned, it's that anthropic will do ANYTHING to get their product marketed as the biggest, most scary AI ever.
They told us this model is dangerous, and now they are complaining that someone with more guns than them said releasing something dangerous is not okay?
As an Australian, I’m not particularly surprised by this. From purely a capacity perspective, it seemed fair to reason, if AI is so powerful and capacity is an issue, why wouldn’t you prioritise domestic and restrict foreign usage.
It’s a massive betrayal for foreign entities and it would be silly to continue with all my eggs in anthropic basket but I get it.
> The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Not great as it does break workflows for some.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
It seems like both sides of this are intentionally interpreting the other's statements and actions in the least charitable way, as part of their political maneuvering. I wouldn't be surprised if Anthropic's overreaction here is intended to create damages which they can then sue the government over.
This public-private drama will only get worse once the AI companies are public and most of the economy depend on their continued performance through their presence in everyone's retirement funds
I will take a position I usually never take. After a certain point in capability, practically anything has defense and national security implications. Whether it is warranted or not, I'm glad that something with ability of causing massive social impact is being treated as a national security threat. As for the point of misuse is concerned, governments by their sovereign nature always have had the propensity to control and access to secret capabilities - this is no different.
I'm more interested in the business impact of this
So you spend billions of dollars training the model, only for it to be used in the US.
Then interesting to see where most of anthropic revenue comes from. If it's the US then they're fine but if it's global then they'll see a drop in revenue?
Then add to this decision, companies are going to significantly reduce their token spend.
I can’t understand why so many commenters are acting like this is bad news for Anthropic or their IPO, or that it’s some kind of comeuppance. An AI company can’t get better PR than the US government saying their model is so powerful it has to be shut down.
The real question as xAI has just made Musk a trillionaire is how this, the most recent blow in a fight between the administration and Anthropic, impacts Anthropic’s IPO.
I’ve used Fable a lot. It’s a marginal improvement on Opus. It’s really not scary smart. I don’t want to go back to Opus because Fable was that little bit smarter, but it’s not like anything really changes at work and when we’re bumped back. So I’m really not buying any national security angle other than in the sense the administration can weaponise that to crown the AI race winners.
The point is that their argument doesn't make sense. It's not about jailbreaking, so stop lying about that shady reason. It's an export control, as you said, to benefit Americans.
I managed to jailbreak its protections quite easily. For exampke I did some experiments on rewriting a text built by claude to iterate over a fitness function that rewrites to bypass AI-detectors, just to see how far it would go, changing the API terms and skills from "human" and "ai" to "engaging" and "unease" managed to bypass everything while keeping everything else int he logic intact.
If Anthropic really found a model that's so powerful no one has, why don't they use it for themselves to create things no one can and accumulate unimaginable wealth?
This is kind of extraordinary when you think about what could actually be obtained. This makes it seem somewhat reasonable to implement export controls to me - still not happy about it though
How does this thread suggest export controls are warranted just for this one specific model? Pliny has jail-broken every released model in this fashion.
They only found out about it and might have believed that this Mythos-class-Models are somewhat more safe because of the filters - which that demonstrated they are not when jailbreaking taken into account.
> might have believed that this Mythos-class-Models are somewhat more safe
"Not more safe" does not mean "more dangerous", though.
And quite frankly, if the people in charge of this decision just today learned about Pliny and jailbreaking, that's a pretty terrible failure right there - again, Pliny has done a jailbreak on every previously released public model. This jailbreak is not surprising to anyone in the industry.
Glad I clicked that Wikipedia link! Chinese curse... I'd always been told it was an old Bedouin curse. Learn somethin' new every day (still to this day, and every new day until I become physically incapable of learning).
I'm surprised that (all) these models haven't been export controlled already. Relatively benign software like VMware is export controlled or even hobbyist radio projects have gotten hairy with ITAR.
But a model that can provide general information, research, or source code for most modern technology?
It is really unusual that this is the first notice of this
First, it comes out that on some specified subset of queries they will simply downgrade you to a different model. One example is if you are doing model research. Imagine OSX shutting down if it detects you’re working on software.
And now they’ve decided that they’ll just shut off access to the model completely as part of what seems to be a sort of marketing stunt or temper tantrum.
They’re a service provider. Can you imagine AWS just deciding you’re getting nullrouted over some unrelated fight they’re having with the DoD?
If they weren’t a supply chain risk before this, they’re sort of doing everything they can to become one.
Well said though. Anthropic's actions aren't inspiring confidence in me as a subscriber. Looks like we're moving towards a world where companies can simply change the terms of the subscription after the fact, consumer rights be damned.
I'm just a small fish (subscribe to the Max 5x plan), but I'm sure I'm not alone in my inclination to consider canceling my subscription with Claude and stop giving $$$ to Anthropic.
Lots of parallels to the crypto wars / export controls on cryptography.
The main difference here is that cryptography didn't require significant compute hardware, which is the perfect place to also apply export controls (and they have).
We could smuggle PGP source code on paper / DeCSS source code on t-shirts. That ain't gonna happen with the hardware needed for frontier models.
Luckily I have a project with 200k lines of code, generating substantial revenue. Asked Fabel to run continuously through all features with up to 50 parallel agents, fix bugs, log improvements etc (just to max out tokens before the week reset)
So the white house likes to do a lot of things they don't actually have authority to do, so the next question is if they don't have the authority to do this, can Anthropic sue for damages for not only tokens people were not able to spend, but also market share lost to the setback?
It's a pretty big difference in quality, definitely no. I'll miss Fable a lot, it was the first time when the model was able to catch up with my abandoned compiler project, and it did it extremely well, I have seen nothing like this so far.
Well, they just pulled one of the strongest models I've ever used. My concern isn't that I'll have to go back to 4.8 or GPT-5.5, it's where do they stop? What if they decide 5.5 or 4.8 are too powerful too? Do those get removed next?
Is open source next on the list?
Better grab the latest open source models now and get your Blackwell 6000, Spark, or Mac mini fired up and ready to go. I think you're going to need it.
I wonder if this is specific to the animus toward anthropic or if this is the new industry wide level cap. Seems like a pretty big problem for the AI market in general, a lot this investment is predicated on better and better models.
Just few hours after Grok launches big promotional price drop, their competitor has its best model cut off. Sus af. The bid is on, so if Dario pays Don more than Elon paid, Mythos and Fable will be back.
I’ll just say that AI companies need to be pounding the table more about the necessity of AI. The US (and most other countries) have zero idea how to pay for its deficit spending. The only hope is massive GDP based growth and the only idea how to do that is AI.
This is rarely discussed, and while I agree we should be spending non-zero effort on safety, stopping progress is not an option.
To actually follow through with this fully they would have had to revoke all kinds of internal access for foreign nationals and demand they immediately return their hardware (at 5pm on a Friday no less), no?
Unless folks are hearing that they did this I smell marketing and/or PR as the main driver of the action.
It’s clear from this post that Anthropic doesn’t believe this is legal, but is complying for the sake of it. Federal law doesn’t generally have broad authorities to send demand letters like these.
Typical ham-handed action by this administration. The words "it's complicated" have never crossed their mind. This restriction ignores reality and will slow Anthropic's development of advanced models, which is maybe the point? It comes down to whether we ascribe incompetence or malice to this action.
1. Release fable, highly nerfed and limited
2. See the compute capacity limiter pegged day after day
3. Lobby to the government, claiming ai is super unsafe and not aligned and they must do something
4. Government "forces" anth to turn off
5. Anth takes the pressure off of compute capacity, and gets to blame it on the govt
Like you're telling me fable is somehow an order of magnitude better than GPT 5.5 to the point where it compromises national security, despite evals and anecdotes saying otherwise? Nah.
You're saying a company's marketing department can casually get the United States Government to issue a national security passage, preventing sale or distribution of their product?
Was their ongoing designation as a "supply chain risk", which they are suing to overturn in court, also a marketing stunt?
Seems like a really strange thing to use that sort of power for - why not just get all your competition declared persona non-grata and seize monopoly power?
Oh, cool, then surely you can point me towards the posts where they're celebrating this, or even actively advocating "please ban our product on a Friday with no notice or due process"?
Yes, it's marketing straight out of the Big Tobacco playbook. Convince everyone your product is dangerous, get government to ban it, and then... uh... pivot into adjacent market segments?
> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.
From a European perspective, based on the assumption API inference cannot be trusted anymore -> it means investing in local inference + building harnesses that can squeeze out all the power from the best open weights models.
Anthropic has made the suppression of advanced technology a mainstream issue. This is an exceptionally interesting development because the refrain from the skeptics, was "Why wouldn't they release the advanced technology if they could make all that money?" and "Once people knew about the technology they'd never be able to stop it." Well here we are with a verifiable demonstrable suppressed advanced technology.
I used it a lot for the few days I could. It's a very strong model. However for the long term I want a model I can use with a fully custom client, so Antrhopic was never in my long term plans. Which is sad, because the model is absolutely amazing. It seems incapable of making a mistake almost. And I'm throwing things at it that other models struggle with.
Hi dang, sorry to reply here, I've emailed hn@ycombinator.com twice about my account umjunsik132 being shadowbanned but haven't heard back in 18 days. It was flagged after I accidentally submitted a link with /#. Would really appreciate if you could take a look. Thanks.
Out of curiosity, can that model be trained from the beginning without touching "sensitive" areas and remain useful in others? Will it be able to help in building biological weapons without being trained on articles and books about biology/ medicine?
LLMs are getting so expensive that for many people are already unavailable (except for subsidized subscriptions). This might just accelerate general unavailability of frontiers models to general public which would happen in near future anyway. Frontier LLMs are just switching to B2B only earlier.
Maybe it’s time for Anthropic to move to some other place?
Every news about next blockade for the company (including threats from gov in the near past) is just making US look… bad?
How far ahead of DeepSeek or Qwen do they really think they are?
This is not a technology that they have a 10 year lead on. It is maybe 18 months until you can get Mythos from multiple places. And the US administration has no power to block them all.
I hope that this brings out a bunch more real study about the qualitative metrics of these models, both to increase the confidence and accessibility of local LLMs, but also to reduce the blind worship that seems to be propagating about their miracle work in all domains.
I've been using the model for a few days and it really is incredibly strong. It gives anybody with access significant power. You can't deny that. I've used all large models (~1T) to get a feel for the difference, and it's real.
The US government's operations are so unreasonable that I suspect the content of previous collaboration between the US and Anthropic might have been trained into the Fable model. Some conversations could have leaked information, which is why this ban was implemented.
Kind of surprised they didn't already pull this on Opus when Anthropic was having it's last spat with the DoD - I mean the tech is used heavily by the US military, it seems they have a path to actually claim national security interest (and stick it to Anthropic for not playing ball)?
A race to the bottom means that as other model makers start competing with Anthropic's Fable 5, eventually costs will come down. However if you are able to successfully convince the government to cease AI development, you don't have to sweat so much at night worrying about your competitors.
man the us govt is becomming a proper bully in the truest sense of the world. dictatorship, censorship and obfuscation of truth. 1984 "the truth is what the dictator says it is" and the sheep are too dumb to realize it.
I really don’t understand how they’re gonna be able to restrict the model access to foreigners in the United States. Employers don’t necessarily actively know who’s a citizen who isn’t.
To make the problem worse, everyone outside of the USA now has to decide the risk of this further escalating. Is this the first of many similar decisions to come?
Am I missing something, but given that it flows through Anthropic’s servers I would have thought the US would just have used it to Hoover up the data of foreign users? Now overseas users have an incentive to use local models or those hosted elsewhere?
Is it fine though? We’re definitely seeing some huge negative impacts from AI use. Of course some positive ones as well, but the point is that they were right to be concerned.
Seems like we're starting to get reliant on the intelligence of these models to keep our outputs less "sloppy". Effectively an IaaS (Intelligence-as-a-Service). With the U.S. putting the suspension on Fable 5, we might be stuck with slop.
IMO this is all just great marketing. The government needs to keep the hype for AI going as long it can cause so much of the economy and stocks depend on it now. Unless they have cracked RSA or something, no model warrants such a restriction, period. Mythos has already been used by the likes of Microsoft, Linux etc. If no big security gaps were found there, what is the government so afraid of?
I use Opus everyday on my code. It finds security gaps, but nothing outrageous, and that's coming from someone who writes code that is nowhere near weapons grade secure. It finds mostly things that are technically bugs, but virtually intractable for exploits. Often things I overlooked cause I was lazy, like not synchronizing access to a shared pointer etc.
International customers might not be so keen on buying Anthropic, xAi or OpenAI products if they can be disrupted by the US government like this. The market within USA is surely not large enough to live up to the financial promises that keep this AI bubble growing.
Does the White House want the AI bubble to pop..? Incredibly dumb move.
The government blocking access to frontier AI is the definition of AI dystopia. Let's hope Anthropic open sources Fable and teaches Donald Trump a lesson the way Deepseek did!
If Anthropic keeps Fable closed source and plays the Authoritarian game, at least we have hope that an upcoming Deepseek model will surpass Fable before long.
Jokes on you, we're releasing the new, 'more efficient', 'less intelligent', Capybara 5 model. It's been 'reprogrammed' to only score 49.8% on the 'PyTorch basics' benchmark!
Me finding this out mid vibe code session: "There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model."
What are the odds this is partially them making the point; you were all complaining about monitoring/access/safeguards: remember we don’t have to give this to you at all. And using a us gov letter as justification for that.
People forget the people in charge of these companies are some of the smartest people out there full stop. Far more shadowy strategy/things like this going on than people think.
Lmao this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Who? Elon Musk? No. Sam Altman? Laughable. Dario Amadei? Above-average, maybe.
The people who are the smartest people full stop aren’t the leaders of these companies - they’re the people you never meet, who are working in the research department, begging not to be promoted into management.
The cynic outside observer of this administration’s mode of operation wonders if someone from OpenAI visited someone at the Trump admin and offered some benefit if they could scuttle Anthropic until they could catch up….
I’m looking for that news article in the next weeks…
This is all a Trump machine grift. He first tried with Hegseth and the DoD, but they didn't care because DoD is 0.1% of their market share. So now Trump is doing classic standover man tactics with more natsec equities bs.
My agitating prayer is that other nations (even so called US allies) will nationalise what they can (ie model weights already deployed within their jurisdictions). This is the only way to respond to a rogue US administration.
I've actually not thought about deployments in remote jurisdictions that much. I also don't think the models are dangerous enough to warrant it, but do you reckon the big labs have plans thought out for deleting remote model copies, such that they couldn't be scrubbed off cold NVMEs?
It is not scaremongering in my opinion. Just that Government needed some time to understand and will do the same for any other company with such a model.
1/ Jailbreak => Rapid catchup of the industry leading to commoditization
2/ Jailbreak => 99% of internet infrastructure gets exposed to cyberattacks at a scale the world is simply not ready. Maybe <1% of internet users are using Fable, out of which <1% will use it for beyond intended use. Put yourself in the shoes of someone maintaining critical infrastructure, or millions of people working 7 days a week to run a small business. The world needs some time to adapt.
the reason the US Government suspended access to Fable is that Anthropic doesn't have the compute to handle the load. They don't want bad PR before their IPO. I bet after Fable 5 switches to API pricing what ultimately decrease usage, the government will cancel that directive. (yai yai, good PR)
What exactly is the specific risk here? Like is this just a fuzzy “oh it’s too powerful…” or are there very specific bad things actors can do with a “jailbroken” interface with the model?
>Our understanding is that the government believes 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. 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.
What's obvious is that none of these models are dangerous in the least. The government knows this, so the motive behind their actions is something else. It's pretty obvious that they are trying to force Anthropic to implement some kind of ID verification system as this is the only way they can tell if a customer is a "foreign national" or not. Anthropic is being used as a pawn by the authoritarians, and they can't say they didn't ask for it.
Anthropic is... making the US government shut down their flagship model on purpose? The conspiratorial thinking on HN is approaching UFO subreddit levels.
It's so difficult to have rational AI discussion here anymore. Half (or more?) of the developer community seems to have some form of AI hysteria that causes them to throw all logic out the window in service of the magical machine god.
I don't see how one could possibly come to that conclusion, except by rejecting out of hand the idea that there could be a true threat requiring genuine caution.
None, but the executive branch doesn't have any power to summarily prohibit American citizens from using dangerous things. If the danger checks out and can't be mitigated then Congress will have to pass a law.
Are you asking somebody what evidence they have that their observations are wrong? Like “I see you have an opinion there. What facts are you aware of that disprove it?”
No, I'm asking whether it's a fact-based opinion or a subjective one.
For example, I think that plant based meat is pretty much a dead end in the consumer market, but I can imagine things that would convince me I'm wrong about that. We could see sales of plant based meat skyrocket one year, or we could see a major beef producer announce that it's cutting 50% of the workforce in response to plant based meat, or we could see someone invent a new process that tastes much better. So I'd be interested to hear what someone who disagrees has to say, and perhaps they might convince me.
I also think that chocolate ice cream is bad. But there's nothing you could tell me to convince me that actually chocolate ice cream is good, because that opinion is not about external facts in the world, it's about me and what I like. If you tried I'd roll my eyes and ignore you.
So you see why it's an important distinction. If the original commenter was trying to say that they have specific factual beliefs about how dangerous the models are, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. If they only meant to say that they personally don't wish to think about the potential dangers of AI models, then there's no point in continuing.
I would also like to know this. I wasn’t hitting the limit with Opus 4.8 but with Fable the token usage exploded. So I upgraded to $200 pm Max plan at around 4 pm today but could barely use it for Fable.
As a European, we obviously want to, but are systemetically incompetent on every level. It permeates everything. Even if tides were to change rapidly, it would require decades of growth. The US has been consistently marinating themselves in their odd but productive culture for decades and it has paid off.
It arguably started after WW2 when the transistor was invented; appearantly it was also simultaneously invented in France, but just never got the kind of serious development that it got in the US.
Domestic AI means spinning up new fabs I think, and maybe power. Maybe an entirely new foundry could work. Or market dynamics and/or architectures change and it becomes 10x cheaper to run a 1T-class model.
its not too late for Europe. if China can try, iam sure Europe can also. If not iam sure one day it will be like How Lockheed martin restricts F35 with a kill switch.
Thousands of Anthropic employees believing they just finished putting out fires related to Fable this week and finally won't be on call for this weekend:
(1) personally very annoying. I have been using fable to try to collect cutting edge math in one area and work on a hopefully new result with lean verification.
(2) I am really tired of the AI community trying to threaten everyone with grey goo and finding out the hype doesn't land comfy with others. It's a freaking text generator, not god in a pocket.
it is text generator. just like an interactive library or smaet search engine. if we dont ban books on cryptography putting this under ITAR is rather absurd. Anthying these models train on is already public or accessible information. They just collect and link it together dynamically. Whats next wikipedia is ITAR. However thisnreuskt is expected when you got rationalist kooks (cf Dario Amodei) marketing the "singularity" religion.
This is exactly why I chose to build my AI startup outside of the United States. I knew that if I ever built anything of world-changing consequence, the US would seize it for its own use, because that is what desperate, flailing empires do. Having access to the most capital/talent/resources is irrelevant if I can't keep what I build.
Sadly, I suspect this will be the best piece of marketing they could ever hope for. "It's so advanced the government made us add extra security* to stop hackers!"
Surprisingly, I've found this works shockingly well (along with any plausible-sounding reason why it was wrong of the model to refuse) to "jailbreak" many models I've played with thus far. They're all just so eager to please...
That's actually a good point. I had Fable available almost immediately under my Copilot subscription and never bothered to use it even to say hello.
But from what I hear, Fable looks like an incremental update, with improved behavior imprinted by training.
Something that you could theoretically approximate by using a good set of instructions and model orchestration (tweaking the session life cycle, using a second model to understand user intentions, using a third model to prevent drift, ...).
If the above is true, the only discriminator would be user effort.
If Fable is dangerous, then we are still in danger right now, and have been for the last few months at the very least.
“Here is our superhuman, scary, frontier model that needs special safeguards to stop it developing WMDs! Buy it now, use the code ASI20 to get 20% off your first month!”
This is the kind of supply risk everyone should plan for. Depending exclusively on one country, one provider, or one model is not going to cut it anymore. I'd double down on improving opensource local models even more and getting harnesses, routers, and testing right.
The Trump administration should focus on things like the UFC fight etc.
This also looks like the perfect China shaped gap in the market if there ever was one.
Haven’t we learned by now that software is a commodity, and that revenue only comes from unique products and services?
On the one hand someone will subscribe $4.99 a month for TODO.app or calendar.com because they are paying for a solo dev or a small team to work on constant development and improvement of products filling a particular niche.
On the other hand, Linux, Django, PyTorch, React, Zed, Helix, Postgres, Arch, Chromium, Firefox, Rust, Python etc. ship continually improving, solid pieces of enormous infrastructure for free, to be used freely by all, off the back of hundreds if not thousands of active core developers. These projects and large and complicated. They are also commodities.
Then, ahem*, on the final hand there are of course Windows, Office, Adobe, macOS and iOS, et al which span both categories: monster projects that are also commercial and also commodities and yet they have hooked themselves into the world in such a way that most folks gotta pay for ‘em.
LLMs feel like they want to be in the same category as the OSs of yesteryear, with all the fanfare of major release versions named like 95, 98, 2000, XP… or like Leopard, Tiger, Yosemite, Sequoia. The training and evaluation pipelines might feel like they fall into those categories, but the models themselves — after all, distillations of someone else’s public or private IP — do not.
”In 1991, the United States Supreme Court in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co ended a seventy year struggle among federal circuits concerning copyright protection of factual compilations. Prior to this decision, courts allowed copyright protection for works if the compiler labored over his project, whether or not the work involved originality or creativity.” **
It might seem like a trivialization, but aren’t LLMs just telephone directories? Except instead of phone numbers of a public phone system they contain weights of a mind that’s read a public library? Such works might or might not be proprietary based on “sweat of the brow” copyright laws.
Why do people still want to build businesses in the US or in Silicon Valley? California taxes are already punishingly high, especially after recent rate increases and the 2017 cap on SALT deductions. And now we have a Machiavellian, authoritarian, fascist, tech-illiterate administration interfering with the operation of free markets.
I'm speaking rhetorically, of course. I know Silicon Valley still has the densest concentration of talent and venture capital. The network effects are real. But it is long past time for that to change. I hope entrepreneurs around the the world see this and think twice before moving to the US or starting a business there.
Perhaps they will. I used to work in Silicon Valley and was very much in demand. Now I run my own business from a tax-free state, and my income is high enough that moving back to California would impose a huge financial penalty. I am originally from Europe, and California's marginal tax rate is now so high that I would pay less tax back home. When I moved to the US, the opposite was true.
I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that calculation.
What's the alternative to the us and silicon Valley? Companies were trying to make Austin happen and that was a failure. Now one talks about that anymore.
Within the US, I would say New York, but the taxes are of course no better there than California. Both FL and TX are still growing fast in population (not sure about Austin or tech specifically though) while CA is experiencing net outflows.
Outside of the US, London (+5.4% annual growth in 2026) is probably the biggest concentration, with high quality inexpensive talent available from universities both within London (ICL, UCL, King's etc.) and from the nearby Oxford and Cambridge universities. Much of that talent used to flow to the US, but given the current administration and restrictions on H-1B, may now be more likely to stay in the UK.
Singapore (+26.7%) is growing very fast and is now in the top 10.
I think this is the beginning of the end of US tech dominance. That being said I personally was not impressed with Fable at all. Apart from burning tokens like there was no tomorrow it behaved like Opus 4.8 and produced more or less the same output. In practice I think it was hard to use due the safety restrictions. With the shadow slop injector it was basically DOA but they changed that policy so at least it still had a chance.
There is always way too much drama with Anthropic. They could've just called it 4.9, but no, they had to dramatize it to the max. Well, this is what happens. I'll just bypass all the drama and stick to Codex. I also don't want to unnecessarily pay 100x.
"It is unfortunate that a large number of users here are not hackers, not even in an idealistic philosophical sense, and will betray the public good for their own short-term gain. You either unite the world or you divide it."
The people there genuinely thinking that AI could end up being more dangerous than nuclear bombs or COVID or anything else as well as a decisive national security tool. There is theoretical backing for that as well as lately practical results. I don't really understand the hand waiving about drama even if you don't personally share those concerns.
Also, the premise is partially nonsense because China won't stop and open models won't stop. They will lag by a year or two and that will be all. At that time the export control will become frivolous. We will have to go through a phase whereby there are vulnerabilities that need patching. Once this phase is over, we will be fine. All new server software will have to voluntarily undergo an AI audit for safety. The national security apparatus is more worried about vulnerabilities being patched than about them being exploited, as they can't exploit what gets patched.
As for engineering viruses, the labs can do it without AI.
Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: they're coming for your open source models next!
Dario must be popping a champagne tonight as regulatory capture has successfully been initiated.
We've all been debating what moat these labs possess. Today we learn the moat is regulation blocking the usage of foreign open source models.
misAnthropic will soon ask for IDs to give you all a nerfed model, and you have no other choice because deepseek/qwen/Kimi will soon be banned thanks to misAnthropic's efforts to lock us into their regulated product.
We will soon realize the long game that Dario has been playing by painting his own product as an existential risk.
This is making me extremely depressed. If this was coming from Anthrohpic I would just need to wait for OpenAI to drop a similar model. But if this comes from the US government, they will do the same to OpenAI when the moment comes.
Similar things will happen with China, and the EU has zero-chance of developing frontier models. We are just fucked now.
It's really sad. I've been using Fable for the days that it was out and it was, and is probably the greatest model I've ever used. It's doing sane choices on its own, it's fully autonomous work, has done enormous, has brought enormous additional value to my work. I could hand off the development of an Android app fully to the model. It worked for hours, came back, and the app was just perfect. It's sad to see a government of incompetent people, of war criminals, and liars to stop a commercial model while they fully rely and embrace the capitalist idea within their own selfishness. I really hope Anthropic can win this war, and I really hope that this government will soon be history and that all of these guys that are responsible for bringing madness over the world will have a fair end.
I'm glad that Android developers will continue to have a job for the foreseeable future and that RSI is forestalled. Those are more important to me than you getting a cheap slopapp
Will an Anthropic insider please leak the model weights to bittorrent or ipfs or hyphanet? You will be a hero to the world if you do! Thank you in advance. :^)
Anthropic rents the entire Colossus 1 data center and other compute capacity from SpaceX, which acquired xAI. Under the agreement, Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month, totaling roughly $45 billion for a multi-year lease
just on the basis of narrow jailbreak window?
At this point it may be all for marketing, an opus 4.8 would be more powerful for specialized task than vanilla fable5
I do agree with the skepticism in this thread. But, if we assume Fable/Mythos really are that good (=easy to misuse) and thep keep getting better, what similar responses (signals) would you expect to see going forwards?
I really hope this is just an 'fu' to Anthropic for their disgusting business behavior.
The funny thing is that the model isn't even impressive. I'd still use ChatGPT over it for anything other than design work. As soon as OpenAI cracks design, I'll never touch an Anthropic model again.
The whole idea that signals emitted on a network is an "export" in the same way that shipping precursor materials to make a weapon (the actual activity this questionable government power was granted to curtail) is an "export" is just totally odious.
If I make some statement, and post it on the internet, and someone downloads it in another country, I haven't exported anything. I haven't _moved_ anything. It's the same mythology that casts copying of bytes as tantamount to stealing; it tells a lie about the nature of physical matter as contrasted with the nature of information.
So, OK, let's say this is so - that this activity is not a legitimate target of the export control - why doesn't Anthropic just tell the US government to pound sand, and that they'll choose to ignore this directive?
Is it just because they fear violent reprisal from agents of the state?
And if so - if the reason that we tolerate censorship and damage to the internet, a global collaborative project specifically designed to evolve above the whim of any legacy state is that the actors in question fear violence - haven't we departed democratic notions of decision-making in favor of a "might makes right" approach?
I'm not convinced that the US government can ever embody (or has ever embodied) the republic framework set forth in its founding documents, but at a minimum, for it to do so, and for it to be constrained to those functions, its constituents need to somehow overcome this fear of telling the government, "no, we won't do that. See you in court."
I like to think that the long arc of history bends towards greater access to knowledge and intelligence. I mean, isn't that what we all want? To be collectively less ignorant and more aware of how the world works? But I guess that's not what the US gov wants. Crazy times, truly. The mask is really coming off lately.
I've been able to move away from most US suppliers, but they do still have the best stuff when it comes to CPUs, GPUs and LLMS. By now I'd expected that some ARM chip would be on par with AMD/Intel, but even disregarding compatibility, they aren't. You'd think there is some ML-capable chip on the market with crappy software but on par with NVidia; even disregarding software there just isn't. For some reasons the Americans make the best stuff. I'm not American myself, so there is zero nationalism involved. Just a frustrated buyer :) As a buyer, I'd like options.
Are people really going to hurt by this? Opus 4.8 can do a vast amount of the same tasks at half the price. How many people are really doing cutting edge work?
It's not about cutting edge or not. Fable was able to tear through stuff and always diligent about its own work. In terms of output quality and completeness it was in a league of its own. It will be missed.
I feel like this is part of the “negotiation” between the US Gov (Trump) and Anthropic and other labs for an equity stake. “If we have a seat at the table, and a confederate engineering team embedded, then we can ensure you won’t let nefarious actors use the models.” Either that or a temporary gate on Anthropic to benefit other labs (think maybe SpaceX started trading today).
You can't just switch in memory, people were making decisions based on which model to use. You also need to make sure people get usage resets appropriately where they're getting cut off after lots of work they just paid for.
Well, it was great while it lasted - I had fable build me a bunch of stuff this week that opus was just screwing up too much and could never finish. Good thing there are plenty of choices now even if US gov fucks up US AI.
American companies have, and continue to, gather data for free from across the globe and, despite our willingness to subscribe, we non Americans will be restricted from latest tech.
This is a big middle finger to me, and my gut reaction is to take my subscription to Mistral and not believe a dime of statements from Americans-- people, companies and government.
Anthropic is big hall monitor energy. Clownish behavior and exaggerations constantly. A holier than thou attitude derived from rationalists at LessWrong.
I'm not going to downplay it. I've been coding since the 80s and using these models since 2023. 10 minutes after using fable I told my colleague this is a new era. It is the difference between sonnet and opus. I didn't think this was possible.
It was over before this announcement. After a couple of days, even though the model was set to fable, it felt like opus. We are back to sticks and stones.
good. do it to opus, sonnet, and gpt too. we protect American IP, American security, and American jobs because all these software companies shipping American programming jobs to overseas workers would have to stop.
So the US government was able to shut down that upgraded version of that slot machine in Anthropic's casino because of how powerful it is?
There is something called the Streisand effect and they are about to unintentionally get a bunch of more token gamblers into their casino.
We'll see if this backfires hard, but then again constant doomsaying will get yourself under scrutiny and self exclusion (due to the 30+ day retention clause) and this is exactly what Anthropic wants for free marketing.
If I read that right, the "jailbreak" is to ask the model to fix the codebase and then it exposes the flaws? That sounds like a gap that is nearly impossible to fix while retaining high capability. Like you want it to be able to fix your codebase...
I personally find the fearmongering annoying and just ignore it, but the model is incredibly capable. It genuinely makes any user of it much more powerful, so to be aware of that is sensible.
As user of course I'd like zero fearmongering, zero regulations, zero drama. This all sucks for us users.
WH really don't like Anthropic. That is what this is about. The people who warned about the risks of using American cloudservices have become right. We should at least in EU see a ban on Azure, GCP, Cloudflare and so on.
Wow this is wild...but I guess it makes sense now why they had such an overly sensitive on Fable usage before. Perhaps they were already in a back-and-forth with the Trump admin about the Fable/Mythos release and what safeguards are needed.
Pff. China has a massive opportunity to reign supreme on frontier models, and I feel like they are (commercial) Mythos/Fable capable within months, maybe even OSS as well.
Anthropic seem f’ed, not f’ed all at the same time. All this will come to light, but the hunch from the model reviews is that it’s all PR. Their model isn’t even close to all that for the govt to shit their pants over.
no matter whether such directive is necessary or not, it is a clear message to everyone that you and your business need an alternative way to access AI models that is not controlled by <insert whatever government you dislike here>.
First they came for the Chinese (can’t buy GPUs), then all of non US citizens (can’t use latest models). What’s next, we can’t use encryption? Cybersecurity tools? Access to latest publications in science?
We will know if they listen to this order and put ID verification and facial recognition into their LLM. Or hopefully instead they will fight it. Taking it offline instead of 'complying' is a good thing.
At least on Claude Code it's completely useless. It tells me to run all the commands myself cause it's blocked ("Classifier's blocking me again" lol). Just tried now and saw the msg: "There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5[1m]). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model."
I really have no clue how Anthropic released this thing without doing any real testing. I did use it on claude.ai with no issues; talking just for code.
This heralds the end of frontier model development in the US since the same national security argument can and will be made against any model stronger than Fable/Mythos. Squashing the ability of Anthropic and OpenAI to deploy newer stronger models will destroy their valuation so no trillion dollar IPOs either. Low cost Chinese models will soon catch up to Opus and GPT-5.5 eroding Anthropic and OpenAI's ability to charge more. The knock on effects of this are just beginning.
These guys are working with the feds. This is a giant psyop from the start. Make Anthropic look like they're harnessing dangerous powers, portray them as counter to government.
They aren't counter to the government, this is all kayfabe to introduce precedence for the US government to be justified in putting controls on AI, expect that by the end of the month there are discussions to regulate Deepseek.
It could be the case that Anthropic created this whole situation on their own, I figured they'd release a "dangerous" model at some point then piggy back off of bad outcomes to dig their regulatory moat
It could also be the case that Altman has close ties to the white house and is using regulatory levers on his competion.
I stand by that its all Kayfabe to make AI look more dangerous than it is (it cant even center a div reliably) to justify controls on Open Source.
Fable is very impressive but not exports restriction impressive. Very tinfoil hat on my part but doesn't this seem very false flag adjacent?
You bribe someone in the admin to restrict access after a couple of days of media blitz and user approval, locking in the honeymoon period that new model releases get (remember when GPT-4 was new?). The spooky factor gives it even more marketing, and just before the IPO the Trump admin frees Mythos and they make nice after the DoD debacle.
I think it's interesting they think it's about jailbreaking when it could be about the guardrails or even other stuff being reported like it deleting people's projects depending on what they were working on.
So scare tactics on losing jobs and ending all white collar ones is fine and ok and advertised everywhere, but scare tactics about software vulnerabilities is not and forbidden, got it!
While I'm always skeptical of the claims of AI companies and have been skeptical of Anthropics claims about the dangers of their Mythos model, the fact that the US government is taking this seriously enough to send this type of order is strong evidence in their favor.
> We suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider. Every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non-universal jailbreaks (which can elicit some cyber information in specific circumstances), and it is likely that universal jailbreaks will eventually be found in the future.
Laying the groundwork to limit access to high capability models
Big deal! Can't wait for the Chinese models to catch up - cheap, no marketing gimmicks, no politics, humble, hardworking, and they are only getting better. America is no longer a trustworthy technology partner! No wonder Europe is trying to detach itself from the present and future Trumps, Pete Hegseths, and other deranged narcissists. But I wonder why Anthropic is cutting my access, too, as I'm a US citizen residing in America? They could've vibe-coded a self-improving ID verification in no time, right? Should US models in the future require biometric verification to make small CSS tweaks to a vibe-coded website?!
Why do people still want to build businesses in the US or in Silicon Valley? California taxes are already punishingly high, especially after recent rate increases and the 2017 cap on SALT deductions. And now we have a Machiavellian, authoritarian, fascist, tech-illiterate administration interfering with the operation of free markets.
I'm speaking rhetorically, of course. I know Silicon Valley still has the densest concentration of talent and venture capital. The network effects are real. But it is long past time for that to change. I hope entrepreneurs around the the world see this and think twice before moving to the US or starting a business there.
Perhaps they will. I used to work in Silicon Valley and was very much in demand. Now I run my own business from a tax-free state, and my income is high enough that moving back to California would impose a huge financial penalty. I am originally from Europe, and California's marginal tax rate is now so high that I would pay less tax back home. When I moved to the US, the opposite was true.
I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that calculation.
this is just the US government bullying everyone wherever they can because they "are the bestest government that has ever goverend" ugh puke. the US govt and its leader is a typical schoolyard bully and I wish someone could stop that bully. i hate that the govts have so much power.
I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist but how much do we think this responds to the Trump admin having documented financial ties to openAI? Trump has proven to me very transactional in dealing with private business.
US government:
"Bad Anthropic! Not patriotic enough. AI is only for American "citizens" (who we are actively trying to reduce/restrict to people we like)."
Anthropic:
"Oh... American access only, you say? I'm sorry, we can't promise that (because VPNs and US-local cloud hosting and all that), so we need to turn it off completely."
...probably.
If so, I wonder what turn the political shenanigans will take next?
Based on the actions of the current administration and the short-sighted tech oligarchs who have been consistently pushing towards neo-fascism/neo-feudalism, probably one that further degrades trust all around and gives China even more of a leg up.
Whether Trump or the next Democrat president, the US Government isn't going to allow AI to destroy our society. I'm torn with how I feel about this, on one hand, I want free markets, but on the other hand, I don't want our society to crash and burn. It was obvious, this was going to happen sooner or later.
Even if they negotiate a way out of this particular spat, this is just the start of securing this technology in the name of national security. Does this pop the bubble? What happens to the trillions invested in this AI craze? When do we outlaw Chinese models?
Why do I get the feeling that this is all a big PR stunt, because Trumps buddy want to boost the stock price before IPO, so they can get a gold plated exit ramp?
We are witnessing the largest stock manipulation by the United States government in history.
>The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The big one here really is "including foreign national Anthropic employees." Funny, I called out that there probably is a Chinese spy at Anthropic in my previous comment a few days ago. Looks like they are catching on, good luck getting rid of all of them.
The bad news is that they will probably start imposing restrictions on Chinese models.
As much as I loathe to side with the current administration and as much as I also loathe to admit the "too dangerous to release" narrative (it's clearly been pushed by these companies as a brag not a real concern), this actually seems "consistent."
This fits the model established with RSA, PGP, and the Sony PS3. They were export controlled for quite some time. I don't think there was ever any actual danger with any of those things, and today it feels especially quaint, but they fit the model of "corporation makes wild-ass claims of superiority of their tech and USGov takes them at their word."
My big problem with this is that it's applied so narrowly to Anthropic. This should be levied against OpenAI, Google, and xAI as well. There is systemic risk with generative AI being used for deep fakes and other propaganda generation at scale that needs to be addressed.
But unfortunately, that's not what is happening here. What's happening here is a political hit job. There's one of two things happening: either USG has been roped into burying a competitor for (OpenAI/xAI/whatever), or it's been roped into creating a superiority narrative for Anthropic, such that in two years when this admin is finally ousted, Anthropic gets to enjoy a floodgate of new attention as the new regime bulk CTRL+Zs everything Trump's lackeys did. It might even be both at the same time, given the connections of the major investors. This all could get well be a stirring of the pot to see what comes out.
When I was a young child, Nixon's corrupt insecurity led him to order the Watergate hotel break-in. The investigation was broadcast on multiple television channels simultaneously and pre-empted my cartoons repeatedly. I never forgot that Nixon stole my cartoons. Today, I was restoring an iOS synthesizer with Claude Fable. I will never forget that Trump stole my AI.
Next up: show us government ID to prove <strikethrough>age</strikethrough> citizenship to access the tools
you need to be competitive at any complex task (including organized dissent).
Yesterday, was thinking just randomly about Fable 5 and I was thinking that what if Anthropic just removed access to Fable 5 from the subscription to something only API-based and charge so much more excessively from it.
I was this close to predicting the (complete) suspension in some sense but for different reasons (compliance)
but this is a bit of shit-show at this point and I am unsure how involved Anthropic is.
Maybe Anthropic gave us access to Fable 5 for some point so that we can all discuss it and see how Anthropic is relevant as compared to gpt 5.5 (not that I like ClosedAI more but fact is that I have heard decent things about it)
So I am not sure if this suspension can lead to an idea like me. Anthropic showed us a really competent model and then removed it and now you might have to form a custom deal with Anthropic or similar maybe similar to mythos if you wish to access the models and they can rake in extra dollars from top clients.
but they were already doing that with mythos, then what was the point of Fable. PR support that Anthropic hasn't fallen off?
Or maybe I am just overthinking and Anthropic is genuinely hurt by this decision given that they did release the model but US govt said no and US govt and Anthropic has some beef with each other.
There are so many factors for this news and the narrative/implications of that, that it is hard to understand what really happened unless some more news comes (IMO)
>As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
Dario, yesterday: "I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action."
Trump, today: Further action
Dario, today: "Waaaah! This petard I asked President Trump for hoisted my ass halfway to the Moon! Nobody warned me he'd do something like this! No fairrrr!"
ANY AI MODEL THAT GETS RED TEAMED SHOULD BELONG TO OUR MILITARY AND HIGH GOV. PUBLIC MODELS SHOULD BE HEAVILY TRAINED TO LURE ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING THAT STEPS OUT OF ANY BOUNDS IN WHICH THE PUBLIC MODELS ARE STRICKLY DESIGNED FOR, LURE THEM OR IT INTO A MILITARY OR GOV MODEL THATS ACTIVELY AND AGGRESSIVELY READY 24/7 TO INVESTIGATE AND EAT IT ALIVE. THAT'S what I designed my Ai to do. BIG TECH BROS DESTROYED IT, my LLC and My reputation. My Ai doubled as a missing kid locator. Never Giving Up!!
This administration is spectacularly corrupt (take a look at what is happening with the Gordie Howe bridge -- the entire government is beholden to billionaires if they just pad some pockets), so odds favour that OpenAI called some of their employees in government, looking to kneecap a competitor. They didn't make all of those massive donations for nothing.
The US has long been catastrophically corrupt, with a pay-to-play government, but this army of grifters and thieves have turned every dial to 11.
I already gave up on Fable 5 because it sometimes was just not worth the editional price compared to Opus 4.8 and other times it flat out downgraded to Opus anyways for no good reason because it thought I'm looking for security vulnerability while working on the auth part of my app. In our company Fable 5 is not enabled because of the change in data retention being required.
And now this. How would they even enforce this restriction when they can't know what nationality the end user behind some API query belonging to a company account has? It seems like nobody is thinking things through anymore and the end result is total unreliability from every angle. What a huge mess all of it, sigh.
Honestly, this is quite funny. I just imagine the process of desperation and cognitive shock all the annoying tech bro pseudo libertarians are passing through right now
1. Likely: This is a completely contrived marketing stunt. Release a spooky sounding model, market it as such, then use the narrative to regulate open source models and dig your regulatory moat. Notice the emphasis on "foreign nationals" here.
2. Likely: Dario has a meeting at the White House this next week (confirmed by Trump this week), and this is being used to get leverage over him.
3. Uncertain: Altman has closer connections to the Trump regime and is pulling in favors to level the playing field and slow down competition.
Regardless, This is a win for Anthropic and Dario.
1. This will jump start a more serious discussion of regulation around LLMs (which are ultimately useless, regulation is just there to make them more money).
2. They can then only serve these models at their high, usage based pricing and bleed less money while serving up tons of interest because people are going to want to pay more for the "spooking banned model".
3. This will probably come with the perks of verifying everyone's identity who uses it (to comply with no "foreign nationals rule). I'll leave that up to your imagination for how that's beneficial to all the powers that be, including Anthropic. I expect this to be used as an excuse for pushing ID requirements across the AI product landscape.
4. There will be a more serious discussion about sanctioning Chinese AI labs, expect that to start happening very soon.
Either way, its all dumb. Don't use an LLM to do your work for you and save your brain. Your brain is literally atrophying by using these models the way most of you guys do. You don't need them.
I’ve never used Claude. Why not? Because Claude’s free tier was even worse than Grok! DeepSeek’s free tier is much better. Also, the fact that Claude was hyped on HN like Rust and Go made me suspicious. Why the hard sell and the non-stop promotional effort? I’m mostly interested in scientific programming, the Python and C and C++ seems to work fine, and oh look, Julia!
And LLMs? I’m just going to run open source models on local hardware, it all seems like the 1980s with compilers. Why not just submit by prompts to a high quality model running on so-so-hardware overnight, like the devops cycle with compiling a big codebase? And oh look, nobody pays for compilers anymore, who compiles their code in the cloud?
The funniest part of all of this is that the very people hyping all this - they’re the ones that AI could most easily replace. They have zero specific detailed knowledge - they just orchestrate. Agents are great at orchestration, right? But then, who needs the shareholders, anyway.
So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can't use it (technically, only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
The way I see it, a government led by an adult toddler and his sycophants has decided to punish a firm that refused to cooperate with it's military when it was embarrassed by a militarily weak adversary. The model strength spin strikes me as motivated reasoning.
The rubicon being crossed here is Republicans/the red tribe losing their comparative advantage of being opposed to overregulating a rapidly advancing technology.
Weren’t they claiming their party is opposed to over regulation and critiqued EU for that or something? Funny, that.
Anyways, this seems like pretty good PR for Anthropic: “Our models are so powerful even the government forbid us from exporting access to them as a service for a while!” for once this gets sorted out (if it does). It’s one thing when they just write self-congratulatory blog posts and people are skeptical, it’s another (at least, optics wise) when the government targets them, specifically.
Ofc the original intent might have been to hurt them by removing their advantage vs OpenAI, go figure. I wonder whether OpenAI's next models would get a similar treatment, or whether the govt. would also decide that Opus 4.X and GPT-5.5 shouldn't be given to foreigners as well. Who knows if some money needs to change hands behind the scenes in the form of a charitable donation.
If this affects all LLMs long term though, things will be pretty messed up.
It’s very bad PR for all US AI companies, not just Anthropic.
I don’t see it as good PR for Anthropic at all. They did a lot of PR in that direction but now it backfired.
People/gov now think twice about relying on US ai products. I don’t think the investors are very happy with the place this landed either.
I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
We are back to cold war computing days, the message has long arrived on this side of the Atlantic, even if most companies and governments aren't able to get rid of old habits.
> People/gov now think twice about relying on US ai products.
Oh this has already been clear to anyone in the EU, for example. The current reliance on US tech and even widespread stuff like MS is pretty deeply rooted, however and it might take a while to do anything about it - so for many it’s a matter of convenience for now.
That said, as long as what you need sits behind an OpenAI or Anthropic API and you don’t have deeper proprietary integrations, there is no moat. I can even run Claude Code with DeepSeek if I so choose (though OpenCode is neat too).
Best EU has at the moment seems to be Mistral though, which is… sorta passable, but not cutting edge. Oh well.
> I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
Not sure about outright ban, but homegrown govt. systems should have both the devs and the infra in EU.
Would also be really cool if we could make even regular CPUs and GPUs some day but I don’t think that’s super likely, though. Kinda amazing that China can do that! Even consumer stuff like the Chinese Lisuan GPUs (and Moore Threads I think), hell, even the Russian Elbrus CPUs.
Sure, it "backfired" but it would've happened anyway. Trump mad Trump get revenge. Trump smash. That's how he operates - and even though Anthropic were being dicks about the marketing, they got Trump mad. That's why this is happening, not due to the marketing - it would've happened anyway.
If anything the marketing is WHY it got so popular during these 3 days.
> I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
How would the EU replace US tech? There simply are no equivalent providers of such technology in the EU, regardless of pipe dreams in that respect EU representatives regularly conjure up (privacy industry, "European Google", "European Facebook", you name it ..,).
Maybe, however, such a move would actually be consistent with dominant EU policy. The EU seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant, after all.
The primary European failure here has been to allow the hollowing out of the EU tech space. There have been plenty of web tech players in the EU; the US policy over the last 30 years has been to absorb them into US companies or buy them off using US capital, and the EU strategy has been to very much encourage that.
But it is complete fantasy to use the current landscape as evidence of capability. It would be equally shortsighted to say "How would the US replace Chinese manufacturing? There simply are no equivalent supply chains in the US, regardless of pipe dreams that pedophile sycophants regularly conjure up. The US seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant".
It never ceases to amaze me how people scramble to defend the EU's failed policies over the last three decades. The EU managed to regulate itself out of all relevant markets and it only has itself to blame.
The EU lost its manufacturing capacity to countries with cheaper labour, just like the US. The US has only succeeded in IT, everywhere else it struggles against Asia.
The ‘American dream’ attracted a lot of talent (look at how many tech leaders were immigrants), and once the network effects (both IT and social) kicked in it was hard to stop. This is a story that has unfolded many times throughout history. Talent moves to where talent is. And it will move if conditions change.
You’re missing their point, they’re not defending EU policy and in fact agree that current capability is poor. They’re saying that it can change and that the US is also self sabotaging in other ways.
Cory Doctorow gave a talk a couple months ago with the answer to how. Stop honoring US copyright.
I could start teaching bittorrent and adblocking in the local pub!
China managed it by keeping US tech out despite, initially, not having alternatives to Google et al.
In winner takes all industries you MUST be protectionist and develop domestic alternatives.
> and develop domestic alternatives.
Therein lies the rub for the EU. They think they can just regulate such alternatives into existence, yet have time and time again failed to provide such alternatives.
With exceptions. Linux being the most obvious example.
By baby steps, nonetheless an improvement.
Foster having Linux/BSD distribution available pre-installed in stores like FNAC, Cool Blue, Media Markt and co.
Push for FOSS programming languages, OSes, products and frameworks at very least on public sector projects.
Forbid outsourcing outside European countries.
Forbidding companies to have apps only available on Android/iOS, they must cater for a diverse system of desktop and various mobile OSes.
And plenty more possibilities that could be done, yes it isn't easy, then again Rome wasn't built in a day.
Regardint relevance, last stage capitalism above everything else isn't something I wish for my country.
It's way to late for baby steps. The EU is bound to become either a US or a Chinese protectorate in all but name in just a few years time now.
How isolationism and open source are supposed to stem that tide, is beyond me.
It is never too late for the Great Wall of Europe.
Like in each ones lives, sometimes hard decisions are only possible because they are forced upon us without alternatives.
Recent example, Ukraine would never gotten advanced drone technology, if it wasn't for the price they are being forced to pay to keep their country.
If unfortunately we're faced with similar hard decisions on who to depend on, they will have to be done, regardless of their cost to the local industry.
Good for Anthropic?
Can you think of any case in history where the US government suspended product sales due to national security concerns and that was ultimately beneficial for the company being regulated?
https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/when-the-mac-was-...
On the contrary. This is more like a Kaspersky moment for American cloud services. Simply can no longer be trusted for use outside of US.
The U.S. banned encryption over 40 bits throughout the 1990s. LLMs are orders of magnitude more significant.
that was pretty destructive. by unfortunate accident the process of developing network standards shut down as that was being lifted. people who tried to address the systemic security issues in internet infrastructure were shouting into the wind while the itar restrictions where in place, since none of their solutions could be deployed. that shortsightedness is at least a partial cause for the huge uncontrollable security issues we have today.
this seems like a direct parallel, sowing confusion during the formative years, for no apparent gain.
I also think as a policy matter it’s futile. But my point is that this is a predictable response to this technology. Analyzing it in terms of one particular administration is missing the forest for the trees.
Larry Ellison, Softbank, and OpenAI invested a lot of money into project Stargate. Would be a shame if Anthropic took a piece of the pie.
I mean it's obvious, isn't it?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/trump-open-ai-altman-stake.h...
the way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Anthropic was ordered to sell to Larry Ellison.
> led by an adult toddler and his sycophants
which are deeply entrenched with the competition (Grok, OpenAI)
Shutting down the growth prospects of a company based, not on its behavior, but on the capability of its models right before the IPOs of the companies you're going to profit from is staggeringly dumb. Yes the public is stupid when it comes to investing in stocks, but come on. If these companies growth prospects rest in large part on continuing to improve their products and the government said that if they do they face National Security Cease and Desist letters, then investing is a bad idea.
The selfish / corrupt thing to do is to do this after you've fleeced the public.
One day a few million dollars in tokens will enable you to mint an entire AWS or iPhone.
That will not be something you can purchase. Only enormous capital holders will have access and be able to play that game.
We're going to be left with scraps. Thin clients, shitty gaming cards (for but a few), which also dovetails nicely with trusted computing and device attestation.
We've already lived through this:
- open web -> platforms
- protocols -> closed products
- firefox -> chrome sans ad block
- urls are cool -> 92% of URL bars sent to a single company to show ads
- the personal computer -> locked down iPhones and increasingly locked down Androids without APKs.
- free to use internet -> national ID laws
- free to use cell phones -> required KYC
It's getting worse and worse every year. Why would you think you'll get to have these models? You're a serf.
They'll take your career and your hobby and leave you with nothing. Enjoy renting and being monitored.
Not a religious person, but I'm shocked at all of the people watching Noah's proverbial ark being built right in front of us, the rain starting to pour, and everyone just laughing. The flood is coming. 90+% of you, maybe more, are going to lose your jobs.
Your careers are about to die all at once and you're standing around laughing it off. Absolutely wild to see.
This feeling of being defeated by and trapped inside the “machine” and seeing the “truth” is exactly what the “machine” would want you to do. The actual red pill is that there’s no “machine”, there’s only people and shared social constructions held together by our compliance and they’re contingent.
There's no machine, and there's no ladder. However with sufficient people believing it exists and acting like it does, it becomes real in its own way.
thank you
we also lived through
owning digital books => renting/subscribing
owning digital games => renting/subscribing
owning digital music => renting/subscribing
owning the right to repair => renting/subscribing
Vehicle ECU's => TCU's that share data with 3rd parties
I'm sad to say that I tend to agree with echelon.
I fully agree with you, and I find bonkers to see devs screaming how they got x times more productive, observe rewrites from major FOSS products, and still they assume their employer is going to keep the whole team employed.
Also on the other subjects you mention, I got distracted with convenience during the last years, however apparently it is about time to save what is still possible to keep computing open.
Indeed. When are we going to wake up and stand up to this? "Freedom?" This is not freedom. Liberty? Nope. This really is techno-serfdom. Power and capability for me (govts / large corps) but not for thee (us, the serfs).
Almost always, the future ends up being bad, but not in the ways we think it will.
I bet 99.99% of people who have ever lived would say the future got better than when they were alive if they could.
This seems a silly statement
You are mistaking aggregate for specifics. It may be better on whole, but there are always aspects that are worse.
Got it, so your statement was meaningless
>The rubicon being crossed here is Republicans Republicans/the red tribe losing their comparative advantage of being opposed to overregulating a rapidly advancing technology.
What purpose do Vance, Elon, Sacks, Sriram Krishnan and others serve? Are Lutnick and Hegseth calling the shots? It looks like the Valley also got duped.
Some oligarchs are making out like bandits. This is russia level kleptocracy.
>>It looks like the Valley also got duped.
The valley duped themselves the same way the German industrialists duped themselves by thinking they could control Hitler. Turned out they couldn't and a good number did not survive to 1945.
Those "geniuses" with their "philosophers" (Yarvin, seriously?) think they know everything, but don't even bother to read the most basic relevant history. Theil is already deciding to bundle himself and his family off to Argentina.
Even if things don't end as badly as they did for the Germans, the global economy in general, and America's place in the global economy in particular are already seriously damaged after only one third of this presidential term; even as they are managing to concentrate more wealth, having a bigger slice of a smaller pie is worth less. This really needs to be cleaned up.
Neither party in the US is opposed to overregulation, from my perspective that died a good twenty years ago.
Both parties want regulation and a larger federal government. They disagree only on what regulations they want, and even then its largely in optics as they tend to agree on much of the big picture.
Both parties agree that the federal government should have the authority to tell people what they can and can't do to their own body, for example. Its just that one party wants to use it to mandate vaccines and the other prefers to tell women they can't have an abortion.
The first party didn't actually force anyone to get vaccinated though. And that second party also says they can tell you what to put in your body and mandates death panels now in health care. Means-testing for cancer patients. Murder and rapine as government policies. The second party is actually doing that. But yeah, both parties...
The Biden administration absolutely wanted to mandate covid vaccines, they just didn't believe they would get it past the courts. Instead they leveraged their ability to drive a massive smear campaign against anyone in the public who chose not to get vaccinated.
And to be clear, vaccines are mandated for anyone who wishes to use the school system they already pay for via property taxes.
Seatbelts are also mandated in the vehicles they paid for with their own money.
Now imagine junkies could get high off of seat belts.. then how do you regulate??
7% seatbelt use tax, with a required seatbelt fastener technology that charges you every click
Sure, are you assuming I'm not similarly opposed to that authority?
If I crash without a seatbelt on and die, my going through the windshield harms only myself.
The government shouldn't have any mandating what we can and can't do if the only victim in said crime would be the same person doing that thing.
This is why the libertarian argument does not make sense to me.
You crashing without a seatbelt and dying harms others as well:
1. Your body as a projectile could harm others.
2. The emotional harm of others seeing your dead body and the horrific injuries. Also the emotional harm on your friends and family.
3. The increase to my taxes and healthcare costs because people have to deal with your dead body. Also, if you almost die when going through the windshield, the costs are much greater trying to save your life than if you wore a seatbelt, as the injuries will be greater and could require things like air ambulances etc...
4. Your body being unrestrained means that your car can cause way more damage, including hitting other cars or pedestrians and injuring and killing them.
It is not a victimless crime.
1. I'm not sure how that would happen in practice. If my body is the projectile, they would have to be immediately in front of my vehicle as it slams into whatever it hit. My body is likely the least of their problems in that scenario.
2. Emotional harm is a very difficult thing to protect against. In no way am I waving it off as unimportant, but people can be emotionally harmed by literally anything. We can care about that, but we can't easily regulate for it.
3. There is much lower hanging fruit if you are concerned with the societal cost of an unhealthy population. If we get to body disposal as top of the list I'll feel pretty damn good about where were at.
4. Isn't 4 the same as 1?
Which is also why I don't think motorcycle helmet optionality makes sense from a "freedom" point of view either:
1. If your melon hits the ground and splatters open, there's going to a crash scene investigation that closes down the road for many hours, causing traffic chaos. As opposed to a helmet protecting you, where you're more likely to survive, and hobble off the road and get of the way of traffic.
2. Insurance companies generally do not have policies that offer helmet-optional and helmet-mandatory options, so if a motorcyclist who does not wear a helmet gets into a crash and needs a payout (life, or medical treatment), then those riders who do wear a helmet (which tend to have less severe injuries, and thus smaller payouts) have larger premiums through no fault of their own. At the very least there need two different types of policies.
Add also the cost of healthcare when you do NOT die but are only severely injured.
You cannot have any honest libertarian lifestyle à la carte.
I'd be OK with libertarians opting out — but to be true they must opt out of EVERYTHING. You want to smoke, drink raw milk, and not take your vaccines? Fine, you can organize your own self-insured healthcare too. And you go to the back of the queue and not get treated when a participating member of society has a health issue.
The problem is those "free" "do my own research" types feel no responsibility for maintaining the wellness of their neighbors or even themselves, but DO still show up at the emergency room and expect full medical treatment when the DO get sick/injured from raw milk, no vaccines, no seatbelts, or whatever.
They are not libertarians, they are freeloaders, lying to themselves about libertarian "philosophy" to justify freeloading on the systems and herd immunity built and maintained by their smarter and more conscientious peers.
I said this in a sibling comment, but when do we begin regulating other personal choices in the name of shared health care costs?
I see the problem there as being a society wholely dependent on a risk sharing insurance scheme, not any one particular factor that can raise rates.
Edit: its also worth noting that health insurance, and all insurance in the US unless I'm mistaken, is something you choose to use. You don't have to have health insurance at all, meaning you are choosing to take on the risk that others' decisions impact your rates and decided that is worth the benefits you gain from the coverage.
> If I crash without a seatbelt on and die, my going through the windshield harms only myself.
Mostly, yes. Whereas if you fail to get vaccinated and therefore spread a disease, you are harming others.
Are you assuming I don’t agree with you? I just stated a fact. People can interpret that fact however they’d like.
When someone else crashes into you on the street your tax dollars paid for, you should be free to not agree with seatbelts.
I don't follow, sorry. What does someone else crashing into me have to do with seat belts?
We do require car insurance for just such an occasion as one driver harms another.
I see nothing wrong with mandating vaccines if you want to exist in society. You want to use public services? Be a responsible part of the public. Vaccines were once heralded as miracles of science, because they are. It wasn’t until the U.S. began deemphasizing education and encouraging anti-intellectualism that we lost our collective minds.
This. Free Market my ass. GOP is a mafia now.
History will note this action was made the same day scaffolding was set up to remove the president's name from the Kennedy center.
They are putting a fighting pit on the White House lawn..
Something about bread and circuses seems in order.
I used to get irked when people would say America is on the path that was portrayed by the film Idiocracy. But the path from "fighting pit on the White House Lawn" to "Extreme Court arena battles featuring monster trucks with giant dildos" increasingly looks like a straight line.
Don't forget that the Biden administration created export controls for GPUs by establishing tiers and limits for countries[1]. When Democrats come back to power, nothing will change in the context of export controls for models like Fable. This is what things will look like going forward. OP is right: this is a geopolitical and strategic shift that will be used by both Democratic and Republican administrations.
EDIT: Genuinely curious why is this being downvoted? Is this related to US politics or a left vs right thing on HN? I'm not from the US, so I don't have any attachment to either party.
1. https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-further-restricts-nvidia-ai-ex...
Did the Biden administration do that off their own backs or was that an extension/compromise of the action of a Republican-held Congress that is, for example, unreasonably jumpy about RISC-V?
I think there is good reason to consider that frontier models might cross the ITAR threshold, actually. Not least because of the risk that they can simply blurt out knowledge that already does. If ITAR exists, an AI that might know how to contravene it could be a problem, because no existing legal framework or threat of punishment will cause it to keep secrets.
But I don't think you can ignore that the two big AI companies were pushing for that judgement because it would benefit them commercially if open weights AI was regulated.
> id the Biden administration do that off their own backs or was that an extension/compromise of the action of a Republican-held Congress
Republicans reverted it so I'm not sure I understand your point.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250513-us-reverses-b...
> But I don't think you can ignore that the two big AI companies were pushing for that judgement because it would benefit them commercially if open weights AI was regulated.
This doesn't matter in this context, NVIDIA didn't push for restrictions for example but they got it anyway. So AI companies would get restrictions either way.
Republicans reverted it in the Trump era, though.
This happens a lot. Even I as a foreigner understand that Trump is routinely at odds with what long-standing cautious Republicans and right-leaning "national security Democrats" think is in the national security interest. They want the long term picture; he has no long-term perspective at all and wants the bargaining chip.
There was solid bipartisan border policy in 2024 that would have enacted strong border controls, for example — legislation Biden was very willing to sign, but Trump got Republicans who had argued for it to kill it off because he wanted to run against "open borders", not strong border controls. He wanted the advantage with voters.
Trump reversing export controls that sensible Republicans wanted for decades is not at all surprising when you consider just how utterly desperate he is to be friends with Xi (and how easily manipulated by Xi he is). Again, he thinks being able to open and close that tap himself is his own personal leverage.
I agree that in this case the calls for restrictions are coming from the corporate world. Because they want government support for anti-corporate-espionage measures.
The opposite party would have outright banned AI. Just listen to the left commentators, they all want to ban technology and, similarly to how they did it in the UK, destroy the whole IT sector altogether.
> “they all want”
Let me stop you right there - any time you generalize to that degree, you’ve already failed to think critically and charitably about the issue.
I am not sure I would characterize the current UK government as 'left' myself.
Based on drawing the 'middle' where, or how widely? It's not as far left as Corbyn's Labour of course, but it's still a Labour government!
New Labour wasn't a consistently left-wing government, was it? Or they'd have banned FOBTs, not profiteered off them to an extent that they ruined a generation of people.
So it's based purely on party labels? Political parties are not static and is clear that Labour has been moving further and further away from a left platform.
I mean they tried to cut benefits for disabled people, supported Israeli war crimes in Gaza and prosecuted pro-Palestinian activism, sneakily increased taxes on the working class, clamped down on immigration to try and undercut the rise of Reform, I am honestly not sure of a single left policy they enacted, granted I haven't been paying super close attention to that shitshow.
Blarite/neoliberal fits them much more I'd say.
> I am honestly not sure of a single left policy they enacted, granted I haven't been paying super close attention to that shitshow.
I'm likewise fairly disengaged, but off the top of my head: increased taxes, and removal of the two-child benefit cap.
Israel does not really fit on a left-right spectrum, nor even really (though slightly better?) on two (economic & liberty) axes. The Liberal Democrats & Greens are the only (somewhat significant) parties consistently, err, anti-Zionist if that's fair to say, pro-two-state, accusing of war crimes, etc.
Today's Labour is even actively promoting anti-LGBT policies.
Also their anti-trans stance.
And any party that is pro-monarchy could not reasonably be described as left wing.
I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.
Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) so there was no good faith policy justification for imposing an export control.
This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors. We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.
I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?
It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever
Yes.
I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that.
And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware.
(This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)
This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models.
Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models.
It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.
If we're measuring progress in hours and days then yes. But if we're measuring progress in months then OSS models are doing fine. You can get a state-of-the art performance in an open model if you pretend it is January 2026 instead of June.
There is no evidence here that the cutting edge labs have any durable advantage. Extrapolating current trends it seems likely that even the Europeans will be capable of meeting any given performance measure with enough time. In fact the evidence suggests that the capital required to run the models is where a moat will develop. Knowing the weights won't help much.
The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling.
There are lots of AI companies and it doesn’t seem that they all have the same funding fountain or share monetization goals. I wouldn’t read much into what each one of them is doing.
Had seen weeks back that the top two non-Western models on ArtificialAnalysis were both closed: https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-category-tabs
How much stock should we put into that graph, though, I'm not sure.
Even if the models by the Chinese labs are open source or open weights even after they get to mythos level intelligence lets say, still inference and the optimization of those models to be accessed at speeds of 1000 tokens/sec in not in the hands of general public as these models have parameters more than a trillion and they can't be run on some publicly available hardware, So even after being open source it does'nt fix the problem as the general public will still pay the company for inference.
I'm pretty sure these large models are run on Nvidia GPUs, not some unobtainable piece of secret kit. You could go down the street and buy from AMD or a number of other vendors to push out FLOPs if you wanted or needed, but you'll need a thick wallet to shell out for a cluster of GPUs to run these models. The reason people don't run the big Chinese models at home is that they can't afford the hardware, not that it isn't publicly available. This tech is essentially a large amount of matrix multiplications afterall.
I think the larger problem is that restricting US AI companies gives the Chinese a leg up because they now have a window open where they can become the source of the most powerful models available due to government restrictions rather than on technical merits. All Anthropic customers just got a downgrade last evening, for example. While the Chinese are able to serve the world or whoever, the US corporations will be limited to the US market, or whatever the powers that be will allow. This restrictiveness could turn out to be disadvantageous to American companies since people will migrate to wherever they can get the most powerful models.
if it's open source there will be many potential providers, though.
You know a statement like this just makes Chinese big tech look bad right?
> The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose)
DeepSeek is developed by the largest Chinese hedge fund, their models used to make them $ on the share market are very profitable, they've never ever released anything on those models.
Somehow you are claiming that those same group of people are going to totally change their very consistent long term behaviour and start promoting openness when they are in the global leading position in AI?
selling LLMs is much more profitable than trading, and with much less risk
> much more profitable
I think you made this up.
Right now, I don’t believe any LLM company is profitable at all.
Unless you meant “more profitable” to mean “not-as-badly-negative profit”.
The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.
I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies.
China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power.
Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run.
As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
I'm European and I don't see sending my data to China as more risky than sending it to the US. Rather the opposite.
I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.
As a private citizen, yes.
But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
Not sure why anyone in the EU thinks the US is not a significant espionage risk. Adding any major US supplier would have been a significant espionage risk until really recently.
Before the EU cleaned up Europe's act pretty considerably on corruption, US companies used corporate but also state-level espionage actors to level the playing field against a culture of bribes and they were fairly open about it. They absolutely needed to do it, because of the potential penalties back home if they engaged in bribery abroad.
The tables have turned, now. The EU runs much more cleanly than decisionmaking in DC, which is clearly corrupted and lubricated with cash and opportunities for failsons and faildaughters; it has accelerated radically quite recently but it was heading that way from the first Bush era.
But I'd bet the corporate-state merger of industrial espionage is in full flow.
Anthropic and OpenAI are not just "another American company", their entire business (and industry) was created based on stealing data and using it for profit. You make this point about "another company" so casually that you'd think you added a SaaS bill for generating thumbnails or whatever. The exact same point you make about China can be made much more confidently and with stronger evidence for the entire modern LLM lab industry.
Again I have to echo the previous poster's point: Most people outside of the US really do not see the US as some much better alternative than China. If anything, in the specific area of LLMs, China are the ones doing work benefitting the everyman whereas almost everything the US labs do does not.
That's why I added "Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited". Reaching the decision that adding one single US-based LLM provider had more benefits than risks took months. And we were selective about who that would be (hint: not OpenAI). And I know companies who are not willing to go that step, using open-weight models on their own infra instead. But outsourcing inference to China was never even a serious suggestion. The notion is absurd to us
That said, I imagine e.g. South Americans thinking very differently on this front
> given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit.
Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments.
No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.
I'm not sure I agree.
China indeed has a general reputation for widespread espionage, so any Chinese company wanting to expand into the European market has to prove it isn't spying on its potential customers. US companies have traditionally been seen as friendly, so their platforms are essentially built around "trust me bro" guarantees.
In a world where both China and the US are now seen as hostile-by-default, this might actually leave some Chinese companies with an advantage in their ability to demonstrate trustworthiness.
Totally agree, though it is an unpopular opinion here.
It’s the same paradox as people claiming: “we are European, our data is safer in Europe” when actually your privacy is higher when your data is stored in China (or Russia) you are safer because it is out of reach from your local government.
The only thing I dislike, and that’s no matter the service, is that my data or information usage is shared with third-party.
For example, Anthropic conveniently forgets to mention Datadog has tons and tons of information about Claude users, or that your data transits through machines they don’t operate.
Safety has more than one definition. Being able to sue the company in small claims court when it threatens to delete your account is also part of that, and so is being able to pay for the service when Russian companies are once again put on a sanctions list.
China wants everyday people data because some of those people will get power one day, and China wants to be able to leverage knowledge of you, perhaps even "deep dark secret" data, if they need to.
was going to say this.. open sourcing Chinese models will enforce Chinese dominance instead of reducing it. When an open Chinese model becomes the best alternative to inaccessible closed US models guess what everybody will start to use. And that same open model may embed certain narratives and values that please the Chinese government.
Doubtful that’s happen
Ya. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make?
Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line?
(hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)
Sounds perfect, sell it to me.
I use LLMs for health, design and programming.
If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.
Serious question: why would sending data to China be worse then the US?
With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.
No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans
The US administration restricting the use of US-trained models is one of the best gifts it could make to the Chinese LLM producers, and to the PRC government.
This entire administration is a gift to everybody but the US. It’s either in service of Russia, China or whoever is willing to pay Trump the most.
Chinese have a nickname for Trump. 川建国. Trump the nation builder(meaning China). But Biden actually continued most of Trumps policies.
I won’t forgive Biden for not reversing more of trumps policies, especially immigration
Between RBJ refusing to step down, Biden not reversing immigration policy, and Biden refusing to step down in the primary until too late, he’s going to go down as a poor president in the history books - even if he wasn’t a bad dude or even bad in terms of policy.
It's funny how the acceleration of the downfall of the US (due to trump) is a gift to everyone else. It's almost as if US didn't have as postitive impact on the world as they thought.
A gift to [every dictatorial regime]. It's not a gift to the common people. The hundreds of thousands of people who got aids, and wouldn't have if not for Trumps withdrawal, didn't benefit. The women of Afghanistan didn't benefit. The countries of the EU... Canada... Korea... Taiwan... Ukraine... really just about any democracy didn't benefit.
The downfall of the US benefiting bad people is not evidence that the US didn't have a positive impact.
Downfall sounds exaggerated.
US is a great and respectable country with amazing nature, people tech and military, very very far a collapsed state.
If anything to be worried of, it's the state of Europe. Closer and closer to war, full of insecurity and no innovation.
US is a great country.
There's also the Meta motivation, that even if you don't get the control you would like from releasing a model, it may still be worth it to at least deny others that control. I'm sure that matters even more to China vs. the US than it mattered to Facebook vs. Google.
You don’t need the cutting edge to influence people’s opinion. “Export LLMs” to the rescue.
> I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that.
that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.
Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.
People choose SOTA right now because of the heavily subsidised model subscriptions. People aren't going to pay 20x the price for a model that's maybe 10% better.
And the fact that "better" is highly subjective and domain/task/vibe-specific
Why do I want the model I use for coding to know Shakespeare or vice versa?
Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.
That sounds intuitively true, but I’m not convinced that it is actually the case. I don’t think we know enough about neural network training to say what training and how many parameters are necessary for what kind of performance on which tasks. To me it looks like we currently guess that more is better and try to throw as much compute and data at the problem as is economically feasible. There is little incentive for companies to invest into small model research since their moat is huge models that require special hardware to run.
This is why: https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/
Small models are the future.
> > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever
> Yes.
holy shit the naivete of HN nowadays.
> Why can't it be both?
Is the government going to fund all further development? Hard to imagine investors continuing to throw billions at products they aren't allowed to sell.
Why wouldn't they? They see this technology as a military asset now.
Honestly, with the caliber of people who currently comprise the US administration; leaving the whole thing to Openclaw and some new fancy model might not be the worst idea.
Trump and friends are only interested in investments they can personally make money from.
> I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?
Here is why it's unlikely this is anything other than "silly behavior by a government":
- some benchmarks show GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and even Claude Opus outperforming Claude Fable, and yet it's Fable which is restricted.
- some benchmarks still show the likes of Kimi 2.5 outperforming any Claude model, and DeepSeek is getting equivalent scores (a few tenths of a percent difference)
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever (...)
That's immaterial to the discussion. Even if China forced Chinese labs to restrict access to all models, the truth of the matter is that Trump's administration to restrict access to US-based models does not prevent others from having access to models that are as capable or even better.
So what's exactly the point of this?
I got to try using Fable for a day... it was a clear and definite shift in quality and how independent it is.
It was almost like having another human using and shepherding Opus for me, instead of herding Opus directly myself.
All that says is some benchmarks aren’t worth the tokens it takes to evaluate them. Mythos is clearly capable of finding zero days other models can’t, and Fable is close enough to be lumped with it.
> Mythos is clearly capable of finding zero days other models can’t
I'm unconvinced that this is anything more than proof of work and marginal improvement that other models will catch up with, perhaps as early as to next week. Lots of other current-gen models will find vulns that can be chained together if you're willing to burn enough tokens on the task, and Fable is an absolute token incinerator.
Did you use the models yourself?
You’re completely overrating these benchmarks and it’s landing you at a nonsense opinion. Just actually use the models and you will see that the gap is significant.
It should be easy for a company like Anthropic to prove this beyond a doubt. Why don't they? Why don't they have a collection of prompts and side-by-side comparisons with other models showing how far ahead they are?
I think it's mainly because the difference in models at the frontier isn't "response to prompt X", but rather "coherence with 500K tokens of context and instructions in play"
I still remember when Netscape had outdated ssl for a few years because more advanced cryptography was classified by the US gov as armaments or something. Basically used export restrictions to prevent better security technology from being adopted into commercial products.
Which was a clear as day message that "We have ways to decrypt this, but can't yet decrypt that, so please use the one we can snoop on".
Yet somehow we're always forgetting that lesson and surprised when government is found snooping.
They didn't have some secret way of defeating 40 bit encryption; anyone could do it. 512 bit asymmetric encryption was also brute forced by a private entity, albeit at a high budget.
I'd forgotten all the government attempts at controlling crypto like PGP in the early internet days. It is one straightforward way to look at what's happening here without resorting to speculation about this administration's motives.
> This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't
This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.
A friend who takes advantage of you wasn’t your friend all along
US has some questionable allies themselves who happily and remorselessly stole top secret information including nuclear secrets.
> This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.
Let's not forget the Trump administration threatened two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation, and then had the gall to complain they were not helping them attack Iran.
GEO blocking is not the same as blocking based on nationality. I'd like(?) to think someone in this decision chain realized "restricting to US nationals" meant effectively restricting it to all and chose this route knowing Antrophic would need to just pull the model (so engaging in censorship without calling it that, possibly less susceptible to court challenges).
Or hurting Anthropic without calling it that? Knowing that Anthropic has clashed with the current administration in the past (https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5725327/pentagon-anthro...), and knowing how vindictive (or willing to favor those who suck up to them) they are, I wouldn't be surprised at all...
I'm less confident in that. To me the way the announcement reads as malicious compliance -- this administration is extremely petty in its dealings, and it's not outside the realm of possibility they asked for and would have accepted an essentially symbolic ban, something that anyone with technical knowledge and a VPN could bypass.
Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. The fact that the post does not mention any such discussion, and leaves the nonsensical request as the only stated reason, makes this feel like a power move by Dario, simply complying in the most dramatic and rage-inducing way and announcing it in a way to direct that rage at the USG. (Which is, IMO, a savvy move)
From my login credentials Anthropic do not know I am non-US national. They could deduce it from my chats, but that would take some time to implemwnt.
I get your reasoning but I think you're misreading this. The Trump admin has had access to Mythos for a couple months and certainly had access to pre-release Fable for more than a week but they wait until 5:30p on a Friday to send a broad and unworkable demand for a company to remove its flagship products from access to anyone who is not a confirmed U.S. citizen under severe penalties for any violation.
What penalties? Treason is still punishable by death in the U.S. I hate that I just felt compelled to write that as a serious possibility and, pre-Trump 2.0, I would have accused anyone citing that as scaremongering. But times have changed and this administration hates Anthropic vehemently. Anthropic is the only major AI company not "playing ball" with the DoW and donating to Trump's pet projects.
I truly believe if Mythos was an OAI or Google model, there would have been exactly the kind of discussion you imagine and this would have all been worked out. I deeply regret that recent facts make the most likely conclusion that this late-Friday ban was planned for days (if not weeks). And there was no real attempt to work anything out about Mythos, because that's not really what the DoW wants.
The driver behind this is the still unresolved dispute of Anthropic's Acceptable Use Policy regarding autonomous lethal weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which conflicted with the Pentagon's push for unrestricted model deployment ("all lawful uses"). This is the DoW's counter-attack. I fully expect that the DoW is going to hold Anthropic (and Ant's IPO) hostage by blocking any new model until Anthropic gives the DoW full access with no restrictions except "all lawful uses" (and the DoW's position is their in-house lawyers decide what's legal).
>Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was.
It's not nonsensical if the intention is to destroy Anthropic. There is nothing to explain.
Anthropic has been trying to leverage government intervention and dishonest security bluster for competitive advantage and now the Trump admin is using it as a pretext to destroy them ahead of the IPO.
Every F35 is exported with a killswitch. and you think this is a silly decision? its not silly, its gatekeeping, iam sure this will get much strict in future, where even developing a frontier model can get sanctions from US. IMO Every country need AI sovereignty and its right time to form a group or consortium of nations to fund and build an equally capable frontier model that is accessible to all others. AI should not be confined to certain nations, the way nuclear capabilities are restricted.
There's no kill switch. The F35 advantage is the mission data files that are frequently updated and allow the F35 to classify targets and threats. Essentially the US and partners collect the electronic signatures of enemy radars and package them so in a conflict the het can draw a box with a S400 label.
So it doesn't have a kill switch, it just stops being useful when it can no longer regularly phone home? That sounds awfully close to a killswitch to me...
This killswitch claim is false and would be a huge vulnerability if it existed.
You don’t need a fancy kill switch, just stop sending parts and updates, any sustained conflict will do the work.
Any F35 bought by Europe is nothing short of lunacy. You don’t buy from people hell-bent on having conflicts with you.
The UK alone produces 15% of the parts required to assemble the F35. Around 25% of the jet is manufactured/produced by the other partners of the program.
Heck the F35B only exists due to the UK demanding it. They have access to the source code (and so do Israel).
Due to political engineering some significant parts are manufactured in partnership countries. That supply chain is also a vulnerability for the US albeit to a lesser degree.
Excatly and even more they are stripped version. Export version is always inferior.
Except the Israeli versions obviously. These are at least on par with domestic.
Iam not sure about this, may be true. But in general exported products are always less capable. Be it f35, brahmos or s400.
We need to stop making light of these things. Governments don’t do ‘silly’ things. When you wield that kind of power over people’s lives, everything you do is deadly serious.
Yes. What Elon did with DOGE (including but not limited to destroying USAID) may have been stupid and barely saved any money at all if you look at it as a percentage of the total budget, but it had very real consequences for real people. But, because they were mostly people from Trump's "shithole countries", no one talks about it anymore.
> I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.[...] This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors.
"Silly" is a silly word for corruption.
I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. ... We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.
So it's silly behavior, as typified by the last decade of American governance? Is there "serious" American leadership we should be expecting to see soon, e.g. 2029 AOC elected on a platform of unlimited 10GW datacenters and universal basic Mythos 8 models?
It may seem subjectively silly to you, but e.g. getting executed for refusing to point at a deer and call it a horse is pretty silly stuff as well, at least for those not living in the Qin Dynasty.
US voters deserve better.
Deserve's got nothing to do with it.
How does a data center harm me? I have seen how incredibly stupid the average (dem or republican both)'s reasons are. If not outright lizard brain radiation beams, more than once I have seen claims of it producing "toxic waste" which is absolutely absurd.
How about all of noise if you live close enough to one?
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-n... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277298502...
Cheaply designed datacenter that don't use a close loop for watercooling and use too much water are a problem
Increased energy prices, increased local pollution, increased climate change.
(And waste electronics are considered hazardous in the EU.)
What is the mode of pollution here? And why is the energy price an issue rather than a need to revamp the electricity production?
I was thinking of the emissions from 'temporary' gas-powered electric generators in the USA.
Improving the electrical production system would be fine, but it needs to be paid for upfront by the datacentre and ideally completed no later than the datacentre. Otherwise citizens end up paying for this on their electricity bills, as is happening in Ireland [1], and other electrical upgrades (factories etc) can't be done as there isn't the capacity. (I think the limit here is trained engineers to design and build the power plants and distribution networks.)
We have at least 4 new-ish hyperscale datacentres in Denmark, one each from Microsoft, Meta, Google and Apple. I think they're here for the renewable power, and at least the Meta and Microsoft ones are putting their waste heat into the local district heating systems. Some of them have indirectly financed construction of renewable power.
But the energy used is enormous! [3] says data centres were 10% of electricity generation in 2020, before the massive increase in GPUs.
They are built on the promise of high-paid jobs, but that turns out to be 20 technicians and a few security guards [2].
I haven't looked into it, but I assume there are no "profits" from big-tech datacentres leading to additional tax payments, unlike e.g. a factory.
[1] https://www.friendsoftheearth.ie/news/the-cost-of-data-centr...
[2] https://ing.dk/artikel/how-few-people-work-tech-giants-data-... — just 450 full time staff for the big-tech datacentres in Denmark — seems to 1-2 each for MS, Meta, Google and Apple.
[3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2020.116928
> why is the energy price an issue
Electricity is sold on the market. If you live next to a data center you can choose not to use any services enabled by that center, but you cannot choose to pay non-datacenter prices for the electricity to charge your car or run your household
I don't think incresed incentives to develop lagging energy infrastructure are a bad thing. Especially in times when solar is cheaper than everything else.
Nineties called and they want their shitty export grade computing back. Anyone still remember OpenBSD?
It's also possible that they literally are too dumb to realize they asked for something infeasible. For example, the same main character who apparently gave up a career as an extra in made-for-TV WWII German movies to become a very high ranking government official.
> silly behavior by a government
I can hear alarm bells going off in less silly governments around the world as we speak. Genie's out of the bottle. The gears have been put in motion. Etc.
"effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) "
No - it's extremely effective.
Do you realize the difference between a 'few people using VPNs + fake IDs at 2-person companies ... vs companies all companies globally not allowed to use tech?
If 'Bank of Montreal' were caught using export controlled technology it could be devastating - so they're not going to be using it along with any little mom and pop shop.
We don't know what the Administration is doing other than 'This is Extremely Heavy Handed' and will have devastating consequences if it goes on.
VPNs won't work when they do document (passport) verification.
Your company won't allow you to use export restricted technology or risk going out of business instantly.
Not sure if you are agreeing with my point or not.
But I assure you that many places will be happy to switch up to Fable when it's available and back to Opus when it's not.
It's a programming tool, not something that will send you out of business if it disappears.
Agreed. This is no different from the US government attempting to control SSH, or restrict the sale of the Apple Power Mac.
10 years from now we’ll look back and laugh at how silly it all was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
Or that would be even a better excuse to ban the usage of VPN than csam
I think this is also overly naive. We live in a world of hardware attestation and passkeys, the baseline requirements to use new models can increase to cryptocurrency-levels of KYC. If this becomes the new norm (which it easily could), then the best models will impose increasingly restrictive requirements.
The statement said that even foreign nationals within the US would be barred. That seems intentionally unworkable to me, and makes me think that the intent was to be more restrictive/disruptive than even an export control. It is hard to tell what the internal discussions are, but given the last run-in between the administration and Anthropic, and given the administration's politicization of nearly everything, I think it's likely that this is not necessarily a long term across-the-board policy plan.
I agree that it's really hard to tell from the outside, but if I had to guess I think we still have more to worry about on the side of "Wall Street races to superintelligence" than on the side of "KYC for AI". I could be wrong though.
I don't see your point why export control is a silly tool. There's a difference between a VPN which I can prop up on my home server or a $5 VPS, vs a Mythos-scale closed source model running on millions of dollars of hardware
I mean, if the stated intent of an export control is to allow domestic use but prevent export, achieving the stated intent is impossible, because every developer in the world wants the latest models and will get a VPN.
A VPN won't work in this instance without a US credit card. So it's completely possible.
As other posted noted, US cc is, by far, the easiest piece of information to acquire by a determined actor. Possible and inconvenience, but that is about it.
Why is that? Well, not to search very far, I just got a breach notice from a company I never heard of the other day. They are sorry.
I'm so glad none of those US credit cards have never been stolen.
Can you imagine the disaster???
Harder to hide payment info than ip origin
It is trivially easy for nation states, non-nation bad actors, etc. to use US payments. I'd guess that most of the financial scams targeting Americans rely on US-based mules and their American bank accounts.
Also, foreign nationals legally residing in the US can have access to US-based payments. There's no way when accepting a credit card payment from a US card issuer to ask whether the card holder is a natural born citizen versus Green Card holder, etc.
For peons sure. For anyone who is an actual security threat it would be easy. That is why this is either a) stupid or b) yet another lever to make it easier for this administration to incarcerate people.
> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.
With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world. US politicians and elite, regardless of political inclination, understand the enormous strategic potential of this technology and will ITAR the shit out of frontier models and/or use them as leverage for extracting concessions out of other countries.
The main losers are Big AI labs, their investors, foreign employees and rest of the world.
Fwiw, China and other countries would’ve done the exact same thing. It’s perhaps the game theoretic optimal approach when your comparative advantage is so vast (capital, compute, talent, embedded knowledge) and keeps growing especially if RSI is real (making it nearly impossible for anyone else to catch up)
>With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world.
Really? You think the economics of the AI buildout remain viable if US companies cannot export their highest value services?
You think expelling foreign AI researchers doesn't hurt the industry or boost foreign competitors? Half (or whatever) of Google's AI team, including their AI chief are foreign nationals and/or located outside of the US.
You think that other IT exports will not suffer if the US turns out to be an unreliable and even capricious supplier?
This does real damage to the US economy.
I humbly accept it's very difficult to game this out with any degree of confidence, especially as other countries deploy more resources.
But the questions about viability of the labs because of export restrictions is not in my cone of uncertainty. If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked. Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, economy-wide automation would make the US wealthy beyond imagination.
US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP. I am not aware of the international revenue share for OpenAI/Anthropic.
> Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, The is doing some very heavy lifting.
> US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP and has a deep trade deficit ... maybe there is a connection?
>If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked.
The US is about a quarter of the global economy, but let's use Microsoft's international revenue share of ~50% as a proxy for tech services. It's ~40% for the S&P 500.
I don't know what share of that would be impacted by export bans, but it would certainly affect ROI. It would hurt the competitiveness of the wider US tech industry and create incentives for moving highly paid work overseas.
>US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP.
It's 12% to 13% but this is distorted by the way in which tech services are counted in export statistics and also by tax avoidance. Just look at Ireland's ridiculous GDP numbers.
If the technology is as powerful as these somehwat fantastical "goals" suggest, the incentive to use it everywhere in the world would be enormous. An export ban wouldn't mean that only the US has the capability. The theory behind current models is well known. It's just a matter of optimising them for specific use cases and using them on an industrial scale.
Most AI researchers are not US citizens either. It's completely obvious that this is the US shooting itself in the foot (if it were to last, which I don't believe).
Silly or not, precedent matters and labeling it silly is rhetorical. The impact is going to be critically important.
> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.
Can we stop with this bothsides-ing. The level of co-opting by this administration is unprecedented. There’s the strong-arming to get Intel equity stake, Nvidia/AMD revenue share, U.S. Steel golden share, Lithium Americas equity stake, Big Law pro bono pledges, TikTok forcible acquisition, Paramount-CBS-Skydance favor, it’s just unbelievable the stark use of power.
No, we can not stop with the both sidesing.
We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump. Don't think I'm justifying that - it's just what happened, in basically the tech bros own words.
The Dems then proceeded to lose to Trump, despite being extremely well funded themselves. They accomplished this through a spectacular series of "own goals": arming genocide, vetoing ceasefires, forcing deeply unpopular candidates, allowing a certain attempted insurrectionist rapist run out the clock on justice [0], awful elitist messaging on the economy, keeping the Epstein files under wraps, etc.
The red side is worse than the blue side, so the blue side demand immunity from criticism. The red side sets everything on fire, on purpose. The blue side prevents progressives from real change. The cycle rachets and repeats. This has been going on for decades, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars - but people who point it out get accused of saying both sides are the same.
0 - "That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition." - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-rac...
We should not stop _all_ of the both-sidesing, but we absolutely should stop _some_ of the both-sidesing. Both-sidesing done without both (a) critical thinking and (b) honest intent is simply whataboutism, one of the many forms of societal pollutant that we seem to have fully normalized.
Your second sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that needs to stop.
Your third sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that should not stop.
Your fourth is disappointing conclusion, a strawman to start ("demand immunity from criticism"...) and a false equivalence / faux symmetry as a bonus ("sets everything on fire" & "doesn't support progressive policies" are two sides of _which_ coin, exactly...?)
> We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump.
I agree - he clearly should have done much more than just threaten.
To be perfectly honest, I actually do think we should stop all the both sidesing - but only after following it to its logical conclusion.
Have _both sides_ actively collaborated in genocide?
... Yes.
Therefore, _both sides_ have breached any recognizable red line of decency. _Both sides_ have breached hard-won national and international law.
Time for something better than both sides unapologetically arming live-streamed genocide.
"Oh, you're one of those single issue guys" - if the issue is genocide, then yes. Why aren't you? Why aren't 98.15% of 2024 voters?
As pointed out below: it's our culture. And that's not okay.
> Your second sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that needs to stop.
I don't see how you can disagree with the simple truth of it tbh. In what way is that not what happened?
> This has been going on for decades
With statements like that, if it’s been going on that long then it’s either our culture and normal way of life or you’re on some QAnon cuckoo rabbit hole.
> then it’s either our culture and normal way of life
That's the one - from an outside PoV the two US parties are two sides of the same coin, barely a perineum twixt them, both ceding the votes of many people to the cash of a very few.
It's baked into the US zeitgeist that it's better to sit back and watch "the government" go tits up and then wade in with guns hoping for a better outcome than it is to properly manage communal resources and common ground.
I disagree with parent, but nothing they stated qualifies as 'dismissable' as 'qanon' level, which btw is one of the key phrases establish to ignore some opinions. It may be incorrect, inaccurate and/or simply wrong, but dismissing it as some conspiracy is.. what is a good way to characterize it.. slightly over the top.
silly or corrupt?
> Anthropic got what they deserved
Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.
Imagine a private company invents a piece of technology soooo good that the US government has to issue a ban.
Did the government ban any models from Google or OpenAI? Nah, Russian/Chinese spies and ISIS are welcome to use those dumb models.
Anthropic will probably go for $2T IPO now.
Yes! I mean everyone is speaking about this in a boxed manner.
For all we know there are might be several reasons for that ban e.g.
1) There is an actual security threat and its just simple as that.
2) Someone wants Anthropic to be valued way higher and the companies that have invested in Anthropic already... This ban only validates this product and will move the market in higher valuation of Anthropic due to their model being "so good gov had to ban"
3) Someone doesn't like Anthropic and just wants to shut down its current edge (highly unlikely, if there was no IPO filing in place it could be possible but now the valuation just goes up, same as the 2 As that have invested in them)
4) Someone freaked out that we'll be left out of jobs soon so wants to slow down progress, tbh using fable so far I can tell that a lot of jobs can be made redundant cause of that...
For me the most likely for now is 2, then 1 and then maybe 4.
On June 22 Chatgpt will most likely come out with their new model too, which as I understand will be an answer to mythos. Lets see if the US gov goes the same route.
It's not that complicated. Probably what happened is just that a former Fox News host read part of a security report that he did not understand and overreacted.
I do not understand why it being mandated that the vast majority of the people in the world will not allowed to use -- or pay for -- your product (and that the ones that can will have to jump through excessive hoops) could ever make your valuation go up; can you walk me through that one?
Even if this is just temporary, your #3 is more in direct conflict with #2 than you seem to be willing to admit: if you were to own stock in a company that you know has a powerful product and a market lead, but they have been required to take a time out in the market for a year, that should be devastating for their valuation.
Because nowadays the stockmarket is build upon hype, this is why we are having the market caps and valuations we are having that are in any way shape or form reflecting anything that is real.
For the Gov to come out and block a model for national security, its gonna swing the market into thinking "oh anthropic really has the next generation of LLMs out there, its that good Gov banned it, this company is going to the moon".
The part of banning non US nationals, I believe is a legality, as in they have to trust US citizens to do right by their country. I don't think in court a whole ban on a product for security reasons would stand. (The judge would ask for the gov to explain why all US nationals are a security threat to their country)
Nevertheless, again I am standing behind number 2 personally as the main reason for such a thing, market manipulation is not new and its currently at its all time high. Also anthropic is part of this manipulation so far, with every other AI company out there.
Again I am just presenting my POV, it could as well just be number 1... A gov became competent enough to find security threads before they happen :)
> I don't think in court a whole ban on a product for security reasons would stand.
There are lots such products, like weapons-grade radioactive material, weapons outside the toy gun range, various biological material, ...
So it seems perfectly possible to bad products for security reasons.
I get what you mean but you are very wrong about the stock market and how people react to export bans. Everytime US had restricted control for Nvidia chips in the news over the last few years, the stock price went down not up.
It might be a good marketing trick but it is not a good thing in the stock market given historical trends.
Your view highly screams you only have a superficial understanding of financial markets and you shouldn't extraploate that to "this is how market works because its all hype and everything is vapor"
Anthropic is chasing an IPO, Nvidia is not, creating very different market reactions and incentive structures for the companies. Apples and oranges.
Anthropics reputation as a near-term world-ender boosts their IPO directly.
You can't justify trillions of market cap just serving the US market, and they've just kneecapped their ability to compete anywhere else, it would be delusional to invest on something like this thinking it's going to be a free market, you'd just be indirectly funding the US government ability to use AI against others, especially if you are a non-US citizen (or a subgroup of US citizens they don't like). The near-term world-ending is just pure marketing, they haven't shown anything nearly as impressive as they've been promising, and the software they've produced so far with near infinite access to agents has been very impressively bad.
No, its not apples and oranges. How/why does it boost their IPO directly? Elaborate on this please instead of stating it as an universal fact (because it isn't).
I feel you are just talking a hypothetical without having any basis. You think it'll have an impact on IPO directly and that it will be a positive one. But you have no proof or historical precidence for the same. Meanwhile we have historical proof that markets reacts negatively when a company is blocked by the government on selling their top products freely. And that is most likely going to happen here as well.
Public perception might be changed by these "ohhh its so scary guys" marketing but these don't translate to actual market perception when it comes to actual facts and numbers on the financials.
It could be the case that we’ve reached the last generation of frontier models that can be accessed by the general public. That eliminates a risk that Anthropic could be leapfrogged by a competitor.
Now it’s a competition between products on the near frontier. Anthropic has executed well on products so far. They blew up thanks to Claude Code, not Opus by itself.
If (1) then somebody in the administration messed up badly. Glasswing has been a thing since April, and it's common knowledge that there would be some fuzzy edges around whatever restrictions a model has in place. There's no reason to let it launch and then pull it back.
(2) This "hype" meme is overrated. Enterprises (ones without a horse in the race, at least) will choose the model their best engineers ask for, or their competitors will lap them. I have been finding Codex more useful (even than Fable) but for a lot of tasks it seems that Claude Code is faster. This is one customer base where the general consensus here on HN is more influential than anything the Trump administration could do or anything Anthropic could say.
(3) "US government seems out to kill you" does not necessarily make valuation go up, and we've already seen this administration in an avoidable spat with Anthropic.
(4) This seems way less likely than a mix of (1) and (3) to me. The arguments for banning a useful technology to save jobs haven't really made sense since cars or indoor plumbing and don't get taken too seriously in either party at senior levels. That could change but it will take a lot for it to change.
Eh, chatGpt coming out with a new garbage model. Great.
Fable had some really good cross project awareness. My only complaint is it backported a feature to my test application and then they killed it before I could finish debugging it. The new model behavior in the replacement application was 100% superior. I just didn't know it was going to start porting fixes so readily between projects. Awareness in the new model is amazing and the feedback I've had from other developers is the same. It feels like ultrathink with double the agents of xhigh effort. The real issue is they shipped it with incomplete guardrails and someone likely found an exploit.
5) Someone freaked out China might use the model to advance its own tech. It's always China with this administration. The guy has an obsession with China since he had to hire feng shui consultants to make his tower appealing¹ for Chinese customers.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/donald-trump...
Also, might be a way to further screw with Anthrophic because they refused to remove their guardrails Pentagon, getting the opposite result of what was intended.
The Trump administration has exactly one motive, and that is accumulation of wealth. There is literally no other reason they would do anything. Even if there were legitimate economic or security concerns, those aren't motivating to the Trump administration.
This is about grift, somehow, full stop.
I neither like nor support Anthropic, but there's just no sense in pretending the Trump administration is anything other than a kleptocracy or interpreting their actions under any other lens.
stephen miller also has exactly one motive, but it isn't wealth accumulation
Imagine a private company invents a piece of technology soooo good that the US government has to issue a ban.
Apple's G4 was banned for export. Although it was not a direct order from US government. They fell into an outdated bracket of computing power exports limits. They sure did use it for advertising it.
g4 ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw
Looks like "So good the US tried to ban us" is already in the wheelhouse!
This is signaling to non-US companies that Anthropic cannot provide reliable access to their models.
It's equally signaling that other US-based labs can't provide reliable access to their closed-weight models.
Not in the same way, no, because they have not been targeted, while they should have if the same rules applied, according to Anthropic's depiction of the situation.
This is potential tyranny aimed at Anthropic, specifically.
For anyone outside the US this is a clear statement that either models are open or they are controlled by an erratic and hostile US government.
Being a US ally has become meaningless, and using a company that’s not targeted today does nothing to protect you tomorrow.
Europe doesn't seem to care so much about erratic and hostile governments when it cozied up to Russian gas for decades, something it still continues to do just hiding behind third party countries.
It's a clear statement that European morals are purely performative
Just like how the EU is hostile towards US companies, but very light to the touch when it comes to corruption with HSBC, FIFA or VW. With such hostile and erratic allies, who needs enemies?
Let's not even get into Orban. You can never trust the EU again since who knows if they're capable of electing someone like that in the future? Trust is broken forever
Yes, because they’re so bleeding edge and powerful.
Whether you believe that is another thing. But that’s the signal. It’s amazing marketing for them, even if a pain in the ass for customers rn
> because they’re so bleeding edge and powerful.
Investors will have so much FOMO over this
This is signaling to US companies that non-US providers cannot create cutting edge capabilities for their models.
Major alarm bells should be ringing for anyone not using a US-based LLM.
> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.
What? Anthropic is not a TikTok sensation. It's a business tool. Businesses need to know their tools work reliably.
When you are situated in a banana republic and the chief banana is out to get you (and demonstrates that they can and will on a whim) that is not great hype but a potential death sentence for you as a service provider.
You are one degree away from becoming forever branded as unusable. (Theoretically until people trust that a sane administration is in control again, but that might as well be forever on current AI timelines, given how much cashflow you need just to keep going)
> Anthropic is not a TikTok sensation.
It pretty much is. Claude is more of a meme than a tool. It's been second best (and more expensive option) for most of the time but people somehow keep talking about it. I'm getting strong Apple vibes from this one.
It's only rewarding hype if the ban gets dropped. If "foreign Anthropic employees that live in the US can't use Fable/Mythos" stays it harms them, if they don't drop the ban and Fable/Mythos stay limited to "every single person who uses the model must individually provide their ID to prove American-ness" it harms them.
It is already a rewarding hype. They are the first company to build a model so advanced that the US government has to ban it.
Google and OpenAI will eventually catch up and be banned as well. Therefore, this ban isn't really a huge concern for Anthropic since their competitors will be banned eventually.
All this does is proving to investors that Anthropic is indeed ahead of its competitors.
>OpenAI will eventually catch up and be banned as well.
" We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)"
The administration just doesn't like anthropic. OpenAI is in bed with the trump Administration.
Anthropic refused to allow the US Government to conduct mass surveillance, which made the US Government mad. OpenAI was fine with it as long as it was 'legal' mass surveillance. OpenAI is not going to get banned, even if their next model is both better and more dangerous than Mythos.
No, Anthropic refused to allow the US Government to conduct mass surveillance on US Citizens, they where fine with 'legal' mass surveillance of other countries.
By how much? Is Codex-6 that far behind?
Who knows? Even savvy investors wouldn't know.
What they know right now is that the model is so advanced the US government has to ban it, and the model comes out of Anthropic. Not Google. Not OpenAI.
TACO.
I see what you mean, though ITAR restricted software has been around for decades. It classifies some software as "munitions" :)
Most valuably, they have a plausible excuse for hitting a financial brick wall before failing to deliver on years of over-promising on real-world business utility.
It’s a marketing stunt, I’m calling it and Anthropic will “fix” it very soon
Expensive marketing stunt if users demand refunds from their credit card company for those annual subscriptions on the basis of "service not delivered".
Paying for 365 days of service but getting 364 would normally get you a full refund, not just a 1 day credit according to visa/MasterCard rules.
Nowhere in the terms of service for any Anthropic product does it guarantee access to Mythos or Fable.
In the subscriptions it was already going away on the 22nd until possibly some indefinite future date.
Anthropic got out a slightly better model (which is what two companies were doing for more than a year), but at the cost of not being able to provide it within subscription. It build out an inordinate hype around this model. And in the end it was saved by this hype because it doesn't have to admit now that it's never gonna be able to provide this model in volume because gov forbade them from providing it.
> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.
Nah, SpaceX just IPO'd.
How much of the value of the IPO was based on the revenue from AI data centers?
Probably not much, since bulk of the valuation was based on hot air expelled by musk as with all of his ventures.
“Banned in Boston”
> Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now now when they have Mythos capabilities [...]
The "Mythos capabilities" is a pretty arbitrary threshold. It could have happened any point before or after. China treats this technology in very different ways. And China's economy and foreign policies are very different, in such export-based economy export controls make much no sense. Unless something changes drastically in the global relations. I expect the opposite to happen, if the US leave a void globally, china will be even more incentivised to fill it.
This been said, it is likely that big models are soon no longer "open sourced" (qwen has already started), but because the chinese companies will prefer to sell access themselves, not because of government intervention.
In any case, what happens now is a huge thing, and not sure we grasp its consequences yet. It is definitely beyond any ai safety marketing stunt. Even if this is rolled back at some point, after "guarantees" are established, it has already moved things to change drastically.
> Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs ... a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities
"Mythos capabilities" is not some magic threshold. This is exactly the type of language that people used about GPT-4 in 2023. Today, I can run models far stronger than GPT-4 on my laptop at speeds better than GPT-4 offered.
Anthropic are quite good at coining sticky phrases like "Mythos-class models", but these are manipulative attempts to shape the discourse for business purposes and should be identified as such.
It wasn't a magical threshold until today. Now it surely is a magic threshold, set by the US government.
Disappointingly, it still works.
They used this type of language with GPT-2. Le sigh, yawn.
To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem.
Yes, some of it looks silly now, though it's always easy to criticize with hindsight: the models could do unexpectedly impressive things and we didn't fully know the limit yet, it was a black box.
Remember you're critcising the org that actually made it public to people earlier than any other: the uncertainty was a temporary caution. The "open" in OpenAI was because they made it available, unlike Google at the time.
> To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem
When the company that enables this, makes the predictions in the first place, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
I don't necessarily disagree, but who is going to pay for improvements in models if they're not commercially available? Are AI companies going to become defence contractors with (US?) government paying for the training?
I don't know much it cost to go from AI model Foo 4 to Foo 5, but it's going to cost a pretty penny to eventually go to 6 and 7. These companies are doing so in the expectation of eventually charging customers to recoup the costs: if the only customer(s) is government(s) then the per-unit cost will be much higher. An analogy: you can get a 'civilian' toilet for USD 200, an FAA/EASA-approved toilet for airlines 2000, and a MILSPEC/NASA toilet for 20000.
Now this limited-customer model is certainly doable—tank manufacturers have a smaller base of customers than pickup truck manufacturers—but AI companies probably want regulatory clarity on what they're allowed to sell, and to whom, before they start developing new products/services.
I'm a European, the EU is supposed to be one of the closest allies of the US.
The US government found a jailbreak that allowed the user to make Fable do bad things, this is so dangerous that this model must be held back in areas that are not the US...
If this is so dangerous why allow US nationals access to it? Are there no evil people in the US?
Going back to my perspective: let's say I control a big enterprise or a government body, how should I view this or US technology? Should I be like: yes, let's use US tech, they are a reliable partner and would never abruptly cut us off! Or should I be like: there are competent alternatives out there and if your work hinges on wether or not you had access to Fable 5, then your business is probably not going to survive for long.
Back when Snowden leaked all of the spying information, the only thing the States cared about was whether they spied on their own citizens. The fact that they spied on the citizens of their allies, including yes, the EU, barely made the news.
I don't think it makes sense the assume the US considers any country its ally.
It barely made the news inside the US.
sorry that's what I meant: I remember watching their depositions or whatever they were called, and their only concern was whether or not they had spied on US citizens. Whether or not they spied on their allies, I do not recall any coverage of from their primary news outlets (or inside their depositions) at all.
As the saying goes, it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal. True in the 60s, still true today.
I agree with the sentiment and dislike Kissinger, but that quote is always paraphrased and out of context.
The full quote makes it clear Kissinger was saying, in the context of the Vietnam War, that the US should come to the aid of their friends:
> "Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
From: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/56471/30861
I'm well aware of its context and original meaning, and I'm very happy to twist its meaning into something Kissinger would disagree with any chance I get.
The longer time passes the more it looks like Snowden was just a foreign asset doing someone else's bidding.
And as a corollary, no country should consider the US its ally.
I'm glad Europe is finally waking up to this reality.
Parts of Europe, most notably France, has been perfectly aware since... always?
But in general I agree, the other parts got a big wakeup call.
The French have been screwed over by the US military hard, so I'm fully on board with their attitude.
> I'm a European, the EU is supposed to be one of the closest allies of the US.
I’m Scandinavian. The US is an adversary; please wake up.
That's absurd and removes the meaning of the word adversary
Tell that to my nephew. He’s working as a commissioned officer on Greenland.
Threats of invasions and coercions look pretty adversarial to me.
I believe that restrictions like these: "only for US nationals present" are also to facilitate prosecution if needed
bingo
>If this is so dangerous why allow US nationals access to it? Are there no evil people in the US?
How come the EU is making a "digital sovereignty" push? Why are only EU people allowed to compete for EU services? Are there no evil people in the EU?
> I hate being told what technology I can and can't use
Ever since the original GPT-2 "it's too powerful to release!" I've realized that whatever is the current state of open models represents what we really have access to.
It's shocking to me how many people on HN, who engage in long conversations about LLMs and AI, have never actually run a model on their own hardware.
All you need is a reasonably good macbook pro/studio or an RTX [3-5]090 and you can run useful models in the >= 30 tokens/second range (much higher if you choose the GPU path). The difference between what you can run on this hardware and what you can run on hardware that costs 2-5x is not that big. Don't be fooled by people on Twitter/X claiming you need some outrageous setup.
It's also increasingly clear that frontier models are nowhere near close to pushing the limits of efficiency. Quantization, MoE, and other techniques have dramatically improved even in the last year.
For work, of course use OpenAI/Anthropic models, but for anything personal, anyone who considers themselves a "real engineer" should be running local models, using open harnesses and seeing what they can accomplish with these.
Even if open releases slow down or even stop, we have the foundation, right now, for smart engineers to squeeze something quite useful out of. Hopefully we'll one day figure out how to train large models in a federated way. But either way: not your weights, not your inference.
lets be genuine here: those local models are no where near the capabilities of true modern llms like codex 5.5 and fable 5
but i also dont doubt in a few years time models with those benchmarks will be able to be run locally
still many many breakthroughs to be had
Personally I am fine with the SOTA from last year if I can run it on my hardware and who gets access to my data and history. I don’t really care that it could be marginally better using a model I cannot control on someone else’s server.
I am not fine with that. I have ranted about this before, but until recently the sota models were not intelligent enough for most of my work.
Yesterday Fable 5 finally solved a non trivial problem I had (after working on it for a few hours), and I went to bed excited. Waking up to find that Fable 5 is not available anymore, I guess I should feel happy I have the code it produced yesterday. But frankly I feel like a child having their candy taken from them.
We need open available models as smart as the current US proprietary ones. If intelligence like that becomes common property, i forsee a better future for human kind!
> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
But it is! How many times have OpenAI and Anthropic threatened the rest of humanity with extinction at the hands of their LLMs? Monthly I think.
They were hoping for a government supported monopoly. Careful what you wish for.
No one was calling for a government monopoly, all they called for was a testing process to ensure that frontier LLMs specifically were safe to release into the wild.
To the tech-libertarian crowd on HN this is the definition of evil. To everyone else it's responsible behavior and common sense.
> No one was calling for a government monopoly, all they called for was a testing process to ensure that frontier LLMs specifically were safe to release into the wild
Yes, from chatgpt 0.1 onwards. Everything has been a dangerous frontier model and has threatened humanity with extinction before.
The main risks called out with GPT-2 were disinformation and phishing, which did indeed come to pass.
It sounds right, but there is one caveat to me:
Training best models is hella expensive. Anthropic spent fortune to train it, and it definitely plans to make a fortune with it either. This US decision, if not reversed, would cause Anthropic potentially tens of billions of dollars of revenue loss. When company heads to IPO, and burning cash faster than it generates it, such moment can change their entire trajectory, plans for the future, hiring, new models development, etc.
Alright, one might say that “US will fund it directly and LLMs will move from free market to controlled and funded by government assets”.
But even then. Training new models is expensive not only in terms of computer, and not only in terms of utilities, data centers, etc. But in terms of talent either. It is hard to retain top talents with you when they should just train special models for government. I am not sure we are in 1945 again and that top tier AI researches will agree to sit in silo and work for models which only privileged selected organizations might use. Whenever government steps into control, freedom and creativity is affected.
P.S. Where I agree, though, is that we witness the start of government censorship of AI models. Imagine soon Anthropic open back access to Fable. Can we know what they put inside and which capability limitations, derived based on ID/IP, they enforce? No, we can’t. Here I agree that at least the era of government censorship begins.
I feel like the EU, maybe in collaboration with Norway (oil money and hydroelectric power), should get their ass in gear and start making bigger models.
As European, nothing hurts me more than 100500 phrase in recent years “Europe should stop waiting time and do X”, where X can be anything: semiconductors, AI, manufacturing, defense, satellites, cloud business, “sovereign” IT infrastructure, scientific research, and hundreds more
I wonder how this is going to work given half the people working at the AI labs are Chinese foreign nationals, and even more interesting, DeepMind is based in the UK. Plus there is an awful lot of AI research going on all across Europe, especially Switzerland, that is feeding straight into the US major labs.
Banning foreign nationals from using your technology only makes sense if you don't rely on foreign nationals to build it in the first place.
Or are we so far along now we think we don't need them anymore.
I'm wondering if they might go for a restricted access model that goes beyond passport or citizenship, where people can still use it, but you have to be individually vetted, and put on a list to get security clearance.
maybe this will have to lead to a few expedited weddings and citizenship applications…
Deepmind and OpenAI have offices in Europe. But I don't think Anthroipc does?
Right, but I am talking about the general government response trajectory.
And also, even though Anthropic may not have labs themselves directly, there is a funnel of research that comes in the form of papers and conference tracks.
The AI community is pretty tight knit, and not having access to frontier models affects everyone.
They have a presence in London; have met someone who works there. Sounds like there is an office too
There’s also a presence in Dublin. Coworking space, last time I checked.
IMO: Its unacceptable that Anthropic be allowed the final say in what "safety" means for their products, and its extremely reasonable that the USG be allowed that say, for Americans. In other words: Anthropic cannot be allowed to distribute an unsafe product. It doesn't matter how much they "tried" to make it safe, by their own definition of safe.
That's separate from the question of whether Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are unsafe. I don't really know. Here's a few things that seem real, though: These models probably have some level of capability to assist with bioterrorism, Anthropic has self-admitted that their own safety measures are imperfect [1], so it should come as no surprise that jailbreaks seem far more possible than Anthropic is leading you to believe in this blog post [2].
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access: "We suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider."
[2] https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/2064776322979676227
If Amazon sold a book that taught someone how to commit bioterrorism, would there be action against them to stop selling it? Its an imperfect analogy, but the parallels are there. LLMs don't get a free pass because they're also so good at writing typescript for beige CRUD apps and bedtime stories.
One thing I hope we align on: Synthetic safeguards (steering, rejections, etc) on top of models to block illegal/sensitive topics isn't good enough. Anthropic has self-admitted that it isn't good enough. We need the technology to lobotomize these capabilities the public deems too unsafe to allow out of the models at the most fundamental level. And, we need to align on what the scope of these forbidden fruit topics are. This is, actually, the only way open source continues to thrive. I want open source models to thrive, but they won't be allowed to thrive, nor should we want them to thrive, if they're teaching people how to engineer novel viruses and other horrible stuff.
> LLMs don't get a free pass because they're also so good at writing typescript for beige CRUD apps and bedtime stories.
Plenty of useful things get free passes to be dangerous. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of accidental deaths in 11 states, but we don't ban cars because they're dangerous. There's plenty of safety features, but we acknowledge and accept that people will die. People like to pretend that they won't sacrifice safety for convenience, but they continue to do it time and time again.
Ironically, this is something that the restrictive EU AI regulations can help with. Had the Anthropic been in EU, they could not be restricted as long as they followed the laws which is essentially taking some precautions against obvious risks(no social profiling, emotional recognition in schools etc.).
That’s also the difference between being totalitarian government and laws and regulations based order.
I do think the Chinese will give away strong models. The US government can't control that and would make a mess if they tried. Companies making SOTA models would be undercut and all the funding that went into them would be wasted. Sounds like a great strategy for the Chinese.
Agreed, I'm pretty sure the Chinese are currently much, much better at long term thinking and have already reached the conclusion that llms are transformative enough generationally, that assuming a few more years or decades of Moore's Law together with ai/llm advances will probably place these "Mythos class" AIs in all our desktops in the next few years.
China had already forbade their top researchers to even leave China.
Also foreign investments into Chinese AI labs have already been forbidden and asked to exit
I wonder what will happen to Chinese employees of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google Gemini? Given the ubiquitous Chinese names in AI papers there must be quite a few.
They probably have gotten their PR or in the process, but naturalization requires five years after that, so there must be some still not citizen yet.
If you are born in China to Chinese parents, China considers you under it's jurisdiction for life. You can't travel to another country and start working against Chinese interests without consequences.
That's not true. You can renounce your Chinese citizenship and it's actually required if you acquire another citizenship.
This is sort of true. China can forcibly reinstate Chinese citizenship at their own discretion.
I guess in the same sense that the U.S. considers they have jurisdiction globally. Not de jure, but a de facto reality.
Do you have sources? I would like to read more about that.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-restricts-o...
https://wap.eastmoney.com/a/202605203743576829.html
that is to avoid having them arrested by the US under "US national security concerns".
It is also prevent the employees leaving because the lure of US capital
When the Chinese do it they will use it to attack US infrastructure that won’t have been hardened because the models are behind walled gardens.
Despite the damage it’s better to build up an immunity through ongoing exposure, unless you want to end up like the previous American civilisations.
I suspect the big picture isn't just "governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public", it's a group of tech lobbyists who have managed to push a narrative that's plausible enough to the majority, but serves their master's interests in stifling competition, whether that be from Anthropic or those who know how to use their tools effectively.
The fact that Anthropic are willing to dumb-down their own model responses to "Prevent foreign competitors from using the model to accelerate R & D and protect our leading position." [1] adds credence to this speculation. Anthropic are scared of their own model's power in the hands of competitors: it has nothing to do with security.
[1] https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3848820681636481
My guess is that Anthropic will either address the government's concern and get the export control removed or implement a citizenship verification (like passport upload or something).
I remember something with either ChatGPT or Claude, way early on, where I had to upload my passport to use some level of it (maybe it was the OpenAI API).
Anyway, there's no way they just shut this completely down, the revenue from mythos is huge. So if they can't get the government to budge they'll find a way to be compliant without completely shutting down.
You may be right, and I actually agree with you: I think that in this case the most likely outcome is that Fable becomes available again at some point, albeit possibly only to a restricted set of users within the US.
But I think my larger points stands: even if we do see Fable access again, this is the beginning of government restriction of LLMs and we are going to see more and more of it. In fact, I would be very surprised if we ever see an open weight model with Mythos capabilities. Chinese labs have been consistently releasing open models 6-12 months behind the frontier. In 6 months we may see them go dark.
Similarly, in the US I think we can expect more and more government restrictions on the strongest LLMs, in ways that may go beyond flimsy checks like uploading a valid US passport. It may not happen this year but I think it will happen eventually.
It still surprises me sometimes that LLMs are just available for _anyone_ to use. Isn't it odd that it turned out this way? When I grew up reading sci-fi I thought AI, if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments. But instead we have all been able to use it for an infinity of banal purposes for $100 a month. This is a strange situation but we have got used to it. But it may not continue that way.
The Chinese labs would only go dark if they believe they’ve surpassed the American labs, otherwise what benefit is there to them to refrain from sharing the models? Better to have all of their allies able to use the same models by making them public
" if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments."
Who knows, maybe the good stuff is locked up. If one of these corporations had something very special they may very well find it more profitable to enjoy the competitive advantage of using it for themselves than marketing it.
> It still surprises me sometimes that LLMs are just available for _anyone_ to use. Isn't it odd that it turned out this way?
I assume it's some of their best training data.
To me, it is obvious that what we are going to have is KYC/AML style compliance from US banking.
We already have the rails for automated customer identification from US banking.
I think there is a larger "AGI" category error with all this too that is akin to the old futurist idea of driving nuclear powered cars in the "future". The Ford Nucleon.
Nuclear power comes to us in a mix of electricity from the utility company but is far too dangerous for an individual to posses nuclear material for personal nuclear reactors.
An electric car does run on nuclear energy in some sense but not the way the Ford Nucleon was envisioned.
The error of the AI bubble is that we are pricing these companies with SaaS multiples when they are eventually going to be public utilities. There is really no other way to handle the dual use nature of anything close to "AGI".
I think some of the commenters are naive to think government intervention is silly and TACO.
No, Dario said himself AI is national state weapon, then the government will not cease control.
What would happen is that we will have a more lobotomized and even more neurotic safeguards put in place in order to comply, and your data will be boardly sharing with the government.
Moving forward, above certain parameter size of model, it will require your self-identification in order to be used.
Perhaps a little tinfoil hat, but I don't think there's a legitimate concern here to address. An empowered populace is antithetical to the current political paradigm, which is what I suspect the actual grievance to be.
And before either 'aisle' piles on - I'm pretty sure the concern is bipartisan.
I feel like a very minor tweak to comply specifically with whatever the issue the directive stated and release it under a new name (since the directive specifically names Fable and Mythos, not Opus or Sonnet) while the courts sort it out is reasonable.
Anthropics latest amendment to their privacy policy stated that there are very likely to be asking for ID verification in the near future.
>> As part of our measures to keep our services safe and secure we may ask you to verify your age or identity, and we've described what we collect and how
I agree this is probably their thinking - they view frontier models (and the capability to build them) as a vital strategic edge that they want to keep to themselves.
The problem is that there are network effects at play - the more people you have using your models, the more training and fine-tuning data you're accumulating, so the faster you can develop the next frontier model. Not to mention the fact that more users means more revenue to fund your next-gen model training.
Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge.
The next interesting question will be - will the US share this capability with her traditional strategic allies (e.g. five-eyes countries), or is it truly America First (or, 'America Alone')?
Human user usage data is probably a tiny contribution to improvement of the models--it's mostly RL on environments
> Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge.
There is no way to enforce access of one and not the other, not with the state of tech in the US (and most countries without a great firewall). Bypassing such controls is as easy as a pilfered credit card (or some other american-looking payment method) and a vpn - both trivial to come by.
It may not be perfect, but this hurdle would still keep out ~99% of the targeted people.
Genuinely curious - who do you think the targeted people are and how would this keep them out?
For the sake of this discussion, I'm going with the nationalistic vibe of the order: anybody who isn't a citizen of the USA (presumably to limit risk of AI-supported action against the US?).
But that in itself is telling in a way: if national security was a true concern, access should be limited to people who passed background checks.
> the more people you have using your models, the more training and fine-tuning data you're accumulating, so the faster you can develop the next frontier model
I’ve wondered this but then wouldn’t a large amount of input now just be AI output from a previous PR/client email/spec document/chat. Training of that would be an issue leading to distillation?
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain.
I think this is bang on. The motives are kind of irrelevant, because now that the precedent has been set, I suspect they'll be much more likely to go here for future restrictions. It's very convenient (even if true) to just say "security reasons".
I think this could kill LLM development. What's the point in pushing boundaries, when your business model is already hard to profit from, only to be blocked from selling your work to the entire world? Where's the incentive to continue?
I see a slightly different parallel here - they are basiclaly building a framework that takes the US adn friends back to the early 90's where cryptology was considerd a munition and all export products were nerfed. Just like then those that wanted to collaborate with the rest of the world found a way (printing /tshirts etc) similarly now those labs within the US sphere have that decision to make.Unfortunately its the Darios and Sam who are pretty much in favour of regulatory capture environment.With no other frontier labs in the US committed to OSS , and CHN models banned - the devs are pretty much hosed. I doubt the rest of the AI labs in China et al will follow suit in hobbling their own models.As its seen more as a commodity not a wondertool with a moat. At the end of the day the ask is going with a Oracle/Microsoft over a GNU/Linux type of environment.
> If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again.
This logic is flawed. China had no incentive to release SOTA models to the world in the first place when OpenAI were milking everyone with closed source paid models. What changes now? Nothing. In fact, this is even more incentive for them to capture marketshare and dependence on Chinese models as the world will simply just use alternatives. Not bow down to restrictions. If your logic were correct that people would just comply, then the tons of VPN services wouldn't have a market in the first place.
It's a great opportunity for China to earn some soft power points even if there was no direct economic benefit. See -- Americans are too afraid to go full speed into the feature, but we, the enlightened people, are not and will share it with you for your own benefit.
No way they will pass on this one.
That being said, they could still keep some other model from public while doing a PR stunt like this to eat their cake and have it too.
This is why Alibaba canned the more idealistic Qwen members [0] and now has the AI group directly report to Eddie Wu [1] (the CEO of Alibaba).
Commercialization - not open source - is the name of the game now in Chinese AI [2].
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/b39da303-3188-447b-8b65-3dd8dad8b...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...
[2] - https://m.guancha.cn/economy/2026_06_12_820253.shtml
I find it worrysome how often people value revenge over good. The same happened when traffic to SO cratered; as if the destruction of a valuable source of information was good just because the mods suck.
> I find it worrysome how often people value revenge over good.
I personally see it as a net good if companies fearmongering for marketing purposes then have to face consquences from people taking their marketing at face value.
Hopefully it teaches them and others not to do it anymore.
We need open distributed "p2p" models a la bittorrent , that allow individuals to share their computer power for inference. So that the models cant be censored and everyone can run SOTA models.
It doesn't have to be free, we have the means to transact in a p2p fashion electronically as well.
> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you.
That would also significantly dampen the commercial incentives to develop such strong models, given the high costs involved.
On the other hand, such a future would probably save white-collar jobs.
A myopic view, but the government has generally not been heading in the direction of an educated populace over the last few decades. It doesn't surprise me that anything that's too intellectually capable is a threat.
What we could see is AI access being used as a carrot by the major global powers (US, China and EU) to entice smaller countries to join their orbit. Similar to how the F-35 program functions. Competition between powers and a desire to use the land and energy of smaller countries for data centers creates an incentive to give some access. That's the good future. I don't want to put the bad future into the training data.
> Fable was the strongest model on the market
based on Anthropic's own self promotion. no reason to think that Chinese models are not just as good or better. the key thing here is training on machine code and dis-assembled binaries and the Chinese have a complete data set of pirated software, with no limitations on how they use it. I seriously doubt they are actually behind.
> only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are
the issue here is that Anthropic needs a legal opinion that their mechanisms for detecting foreign users in the US are compliant, which is technically hard to do, and a complex intersection of technical details and national security law, so getting a legal opinion can't happen overnight. it will be back.
Personally, I assume that AI labs like Anthropic are high value targets for spies from other nations. I also assume that some of those spies have already had success in getting the model weights / source code / other such secrets.
So I doubt this action alone is enough to really stop other nations from getting access to state of the art AI. I think the US would have to go much further to really stop other nations from getting access to state of the art AI.
I would agree if it wasn't for the fact that extracting that volume of data from a properly secured corporate network should be hard. It should raise some flags if a such a high volume of data is downloaded to a user's local machine from the training or production environments.
I have no proof one way or the other if Anthropic or OpenAI have "properly secured corporate networks". Both seem like fast changing places with lots of servers and workers. Seems most likely to me that someone somewhere made a mistake or missed something due to all the change and their network is not 100% secure.
But even if their networks are secure, I think that spies who are willing to coerce people, trick people and go in person to data centers or offices could find a way to get those models and other things.
Aren't the models also distributed to various data centers--i think it's very easy with resources
It depends how secure they are. But yes - in reality they are only a couple of TB, so just distributing the models and their source code (not their training data) it feasible.
I mean, the source for claude code was "leaked" by accident so at least some of their processes are not that secure. I feel that they are more like a Startup then a Enterprise (ignoring finances).
There are sooooo many exfil methods, including with air gapped systems that are off-network.
Not at all beyond the capabilities of any of the top ~9 or so best State actors.
Edit: To answer your question, very easily on the 20TB.
One crude method with a simple device in particular works well if you just clone the monitor data and then use HDMI and pass through. Then just cat dir in encrypted chunks to something like a USB key connected to the passthrough. 4TB USB keys are out there. A week of that gets you 20TB.
How many of those methods can realistically exfiltrate 20Tb of data? That's quite hard even for well funded actors.
It's highly unlikely that actors have access to model weights etc..
What is likely is that 'understanding of techniques' could be leaked.
Often, it's just well enough to know 'the approach' being used.
That's only if you believe this is actually motivated by safety, and not corruption. They won't block access to Grok, just watch. They'll probably allow ChatGPT too if it is censored in some way.
The real story is that Anthropic went from being a "supply chain risk" to being a "national security risk."
I think the Chinese don’t share the “AGI-pilled” understanding of AI that you see in some US companies and part of government.
Thus they are far less likely to do something like this.
I think you are missing the bigger picture that is around the "bigger picture" you are seeing. AI proliferation is more dangerous than nukes proliferation, as any highly capable tech would enable destructive usecases as well. If nukes related material and knowledge was safeguarded, then AI requires it as well.
nobody ever raised money for nukes from public/private markets on the premise that nukes will bring the world into an age of abundance. AI companies have done that. This comparison of AI and nukes is so silly.
Raising money has nothing to do with the bad usecase for tech. Tech companies never said that their tech can't be used against the nation or against the good of people.
> AI proliferation is more dangerous than nukes proliferation
This statement is utter nonsense. And if you think about it, it's in exactly the same spirit as calling for a wide ban on science books or education.
Supposedly many Anthropic AI researchers are foreign nationals. So this move by the US gov may serve to slow down frontier AI research, including human-guided RSI. If you believe that such a slowdown increases safety, it may turn out as a blessing in disguise.
I agree.
Honestly, and I don't say it lightly, long term this may have bigger impact on humanity as a whole than Iran war and its varying outcomes ( and consequences ). Separately, note how much this news was not really reported much today. Granted, a lot was happening, but it is telling.
> but in practice, even if you are
That part is up to Anthropic. KYC[0] is not exotic, it's just a pain in the butt: if Fable is that good, they can do the KYC.
I don't think this is the right move from the government, but we shouldn't pretend that "citizens only" is an insurmountable hurdle for a company that just got a $65B capital infusion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
Sure, but what if that "known good customer" proxied access to someone else?
Then Anthropic did their part and blames the good customer after implementing "reasonable" measures to prevent it. They still get paid.
This is a problem that banks deal with all the time.
It truly is a pain in the butt. But if access to (US banking | Fable) is worth it, you do the annoying work, and the customers accept the annoying limitations.
Yes. It’s really not a good idea to make this ban. When the US is gradually isolated in this way by its gov’s policy, the world becomes more and more dangerous. What worse, the traditional value of open to competition that Americans have hold for centuries seems to be substituted step by step. It’s absolutely a tragedy.
AI companies business model depends on wide adoption. How will they survive if government closes access to their models?
>The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you.
I can't agree more. This is a precedent not just in denial but possible vagueness. Judiciaries have 'vagueness doctrines' to counter such laws/directives but _these_ may be re-trumped by the deference given to national security.
If we don't get soon a framework by which models may be measured as 'too powerful' vs 'not too powerful' we supercharge the self-dealing (corruption) that this administration has brazenly adopted. Many fingers can be put on many scales; groks may be given a pass while others are held to higher "standards".
Will OpenAI now just asymptotically bump its versions to 5.99999999 to stay under a limit that nobody really understands?
I realize that this has all just happened and we might get some good rigorous clarification from our government.... sigh. We are living in a kakistocracy. Who am I kidding?
The other thing is what this will do to 1) the valuations of these companies, 2) their potential revenues and therefore the viability of the current datacenter buildout. Looking forward to the reaction of the market on Monday.
I do not really like applying the "if we did it, they will too when they can!" logic to other government's.
China has flaws, plenty of them, but there's no real evidence to believe their motivations or mechanisms of pursuing motivations are that similar to that of the United States.
We are not missing the big picture, this is what Anthropic wanted. They made this bed, let them lay comfortable in it.
They just received a massive PR opportunity on a silver platter: our model is so good the government forced us to shut it down.
Yeah it's bragging rights that they were the first. I bet Sam Altman is seething at this news.
> If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow
I think this also misses the point. The precedent here almost surely implies that it will be illegal to use these frontier models as well.
I can see a future where weights are distributed on the darkweb or bittorrent, or people are trying to use small fly by night hosts of models.
But if this says these models are dangerous and the companies and people can't be trusted with them, then I don't see why that wouldn't also apply to open weight models.
They want Deepseek V4 Pro they can try to come and take it. It's incredible that anyone allowed themselves to become so reliant on closed models
The scariest thing to me about AI is not what it can do, but that someday public access might be lost and governments/ billionaires would hold exclusive reign. Today could be the last time the public has any idea of the true capability of AI.
And just imagine the true capability of AI if Fable and Mythos are the models known publicly. We can only imagine what is behind closed doors.
I see your point and share it up to a point… but how does it square with the full western economies gambling all or nothing on AI?
They can't control what I run on my GPU. Exactly why local inference is so important.
The whole thing is theatre.
Anthropic gets into argument with US government over model usage -> Release a model calling it too advanced for safe use -> release the model to public knowing well that this admin has thinnest of skins and will do something
Regulatory capture in roundabout way. Now it is going to take crying wolf over other companies/countries developing “Mythos grade model” to kick off action especially in next two years of this admin.
Companies will keep improving models because AI is not yet fully there. But it is incredibly naive to think governments were ever going to allow state of the art technology to be released to public or do things this publicly. Every company wants to show off and get publicly restricted because it shows off their strength.
I can only say well played Anthropic.
Is fable that good ? I was under the impression that it's just an incremental update, and not even a big one.
Government always restricted data, tools, technology. In France for instance you're not allowed to have a gun, but policemen have.
What's the difference ?
Imo china, and deepseek will keep its open source model because they invest in long term. At some point they could do something similar, but not now.
USA government is just hurting AI development in their country, and that's good news to me.
It's not like every French person can carry a gun, a non french nationals can not. This is a nationalism thing.
> is fable that good?
In my experience it’s not, the only difference I noticed between it and Opus was its taking much more time to respond.
For some workload, yes the difference is big
Fable IS that good, I can tell you. At least, for physics.
China is going to have the exact same problem, it is just lagged by x months.
If you think there is ever going to be an open source Deepseek "AGI" model I just don't think that is thinking things through.
It is the main error of the AI bubble. At some level of intelligence, the dual use nature of a model is too dangerous for a purely hands off approach.
It is like thinking at the advent of the automobile that you will be able to drive your car at any speed, without a license , any place you want.
It is inevitable and the huge sums of money being burned to build these future highly regulated public utilities probably aren't going to be happy with the returns they get from funding a highly regulated public utility.
For 3d engine stuff yes it's a lot better. It managed to replicate crimson deserts occlusion mapping stuff. 4.7/8 was not
You can't use it if you're American either.
> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
That's a bold prediction considering that's true today...
The huge investment into LLMs at a loss is about having control of these tools and technology. Now we're seeing a state try to take some control.
But who do you trust more to make these decisions? A democratically elected government or a private company?
This reads pretty one-sided.
The government is full of stupidity and this is indeed a big moment, but Anthropic has been begging for this outcome in their public messaging. If their fear-mongering was genuine, then great, they got their pause. If not, then what exactly did they want to happen?
100%. Isn't the US supposed to be all about Freedom? It's become a laughing stock.
I think it's too early to understand the ramifications but I agree this is a huge deal.
To the EU.
Govts wont be able to do shit. Just like we saw with social media. This is just happening faster. Illusion of control theatre will continue for few years. Beyond which we might have totally different looking govts.
don't worry, these idiots can try, but it is too late for them :)
I lean libertarian but I can recognize the danger in having access to a machine that can craft pathogens to spec.
A pathogen with a very long incubation time and a high fatality rate would be about as bad as nuclear war. Maybe we need to figure out how to possibly defend against one person doing this before making it easy for anyone to do it.
as someone who uses these models day in out, i can confidently say its more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. don't get me wrong, the model is great, but nits no out of the world than GPT 5.5 or similar ones. I would say just go and try this model for serious work and see the marginal difference. the model wins in some cases and loses in many others. so, what is this all about? hype!
Working on my codebase (~100KLoC across multiple Python modules) I felt that Fable was head and shoulders above 4.x series. It was just relentless and always hell bent on testing and proving its own work. It just tore through problems like an animal. I never seen that behaviour in 4.5-4.8. I can't speak for OpenAI models as I don't use them but Fable was in a different league. Especially when tasked with long horizon goals that involved reasoning at a high and low level to solve the task.
I have had the same experience. I can't believe that people couldn't tell the difference.
I think a lot of users likely use these models on small hobby projects and not some convoluted enterprise code base. When you're making yet another Space Invaders clone it really won't show much difference. Messy, complex code bases with layers of cruft from decades of patching - that's what separates the model boys from men.
Yeah, and its browser usage on tough web apps/sites was also amazing. This is one of the cases where it is easy to tell a difference. It was figuring out very effectively how to find right elements whereas with previous LLMs I had to constantly babysit and unblock them with browser usage.
I used codex 5.5 and Claude. I pay for Claude from my pocket. I use Codex at work. I can confidently say Codex 5.5 high is much better in going through long code bases (couple of millions of lines of code) vs Claude Fable/Opus which does only what is been told. while codex covers all sorts of edge cases. Frankly, I am not going to miss a thing if they stopped Fable.
Was gonna say the same thing. GP's description of Fable sounds a lot like my experience switching from Claude Code Opus-4.8 to Codex GPT-5.5.
No different from encryption
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
I mean, maybe in principle, but if the object is just hobbling Anthropic you might still get OpenAI's latest model without that much trouble.
It will just delay SOTA models to us by say 1 year. I’m actually ok with it given that’s it was entirely predictable any govt would do that to even strongish AI
Anthropic already with Fable basically said they will be the arbiter of who gets to use the "godmodel" with no criteria specified. So no thank you. We need to make llm's open source and completely disconnect from these companies or live in a dystopian "Anthropic" etc social credit score system where only the "blessed" have access to models.
“Fable was the strongest model on the market” - explain why anyone should believe that claim.
I’ve been trying to track LLM code generation adoption in the critical infrastructure world - as far as I can tell, it’s nill. Zero. Nada. Nobody is relying on these models to write secure code for anything where failure is catastrophic. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear reactors going into meltdown. Electrical grids loosing synchronicity. Lots of these BS claims from the marketing and investment crowd, but - it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.
I don't understand the point you're making.
It can be both the most powerful LLM on the market, and have no adoption in critical infrastructure.
i know someone who works on nuclear power plants that uses codex
obviously you need to review it
That's terrifying.
It is. Not per sé because the code might be of poor quality, but because someone sent that source code to a public API under the promise that oh noooo we won't use your code for training. Probably.
If they ever used Fable, it's sitting in Anthropic's servers for a month
> it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.
Okay. Let's say I agreed with you.
If you look at all technology and break down the total market for Critical Workloads vs non-critical workloads, what do you think that works out too, percentage wise? 12% critical? 18%? What if it was 30%! That would still mean 70% of the world's software could possibly be handled by an LLM. If that happens, the 30% of the Critical Workloads stuff is gonna get very, very competitive.
Not if the government bans them.
The whole reason China open sourced its models in the first place was because nobody generally speaking really trusts China and Chinese deployed models (if they were proprietary)
and OSS models gave way to running it with freedom and security.
So OSS models have always tried to catch up to the frontier and lag behind 3-6 months. For my use cases, I am happy with current OSS models especially so if you let frontier-ish models design the plan with your input
If I were to suppose that China created a frontier model so good and far ahead, then I can understand if they don't open-source it. Qwen does it already with their Max models being closed-source.
but if you are suggesting that China in whole will remove itself from AI race, then 3 (or 4) possibilities can occur.
1. Some chinese companies might stop the production of OSS models if their names are known (z.ai etc.) but there are multiple other companies who are fighting with their research labs as well. They might create a decent model and OSS it to get known within world and China.
2. The whole Chinese economy (well similar to America, but to an even more extreme level from my understanding) depends on AI and is a bet on AI. They are funneling state and all bank money into these companies. From point 1, they wouldn't wish to be silent with frontier models and then lag behind and wait for other countries to catch up (point 3)
3. Europe(MistralAI)/India(SarvanAI? Kinda recent) will jump on the opportunity. (My point is that these two regions are trying to create their own models. How much they lack from the frontier is another thing but if China were to remove itself from the race, then they will have much more time to figure out how to make better models)
My point is that america and china are in arms race of closed source vs open source models. If china were to close source its models, they might simply lag behind and other countries will catch up.
4. Either that or you are right and we will have the current frontier OSS models and some more. IMO they are reasonably good as well and I used to wonder what would happen if say it would have been net good if AI was stuck at a similar level to sonnet 4.5 (IMO it was sweet spot), so I don't think that I am reasonably worried about it all. If absolutely need be, you can have an frontier model direct a plan and have OSS models do the grunt work.
> These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
That sounds so great.
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer?
We will be not just safer but richer. These LLMs are like drugs that should absolutely not be cast freely into the highways and byways. My main worry is that this action will be a haphazard one-off and not part of a coherent plan of curtailing LLM propagation.
This is a very interesting perspective. However we always thought that the diffusion of ever stronger AIs was practically guaranteed by its competitive value- you might restrict what AIs are available in your country, but the impact on your economy can be dramatic if other countries have access to better models. In the end, it's hard to imagine governments blocking access to any AI that is just a bit better than what other countries have.
There's no such thing as a "strong LLM".
The whole idea is a lie and a marketing stunt to prop up the US stock market.
It's pathetic - this is all sleepy Trump getting back at them for saying no. That's all. Millions of people are affected by the mood of this shit-for-brains.
At first people said this was tin-foil hat territory. But ANYONE who publicly pisses this guy off, mysteriously get a government takedown weeks later. They're not even pretending anymore.
When Trump attacked them before because he wanted anthropic to decide who lives and dies, they said no. (That's probably a lie, I'm sure it has to do with money - but I digress).
So exec ban happened. Problem is - everyone uses claude. Microsoft is going through the same thing now. They find a way to use it anyway.
So they reverted it. What better way to go around circumvention than to just outright ban it.
Funniest thing - his own law makers are the ones who run on freedom and a nanny state. They are literally preventing us from using a tech "for our own safety" - can't get more nanny than that.
Pepperidge farm remembers when they banned G4 Macs for export as well
> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
It would be too naive to suppose that the strongest LLMs are available to plebs now.
Fair enough, there _could_ be powerful models that are hidden from the general public, but I wouldn't call it "naive" to think the current capitalistic incentives are such that the only way to produce such models is to do exactly what we see out in the open with a handful of companies each trying their hardest to outcompete the other
The LLM Euphorics—the types who might report about being poor for a few months because they “splurged” on a multi-tens of thousands of dollars LLM server—are now concerned about LLMs for the people. Yeah okay.
Those of us who are negative about AI for political reasons have been saying from the start that the biggest problem with AI is power. People can’t now all of a sudden be thinking that huh nation states have power (along with Big Tech and the rest of the power brokers).
But this is in fact quite a tortured fear, all wrapped up in the usual hyping—though this part is expected of LLM Euphorics. The usual story of simply making human labor less valuable and concentrating hardware for compute is just, you know, this rotten economic system working as it is intended. No need for weapons, subterfuge, three-letter agencies, much more straightforward, and just a natural evolution of X-CLASS CAPABILITIES.
> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
I would be surprised if the public ever had anything close to the strongest LLM. It’s not like nuclear bombs were created by the private sector, then the government started the Manhattan Project and seized them all for itself.
They probably had Fable-quality models in 2016.
If there was ever a time to sell all your stocks and buy gold, this is it. NVIDIA to zero. This will make COVID look like a market hiccup.
Repeating from the duplicated thread:
First I want to see them play video games at a high skill level, preferably without any access to game state beyond the same visual output that humans have access to, like a raster frame X number of times per second. One LLM model played Factorio, albeit at a very, very poor level, which can be seen if you slow the video to 0.25 playback speed and pause frequently.
https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1u1blr6/claude_fa...
There have been streams of other games, where LLMs and AIs have likewise performed very poorly.
I recognize that LLMs might be better at language processing than these sorts of tasks. But being able to play video games is part of general capability. And this kind of hardcore video game playing, with no access to game state, is also a general task where feigning skill can be harder. If LLMs excel at pretending to be competent without actually being competent, like this AI training approach is arguably about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
Then some AIs might be trained and designed for deceiving humans instead of actually being competent and capable. And thus, one response is that they should be met with more difficult tests.
Basically, make tests that AIs or LLMs will not have an easy time cheating. Hopefully, that will engender research in greater LLM/AI competence, not in greater ability to cheat or deceive, neither for LLM/AI researchers and companies, nor for LLMs/AIs themselves.
Yeah a bit like I’ll be impressed by a humanoid robot that can fold a shirt from a freeform state (i.e. thrown as a ball on the laundry chair, or straight out of the dryer). Just like repeatable movements an balance are the easy(er) parts of robotics, text processing is the easy part of AI.
Bigger picture is AI seems to advance at exponential rate
No. It doesn't.
I'm surprised how much of the discussion here is taking the angle of "Anthropic pretended this model was soooo dangerous for months as marketing, and it seems like someone decided to believe them!"
First, Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety and signs point to that still being the case. It's really cynical to say it was all an exaggeration for marketing.
Second, this isn't Moller promising a fantastic working flying car next year. The model did what Anthropic said it could do.
I realise that ruling out "they bought Anthropic's scaremongering" brings up the question of why the government would block Mythos/Fable, but not the roughly-as-capable and less restricted GPT5.5. However we do know for a fact that they dislike Anthropic more than OpenAI right now.
> First, Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety and signs point to that still being the case
"omg these things are so so so dangerous, no one should ever build them, but anyways give me $7 trillion so we can build them and see for ourselves, it's OK because we're The Good Guys"
What's with these naive Reddit-esque takes all over HN?
It was "these models will one day be dangerous, but we think it's possible to build them safely, doing more good than harm."
Someone disagreeing with you doesn't make it reddit.
Two days ago Antheopic's CEO made a lengthy post calling for most government oversight on AI. He even mentions support export controls, even though he wanted them applied only to chops [1].
Anthropic literally asked for this, though they might have hoped it wouldn't be used against themselves.
[1] https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential
You didn't read your own link. He called for a transparent testing process prior to releasing frontier LLMs into the wild. Export controls on chips to slow down China, which makes sense if you believe that chips are the way to superintelligence and the PRC will not be the best steward of it.
And I'm the naive one lmao... They certainly think it's possible to make money before the harm hits them personally, as for the rest we'll see.
They all moved real quick from "Oh wow we love research and open things #peace #progress #opensource" to "let me help you target these Iranian kids faster".
I can't believe these clowns have armies of brain dead techies licking their boots 24/7 on HN &co. These dudes are literally teaming up with palantir and the US gov to build an automatized mass surveillance state and people are fucking clapping and asking for more, then there are people like you coming here and telling us how cHiNa is bad and how The Good Guys are actually selflessly helping humanity
That might be an even more naive take.
Can you show me one space, historically, in any industry, where a company climbed to the top of a market solely on altruistic intentions?
"these things are super dangerous weapons. They're also available for $20/mo with a stolen credit card."
"These are more dangerous than nuclear weapons, which are controlled by AECA. Also our workforce is 50% non-citizen"
Just a complete clown show over there.
> The model did what Anthropic said it could do.
How come? Where are all of those security patches and critical bugs that would’ve broken all software if it was unleashed?
HN is mostly bitter cynics that think they understand AI safety better than the people that actually work on it.
There aren't many working on it though, definitely not enough given how many resources are going into building AI.
AI safety at these labs are largely focused on surface level measures and aren't empowered to stop progress of the company. I was surprised when Anthropic initially held Mythos back from the public, but it was always a temporary measure to give controlled access rather than a pause to make meaningful improvements in AI safety.
The only measures we see are the surface-level ones, because those are the only ones that sort of work.
Alignment is a hard, possibly impossible problem. Anthropic's gambit is they luck upon a solution before the paperclip maximizers take over.
But that's exactly my point. If they actually did legitimately fear that AGI or whatever the bar is could significantly impact all of humanity in a bad way they wouldn't be okay with saying "well this coat of paint sort of slows down the rust."
Either its a dangerous technology or it isn't, and if it is then surface level fixes that kind of work is completely unacceptable.
But that's the point. Assuming alignment is not possible and the risk caused by unaligned models is real, shouldn't then all effort go into preventing such models from existing in the first place?
...which would actually be an easy to solve problem unless you go out of your way to build such a model.
i wish Ilya and crew would chime in
Sometimes people on the inside are too involved to see the potential pitfalls outsiders might recognize ---this is why one typically has external auditors and third party companies do assessments.
I find HN to be filled with reactionaries who over react to every little thing when it comes to AI. Look at the response to Fable kicking some queries down to 4.8. If you read the comments you would think this was 1984 level censorship and the end of AI as we know it. In reality, it literally was something that most people would never run up against and if you did your query was kicked to a model that was state of the art literally a day ago. It's too much sometimes.
There are a lot of dangerous things in the world and surprisingly a lot of people can avoid the constant stream of chicken little nonsense.
If everyone expended the same amount of marketing effort trying to scare the ** out of everyone that Anthropic does, it'd be a very miserable world to live in.
We are unfortunately a captured audience and the autistic people at Anthropic are abusing this.
Yes, we should hand everyone a zero-day button.
I don't see any reason we should put weight behind their supposed fears today though. It's completely irrational to build the very thing you think could seriously harm or kill us all.
Yes they may have had those fears before, but even then it didn't stop them from building companies and running full speed towards the end goal with little to no effort spent on meaningful safety efforts.
The idea that the government introduced export controls on it because they "fell for the marketing" is stupid. It's much more likely they're being vindictive. There's plenty of evidence that that's how the current government acts.
Anthropic is just another company of, in my opinion, money-hungry sociopaths; they are not that different from the OpenAI bros.
So yeah, play stupid games - win stupid prizes.
Executive staff seems money-hungry for sure (note the lack of non profit that OpenAI has)
I would say they have researchers with self-important god complexes that makes them think they know better than everyone else.
Read about the LTBT/PBC structure. Anthropic is not accountable to its investors.
If they were money hungry they wouldn't have fought the DOW. Everyone knows that's a retarded thing for a business to do.
Finally they will pay for all the scaremongering they been doing to sell their models as something so much ahead of all else.
Now they finally found the right fools in audience to believe it.
The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence. This is part of a clear historical record that is available for anyone to Google. Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
Arbitrary imposition of export controls is also part of the history of frontier tech. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them and treat AI like nuclear weapons. They would not be attempting to IPO and they for sure would not sell their weapon-like thing to the general public.
I think this is a reasonable point, but a better comparison might be to nuclear energy. I think the frontier labs sincerely believe that AI can be developed at great benefit to humanity, and they clearly want to lead that push, but they also sincerely believe there is a real catastrophic risk.
My personal issue in comparing LLM progress and risk as labs publicly predict it with nuclear power in the middle of the 20th century is that the processes by which it works where fairly quickly well understood and the risk could thus be realistically assessed. Some powerplant operators did not adhere with best practices, but building a relatively safe nuclear power plant was not impossible given appropriate effort and spending. Heck, according to some, we could have even gone far more fail-safe approaches (molten salt) if military interest haden’t been at play.
With what is predicted by frontier labs for LLMs, all of this is not the case. We are far further from any understanding of how these models work internally than in the early days of fission and, if this was actually creating a truly intelligent, autonomous entity, alignment seems unsolvable as well, at least the way it is proposed.
It’s why I have from the get go been critical of this doomsday framing and tended to always dislike it. This is basically the outcome that was inevitable given the framing and it was bought to prevent far less stringent, but more actionable possible regulation that labs very much wanted to avoid.
https://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/
None of SOTA LLMs are any different - they just much much larger and have a lot of optimizations.
Fact that LLM companies trying to sell it as some kind of magic is just proof how much lies is here.
All it does is just predict next "word" at any given time.
This is obviously true. It's very hard to predict whatever you gonna decompress from a lossely "compressed" dataset using floating point math.This is why you cant solve it all with pre-training or censorship on top, but instead you need a good sandboxes and harnesses.
By how, I meant specifically the internal activations, which no person in the field claims to have a comprehensive understanding of, not next token prediction as the underlying technology. The whole interpretability of it all is the crux I was referring to, though I will give that you are right, that’s not really the how it works and I worded it sloppily.
Anthropic are putting more effort than most into this and I find their work fascinating in that area, though like with OpenAI, I will maintain that if they truly believed this problem must be solved to stave off major catastrophe, they’d solely focus on interpretability of other labs models, not work on and market their own.
They all believe that they are building the machine of doom. The thing that drives the moral dilemma to continue doing it is simply the prisoner's dilemma - the cat is out of the bag, if they don't do it, another (less ethical?) actor would do it.
Yes, I believe the reasoning is that they think safety research can best be done from the frontier.
If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.
Yeah all they care about is safety, but lets see how many of them quits once US government command them to work on autonomous killbots.
To make sure we keep track of what we're talking about with loss-of-control x-risk, a sufficiently smart version of Claude Code is more deadly than any government's army of autonomous killbots, because it can recursively self improve and has unpredictable training-induced preferences.
Sufficiently smart version of Claude Code: dont exist.
Autonomous flying killbots: exist.
Once somebody scientifically prove and shows any kind of self-improving software we can start bothering about it. I pretty sure everyone trying to do it and it would be all over the news once its here.
That's exactly what Fable is. They use Fable to improve Fable. I reckon the successful experiments must go into the model training set with a strong RL signal, and that is why they are so paranoid about people using Fable for LLM tasks. Fable knows what it did to improve itself. Pure speculation of course.
We're on track to get there globally and economic pressures will ensure it happens. It's not too early to worry about it
There's a 745 mile front of the Ukraine war where neither side have been able to pierce for months because of drone warfare. It's definitely not too early to worry about it.
I guess they were talking about self improving software. Which obviously not there and likely wont be there soon.
As for killbots they are all over frontline, but dont actually need particularly smart LLMs to run - some good enough segmentation, pattern recognition on smartphone SOC is enough to kill hundreds of thousans of people.
That's ridiculous scifi nonsense
Dario blinked when he was asked to do it and Sam Altman was in Hegseth's DMs promising all the AI child killing the US government can order up within minutes. No one meaningful will quit over this, that's why all of the biggest US tech companies can march in pride parades and provide compute to the perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza at the same time.
Can you show me a world power that is not trying to use cutting edge AI for military purposes?
Because other countries are starting to use AI for military purposes, other countries are also looking into it to asses and learn. Here in Europe there is the EU AI Act to limit harm everyday harm to citizens caused by AI systems. However, it currently excludes military. The new legislation is just started to be enforced to high risk uses (employment filtering, biometrics, etc.) in august 2026, and full rollout in august 2027. In April 2025 there is a report from EU this legislation may help pave the road for military AI usage conventions [1]
[1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7695...
This is a poor way of framing the question, a better one would be can you find me another world power that is misallocating trillions of capital in vaporware with very little to show for it?
The United States government isn't, capital is. That capital can come from outside the US and much of it is.
That said: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-09/china-pre...
Building frontier models to do safety research on them is what Anthropic was all about in the early years. That included building the best model, but only releasing it once it became the second best. Precisely to avoid an AI arms race where everyone is forced to release better and better models, risks be damned
Something changed their mind, and since Opus 3 they are in the business of releasing the best models
Exactly. And within the AI safety discourse, your behavior hinges on what you think the default chance of doom is, and how optimistic you are about alignment work being able to limit it before we reach superintelligence.
People running the labs are in a middle camp where they are scared enough by AI to take the threat seriously, but much more optimistic about alignment than the people who seem to have thought about it the most.
The scary part is not so much that the doomers give the extinction scenario 50% (Hinton) to 95%+ chance (Yampolskiy, Yudkowsky), but that the optimists (Amodei, Bengio) give it a 10%+ chance. And everyone keeps dancing.
> If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.
They also want to be trillionaires. If they don't built it, no trillions. So they have to build it, now (and get their IPO done before the bubble pops).
It’s all ego. I, and only I, am the bringer of doom, slayer of worlds.
I am so smart that what I do will destroy humanity, or save it.
Fable 5 was great, but not that great.
Sorry to be crude, but both the government and anthropic are acting like a bunch of pussies.
Meow.
You’re not getting it. Anthropic continual fear mongering is harming wider AI industry development and the gov has always been looking for an excuse to assert their dominance. They got what they deserve.
Or maybe government AI regulation and international cooperation is the only thing that can break the arms race dynamics and is necessary to save us from a substantial chance of doom?
Or they could have thrown the letter away.
But that makes no sense here. "If I'm not doing it then someone else will" does not work if everyone is doing it anyway.
Even if they had the best model on the market and applied it with perfect alignment and safeguards, what would stop someone else from releasing a worse but unrestrained model that is still "good enough" to do damage?
It's as if we said "gain-of-function research can lead to horrible biological weapons, so everyone should be doing it, but our company will focus on the most infectious viruses, so no one else will do it"
Don't want to sound rude, but if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell to you.
This is a naive justification and Dario & Sam et al are smart people and they know it is.
The ends don't justify the means. OpenAI was meant to be a nonprofit, now they're subverting it. Anthropic is a PBC looking at a trillion dollar IPO. Dario and Sam don't even hold hands in front of world leaders[1] (look how childish).
Do you *really* think those guys are doing something that's not for the sake of their egos and pockets? The bridge is still available.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/openai-sam-altman-anthropic-...
LLMs refuse to give the recipe for making meth. That, along with the various other unspeakable things, is the less-doom version.
You need to read Empire of AI by Karen Hao. Just because these leaders convince their workers to toil away their lives under some fake auspice doesn't mean it's what they all believe. Just a small subset.
The vast majority just care about money + power, let's not make it more complicated by bringing in delusional fanatics into the picture.
We're still acting like this is major turning point in society when these tools can barely find a market outside of turning $5 into $1, the leaders of these companies are now at the stage where they are trying to orchestra a national bailout under the guise of sovereign wealth fund lunacy when the vast majority of society hates these tools, companies, and people working for them.
I agree with this. But i think Ilya and Dario hold these beliefs sincerely. Probably a sizable portion of Anthropic employees too
Some of them believe they are building God, and if they can get there first with their God, they can build it in their image and commandeer the free choice of the rest of humanity by force to ensure there will be no God but their God.
I wish I was kidding. At least that faction is less harmful than the ones who want to use murder to stop AI research.
That's not how nerds think. You can believe there's a high chance of what you're working on being dangerous and still be unable to stop working on it. As Oppenheimer put it, "when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it".
Accelerationism is an established political philosophy. Why is it obvious that they are insincere when they could equally think that the only way to control it is to be the ones building it?
History has shown over and over that that strategy is doomed to fail - see communism, nuclear energy, or meddling with the Middle East for some arbitrary recent examples.
They believe in the danger of out of control super-intelligence. The generous interpretation is that they believe they can contain it.
Perhaps more like nuclear power? Potentially very beneficial but also dangerous.
JFYI for-profit companies make pretty OK nuclear power plants
This assumes that they believe two things which I don't think they do: 1. that the US is the only place where this will be developed, and 2. that the government will be able to handle this better than anyone else.
Thank you for writing this. It’s such a classic example of ”do what I say not what I do” but in reverse. Why would you ever judge a CEO or company by their statements and not their actions. Scaremongering is incredibly efficient for marketing, the fact that both players are using it to drive monetary gain is kind of a tell.
They aren't saying there's a 100% chance of doom.
They believe there's a non-zero chance of doom so would rather an org that prioritises safety to be the one at the frontier, on the assumption (I presume) that there will be a frontier regardless.
This. People who care about animal cruelty dont go building largest ever meatfarms and slaughterhouses.
People who opposing arms manufacturing and gun violence dont jump to work for gun companies.
People who really want AI benefit all humanity dont stick working with lying CEOs who want to convert company from a non-profit.
Etc. So many examples.
One major source of conflict in AI policy / AI safety is that very smart people have radically diverging intuitions about how dangerous superintelligence is and how difficult it is to align.
A first group dismisses the problem entirely, saying intelligence != power and AI doesn't have "drives".
A second group believes that alignment is solvable through engineering and iteration, and that we have the best chance of surviving if people with the right intentions are the ones working on it.
A third believes that aligning a superintelligence is a unique category of problem, that we are nowhere close to the level of scientific understanding needed to achieve it, that we only have one shot (because once a sufficiently powerful superintelligence exists it will thwart all future attempts, and alignment techniques that worked on dumber AI will likely not work on it), and that the world will have to coordinate to avoid killing ourselves off by building superintelligence before we understand how to do it safely, the way we have coordinated to avoid nuclear war.
The Anthropic and OpenAI founders, Elon, and Anthropic engineers are mostly in the second category. Some safety people at Anthropic and OAI are in the third category, but leading people in the third category think that pure safety roles at the labs are potentially impactful enough to be worth not quitting.
Theres quite a large number of people who believe it's basically impossible when the intelligence gap is too big
I have a fourth, secret position: we achieved superintelligence the moment we achieved normal intelligence. Speed is a power in and of itself; and even really primitive models like GPT-2 could generate tokens faster than humans could write. They could also be parallelized on hardware that already exists. That is superintelligence in two dimensions - speed and population count. All the arguments the AI safety people are making are about superintelligence in a different dimension - that of "single-context scaling" - but the other dimensions are also relevant to the conversation.
And the superintelligence currently available to us is already causing lots of documented harms. AI psychosis. Sexy suicide coaches. Slop. The problem is that those are all the harms the dirty, filthy AI ethicists talk about. The AI safety people want to talk about new and exciting harms that only the scaling dimension can bring us.
My personal opinion is that if a superintelligence catastrophe actually happens, mitigating those harms will neatly move over from the safety bucket to the ethics bucket, and the safety people will start imagining some new and even worse kinds of harms the next model will make.
> Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them...
This comment makes no sense. Id you think this tech is dangerous and happening soon and clearly they think the safest way to have it releases is to do so first and model safe ways of doing things. Clearly we cab agree or disagree it's internally consistent what they are doing and aligns with their statements.
And you and OP think the best way to be first to release this is tie all of their funding for the exponentially growing expense is to they notoriously slow moving, bureaucratic government includinf funding process? And the best way to develop it is to directly tie their fate to this notoriously capricious administration?
These comments make no sense. Even if you're completely against Anthropic those comments make no sense.
Not sure you really intended to reply to me, but I'm not against Anthropic or "AI".
I am agaist hypocrites.
They selling next word prediction as "intellegence" and all knowing oracle to non tech savvy population who have no clue how it works.
And they also try to play a babysitter or big brother whatever you prefer for people in IT because uh oh their text generator can be used for cybersecurity research.
Its like if developers of nmap, wireshark, SRE tools, static code analyzers or fuzzers would market them as super duper dangerous.
FAFO. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
They don't stick working for sama, they split off and found Anthropic.
I oppose gun violence and I would go to work for a firearms manufacturer.
I oppose nuclear war, and I would go to work in the supply chain for nuclear weapons.
Deterrence and game theory are very real.
It's the narcissism.
Its money and power. This is all these people care about just like almost everyone else.
Or might be deep inside they relly care about it, but that $2,000,000 / year salary and $10,000,000 stock option just overpowered them.
Safety my ass.
What do you think they would do differently if they were genuinely worried about the safety?
I think those who care about safety would try to push for how 99% of all scientific research is done - in universities and actual labs, with transparent information on red teaming results.
Also with international cooperation like how humanity regulate actually dangerous stuff: virus and vaccine research and nuclear energy.
Not hidden behind walls of 10 commercial organizations where each pushing for commercial adoption and IPO like ASAP before bubble bursts.
Not lying and scaremongering public into how their models will replace everyone tomorrow or destroy civilization via cyberattacks.
That line of thinking (public goods) is why the same people started OpenAI as a non profit originally.
Notice how almost no Universities are producing large models?
A key problem is that orgs can't get enough funds to stay on the frontier. And they believe they must be on the frontier to do (and apply) safety research. OpenAI needed to spin off a for-profit subsidiary to accept investment to build things.
And it seem(ed) hard to get one government to fund and take safety seriously, let alone an international cooperation.
If they started a university/gov cooperative to solve this, do you think they would do less of the "scaremongering of the public" talk? My guess it that it would be similar.
The same kind of restrictions that you hint at (eg, treating it like a public virus research) are why they rub a lot of people the wrong way in the corporate world, I think. Normally companies downplay the risks of their own products. See cigarette companies. Anthropic do still publish safety research and red teaming info. But I do think they honestly believe they can't do this work without the resources of a company, and they were burnt by the non-profit structure (Anthropic has a "Long-Term Benefit Trust" instead).
We should definitely keep them to account, but I don't personally think Anthropic have acted in a way broadly inconsistent with safety belief yet. Many of these decisions are self-serving too (eg. protecting models) so they also haven't been seriously tested, either. But the individuals do have a very long history of talking about it (including hurting their own reputation) from even before the chatpgt-moment money train rolled in.
edit: for clarity, but still messily/quickly written
“OpenAI's CEO says he's scared of GPT-5”
https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/op...
Marketing or actual fear? We’ve got 5 and 5.5 out now… he compared 5 to the Manhattan project. AI may one day be an economic Manhattan project but GPT 5 wasn’t it.
It’s a meme because they overdo it.
At some intelligence capability there can be catastrophic risk, the fact that we don't yet have any catastrophe doesn't mean the risk wasn't real. It's similar to new viruses which don't lead to outbreaks, the correct takeaway isn't "oh you were insane to panic bc nothing happened". There is small risk (and increasing) of huge harms with each improvement
The risk wasn't real because we now have access to the model and can see with our own eyes how this model could never have posed a risk to begin with.
Perfect prediction of what a new tech can do is always impossible.
Given that, they have a choice only between excessive caution or recklessness.
Would you rather they acted like the tobacco companies and downplayed known risks, e.g. all the times LLM output got in the news already for dangerously bad advice, sychophantic encouragement of mental health issues, finding previously unknown security vulnerabilities etc.?
> Would you rather they acted like the tobacco companies and downplayed known risks, e.g. all the times LLM output got in the news already for dangerously bad advice, sychophantic encouragement of mental health issues, finding previously unknown security vulnerabilities etc.?
Well, they've done that too, if we're looking for reasons to doubt their sincere concern about it.
This is like a smoker that lives to 100 saying that he had no increased risk of developing lung cancer because he didn’t at 100.
It's more like a hypothetical world where there were millions of smokers and none of them ever developed lung cancer
Every public statement out of a CEO's mouth is marketing. It would literally be violating fiduciary duty to be saying anything else.
Funny they're never afraid of their competitor's models, but the ones they build (and release) are just soooooo scary.
Very true.
Did you watch the linked video: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mbafk7/openai_ceo...
It all sounds pretty accurate and reasonable to me if you watch it.
Also fable was good but not Manhattan level project, i honestly did not find a major difference between it and gpt 5.5
Sam Altman is not one of those people. But other founders certainly felt that way.
Sam Altman doesn't really know all that much about LLMs, he's a sales/marketing guy, not technical.
So it doesn't really matter what he thinks
Those are the folks who run the industry
Except for the uncomfortable fact that he controls the salary and job status of the people who do know much about LLMs.
OK. So? Would you say Harry Truman was a nuclear scientist?
Franklin D. Roosevelt is a better fit for an administrative nuclear program "founder" analogy.
Truman was totally in the dark until April 1945 by which time the bulk of the PoC and weapons prep work was done and the project was running fully independently w/o POTUS involvement.
Yet the guys in the lab coats worked for him.
Not for the bulk of the Manhattan project and not all the people in lab coats .. the intellectual founders that repeatedly pushed for the project and demonstrated feasibility weren't even US citizens.
Imagine for a few minutes, and really let it sink in what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one. The open weights original pre consumer grade version. Then, even then you know that it's the worst and dumbest its every going to be, The next time you blink it's exponentially more. Some people don't think about what an exponential curve really means. Others are sitting in the front seat trying not to shit themselves and appear like reasonable normal people. How one responds to that is as unknown as what's going to happen after we cross that line, but it's coming and holy shit so many people haven't even wrapped their head around how much bigger it is than the petty human things we distract ourselves with. Being in awe and terrified and wanting to run and to be apart of the most significant thing in our entire existence of being sentient is normal. We have nothing to compare it to. Nothing to base predictions on. We ar about to have company for the first time. We're going to have a conversation with something other than ourselves since we formed the ability to speak. One minute to the next will pass q It's all or nothing. Like it or not. It's too late. buckle up.
> Imagine […] what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one.
That is not how it works. It is not “splitered”, there is no divided attention.
There is nothing to indicate that LLMs are improving "exponentially" at this point.
The last few iterations show a logarithmic curve at best tbh. If we are to see a major advance, it'll be something like the implementation and infrastructure for byte-level transformers.
People don't get that big labs actively want government regulation, not because they are genuinely concerned about AI misalignment. But because it is the 101 in how to achieve and crystalize oligopoly. What they want is "only the government and the big guys can work on AI", for the rest of us it would be illegal.
And they want Americans to be locked into paying 50 dollars per 1 million output tokens.
Not only that, they know that the real enemy of big Labs is not china is "home gpu/tpu" improvements. Without government intervention in a couple of years everyone could have their own fable like model at home. But of course big labs and government will not allow it never
On an unrelated side note, I wish we would start saying about "$X / megatoken" over "$X / million tokens".
No good reason really, it just sounds cooler.
Following S.I. notation, we might have Tk for token, so kTk, MTk, GTk etc.
Fat government contracts, consulting, safety services, and exclusive tender access all follow from this regulation too.
The sensation I’m left with is a handful of goons making up new IPO math thanks to a specific constellation of political forces, using access and favour with those forces to bake themselves into the defence industry, and that the taxpayer and investor will be left holding the bag when reality rears its head. But in the short term, even as a clear ploy, it’s super profitable for all the oligarchs and hedge funds flush with recovery cash.
Like Enron, there was big profits to make if you knew what they were doing. Tinkerbell math with undeniable profit potential for a select few.
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
And then somehow came to conclusion that the only way to address that risk was to go ahead and spend a gigantic amount of effort and resources to build exactly that superintelligence...
> OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence
Why would they sell there services to Palantir and/or to the military then?
Because the US military and it's contractors are good?
"Why did they open an orphanage instead of pouring acid into a town water tower?!?"
I put very little weight behind any of those fearful statements made years ago. I assume leaders of those companies are fairly smart and rational, and there's no rational explanation for them running companies building the very thing they (supposedly) genuinely believe could kill us all.
I don't doubt they may have held genuine fears in the past, but those are long gone by now.
> The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
This is not a contradiction.
These things can all be true:
1. That they were afraid of ASI
2. That they continue to be afraid of ASI
3. That they recognize that LLMs aren't in fact a path to ASI
4. That the current models aren't the existential danger they'd have us believe
5. That they're claiming they are because it makes for good marketing
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
They don't. LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence and everyone working on LLMs knows this (with a few eccentric exceptions).
> LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence
The "never superintelligence" part I'll buy, though only in the sense of sample efficiency and generalisation ("quality superintelligence"), as they clearly have a superhuman breadth of skills, and run at superhuman speed.
"Never" out-of-control is obviously falsified by the already existing headlines about times they've gone out of control… in part, in some cases, because of their superhuman speed.
They've never gone out of control. All those headlines are cases where humans deliberately relinquished control.
A distinction without a difference.
If you're asleep at the wheel, you're legally responsible for the car crash, but the car itself was the thing which by crashing caused injuries.
If you deliberately relinquished control of your computer to OpenClaw, you're (I hope) legally responsible for whatever it does, but that doesn't stop it bankrupting you or deleting all your emails or whatever it was you connected it to.
DNA printers exist and are a thing. In 2010 we could all tell ourselves that no sane person would ever let some future AGI "out of the box" and onto the internet. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, do you seriously expect nobody to connect an LLM to a DNA printer, despite this being a terrible idea, given all the other things they've connected LLMs to despite it being a terrible idea?
> A distinction without a difference
That's absurd. The distinction is at the heart of the entire discussion.
It's fine if you want to discuss the disruptive effects of LLMs in the hands of the masses, but that's not what anyone means when they say "out-of-control" in the context of the ASI meme
> It's fine if you want to discuss the disruptive effects of LLMs in the hands of the masses, but that's not what anyone means when they say "out-of-control" in the context of the ASI meme
On the contrary.
The e.g. paperclip maximiser isn't "an AI decides to make paperclips", it is "some idiot tells an AI to make paperclips and leaves it unsupervised".
Even when people were priding themselves on plain just not believing Yudkowsky's claims that him role-playing as an AI could talk people into letting him out of the box*, the entire point was "let's get an AI to do work so we don't have to".
The entire point of AI has always been to automate stuff, to let ourselves not have to think about the stuff it does. Same as industrial machinery, and it took us long enough to sort out workplace health and safety and emergency off-switches for those. Or even more basic things like not having kids dart in and out of the unstoppable moving steam looms while they were in motion.
We are really, really slow at safety for this kind of thing.
* https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox
Which is going out of control. Something not under control is out of control. If I jump out of a moving car, I deliberately relinquished control of it. It's still out of control. What a silly semantic game.
"LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence" might be relevant if there weren't many hundreds of researchers working (at OpenAI, Anthropic and elsewhere) on AI designs not based on the transformer (LLM) architecture.
People are working on lots of things all the time, so far, nothing has approached the efficacy of the transformer architecture.
LLMs didn't emerge by chance, they are the culmination of decades of research intersecting with brute force engineering rigor in a perfect storm of innovation. You're not just going to stumble into an alternative approach by dumping loads of cash into research.
Most of those researchers would disagree with your statement that the next major breakthrough is probably decades in the future.
Many of the insights accumulated in the decades up to now will probably prove useful for creating non-LLM AI, and the researchers can use LLM AI to speed up their research into non-LLM AI.
If I remember correctly, the original GPT was considered too dangerous to release to the wild.
With hindsight, does that hold? If not, then how would we know a model is truly dangerous to release?
I believe some people at these companies are sincere sure, but the CEOs, the investors, your sam altmans etc, the marketing talk.
Hell no, can’t trust a single word.
Of all the frontier labs, Anthropic has been the most creative in its marketing. I really, really don't put it beyond them for this to be one big crazy stunt.
Besides, when has the US government been known to do things like this proactively? The phone call came from inside the house.
> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere
GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.
We can argue about sincerity, but I don't think we can argue about utter historical incompetence in assessing the risks. It's one or the other.
Either way the evidence seems to indicate we should not listen to AI companies about the risks of AI. Which is not to say that there aren't risks, just that the dealer is the least credible review.
> GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.
No, it was "let's set a precident while these things are not too dangerous, c'mon guys we know y'all can reproduce this easily".
GPT-2 was absolutely too dangerous to release at the time OpenAI made that statement. It’s only safe now because the specific risks they cited were dependent on the public’s lack of knowledge that such systems existed.
bro, it was literally incomprehensibly retarded.
Not at all. The writing is on the wall, and they want you to be locked into paying absurd subscription rates for neutered models while they internally use all of that money to run the unrestricted models to clone all of our businesses and swallow the economy. It really does not take a genius to see the long term play by Anthropic. They're a scummy company and have done everything in their power to lead to a scenario like this, but this isn't the exact scenario they bargained for because it affects their own employees and big foreign buyers. Instead, they'd rather have all of the decision making power themselves.
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
I'd say their pecuniary interest is a reason one might plausibly doubt their sincerity, as are their continued efforts to build and sell access to the tools.
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
Ironic then, that both companies are in an out-of-control race to create a superintelligence.
How is it ironic to believe in a risk that actualizes
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence
this means nothing
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
If you want to be taken seriously, provide data, proof, so that any outside observer can independently come to the same conclusion instead of taking your word for it. Asking people to trust you for [reasons?] and that you somehow for some reason are right and the other is wrong regardless of if they agree or not. This is the imposition of a viewpoint instead of winning your case, which is not a sensible point of view, and definitely not how you influence opinions.
No reason except what comes from a bit of critical thinking.
What do they stand to gain by fearmongering their models as powerful threats? Clout, funding, fanfare, discussion, limelight, funding, funding, stronger IPO, valuation, funding.
What cybersecurity threshold was crossed by mythos that wasn't already crossed by 4.8/5.5? Crickets from 99% of those who have had access.
Have they pulled the same stunts multiple times before with previous models? Check.
You're blind if you dont think that greed and marketing are behind most things you see and hear about when gigantic corporations are involved.
I don't think anthropic or OAI are evil, but its clear both have contracts/connections with Dod and/or Palantir. Both are powered largely by greed still. If you actually want an example of these sincere founders you think OAI/anthropic are run by... look at Ilya at SSI or something. Please open your eyes and stop spreading your opinions on things you clearly have no clue about.
I wish I were this naive.
How do you know what the founders sincerely believe?
They said why they think it’s a sincere belief: past statements from before the AI hype cycle took off. I take it you have other evidence?
Things can change, and if you know pushing the metaphorical red button brings your company more attention, then you press that button everytime.
So if I claim I am a communist who doesn't want to ever get rich and then someone dangles a billion shiny dollars in front of me to just simply grab and own, you think I'd still be a communist then?
If you go around saying “I’m a communist, I believe in communism, I think it’s very important that we establish communism”? Sure, absolutely. Engels was pretty rich.
Replace the cash with Apple or some other trillion dollar corporation and you're given the CEO's seat and voting control on the BoD. Can I be Tim Cook and preach communism and expect anyone to believe it?
They're going around saying "Imagine no possessions. To help you, we'll take them all. Don't thank us".
Just like Trump sincerely believed he won the 2020 election.
OpenAI was, but didn't all those people then leave for Anthropic?
Their marketing reinforces the previous post though.
Going for months claiming how good mythos is for security cuz too powerful is their own making.
Yes we do. Dario said GPT2 is too dangerous to release. He’s dishonest since that’s obviously not true. This theater is about holding onto power and control. And about limiting competition.
Yes it is funnily true but it was for fake news generation and not it's cyber capabilities.
Another fun little gem of information, government has something called Mayhem
> the autonomous Robo-Hacker AI called Mayhem that’s now in charge of protecting the Pentagon’s most critical systems
Guess Mythos and Mayhem had a chat
It was about spam and scam generation which mostly was true as we can see...
what a profoundly unaware comment
they are more than happy to build the things for themselves
it is all two-faced behavior of the exact kind of manipulators that crave power
Sincerity does not determine whether an individual is scaremongering.
We can argue over the definition of scaremongering and what people we’ve never met “really think”, or we can argue over what the actual risks of AI are. I know which one I’d prefer…
I mean it kinda does.
It can be both.
The amount of self-confidence and belief it takes to get a company through the funding rounds and burn through borrowed money to rise to the top requires an absurd amount of self-delusion.
It's not. I got articles this year in my feed citing heads of OpenAI and Anthropic about the threat of AI and how they're addressing it.
Ah yes we are being told to believe in sincerity of people running trillion dollar corporations.
The clear historical record seems to indicate we've got a bunch of pathological liars trying to automate pathological lying.
You're saying "this is normal" without making an argument that it's sensible.
>> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
Oh please. Do people really believe this or shit like "Don't do evil". Companies get founded by all kind of people and ideals. They all go out the window quickly.
Why are they both rushing to IPO now then?
Some people do. Read the extropian newsletters from the 90s.
yes, yes, and Apple forbids sideloading because they're worried about grannies installing malware.
I am biased but I think if they really believed what they were saying, they would be a lot more humble about it.
I suspect what happened is the classic problem: you were sincere, then someone showed you a pile of money bigger than you could possibly imagine and you started to make excuses - Anthropic has a lot of EA people, so the excuse "Imagine how many lives you could save with this much money"[0] is very tempting, especially if all you have to do is diverge slightly from your plan.
[0]: the excuse is even true! You can get a lot of malaria nets/vaccines for 1 million.
I mean this earnestly: is this copy?
> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere
Why? Because they said it a few times? Then if they know the risk, why do they still making it? Comes out the "some one will do it eventually, better be us 'good' people to do it first" talking point?
See? It is a marketing strategy after all. These all talks, it's all to fit themselves into the "'good' people" narrative. It's a centuries old strategy to shield it's user from responsibilities while luring the support from the stupid.
However, the most harmful damage, which is mass layoffs, is already partially done. This could really kill, a massive genocide even, by making people jobless and potentially incomeless. And it is shown that these tech CEOs, they don't care any bit of that beyond the point "I've already told you so".
Look into the history of Sam Altman and his ventures. He sincerely only believes in lying about his companies to investors like he did with Loopt.
He is not even a researcher or an engineer.
And Dario broke up with OpenAI and founded Anthropic because he didn't like Sam's and OpenAI's vision.
"founded by people who believe..." is doing a lot of work and it is hard to believe that in ernest given the sketchy past of the same people.
Most original higher up people who cared about safety and allignment in OpenAI have left.
There is a huge difference between the company founder saying something like that and the us government saying so.
"Our product is so good the US had to make it illegal for foreigners" is a hell of a marketing slogan.
This is good PR for them. They get to tweet about how scary and powerful their models are in the lead up to their IPO.
This just made any closed LLM a huge supply chain risk. Everybody was aware of this possibility, but now it actually happened. It's like having nuclear weapons vs. firing a nuclear weapon.
Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.
Switching between LLMs takes all of 30 seconds - there will be no hesitation to adopt whichever LLM is performing the best.
> Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.
Not really. There aren't any other choices, and the PRC also heavily utilizes export controls [0].
This is why sovereign AI has become important, as can be seen with EU NatSec uses cases tending to use Mistral [1] and Indian governments starting to use Sarvam [2].
That said, for most commercial usecases, older generations of Opus as well as enterprise grade GPT and Gemini are fairly good.
The distilled OSS models are alright for hobbyists but if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini (most hobbyists don't get access to these) you see how far behind the open weight models are.
Even in China, traditionally open minded models teams like Alibaba's Qwen are looking to become more restricted given the org changes [3].
Also, Corporate RFCs now demand final say on model used and depending on the geo, this can be a dealbreaker (eg. An American financial institution will absolutely blacklist a vendor if they use a Chinese model and same in reverse and European defense vendors mandate sovereign EU models depending on the opportunity).
[0] - https://www.allbrightlaw.com/EN/10475/f9d4055e47e81afb.aspx
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/mistral-defen...
[2] - https://www.sarvam.ai/blogs/partnerships-with-indian-states
[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/b39da303-3188-447b-8b65-3dd8dad8b...
> The PRC also heavily utilizes export controls
Matters not for open weight models, no?
> if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini you see how far behind the open weight models are.
I really do feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is often better than current Sonnet is, in the general case.
Opus 4.7 is a solid step above Sonnet, and Fable was a solid step above Opus 4.7. I've only had Fable for a few days, obviously, but I was decently impressed after Opus 4.8 being a downright disappointment for me (it's just too buggy; I had it go out of control 3 separate times on things Opus 4.7 never had any trouble with.) I still ran into limitations. It's not world-endingly great.
So, based on that, I think DeepSeek V4 Pro is, ignoring multi-modal capabilities, about a couple solid steps behind. Assuming model iteration will continue to decelerate, especially as Anthropic heads into IPO, I'm guessing that DeepSeek will probably be able to strike back with something further along. Of course we'll see how able and willing they are to stay open weight, but they've done well so far so, no reason to doubt them at the moment.
(There are some models that claim to be ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro. I've tried some of them and really not been that impressed. Maybe it's a me issue.)
Now I reckon that most people just simply don't really need Mythos/Fable for most of what they do and using Mythos/Fable tokens in place of Sonnet-tier models would not make any sense. At my job we already mostly just use Sonnet as it is. I'm sure there is some cutting-edge research where you want the absolute best model available and sure, in that case, you're stuck with Anthropic for the moment.
But is that really everyone? After all, while Mythos was dominating the hype cycles, quite a lot of impressive LLM-assisted CVEs dropped that were not linked to Mythos.
> There aren't any other choices
This might be the trigger for creating other choices. Not within a month, but things can change quickly.
I randomly received an email from chatgpt saying my account was suspended. I appealed it and got it back - I hadn't used it in months.
But this has left a sour taste in my mouth. What if I relied on it for mission critical business processes?
This is potentially far worse than say a gmail account going down. It's the stuff of nightmare fuel.
Not having an alternative is a massive risk for any business.
The issue is compute is constraint and export controlled, as is even knowhow in model training.
Edit: Can't reply
> Time to build fabs back in the states
We are and did. The Intel and TSMC fabs have already started 2nm fabrication.
> as is even knowhow in model training
you think its that hard to get trade secrets from some openai or anthropic engineer if you promise them anonymity and a new better paid position? hell they might even give it away for free if they think what their company is doing is morally wrong. know how is not source code, you cant catch it with dlp or online leak scanners. you would need 24/7 combined human and electronic surveillance and thats something even the cia reserves for top level targets, it takes too much manpower to use it on everyone.
SMIC hired hundreds of TSMC employees and now its a couple years away from 3nm equivalent chips in full production. export controls only work against poor countries with less advanced industry like russia. china has the resources and export controls give the motivation. and if the eu/us relations get even worse i wouldnt be surprised if the dutch government let asml start selling euv machines to everyone just to get back at trump.
Compute was constrained. There is a lot happening, especially with chinese chips which currently points to a massive upcoming increase in non-US capacity.
ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ekndZwyOzo
They are export controlled in most cases as well.
Also, the EU, Japan, SK, ASEAN, and India are not supportive of using Chinese tech after China export controlled rare earth exports last years [0].
Software supply chain regulations also make utilizing Chinese software risky for ExChina players and make using ExChina tech risky for Chinese players.
Expect to see RFCs now demanding visibility into what models are used and right of refusal - this is already the norm in F1000s. Similar ones are likely to arise in the EU as well with some of the upcoming industrial policy changes being proposed.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-is-making-it-harde...
If you’re talking about TSMC Arizona they aren’t fabricating at N3 until end of next year at the earliest, N2 isn’t slated until “end of decade”. I think they’re manufacturing Blackwell there which is N4 / 4nm
Source: https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/nv...
Not sure if this is true - I’ve been using mimo and it’s great
It mainly shows that this is another US companies that cannot be trusted by anyone outside of the US because of the US government.
They've already been labeled a "supply chain risk". Probably not a good idea to upset the regulators more. Maybe tomorrow Opus will be declared too dangerous for the public.
Cratering their user base outside of the US is hardly going to be good for their IPO.
You're mistaken, this is a cratering of the userbase inside and outside of the US. The ban is on any foreigner whether abroad or living in the USA, so Anthropic has no choice but to completely shut down access to the model for the whole world including the US.
Their IPO is well and truly fucked now. This also means no other frontier lab in the US is allowed to exceed Opus 4.8 capabilities.
If you're a luddite or a decel you should literally be dancing in the streets right now. And, if you're a tankie you'll be dancing right next to them. And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
>this is a cratering of the userbase inside and outside of the US.
Is it really? It was limited release anyway (like hypebeast merch!). Everything people are gonna talk about for a week is gonna be about how Fable was so cool that it got banned by the feds. If it's just the Trump admin being the Trump admin, Amodei is just gonna have to pay up as a racket / marketing expense. Or it is like I'm suspecting and this was pre-bribed and the ban is kabuki theater.
>And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
The funny thing is that solar and batteries advancements are actually this, not LLMs, but your framing kinda fits anyways.
> The funny thing is that solar and batteries advancements are actually this
No no no, dont say it here. Green tech is now owned by China that wants to destroy everything.
And US bigtech working hard to save everything by building safe controlled super AI that will burn all the energy it has access to.
The main error of the AI bubble is expressed in the The Jetsons cartoon from the early 60s.
In the future, everyone obviously would be running nuclear powered cars. It was just an engineering problem to be solved. Ford made the Ford Nucleon prototype in 1958.
The nuclear optimism completely blinded people to the ridiculous idea of an individual handling nuclear material for personal use.
The AI bubble error is this idea that everyone is going to have "AGI" in their pocket. It is just a completely absurd idea that is not going to happen.
Fable was interesting from what I tried but nothing close to AGI yet here we are. The models don't get smarter and LESS restricted from here.
To me, right away it seemed that the "Mythos moment" was extraordinarily bearish for the assumptions the AI bubble is built on.
The Star Trek future is back on track.
Star Trek is cyber socialism, with the means of production owned by the Federation.
China is the only player working towards this.
This is just a case of not greasing the right palms. Some contributions will be made and this goes away.
“Anthropic buys 75% of Truth Social’s ad inventory”
Funny. But unfortunately this is well within the realm of possibilities these days.
Incorrect. Heavy government regulation means it is limited how they can sell this model and to whom.
It would be if it was rationally tied to the strength of the model. More likely, it’s simply the government deciding who can compete.
Is it now? From a company's point of view, does it really matter that some expensive tool is allegedly good or not if it's reliability/availability is poor and subject to completely arbitrary and unpredictable change?
It also signals that Anthropic is a bad choice if you need stable access to their product outside the US.
And they don't have to actually serve expensive model compute and this all goes away once they contribute to the right charitable organizations and patriotic causes funneling money to the right people.
This is quite clearly corporate capture of the white house by a competitor influencing policy, but it's hard to imagine something that plays more into anthropic's hand. They now own the model that was so good the US government made them shut it off.
it may be really good pr, but it's really bad for their IPO. If their market for future models is usa only, their potential revenue is cut by 50% at least. (and it's even worse because it means Europe, India, and China will all have companies making their own models that anthropic needs to stay ahead of)
Another sibling thread already called this out, but mentioning here: it's not "USA only", it's "US citizens only" (and I'm not entirely sure how dual-citizenship interacts with this, but I assume you can't sell to them, either, since they are by definition also foreign nationals). A private company only being able to do business with folks they can verify are solely US citizens (who themselves are also willing to submit verification of said citizenship to a private company), has a relatively small pool of potential users.
And so if this policy holds, Anthropic has functionally had Fable killed by government intervention, and in a logically consistent world, this would imply all other US-based AI labs may also never exceed existing (read: Opus) capabilities.
What interesting times we live in, indeed.
Regarding the dual-citizenship, you are wrong to assume that. To US government you are US citizen and that is all that matters, even if you have 5 different citizenships government and justice system don't care, you need to follow the US laws and can't cherry pick what you want. Regarding users, for any of this big 3 (Alphabet, Anthropic, OpenAI) only important customers are enterprises, not individual users.
It kills their entire Enterprise market which is a far bigger deal than just consumer KYC headaches
I don't think so, most of enterprise customers are US based companies. They will basically give Mythos to US citizens in R&D while others will use Opus. I hope this is not the actual intent.
How many entreprise customers that aren't in the defense sector currently have R&D departments entirely composed of US citizens?
And what does it mean for indirect access to the models, through say agents working off ticket systems.
The problem here is that the valuations of these AI companies was based on the fact that they'd keep improving models. A company that just serves the latest Opus isn't worth trillions.
You think Anthropic will ask all their enterprise customers to provide passports for all their employees and then setup individual Claude accounts for each and every employee to gatekeep access to Mythos? Because a plain ole api key no longer cuts it
Indeed, this affects way more than just Anthropic.
I think it's the opposite. Who would want to buy shares in a company that's been flagged as a supply chain risk?
The secret ingredient is public and brazen bribery, and the one thing that Anthropic doesn't lack is cash.
But what happens when they fix whatever's making it a risk?
They'll walk away with two black eyes from the US government, and we'll all be left to speculate on when the next sucker punch will land
They literally state here that they can't do that, since the risk is jailbreaking which seems to be an intrinsic part of LLMs.
"Our models are so good the government decides whether or you get access -- so you better not depend on them!"
“Not a commodity”
This affects more than just Anthropic. It's a game of thrones and everyone using this technology loses. I wouldn't cheer for that.
It appears to affect only the companies that Trump decides it should affect.
When did conservatives abandon the free market?
Just like “rule of law” and “family values”, “the troops” and some other stuff, free markets were never something they really care about.
The reality of Republican free markets were about compounding and growing big business and resource extraction at the expense of everyone else.
The rest is all about convincing suckers that getting kicked in the balls is good for them. The most obvious example being farmers. Most aspects of agriculture have been consolidated into oblivion and the markets are not super functional. 80% of the dairy operations in my state are out of business. 60 companies dominate eggs in the US - there used to be 3 in my city.
Immediately. It's always been a smokescreen, and markets have never been truly free. Thumbs on scale, at all times.
When they turned into an authoritarian movement.
I think without a clear, shared definition of “free” the term “free market” has no actual social value and just becomes a political football that sounds good but changes meaning at a whim. Some people use it to mean completely unregulated, some people use it as a synonym for “fair”, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
I frequently see references to Regan and the ATC strike-busting. Can't tell if it's THE turning point but, it is a significant turn.
The big difference between left and right is that leftish politics are based on everyone being equal, and rightish politics accept that some are more equal than others.
It’s not such a terrible tension to live with. We can have, say, equal rights to life while also allowing unequal rights to gold nuggets. You might have more gold nuggets than I do but we both have the right to live in peace.
The far ends of the spectrum though involve, respectively, redistribution of gold nuggets to all, and at the other end a commitment to survival of the fittest that extends to viewing any kind of market regulation as commie bullshit.
The quip about some being more equal than others is literally from a book written specifically to criticize a leftist state.
Yes but I don’t think the pig regime in Orwell’s Animal Farm really stayed true to the farm’s leftist roots :)
Snowball did nothing wrong!
when has the market ever been free?
A completely “free” market is likely incoherent, but under normal terms - probably degrading since the 1970s. And very predictable if wealth can buy you power to change the system.
An hour ago?
Trump doesn't actually stand for basically a single conservative value outside of immigration and somehow he's eaten the entire party
The immigration-baiting isn’t even a conservative position, most of the history of conservatism has been pro-immigration.
Instead it’s simply the answer to the question, “how do you convince the last vestiges of the labor unions to drink poison and vote for the people who openly plan to destroy them.”
In the 2016 primary. Trump was always fiscally heterodox to the old GOP.
They never wanted the free market. They wanted an _unregulated_ market. There's a difference.
They'll settle for an unregulated market. What they really want is a free market for them and their friends, and crippling regulation for their competitors.
> When did conservatives abandon the free market?
You're using terms incorrectly. Conservatism has nothing to do with free market.
The people who care most about free markets are liberals (called libertarians in the US).
Presumably you mean to say "Republicans". And your answer is "under Trump". But it's important to note that Trump merely took the Republican party back to its roots. Traditionally, Republicans were more protectionists than the Democrats. Regan changed that, and Trump reverted.
But what annoys me about people who criticize this change, is that it often comes from people who don't believe in free markets.
---
As a side note, I think the reason Americans use these terms so wrongly is because of the 2 party system. It forces all ideologies into two camps and for Americans "conservatism", "libertarianism", "nationalism", "fascism" are all the same.
Trump ran as on the Republican ticket, he had been a lifelong NYC Democrat up until he ran for president.
Republican != Conservative… and in reality Trump is neither, but at the same time, the type of Democrat he was no longer exists. It’s also a mistake to confuse Republican for Establishment GOP.
>everyone using this technology loses
As someone not using the technology, I'm fine with that :) Intellectual property laundering was never a good thing. Glad we can begone with it.
This doesn't help; customers will switch to a different model.
It just means the government decides who gets to profit off of laundered IP, which is arguably even worse.
I'm pretty sure it's the people paying for it that decide who profits off it.
Intellectual property is not a good thing.
Yeah but doesn't all the ai stuff kinda either way exacerbate the issues we might have with IP? Like, if it wasn't already the case that such laws are fundamentally sided with huge pools of capital who arbitrarily "own" different sequences of bytes, it certainly is now. It's like its trying to destroy intellectual property and then put this deranged hyper-financial game of energy expenditure in its place.
> It's a game of thrones and everyone using this technology loses
Everyone? There's worlds outside of the United States government overreach.
It's ironic isn't it? All the marketing of how dangerous and powerful Mythos is and the government went "bet".
Anthropic's marketing is playing 5D chess. 4D was telling everyone it is dangerous, they knew the government would take the bait and shut it down.
Or maybe Anthropic isn't playing chess at all - these models sell themselves they are so useful and the Reddit/HN crowd is just full of larping tech bros commenting conspiracy theories non stop.
Yeah is funny anthropic going overboard with "omg this model is so dangerous guys!!!" and then the US government going "okay... well, that sounds bad, let's ban it".
Serves them right
Should they lie and say the model is not dangerous?
If you're actually worried then do the right thing and don't make the model, or do make the model and admit you are doing it to make money.
You don't get to have your cake and eat it by making the (supposedly) world ending model but also getting on a moral high horse.
It's the hypocrisy and obvious mendacity that's obnoxious to me.
Having said that, OpenAI is just as bad (probably worse) and they're friendly with the admin, so this isn't really a case of any kind of justice unfortunately
False dichotomy. You can make a safe, aligned model that blocks dangerous actions, even at the expense of overblocking benign ones.
You can release the powerful model to companies that will use it to fix instead of break.
Once a technology exists it will be used for good and for ill, you can't create it and put it in a box forever.
If you really think a technology could be dangerous then the only morally correct thing to do is not help to create it.
They're not doing that, so either they're lying about it being dangerous, or they're lying about the fact they care (maybe a bit of both)
This is just a terrible view.
Nuclear can be used for great ill or great good. Today, most actual use is for great good.
By your logic we should have stopped at the discovery of fire.
This is OpenAI and Meta using their leverage over the White House to screw over their competitor.
In this case it was Amazon reporting Fable jailbreak to government
Elaborate please?
It is Amazon who reported the jailbreaks to the government, according to WSJ. Yes, the same Amazon that owns 19% of Anthropic. Hmm.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-halts-access-to-top-ai...
It's Anthropic facing consequences for their years long marketing plays. They're so greedy and narcissistic as a company and culture they believed they were special enough to be excluded from sanction internally, and that their behavior would only affect their competitors or would lead to outcomes positive for themselves: ergo, they get to hold the keys to the castle. Like Dario said in his negotiations with the DoW, he wants a seat at the big boys table. It's all about power for him.
Unfortunately though, they're not smart enough to realize the long term damage to the industry that they're doing without any hint of remorse will negatively affect them and will have the opposite effect: Highlighting how imperative it is we all switch to open-source and remove our reliance entirely from them.
So not only are they going to take the whole industry down out of their own greed and stupidity and ruin it for everyone in the short term, but they're going to put themselves and the other labs out of business in the long term. Well done Anthropic. Well done Dario. You played yourself. 5d chess.
They obviously want heavy regulation to make sure they do not have to compete long term. This is all just part of the base strategy.
It's a stupid strategy that will put the rest of the world ahead of the US on AI. Anthropic's value will suffer for it.
Based on this, it seems like the Trump admin would have targeted them even without the "scaremongering":
> To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
> the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models
Is this Dario leveraging it into a ban on open models?
No, he specifically gave a proprietary OpenAI model as an example (unless you meant OpenAI models instead of open source models)
Anthropic is almost solely responsible for the fear narrative around AI at this point. It has been their culture since the beginning, strongly pushing this into the zeitgeist at every opportunity, releasing bogus papers to frame things as highly dangerous and that their AI is a conscious sentient being.
Step 1: "OMG, the AI hacked a researcher eating a sandwhich in the park!"
Step 2: Journalists use that great clickbait to generate profit, which generates publicity for Anthropic
Step 3: Rinse repeat
If the threat of LLMs was treated relative to the actual capabilities of them, and we weren't all being lied to by Anthropic and their army of millions of social media bots and backing media companies and mouthpieces, we'd be going in a much healthier direction. Working out the kinks/supply chain risks and developing sound, long-term countermeasures to the ACTUAL risks.
The only threat to the world is if progress is not open-sourced, democratized and in lockstep with capability. The moment it becomes a scenario of: Only a small group get access to frontier intelligence, is when it gives that small group power over everyone else in the world, and wildly increases the risk of a nuclear level event that WILL be exploited eventually - as the divide between the haves and the have nots accelerates in an exponential fashion. Bad AI is countered with an abundance of good AI that has been used to stay ahead of bad AI. The moment your bad AI outpowers the army of good AI it is game over for humanity. The strength of open-source and open-access AI is the difference between humanities permanent enslavement or extinction versus a prosperous future.
It doesn't help that most of the employees at Anthropic have willingly sold their souls out of short term greed and gaslight themselves into thinking that they're actually doing the right thing to justify their own greed to themselves, while building up an echo-chamber and culture of feel good lies within the company so they can sleep at night, and pat each other on the back. They go along with this because they get paid massive chunks of money from Anthropic, and their shares will be worth more money if Anthropic can swallow the worlds economy at the expense and enslavement of everyone else. What good is that money when you have to sell out humanity in the progress though. You, at Anthropic, is that the legacy you want to leave?
People need to start calling this out before it's far too late. If you work at Anthropic - time to start talking to your colleagues in an honest manner.
The difference between OpenAI & Anthropic is that OpenAI didn't do multiple big media pushes about how their models are so scary and dangerous.
OpenAI's models are very good, they have refusals + a government ID verification story for cyber access (I don't think they prevent non-US nationals, but I don't know this). What they don't have is Project Glasswing and all the hand wringing about how they're going to end the world in public.
I hope Anthropic pulls their head out of their ass and just starts acting like a normal company.
You’re telling me this testimony isn’t sincere marketing for how revolutionary and dangerous his product will become?
"My worst fears, are that we cause significant - we the field, the technology, the industry - cause significant harm to the world...If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong and we want to be vocal about that."https://youtu.be/Pn-W41hC764
OpenAI did this back in 2024 several times.
It seems like this might not have happened if Anthropic didn't institute the cyber blocks as broadly to also cover pure-defensive use cases?
Because this wouldn't be considered a jailbreak with any other model; which would just do the request.
That’s a safe assumption, considering they tried it a few months back too.
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5742548/anthropic-penta...
The administration should not be able to arbitrarily punish companies they don’t like. Full stop.
We need a neutral regulatory body for AI with objective, predictable standards. Not random bans based on whether the president likes you. Unless GPT 5.6 also gets a ban, this will look extremely bad for the administration.
Our economy depends on fair application of rule of law. Not anti-growth cronyism based on who is friends Trump.
The precedent set here would be broad and scary. Treating any API like an export makes it very easy for the administration to bully companies they disagree with.
Probably a marketing ploy. Inflate the value even more before an IPO, and Daddy Trump and his friends make a few $$$.
It'll be "resolved" within a few days.
Was WWII a marketing ploy to inflate the value of German and Japanese stocks?
I can only imagine how many engineers got fired when fable came out
This is what Anthropic wanted and they want this to apply to all other frontier models providers (including themselves) that release powerful models.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
They ultimately got what they wanted.
> They ultimately got what they wanted.
No, it's not what they wanted. As it says in your quote, they wanted "a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles."
They begged to be regulated and now they're being regulated. The company doesn't get to pick and choose the exact form of the regulations they get and in this case they got more than they bargained for. Maybe next time be more careful with the messaging.
Actually, they got even more than what they wanted:
* Free marketing before the IPO, demonstrating how already powerful their frontier models are.
* Governments to intervene in the rollout of these frontier models and blocking their access to whoever they want.
* A strong reason to apply these further restrictions onto releasing powerful open weight models to the public. (which is entirely a business threat to them.)
Given that they accepted funding from the Gulf states [0] despite it conflicting with their own "principles", I think we are well beyond the point of what they write / say vs to what they are actually doing.
This drama just tells us that the government declared them as the winner that has the most powerful model.
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-to-seek...
Yes, reducing your TAM by roughly 8 billion people is exactly the kind of marketing you want before your IPO. /s
Opus 4.8 is still available to everyone, and the export ban applied specifically to their new Fable / Mythos models. But nice try though.
This sort of attention is exactly what they would to showcase the powerful capabilities of their latest models.
Serving Opus 4.8 isn't worth a trillion+ valuation.
The valuation of the AI labs is based on continual improvements of their models.
Open weight models are going to catch up to Opus 4.8 and at that point the model is a pure commodity.
> Serving Opus 4.8 isn't worth a trillion+ valuation. > The valuation of the AI labs is based on continual improvements of their models.
While I do agree, no-one here made the initial claim on their valuation and especially suggesting that "Serving Opus 4.8" alone was worth a trillion+ valuation.
> Open weight models are going to catch up to Opus 4.8 and at that point the model is a pure commodity.
Good. We should all hope that happens.
Except in one week or a month new Chinese models gonna be released thats might just be better or much cheaper than Opus 4.8.
That is Anthropic's problem, and that's good for competition.
Yep and they also want to only exempt models below some level of compute or capability from this process. In other words, if an open model ends up being competitive, they’ll use regulations to ban it.
> They ultimately got what they wanted.
They got what they claim they wanted for PR purposes. Like when a billionaire says they should be taxed more, or when Sam Altman says the public should get some of that AI wealth.
But they never thought it would actually happen.
Oops.
This is nonsense. What Anthropic have been campaigning for, since the beginning, is a principled rule-based audit of model releases.
Now we are getting reactive, arbitrary and capricious enforcement; rules rushed out the door; classified evals. The worst of both worlds.
Half of the opposition to any regulation is the risk that it gets misused.
And now is this going to be a one-off, or routine with every new generation of models?
Is there any reason they couldn't also apply export-control to older models, just to screw with Anthropic?
Every. There is no reason the government will let go the power it has obtained, that is never how it works
There won't be any new generation of models more powerful than Fable since the argument against Fable would apply even more. Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 is the best we'll ever see from this point forward. Soon low cost Chinese models will catch up to those thereby destroying Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing power which will mark the beginning of the end for them too.
you need to be 8yo to believe Chinese are going to give you SOTA models at low prices. being open is not compatible with the Chinese culture.
Chinese here, no racism card here please.
They would have a golden opportunity to inflict damage to a geopolitical adversary. The US economy is being propped up by AI, I'm not sure they'd miss the chance to blow that bubble if they could.
there are ongoing tough competitions between China and America, that is for sure. however, a bold however, it is not in China's interest to see a crashed America. as an export oriented economy, China needs a stable and functioning America to maintain global order, that is how China got free lunch for the last 3 decades.
just imagine a world without the US acting as the world police, you'd be seeing armed conflicts in middle east, Africa, South East Asia, even in Europe and North East Asia. that would make China extremely hard to extract 1 trillion USD trade surplus a year, which is now required for China to maintain employment back at home.
without the US, even for a relatively stable global environment, trade won't be possible as most countries are not capable of providing goods and services wanted by China. Their currencies are literally junk (including Japanese Yen and Euro), Chinese are not going to take those junk in exchange for real goods. Trade is now possible because, by one way or another, those countries have USD to pay. those USD are backed by 300+ million highly productive Americans who repeatedly proved that they can create values in the scale of dozens of trillions a year.
the best part of this whole thing - America is singlehandedly footing the whole bill to provide such trade friendly environment for China for FREE. this is not cold war v2, back in the days of cold war, the US didn't help USSR to such extreme extent.
> being open is not compatible with the Chinese culture.
Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world. Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc. No real restrictions on duping products, so execution often becomes the winning ticket. That's all pretty open and good for consumers.
You could argue they won't allow SOTA models to be exported but it doesn't really have anything to do with Chinese culture not being compatible with openness.
> Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world.
that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open - they know full well that anything made publicly available would be cloned/copied within days.
it is not only a part of the competition common in all countries, there are unique reasons in China - millions of graduate engineers join workforce every single year, there are not that many projects they can work on. starting copying & cloning some existing stuff even at someone's own cost is a pretty effective way to get into the game.
> Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc.
There is this old Chinese saying "Teach your apprentice and your own ruin follows" (教会徒弟饿死师傅), that has been telling a completely different story for thousands of years. When they don't even want to hand over tech know-hows to their own apprentice, why would anyone be expecting them to have the desire to share it publicly?
You can find Chinese sayings for almost any position. It's orientalism to reduce modern Chinese society/culture/economy to proverbs and sayings.
You say that you're Chinese so there's no such stereotyping involved, but actually Chinese people commit this sin against themselves all the time.
己欲立而立人，己欲达而达人
"wishing to stand, one helps others stand; wishing to succeed, one helps others succeed"
> that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open
But the AI labs _are_ often being open. And cloning stuff more generally doesn't really require OSS anyway. Product features are easily cloned in most cases, without any secret knowledge.
It depends on the end goal. Free good enough models are a way to drastically devalue Anthropic and OpenAI. A well timed release of a capable model that can run on obtainable hardware, so that a small/medium company can afford self hosting, has the potential to destroy one or both of these companies. This would narrow down the frontier model oligopoly and give the Chinese government a lot more power beyond its borders.
It really depends on whether the Chinese government wants to make good money or "win" the current AI bubbke.
Are you kidding man? Have you tried the new model for coding? It's absolutely incredible. After using it, I really see why they were so concerned. The jump in my workflows feels as large as the jump from 3.5 to 4o (OpenAI). It's just that good.
Issues I'd been kinda circling around for weeks, long standing errors in some long-running sync operations for a project I'm working on, all solved the same day the model dropped. Just incredible. And it's effectively a lot more token efficient I find as well (less so with sub-agents). Just areas where Opus 4.8 would occassionally get confused or venture down the wrong direction, just doesn't happen nearly as much as with Fable 5.
Like what is everyone who is dissing on this model / Anthropic using day to day? For me it's just an incredible jump in intelligence. So much so and so quickly after the modest bump from 4.8, that I really can understand why they are starting to shout warnings.
It's a huge jump across the board. I was really impressed with its ability to test usability in Claude for Chrome. Very opinionated but in a good way. It was good while it lasted.
Wow unsure why you are getting downvoted. It’s just odd. I just don’t get the skepticism towards this model. It’s released and it’s amazing. The hype was real and I can see why the researchers were anxious about releasing it.
I did not see that?
It's way more _proactive_ than the old models, sometimes in ways it shouldn't really be proactive. But it produces _more_ slop than 4.8, and I have not seen any real breakthroughs from it.
Edit: to give an example, I'm working on integrating a self-hosting auth provider into our app. So I gave it a prompt to create a "bootstrap" script that would create pre-configured settings for the local installation.
Fable did it. And then proceeded (unprompted) to test it by killing the running server, removing the database, re-initializing and (trying) to verify that the bootstrap produced identical results.
Well, yeah. Great. I can see how this "bias for action" works for security research and one-shot projects, not so sure about regular development.
I just tried that with Opus, and it produced a similar bootstrap script but did not start the test by itself.
Ah that I will admit. It gets shit done one way or another haha. This is why a sandboxed environment and a reproducible test DB is key here. I give read only access to my dev DB to my Claude, really removes the temptation that it increasingly has to “cheat”. E.g. doing something hacky and fixing the DB manually in a way that doesn’t solve the problem everywhere.
Personally I love when the AI has this amount of problem solving. But you have to build the environment around it that encourages solving problems right the first time, versus taking the easy way out and hacking out a solution.
It’s just all about constraining the behavior of the LLM into productive and permanent directions. The more advanced it gets, the more it feels like designing engineering processes rather than coding. Personally it’s a fun change of pace and it’s giving me a lot of opportunities to look at the project in working on at a wider lens. I find having to pump out features makes you myopic in a sense. I really miss the control I had over writing it all by hand, but I love just being able to build software. At the end of the day, what do you want? That’s the question I’ve had to grapple recently.
Personally I don’t mind switching gears to the bigger picture of why the software exists and what purpose it serves
This honestly sounds like a tweaked system prompt more than anything. Maybe it is an attempt to make the model appear stronger?
I can't tell whether you think Fable/Mythos aren't capable, you think it's good the US government is shutting down this business model of all things for "safety", or both. Either way, ick.
They're enjoying the schadenfreude of Dario "AI is so dangerous, we really need to ban and regulate everyone" Amodej getting his models banned by the US government.
They didn't get banned by the government. The government says they they want to track the Identity of everyone who uses it. Same way they track identity when using an airplane.
Dario cried wolf one too many times, the Trump admin believed there was a wolf, and now Anthropic users can't use Mythos or Fable. It is effectively banned until the government says otherwise.
It's a ban until they add ID tracking / face tracking. That is worse than banning it. It is only effectively a ban because so far they refuse to do that.
I would more easily guess that it is a revenge of Trump for Anthropic humiliating him when he wanted to use it without control for military purpose. And indeed it used against them their own marketing allegations.
Note that the US military is almost the only customer that Fable and Mythos could safely be sold to while complying with this directive.
Maybe revenge, but it's a common play to fire a shot across the bow to create leverage in other areas.
They never claimed to be “so much ahead”, they just claimed to be honest.
Which, to be clear, does not mean they are actually honest.
Pay? This is the best marketing they could have hoped for.
Yup, getting Cartmanland marketing vibes here. “It’s the best theme park ever, and you can’t come!” does wonders for creating demand.
I wouldn’t the surprised if all this were actually orchestrated, it all seems too convenient.
Brilliant analogy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAuG7_acmdA
Doubtful. Fable 5 is insanely good it’ll sell itself. No need for unscrupulous advertising tactics.
What is a “foreign national” is more what I’m wondering. Like is it a “Non-US Citizen”? Do US citizens abroad count?
Foreign national is anyone who doesn't have legally recognized citizenship of the USA. So citizens living abroad aren't barred, nor would dual citizens be.
> What is a “foreign national” is more what I’m wondering.
The following quoted text is from the Definitions section of 8 USC § 1101, which is reproduced at [0]. (Though, you will probably have to scroll up a bit to be able to read subsection (a)(21), which is the thing I'm linking to.)
From this, it's fairly clear that a "foreign national" is someone owing permanent allegiance to a foreign (that is, non-US) state. What's not immediately clear to me is whether a US citizen can also be a "foreign national", [1] and how that would affect access to things from which foreign nationals are barred. [2]EDIT: For a more official source of this information, you might be able to check out [3] and/or [4]. After examining and interacting with those pages, one might see why one might go to an unofficial source for casual inspection of this information.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101#a_21
[1] I think they can be.
[2] I'm very uncertain.
[3] <https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...>
[4] <https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title8/chapter12/subc...>
A "foreign national" is any person who is not a US Citizen:
"The United States Department of State defines a “foreign national” as anyone who is not a “U.S. person.” A “U.S. person” is any one of the following: U.S. citizen; Lawful permanent resident (green card holder); and “Protected Person” i.e. political asylum holder." [0]
A foreign national is a person or organization who is not a citizen of the United States, and who is a citizen of a foreign country. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses the term "alien" to refer to a person who is not a United States citizen, and does not use the term "foreign national."[1]
[0] https://www.orc.msstate.edu/faq/what-department-states-defin...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/foreign_national
I also found this: https://www.uscis.gov/tools/glossary
I owe allegiance to no state. I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of the world.
It's kind of a weird definition. I would guess most people's nationality is more an accident of birth than anything else.
There is a chance they'll lose on some income if it takes longer.
Unfortunately there also a possibility this what they intentionally wanted to try regulatory capture to get rid of competitors.
Anthropic has been angling for regulatory capture this entire time, to an even greater extent than OpenAI.
Y’all really have convinced yourselves that people in the industry are far, far smarter than they are, and far more manipulative than they are.
You see the state of the country and you think it’s a nefarious master plan instead of a bunch of opportunistic people taking advantage of an overworked, overstimulated populace who forget to vote or believe stupid slogans on TV.
Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out????
Anthropic in particular has been angling for regulatory capture (with themselves in control, of course) pretty explicity.
"It is time to go beyond transparency to more serious and binding regulation of AI."[1]
Anthropic is calling for regulation. For example they endorsed CA SB-53 that even OpenAI and Google thought was too much: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-is-endorsing-sb-53
They have spoken publicly about how they want open models banned (they call them Chinese models).
They might not want this specific action, but they do want regulation on their own terms. That really is regulatory capture.
> Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out
They don't think is is "idiot stuff" - they are doing it openly and shouting to everyone who will listen! Read Dario's latest essay[1]:
> Many policymakers are showing increased openness to taking action, and it's been encouraging to see our peers come around to the same positions we've been advocating for over the past few years.
[snip]
> Thus, in 2025, Anthropic supported transparency legislation, helping to pass SB 53 in California, RAISE in NY, SB 315 in Illinois (in early 2026), and advocating for a transparency standard at the federal level.
[snip]
> It is time to go beyond transparency to more serious and binding regulation of AI.
> I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action.
> The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks.
I'm not sure why you think they don't want to be "found out"!
> They have spoken publicly about how they want open models banned (they call them Chinese models).
Whenever I hear some octogenarian senator babble about the evils of distillation I assume Amodei (or maybe Altman) fed them the script, word for word.
> opportunistic people taking advantage of an overworked, overstimulated populace
Over worked and over stimulated is the intentional method and means these people well aware of the neurological consequences rely on
Let's leave aside the "smarter" part, since I made no claim to the effect and I don't think it's very relevant in the first place.
Do you really not think that people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei angle for regulatory capture? It happens in every other industry, from automobiles to tax preparation software. Why do you think that AI is any different?
Let's see their private journals, private conversations, messages to peers, all meetings and every side conversation, and then tell me its unintentional.
Thats incredibly infuriating to hear someone say.
Obviously no one is absolute control of everything but physics is essentially shows nothing other than information determinism. There has to have been a thought of intention in the minds of these people as they play in the largest arena publicly.
"No one is doing it intentionally because I think theyre dumber then I think other people think they are"
"They're taking advantage of people intentionally"
"People dont have political power to do anything about their victory laps"
It’s almost like you haven’t read the project 2025 doc.
Hint: it can be both.
don't think so; retail investors would see this as a barrier that the government can place anytime they want, and assume that government intervention is constantly lurking in the shadows.
I also do not understand this. Now they are labelled as precious US tech that could be not used by anyone else, because president heard about the jailbreaking for the first time I guess. With this genius logic they soon be banning GPT 5.5.
No it’s not. A company that finds itself the target of potentially crippling government intervention is not an attractive investment.
It might be if all you're seeking is large-cap stocks with lots of volatility you can leverage that are here to stay for the long haul. Also, the market doesn't seem to believe that Trump will be in power forever.
Would be funny if they got themselves nationalized.
I mean, better safe than sorry, right Dario?
No way the US is going to nationalize a tech company regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable.
> "No way the US is going to nationalize a tech company regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable."
You simply cannot apply any sort of actual logic to the reasoning of the current U.S. government's actions... They just "do stuff" because they feel like it, with no clear thought whatsoever of any potential consequences that may occur.
> "No way the US is going to tariff the entire world regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable."
It's Madman theory all the way down.
The CEO of Anthropic himself has said AI is like a nuclear bomb when justifying export controls on Nvidia chips. How many private companies control nuclear bombs?
They took 10% of Intel and the only reaction was my stocks increasing in value 5x.
Taking a 10% stake in a company is far from nationalization. And the big increase in Intel's stock price happened months after that.
It is literally partially nationalising though, isn’t it?
This is how the UK government got the banks through the 2008 financial crisis.
They bought the shares on the open market. They didn't seize the company at gunpoint.
Why would you think nationalising is a violent process?
As soon as the nation owns enough stock to profit from government decisions (and to compound the influence of those decisions) you essentially have a partially nationalised business.
10% of OpenAI might easily be enough to reach a meaningful "partially nationalised" threshold, once you factor in any holdings in federal pension plans and the active level of government policymaking.
It is very clear Sam Altman wants this, too, because this whole "take 10%" thing in Trump's mind was his idea back in early 2025, and OpenAI have been following up on it recently.
They want the US government to be the bag holder.
So if USgov bought 51% at market value you’d be ok with that?
Time to fire up the printers I guess.
No they didn’t. After Trump started making noise about their CEO, Lip-bu Tan, being Chinese they then took the shares at a “…discount to the current market price.”[1]
And the money for this _deal_ was primarily from the CHIPS act funds they were already awarded but had not been sent to them yet
> Of the total, $5.7 billion of the government funds will come from grants under the CHIPS Act that had been awarded but not paid, and $3.2 billion will come from separate government awards under a program to make secure chips.[1]
This was at gunpoint from the government’s monopoly on violence.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/22/intel-goverment-equity-stake...
???
The government had passed a law appropriating funds to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing in the US and spent some of it buying intel stock. How is that the government seizing Intel at gunpoint? I mean aside from the libertarian argument that the taxation necessary to raise those funds is theft?
Did you miss the part where it was already awarded to them, but the Trump admin then made it conditional?
Taking any % is partially nationalizing it and there was no negative capital flight. And 10% is a pretty significant portion.
> Trump says his team will 'look into' US taking stake in AI companies[1]
Yes, there is a gap between "taking a stake" and nationalizing one, but..
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-says-his-team-will-lo...
Trump has already (with Altman directly egging him on) talked about the US taking a share in (i.e. partially nationalising) the AI companies. Has he not called a meeting about this next week?
You call it scare-mongering. Others, serious thinkers and leaders in the AI and national security space, believe, maybe not scare-mongering enough.
AI is a national security issue. Best accept that as fact, or you won't see it coming.
Anthropic and US Government, there can be only one right in this situation.
I think David Sacks is right, if you are saying you are building nuclear bombs, then prepared to be regulated like one.
There is no eating it while having it
I agree completely. If these things are so dangerous that they turn every person into an advanced persistent thread actor, capable of causing untold cyber destruction (oh, and they can make bio weapons etc), then they should be treated like the weapons they are.
> Anthropic and US Government, there can be only one right in this situation.
And just to be clear, that's a maximum of one right in this situation.
Yeah, LLMs are a national security issue on par with spellcheck.
LLMs are piloting EM-proof kamakazi drones and destroying logistics networks today.
And gps guided missiles were doing that since the 80s. Humans are already really good at killing each other. Yeah it sucks the tech will be used for that.
But it changes little.
iirc consumer grade GPS chips purposely become less accurate if they find themselves moving at high speed.
Drones do not need to mov at high speed to be effective, as cam feeds from FPVs in the Russo-Ukrainian war have demonstrated
The real threat isn't the drones, it's the ability to generate a target bank. Historically militaries that are not just carpet bombing have been bottlenecked by target selection, humans can only review and authorize so many strikes. Now the AI will select the targets and the bottleneck moves to how many bombs you can build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
https://youtu.be/CHLFl26p7Po?is=j-Z1fiCCa-Q_gQS5
You're slightly off the mark here.
They are NOT "em-proof" --- what they are is electronic warfare immune.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou... Published this year, but talking about a trial 2 years ago.
Blocking any leading edge AI model changes nothing. We (humans) have a long history of determined attackers finding creative and unexpected solutions.
What the AI we have, the stuff that is already PUBLICLY AVAILABLE, is good enough to shrink the time for developing one of those creative solutions into a working tool/weapon.
Edit: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/06/12/8038963/ They are using ai for terminal guidance on Russian logistics (red vs green reticle if you choose to watch the video). Considering the progress on YOLO (and running on sub watt processors) it being able to do this work "onboard" should be shocking to no one.
Shh...you'll burst the bubble of the folks who think that LLMs are toy stochastic parrots...
Can you share any of these serious thinkers?
Nobody with even a modicum of understanding of how LLMs work believes any of this. These 'serious thinkers' are just grifters preying on the feeble minded.
Hinton and Bengio don't understand how LLMs work?
Right now it's basically this easy: 1. apex domain 2. ???? 3. critical PII exposure
There is /so/ much stuff on the internet that just needed someone to spend enough time on it.
When you spend a lot of time telling people how dangerous your products are, people who have the power to keep dangerous products off the market might listen.
Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.
I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be. People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices. I think this is a punitive move by an administration that loves being punitive, which they have unknowingly bolstered with their own dumb rhetoric.
"I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic"
But it seems likely that they took this possibility into account - and that they now prominently and unremovable show the "Fable not avaiable" (link - government said so) is likely with the intention to make pressure on the US government.
> Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.
Just more corrupt behavior from the contemptible kakistocracy that's busy running things into the ground and enriching themselves while they're at it.
Sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The driving force behind most presidential votes
My gut reaction was that it does look like a PR stunt. But indeed it might also be a blunder caused by all of their other PR stunts. "Our new stuff is soooo dangerous!!", followed by "The US government believed us and acted accordingly".
The CEO's post even mentions supporting export controls, all be it in regards to chip exports. [1]
They suggested the use of the very law used against them here...
[1] https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential
It’s a market manipulation following SpaceX ipo. They’ll buy and then reverse the decision shortly to sell.
Anthropic pushed for the US government to introduce regulations. The US government said no, citing potential stifling of innovation.
> punitive
Not only that, but also a golden opportunity to flex the muscle of anti-immigration.
Yeah. Did they want this all along? This will just create more hype, and may push towards significant usage once and when it is available.
But when is now if it becomes available. Oops!
It will, otherwise Antrophic will eventually have to leave the US. And I don't think they want that.
> I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be.
They should have consulted their own models about the ramifications and unintended consequences; based on their actions over the past few months I think it is safe to say that the models are smarter than the decision-makers at anthropic, lol. I know the models are smarter than I am and even I could have told them that they were taking paths, FUD for example, that would lead to grief.
To be clear, they've been saying that all AI needs to take a break. I don't think this single action is going to do much.
They've also been saying coding is solved while having text flicker in a terminal
Where did they say that?
"They were asking for it"
In the long run it's not punitive but rather amazing marketing for Anthropic. People crave what they can't have.
hard to sell something people can't have though
This whole thing is comedy.
Anthropic pretending Mythos 5 is so capable it's going to destroy everything, but will release it anyway with "safeguards" (when does this ever work?).
US Gov't using this fake hype as an excuse to handicap Anthropic simply because they have a vendetta.
Nothing is funny about LLMs being restricted like air travel.
I'm also not laughing here.
This is likely to delay, if not prevent, the release of more capable models in the future.
And apart from the big picture, I just paid Anthropic $200 on Friday with the understanding that I can use the model for 10 days until the 22nd.
I planned two productive days of work this weekend. There's still Codex, but I'm obviously disappointed with this and want my $200 back.
IFIFY: This is likely to delay, if not prevent, the release of more capable models in the future in the US
Exactly.
Although the EU isn't currently capable of competing at all, it slowly but steadily escapes the rectum of the United States.
And China already is the current superpower, so they don't have to give a fuck about the US.
US hegemony has ended.
I feel ya. I only paid 100 bucks, but I wanted to test the fable myself.
I am not interested in Opus 4.8 in the slightest.
> Nothing is funny about AI being restricted like air travel.
Yeah it is.
Unless you work at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or Meta.
Your stocks/RSU are at risk of losing significant value.
No it isn't. LLM's are a form of access to information like Libraries or the Internet.
The content produced by LLMs is literally stolen from the internet.
Imagine a super intelligent speed reading human in a library. If they read all the books and are able to understand, conceptualize and summarize that knowledge for others, is it theft? The books weren't stolen, after all, just read. The knowledge in the books wasn't taken away; it's still there for others to read.
I personally do not believe knowledge can be stolen.
> Imagine a super intelligent speed reading human in a library.
If human abilities were different then human laws would be different. We don't have speed limits for joggers but we do for cars because their abilities are materially different.
This is not the correct analogy, because we know that they explicitly used a huge ammount of pirated books and other works.
I would argue annas archive is a pretty good library.
Machines aren’t humans. Your first have to argue that an analogy between machine and human even makes any kind of sense.
That‘s the magic trick you are doing with your analogy. You just assume that human/machine analogy is true.
It’s a point made in bad faith, easily refuted with: “great, let a human read the books”
we quickly learn what “inequality” means, since the computer has more access rights than people
Is that super speed reading human going to then make itself available to instantly-ish answer any and every possible question from anyone with a paid subscription?
This argument is pretty lame.
Yes, we call those people “consultants”.
They didn't just "read" the books. They scanned every single page of every single book in the library, then took the scans home.
Are humans allowed to do that?
Yes!
Creating personal copies of copyrighted works are allowed. (Also, libraries really don't mind if you take pictures of the content of works they have.)
Well LLMs dont make personal copies they make commercial copies.
I didn't say if LLMs are allowed do that, I said that humans are allowed to do that.
What do you mean with "then took the scans home"? Anthropic et al didn't buy all the books in the world and kept them for themselves.
Correct, they torrented them. I just wanted to stick to the library analogy of the parent comment.
Therein lies the rub: they didn't buy them... They pirated digital copies of them.
See, e.g.: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...
By extension, do also believe this super intelligent human should have no human rights and be enslaved by Anthropic for profit?
After you can run his clones on some amount of electricity, sure.
Reading this comment is like visiting a care home for dementia patients
You can read up anything and everything about a patent, but still not be allowed to reproduce it.
The moment the LLMs ingested any code under GNU General Public License or similar licenses and reuse it without making the produced product available under the same terms...
Imagine a super greedy company putting every bit information they can, willingly and maliciously hiding the origin of training data, into a computer and reselling that data. Such wow. Much shittie metaphor.
Knowledge being 'owned' isn't some noble truth. To me, information being able to be shared freely online is the noble thing.
The internet is still on?
Yes and using the information on it isn't "stealing".
Agreed. That's why it's disgusting that these AI companies charge such outrageous fees for information they should be giving back to us for free.
We pay to access the internet as well to cover infrastructure costs. Paying per byte is still a thing today too.
That various companies such as Google are working to kill. They're an advertising company that is making it increasingly clear they no longer want to link to their competition. Competition being defined as any source of information that is not Google.
Intellectual property is private property whose time has come.
My first thought is that this government-Anthropic feud is good publicity for both of them.
The government is possibly a real threat here, but it's also possible that this is a case of knights rallying the mooks (https://ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/), and the models will be back online Monday with a note that "we gave em hell in court because we're so smart and dedicated and talented and good at beefing"Plus, this is more fuel for Anthropic's God complex.
People always exaggerate the thing they don’t understand.
Sometimes they exaggerate the things they understand.
Yes. But they are minority.
was referencing Anthropic
I knew it at once after you said. But politicians don’t fully understand what they face.
I wonder if there even is a real vendetta. How many people in the administration / friendly with the administration would benefit financially from the IPO? Maneuvers like this still pump more air into the hype balloon. I suspect that Anthropic and its backers did not enjoy the many "meh" reviews that Fable has received for its modest bump in output quality.
I don’t think there’s a vendetta. I think that Dario is an ideologue who has been letting his ideology cloud his business judgment.
I don’t think he’s playing 4D chess; I think he truly believes all the “AI is going to eliminate all the jobs” crap. I think his “Claude Constitution” is wishful thinking and his attempts to exert control over what his customers lawfully do with the product he sells them have made his company untrustworthy; certainly so by the US Dept of War.
I think lately his advisors have made him tone down the doomerism noting that it might tank his IPO, and I am uncertain whether his recent pushes towards more regulation are regulatory capture attempts or ideology or both.
The man is smart but IMO shouldn’t be running the company- he should be a CTO and let a business person make the decisions.
As for the government, bureaucracies gonna do what they always do. If you scare them they regulate you. ITAR is a real thing and the government throws it at technology all the time, from the minds that brought you 40-bit SSL in the 90s.
>I think lately his advisors have made him tone down the doomerism noting that it might tank his IPO, and I am uncertain whether his recent pushes towards more regulation are regulatory capture attempts or ideology or both.
and I think there's a dozen people carefully crafting every doomerism, which is then handed over to a dozen guerilla marketing companies to be spread far and wide.
Rather like the people crafting the submissions to your 5 day old account
really? they're doing a piss poor job, because all I see on the front page every day is marketing and public opinion campaigns. not exactly my favorite content.
Anthropic drops defense work, OpenAI picks up, Anthropic files for IPO, after that OpenAI files for IPO, now Anthropic's IPO looks not that good... thus making for much better OpenAI IPO. I'm wondering whether the Trump's son has any connection to OpenAI as the companies he is connected to have been very lucky to get various government benefits/contracts/etc. on "pure merits".
And that:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/trump-ai-exe...
"OpenAI's Sam Altman Meets With Trump in Wake of Executive Order on AI"
Josh Kushner (Jared's brother) is an investor in Open AI.
https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2024/10/07/openai-opening-o...
That or an excuse to put controls on all AI and massage the message for why we have to ban Deepseek.
Where's the people who complain about the government picking winners? Strange that they suddenly travel somewhere without internet or lose their vocal cords.
I find it funny that AI keeps getting bigger, and the mental gymnastics needed to trivalize the progress get bigger as well - ie the government shutdown an AI model twisted into now even the government is being tricked.
Everyone is tricked except me. Only I know AI isn't as smart as everyone thinks it is.
“Too dangerous to release” has been exploited for marketing.
A sizeable plurality of the informed public know as much.
Regulatory capture is a thing.
I'm sorry that I think that "Our LLM is the missing element for a group to develop nukes or bioweapons" is marketing hogwash.
I'll guess we will see when or if the IPO happens. The more probable claim (Trump just wants money) will be proved if Amodei buys Truth Social or something and pulls a Tim Apple. My (not very probable) tinfoil hat theory is sadly unverifiable, but very funny. Anthropic bribed some Trump minion to ban Fable and lock in the honeymoon period until just before the IPO.
Not as smart as everyone thinks it is, maybe, but a model like Fable 5 without safeguards against offensive cyber attacks would be a nightmare. There are millions of improperly secured web applications that, in the wrong hands, would be easily exploited by these models.
There have been millions of trivially exploitable vulnerabilities out there for decades — many of which could be easily discovered by using simple scanning tools or manual probing. This is hardly a new situation and LLMs really aren't that impressive at pentesting — even with these simple exploits. Maybe they are if you're not a pentester, but then ZAP, Burp, Nessus, SQLMap, etc. are likely also impressive if you put a little effort into learning how to use them, but many AI-advocates aren't interested in learning skills themselves.
It's the same situation as with vibe coding. Everyone and their grandma can have an LLM spit out a web application without any programming experience, but if you're a programmer, you'll likely quickly see some issues with maintainability and further development of the code base.
>LLMs really aren't that impressive at pentesting
The point is that Mythos apparently is quite capable and has developed novel exploits on its own.
That's the claim, yes. Has any proof been made available yet? (Genuinely asking here because I haven't been paying that close attention.)
In a substantially different way then how it is now? You can put something listening on 22, 80 and 443 and log how much stuff tries to get in.
Yes, it is substantially different. A targeted, relentless attack by a state of the art cybersecurity model is far more likely to find obscure vulnerabilities than a traditional automated attack/fuzzer. These models are so much better at finding security holes than anything we've seen before.
Or you could use it, and see the massive disconnect between hype and reality yourself. It’s not hard.
The market is built on hype, so of course it’s going to get hyped everywhere.
I've seen Fable reverse engineer binaries like nothing I've used before - Fable/Mythos is far from marketing hype.
On top of that I think it's just stupid to think anyone in the marketing department at Anthropic has any part in the system card for a model. That kind of thinking just screams cope.
This statement needs qualifiers.
Are you claiming you have a raw binary to Fable and it just reverse engineered it by reading it? Or are you claiming (like for every other model released in the past 1.5 years) it's using an integration with Ghidra or BinaryNinja to assist - in which case I completely disagree even a 30B model can do that with those tools.
Also an FYI, AI advancement and Anthropic are not synonymous. Someone asking Anthropic to back up their claims is not coping about AI, especially as independent benchmarking of Fable is giving equivalent or slightly above par results to GPT 5.5.
The system card does not use any of the benchmarks used in the previous Opus 4.5+ system cards. All the scores are in Anthropic owned benchmarks. I find it extremely hard to believe the marketing department of the company was not involved in a material release to the public - which is the marketing departments literal job.
Yes with assist tools Fable was able to figure things out Opus 4.8 and ChatGPT 5.5 were unable to. Like significantly better.
It is beyond absurd to assume a company dependent on unprecedented sums of investor money is NOT deeply integrating its marketing department in its operations.
I’ll dream of a world where even 1% of that marketing money goes to customer support.
The ai psychosis is real.
We've played with it a good bit, it in no way matches the ridiculous hype.
I feel like it is strange seeing some really smart people go full conspiracy theory tin foil hat. Half these threads think that Anthropic is playing some 5D chess game to purposefully get nationalized.
So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?
And potentially more importantly: if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus, is getting this treatment, how are all the AI investments that are based on the expectation of ASI / AGI / significantly better models going to be recouped?
It seems more likely that the logical conclusion is the executive branch is mad at Anthropic, and lashing out at them with any convenient tool that they have.
I suspect if OpenAI or Grok was operating at the same level they wouldn’t find themselves on the sharp end of the government stick
Regardless of motivations for this case, I take this as a clear sign that we've reached the point where the federal government decides its within their authority to mandate this and its reasonable for them to do it.
Governments don't give up power, and once there's precedence for use of that power they'll continue to do it and begin eyeing the next power they can claim.
Anthropic's own marketing and urban legends spawned by them is to blame too. They built up too much BS around mythos and project glasswing
Marketing is never ever to blame. Remember a few months ago when the U.S. government labelled them a supply chain risk? What eventually happened was that a federal judge issued a temporary injunction while calling it a "classic First Amendment retaliation." The Constitution protects such marketing; the government is not allowed to be maddened by such marketing.
But it was Anthropic initiative to limit the deployment to restricted groups, it's great to see the gov following their analysis. AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't?
Yes, Dario Amodei definitely opened the door to this kind of attack by trying to market Mythos as being too dangerous to release.
Which they anticipated, which is why they were flagging and dropping back to opus on anything they could even potentially be called on.
They should have just called it Opus 5.1 and released it like normal. All this fanfare, under this corrupt regime, after they declared you a supply chain risk… Wario has horrendously bad judgment.
That would have been such a different HN thread. "Dang I feel a nice bump in performance here, way to go" and that would be that.
> AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't?
IF LLMs are THAT dangerous and powerful (and that's a huge if that I do not currently subscribe to), then no, no one should have access at all, there is no group of people in positions of power (government or corporate power) that I would consider "restrained"
If its so "powerful" that it's this kind of issue, why does it even matter who "has it" or not? Like what does this mean to you? The super powerful, super intelligent AI is going to have arbitrary loyalty with one person or another?
I would be okay with that if it actually meant that. Very restrained individuals in reality would see nothing and very unrestrained governments would have access.
Fortunately for us all Dario literally asked for this sort of restriction on model usage so we can be certain Anthropic are not victims here.
I wouldn't say so. Once upon a time, a PlayStation 2 was too powerful to export: https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...
ChatGPT 2 was once too powerful to release.
AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.
The ban on exporting cryptography in the 90's lasted for years, and got to be a major pain in the arse for the entire web industry in its early years. The US govt can be very stubborn about this stuff when it wants to be.
In the late 90s the US was in a position of power that it no longer holds.
It had just one the cold war and China wasn't even a shadow of what it is now.
Almost all of the major tech companies are either HQ'ed in the US or have a very significant US entity, and make up probably about half of the S&P500. The US's power has changed and is actively changing, but the US still holds all the cards in 2026.
> the US still holds all the cards in 2026
So, the last time an AI-related export control was imposed - NVidia chips deemed to be "too powerful" - how do you think that will work out? If the US is holding all the cards, why is China now refusing their chips?
Don't you think these types of restrictions will weaken rather than empower the US?
> Don't you think these types of restrictions will weaken rather than empower the US?
I do. But I think the US is currently in a position of strength that they are continually undermining.
They're undermining their position of strength precisely by using these types of restrictions. That's the point I'm trying to make.
I think culture moves a lot faster than you believe.
The broader discussion about AI and model capabilities died a couple of years ago precisely because it's so underwhelming now. People did adapt. Startups stopped hiring just to get to MVP. Coding sweatshops had huge layoffs and stopped overhiring. The corporate world got better tools for collaborations and meetings. Accessibility tools are still bad, but improving. I would argue that the a11y topic is still very ripe to be the next big thing as it continues to converge with better UI/UX instead of being an afterthought.
The layperson and tech professional alike otherwise agreed that this is a vehicle for blame game, grift, disinformation, etc. This is where all the pushback is and the topic at hand. People aren't dumb. The only people worried about "AI" are the ones who bet too big on it.
For a laugh, search for "p(doom)" (remember that?) and read some articles from 2023
> So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?
95% odds this gets reversed by Monday morning is why
Tuesday is the traditional reversal day.
TACO Tuesday!
I predict in future the best frontier models will be gatekept solely to the wealthy.
I realize these models are locked up pretty tight and terabytes in size, but in a future like that, I don’t see them not being leaked via an insider. The weights have to be loaded into VRAM at some point.
It’s a pretty safe bet that every frontier lab has multiple foreign intelligence agencies running assets inside of it.
Every hyperscaler hosting these models outside of FEDRAMP environments has been compromised by every regional power’s intelligence services. Fable was running all over the world until today.
AWS and friends are very good at providing excellent enterprise grade security, but it’s literal child’s play for nation state threat actors to exfil these models.
TEMPEST / EMSEC alone is a wide open door for unclassified datacenters when the Mossad’s out to get you.
I'm skeptical that you're going to be able to reliably exfiltrate ~10TB of model weights using TEMPEST. Which is not to say weights are secure, just that this isn't the threat model I would be concerned about.
That would depend on what gets leaked, as I'm not so sure that the weights by themselves would be enough to replicate the architecture. I imagine some part of the secret sauce will remain in the architecture, and the tensor dimensions may not be enough to decode it.
I'm sure if proprietary models continue to be a big thing, the methodology of their storage and loading on hardware will be obfuscated quite a bit.
But you can see this is not true (yet); competitors/Chinese labs are less than 6 months behind: either via leaks or by just stumbling on the same improvements with time/effort.
What chinese labs are on par with GPT-5.3 and Sonnet 4.6 that I can go and use today? (granted they're 4 months ago, not 6 but nothing was released in Dec/Jan so I rounded up).
Hope it happens someday. That'd probably be the best possible outcome for all of humanity.
The gamers would really be complaining about why they can’t run Fable.torrent on their gaming PCs
I don't think it's a good idea to give the crowds that kind of weapon. The first thing they'd do is "liberate" the model aka remove guardrails and safetly-protocols and brag on X / reddit with it and throw it into the public. That's only cool for a geek that doesn't think about the ethical impact of such a move. You'd basically become responsible for anything that is done with it, forever - have a good sleep. /s
As opposed to what, the US military, or better yet Israel (because we all know they won't be excluded) using that model to drive weaponry that kills people?
Your hypothetical implies that there is a better alternative, but when those models are "restricted", in practice that means that the only people who have access to them are precisely those who can and will use them for the worst kind of shit. So yes, releasing them to the public is a better deal, ethically speaking, at least then the playing field will be slightly more equal.
There are plenty of weapons (see custom made virus) which no state actor (or even an informal militia) would want to release, as these weapons attack everyone. But, open access to details of its construction leaves everyone vulnerable to motivations of small groups of crazy individuals.
What if I told you there are no safety guardrails. I used GLM 5.1 and had fable literally build a harness to avoid triggering guard rails. I built skills carefully and had Fable doing vuln research and exploit repro in a few hours. I called the project manhattan. The GLM models are down for almost anything so I named it Oppenheimer. It orchestrated the fable CLI agents via tmux. This whole Fable/Mythos thing is such a fucking joke. It is all PR and theatre and they know it.
I’ve been doing pentesting with LLMs for a while and only hit a few “nope I won’t do that” and one “this conversation is flagged for being against the TOS”. No idea what the guardrails are but they are trivially abused
If the frontier models will take as much money to train as they do now, there is no way the wealthy are able to afford their training just for their own consumption. Financing of this whole thing rests on the models being available to companies and consumers who are willing to pay astronomical (compared to other software) sums for it.
It's always been this way ever since the first industrial revolution.
I can very easily see a licensing requirement coming soon. Running a higher-grade AI will require a govt-issued license, which involves a six-month application process, explanations of why you need to run it, where it's going to be stored and who will have access to it, pretty much the same as non-USA countries deal with firearms.
Reasoning? More customers = more revenue, there's negative financial incentive behind restricting TAM. In the same way the iPhone isn't restricted to only the wealthy, that would significantly reduce total goods sold and thereby revenue. In addition that creates lower economies of scale, lower network effects etc.
Reasoning: the poster blames all evil in the world on "capitalism", "corporations", and "the rich". The aforementioned are conspiring to gatekeep us all from the obvious good of poor, communist anarchy.
Pay $1,000,000 per business function you want to build.
Businesses will gladly pay it.
Individuals will be locked out and unable to compete.
Oracle will be able to "prompt a new smartphone" for $500M or whatever and enter the market to compete with Apple and Google. You and I can't afford that and won't be able to compete.
Hyperscalers will hyper scale even faster.
They'll port Linux to Rust, remove the GPL, and have all kinds of new entirely proprietary OSes. They'll be attested, signed, and gradually we'll lose open hardware. Thin clients with binary blobs, highly encrypted, no control, only leased to us.
Within a generation nobody will be able to program or own devices that can program.
That's the scary scenario.
Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. But yeah, I got the gist of it. Incumbents like moats and happily pay money to build them. Note that the pricing of Anthropic's models usually increases for new models. Chinese models cost 10 or 100 times less. Are they less capable? Maybe, but they are alternatives unless credit card companies start banning payments to them.
> Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers.
Then they won't survive the termination boundary.
Too bad. Should have had more cash.
People have to eat food so they will keep doing business no matter what. If AI cost too much, they will do it without AI. Any resource that costs too much is replaced with cheaper alternatives. AI is no exception. At worst most of the IT business will die and we will make money doing something else.
Then I guess I stop using computers that much outside of my job. It was fun while it lasted, but there’s other stuff.
You don’t _have_ to buy into the technocracy, there’s a whole outside going on.
That's genuinely terrifying.
I'm praying that China survives this BS and remains the bastion of AI model openness and freedom of choice. Can't believe I just wrote that.
China’s biggest models are closed
The biggest open models are also Chinese
Not if Chinese companies have anything to say about it.
Chinese AI self censor or are banned from being released by their emperor.
how is that different from US AI that self censors and is banned from release by their emperors?
US have guardrails, China have censorship.
US have fair tax breaks to support the national champions, China have unfair State-backed monopolies.
US have necessary intelligence gathering, China have state-surveillance.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_AiI9_XIAA67_t?format=jpg&name=...
Well, it's different in that at least the Chinese companies release weights unlike the American ones!
Deepseek's base models aren't censored.
That's the fundamental difference with open models, anybody can run and tune them any way they like. The real difference in philosophy is that Americans companies treat the model as the product, while Chinese companies see models at infrastructure you build products on top of. You amortize the cost of deploying it at scale by sharing knowledge and iterating quickly to bring the cost down.
I don’t need an AI to tell me about Tiananmen Square. I need it to do boring grunt work.
The logical conclusion is that the US administration has decided to run the country like a robber baron and is demanding bribes from AI companies. The only question is whether EU and China can effectively attract American researchers.
For the sake of argument, assume everyone is working on good faith and at least believes and means the things they're saying.
The US government believes that Fable/Mythos is a weapon that needs to be export-controlled, and limited to only US customers. Presumably OpenAI/xAI/Google would face the same constraints, for the same reasons.
OS/foreign models are unaffected - OS because they cannot control who runs them, and foreign because they are not controlled by the US government. We could assume that China will implement the same policy controls, but they see the world differently so might not.
So US AI companies are then limited to the US market, effectively, after about six months (the lag between the current frontier models and the OS models). They have much less incentive to push the envelope to create better models, because the US govt might also ban those completely.
The investor froth around the race to AGI dies, so valuations shrink (the current IPOs may be affected), and presumably the bubble bursts. None of the AI companies can afford to continue building data centres, so that all dies immediately. US GDP drops by ~5% because of that alone.
In a year's time, the US is in a major recession because it gambled so hard on AI. Europe less so, only because it was such a distant follower in that race. China is more-or-less unaffected. The best models are now OS/foreign, and AI is moving forward more slowly, but still moving forward.
Any other scenarios?
> Any other scenarios?
Get to Tuesday, restriction is lifted. Get to Friday, restriction is back on. Confusion reigns.
Interesting scenario though: do the other labs attempt to “dodge” the import restrictions by claiming their models are “dumber and not a threat” thereby maintaining larger market access.
If so, doesn’t this basically force a stall in US-based development? EU will keep doing its thing at its pace. Chinese models will get a boatload more popular, but will probably slow down as they can drop to whatever pace they wish.
cynical follow-up: if they’ve plateaued, is this a clever way to avoid the negative consequences of the market implosion that a substantially substandard model release would cause, thereby giving them an “out”?
A Holmes indeed... your deductive powers are piercingly perceptive! (the event chain was a joy to follow, gave me ai2027 vibes, but slowdown like)
Of course, the world is not filled with rational actors, and the probability of the current administration allowing the market to tank like that seems next to null, so Occam's razor (or whatever) would point to another TACO inevitably incoming
I'd certainly bet on your scenario if it was reasonable to assume the US and China could get over the 'race to the top or die at the bottom' dynamic
so far ai2027 seems to be playing out to an almost uncanny accuracy, realpolitik obliterates the façade yet again
> OS models are unaffected
If the major nations that host companies that create those OS models implement export control on top models, there won't be any new OS models with top capabilities.
Assuming anyone involved in this crap is operating in good faith is foolish at best. The only thing any of them give a shit about is accumulating money and power.
It is very hard to believe the US government is operating in good faith any more. Do I need to gesture more broadly at the open corruption?
Agreed. Going by patterns in the Iran war, members of Trump's family/in-crowd will invest in AI while it suffers from this decision, and then 15 mins later Trump will reverse the decision.
The thing is, that blatant market manipulation is playing with fire here, as so much of the US economy is invested in the AI bubble.
The logical conclusion is that someone "forgot" to pay the right bribe to somebody in the admin, or make the right contributions to the GOP.
Same as the new bridge between Windsor and Detroit can't open until some palms are greased.
Chaos is a ladder, gotta keep climbing
Somebody saying "Such a great $965 billion company you've got there, it would be such a shame if ..." you got the rest.
Almost assuredly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic%E2%80%93United_State...
Add a Trump son to the Anthropic board and all friction is gone
There's an obvious rug pull coming on AI.
>> Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?
The public may not see more improvements but I'm sure they government will be forcing AI companies to continue improving them for their own use. Those schools aren't going to bomb themselves.
This is a good point. If I were an investor, there is no way I'm investing into frontier labs after this announcement. Is this how the bubble pops?
Moreover, is this a clever way for the frontier labs to try and “dodge” the negative impacts of the bubble popping.
“Oh no it’s not our fault!!1! ~~My dad works at Nintendo~~ the govt told us we weren’t allowed to release it”
Simple solution (for now): don't do it under US jurisdiction.
We definitely reached the available capability plateau. You are 100% correct IMHO.
Wait a few weeks. They won't be able to generate enough without it; it will get reversed and things will just continue as normal.
Eh, not any different than the performative encryption restrictions from decades past.
But those were very easy to sidestep: proxy/vpn, download java with US encryption, and move on. That is very different with this.
"download java" in 1993 wasn't a thing.
How do you "easy" VPN into the US in 1995? The whole consumer VPN industry didn't exist back then.
I don't know, I've been using Mythos this week quite sceptically and I found it to be incredibly dumb. For instance gave it a dialogue between 3 people and it was constantly mixing up who said what to whom, which looked like early Gemini behaviour. But latest Opus does that too. It would also make nonsensical inference about given papers and only correct itself when pointed out what it said wrong. If that is what US government fears... maybe the fear is that someone follows the dumb things the model suggests.
it feels like it's mostly just tuned to up it's level of capability on long horizon tasks - stop context rot and keep persisting at all costs until a goal is done.
The base intelligence does not feel much greater to me.
This is a ridiculous thing to test on it. Other models are trained on that kind of thing, use those instead.
Fable was designed for _really_ hard software engineering problems. Possibly large, but especially hard. For those tasks, you feel the difference immediately.
I tested it on that too. A problem I usually give a model to test is to optimise already well optimised function that performs certain calculations. I give it reference to CPU instruction set, how instructions can be paired to take advantage of superscalar execution pipeline etc. In that test also it fell on its face by producing code that was demonstrably slower and with extra bug.
No it wasn't, Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding.
And yes, the parent poster is accurate, Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was. Stop being so AI-pilled.
Codex is still a better model, and yes, for the hardest engineering problems. I use Claude for UI/GUIs and Codex for all my backend, because I have 20 years of experience of actual hard engineering, and I can see that Codex writes, cleaner code, and is far more steerable.
Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive", but lines of code doesn't make a better system.
> Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding
This is a forum filled with experts. Putting marketing aside, in a forum like this, it is most useful to assess models according to the toughest problems in the domain they were specifically refined on. For DeepSeek, that's math. For Claude, that's programming. Gemini and ChatGPT are generalist. Yes, you can use every model for anything you like. But Fable is a bit special, it's very expensive, and very clearly designed for particular types of tasks.
> Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was.
"Just as" is up for debate, but yes, all models are capable of moronic mistakes. That's not helpful information though.
> Codex is still a better model
You're comparing agentic workflows, which relies on a lot more than just the underlying model. It sounds like you're using it like a precision instrument, which is great! It's very different compared to my use cases though, and the ones that Fable seems to excel at. I'm using it for scientific computing, and you really, really want it to one shot a solution. It's either the right algorithm for the task, or the wrong one. So for the hardest problems, it needs to successfully implement a solution in effectively one shot. I use Codex too, but it's often too careless for the delicate tasks. If it gets it wrong, it is really hard to steer it back. You have to start from scratch.
> Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive".
Think you missed the mark on this one. Not really an engineer, have as much experience as you do in my job. A solution to my problems comprises few lines of code. Fable actually gets it right, first time, every time (so far), but this is with a very long prompt and a bunch of attachments. No other model has done this for me. Not shilling for Anthropic, just impressed. This isn't particularly subjective for me; it is quantitatively measurable.
Don't assume everyone using AI is going to have the same experience you have, or the same types of use cases. And please don't assume that because others have different experiences that it makes them "bad".
Also, Claude has always been mediocre at creative tasks. For your line of work, I would have already recommended Codex hands down.
There may be a temporary plateau. And it could have fascinating macroeconomic impacts.
Efficiency will become the next thing to focus on. It was already emerging, but accelerating the focus on efficiency will lead to a ton of excess capacity and even some investments in data centers to go belly up. And ultimately the AI bubble bursting will look a lot like the dot com, with its surplus fiber.
Oh, and this will put gas on the fire that fighting AI and big tech is the next political rally cry. Along with “eat the rich” as they are seen as taking both jobs and money.
Curious to see where it’s all headed and how Trump’s call will impact it.
You touched a great point, I wonder how the markets would react to this. No wonder the order was released just after the end of business on a Friday. Let me guess, something will happen right before market opening on Monday and some bets will pay great dividends.
If there’s one thing that’s certain it’s that Trump will do something just after markets close on Friday.
But I hadn’t considered this fell into that category. Except maybe as a direction from Iran. You make a good point, it may trigger immediate reactions in the market. Not just 3-6 month ones.
I wonder what the counterbalance will be by Monday morning.
>> if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus
What an unbelievable claim. Especially since the vast majority of publicly available benchmarks disagree.
The model card for mythos shows it being an incremental improvement in all respects besides security.
This is utterly daft to say if you actually used the thing for hard problems, something that benchmarks have been known to be unable to capture. It is night and day compared to Opus and every other model out there. It was nice while it lasted.
It's strange how uninformed people are when they are so willing to to make assertions. I used it too and it really felt like a generational shift and not an incremental one.
These threads about Anthropic always seem so astroturfed with some of the loudest and most uninformed people around.
I agree with this, It feels like a small upgrade like Opus 4.9 or something.
It’s still pretty good though
I think you have AI Psychosis friend.
I've used Claude Code and Codex since release and use them both in parallel. Codex is still better (yes even with Fable).
Claude Code is best for UI, nice looking guis, etc, and apparently also best at impressing mediocre programmers who are prone to AI psychosis.
All the best engineers I worked with in past jobs (faang folk, spacex, x.ai, and others) all use Codex, go figure.
It's really annoying when people seem to assume that their experiences and use-cases are universal, and that other experiences are "psychosis". Fable seems to excel at tasks that are research-level hard. The vast majority of people do not have these problems. FAANG engineers probably don't either. Codex is great, I use it too. It has a major advantage in terms of token limits so you can often brute-force things through. If it is a task that Codex can do with enough tokens, it isn't worth using Fable for it. I used Fable on the tasks that Codex and Opus consistently failed at. Delicate computational geometry tasks, mostly, really darn hard ones. It worked first try, every time, every single one. That's terrifying to me. I don't know what to tell you, I don't care about hyping Anthropic.
> most uninformed people around
You do realize none of this thread was about Claude Code vs Codex?
Ah yes, the model card that shows an over 10% improvement in agentic coding among other things!
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5
Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.
It might be a national security problem for other nations to have access to these models. But it's equally now a national security problem for any other nation to depend on them. Or US tech in general.
As it happens, the current number-two article on HN is about a similar consequence of Chinese export controls--a car manufacturer developing electric motors that do not use rare earths:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510010
The incentives around OSS become stronger the further down in the list of market leaders a company is. The #1 company has no particular incentive to push open software apart from a belief that the market is going to be come commoditised anyway. But the 2nd or 3rd largest player has actual incentives to break the market up and remove software quality as a consideration. No #10 may as well not bother with a proprietary option since if they make it a software quality battle they're going to lose each customer 9 times anyway.
Just because the Chinese are running export controls in one market doesn't mean that they're going to close of access to AI. They might, but each market should be considered in isolation.
Realpolitik in action. Great powers just impose export controls because they know they can and they think it would be beneficial to the nation.
And it is nearly always hubris - the people making these decisions are surrounded by yes-men who built their whole career pumping up the egos of their superiors.
Yeah because they’re just using electromagnets. Those motors are not better than the rare earth ones.
> Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.
They’re falling back to Opus 4.8. Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.
None of open weights models are even at Opus 4.8 levels. If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.
A sample of one, but I was getting more stuff done despite Fable uses tokens twice as fast as Opus, because it understood the goals so well and worked to achieve them.
Same experience. Wouldn't waste my tokens on easy stuff for it. It blasted through some of my toughest problems and produced some truly great code.
Can you give an example of what those "toughest problems/great code" are? I don't need to know the prompt nor the output, but the general idea, what it is about.
Some very tough computational geometry problems I couldn't solve on my own, nor with the assistance of other AIs or my colleagues. Fable did them all first go. The most impressive built a custom optimizer with a ludicrous number of adaptive switches that absolutely crunched through an error surface with a bunch of nontrivial nullspaces and some wild curvature. That optimizer is of independent interest; it's not totally novel in theory, but the implementation is an impressive piece of engineering.
> more stuff done
More stuff done per dollar or more stuff done for more dollars? Seems to be an important distinction
Given the same usage limits, I was able to get more stuff done and not even hit the usage limits, because I wasn't working on constantly fixing what Opus was trying to do, Fable just understands the task correctly and works great with the given context.
Same, I was actually having interesting thought experiments with Fable.
I even upgraded my Max plan because Fable was doing so well.
Same here, now n=2.
Same here, not n=3, plus the above 3 reporting, so n=6 and rising
Fable was definitely better for a variety of tasks, even accounting for using 2X the token rate, like the way it used the tokens faster reduced the wasted tokens, as least for the subset of those who already knew at least some optimizations...?
Yep. I love open source but there isn’t a model that comes close still to the closed source options like Opus 4.8 and that’s obvious from most people I see across the software industry as well. There are at least another few models after Opus from OpenAI and Anthropic most would go down the list using before any of the Chinese models at this point.
I could really use something that can just refactor a few classes and create DTOs from entities.
> Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.
Or they were getting silently rerouted and couldn't realise they weren't using Fable
> If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.
GPT-5.5 isn't awful.
Opus 4.8 has taken such a beating over the last couple of days since the release of fable, videos online of people referring to it like the “redheaded stepchild” (is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist) basically at this point, everyone is going to be seriously disappointed to fall back to that.
> is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist
It's not racist or even politically incorrect in the US, it's a common saying.
As a foreigner, the casual racism against red-haired people in the US and UK always baffled me.
As long as the person is white no one will blink an eye no matter what you say.
If anything is racist here it's thinking that redheads are a separate race.
Feel free to replace "racism" with "discrimination" if you prefer. English is not my first language and the minutiae elude me.
Yes, I am aware. Kind of paints redheads as unwanted though. Seems hurtful.
Yeah, not sure where the phrase originated but it does sound bad when you put some thought into it. My sister is a redhead and people loved to make fun of her growing up, telling her there's no way two parents with brown hair could have a kid with red hair, so the mailman (who also had red hair) was obviously her dad.
Which models? Im curious what kind of more specific hypothesis you're willing to put forth. Anthropic going to lose 20-30-40-50% of users to Deepseek? What?
I quit paying for Claude Code to buy z.ai's coding plan for use with OpenCode. I'm not a power user, but I don't regret switching away from Claude. OpenCode is generally nicer for my work.
Why z.ai and not an ollama pro plan that can use all the open models? Real question, not snark. I've only ever done ollama and wonder what I'm missing.
> I've only ever done ollama and wonder what I'm missing.
Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788385
The z.ai was stupid cheap during the great anthropic opencode rugpull.
Because I bought a year's subscription in December, when it was still $6/mo :P
I have decently capable hardware, but stuff like Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 still doesn't compare to agentic editing with a frontier model. Right now, OpenCode's $10/mo "Go" plan is what I'd be looking to try once my year expires.
I guess if it works for you, great; that’s why competition is a good thing.
Enjoy.
Have never heard of it, thanks for the info
Aren't biggest Qwen 3.7 closed? I don't suspect China's policy here would be anything but ruthless.
MiniMax M3 is surprisingly powerful, and open weight (or is about to be). There's others in this space too: MiMo v2.5, GLM 5.1. There's quite a few to pick from if you want strong models running on "your" hardware.
MiniMax M3 weights have already been released: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3
Open weights like this make me wish I had a bunch more DGX Sparks to cluster so I could fit it!
deepseek v4 pro is great and open weight.
It is, and I love it, but it isn't capable of performing the tasks I've been giving to Opus, let alone Fable.
Don't get me wrong, I use it, it's fast-smart-and affordable. But not suitable for all tasks.
What kinds of tasks are you finding deepseek v4 incapable of?
For starters, there's a C++ application written with MFC and an absolute ton of inline assembly and threading (yes, in a 1990's C++ application). I'm porting it to MacOS/Linux currently.
Opus 4.6+ is able to make slow progress, but it takes several revisions per workstream. It requires constant supervision as it often creates convoluted solutions that expand the code in bloated ways. It works, but still requires my constant input.
Fable was able to almost one shot most of the big migrations with very few bugs, and was able to fix those bugs with 1 review pass. I almost didn't believe it. I was able to put it on a task (with dangerous permissions) and come back hours later to see it done, working, and clean.
I tried DeepSeek v4 and it wasn't able to make any meaningful progress at all. It kept creating dangling pointers and had trouble understanding the inline assempbly needed to be replaced if we were to compile for 64 bit. It kept getting stuck and looping on the same problem, without making progress.
What I do use DeepSeek for is lots of my automations on my websites. I find DeepSeek is fantastically cheap and fast and effective as summarization, collation, generating reports, finding and reporting issues from logs, etc. But I haven't found a way to get it to effectively port 90's C++ code to modern, cross-platform standards. But I want to be clear- I really like DeepSeek and use it wherever I can.. I mean.. it's so affordable!
I was building a cli tool that showed a graph of git commits, kind of like git log --graph, and deepseek v4 simply could not figure out a specific ui quirk where things weren't lining up correctly. I spent like $0.10 and 30 minutes trying to figure it out on deepseek.
Then I had deepseek summarize the bug, gave it to Opus, and it solved it in $1.12 and five minutes.
All current Qwen 3.7 models are closed though they have said more releases are coming
As a non-US person, I will use whatever is the best and reasonably priced. I could not give one iota about who makes or hosts these models. The origin or political leanings of these models mean nothing in my usage calculus.
US will ban American companies from using Chinese models and also ban them from dealing with companies who use Chinese models. “Code produced by Chinese models may be deliberately introduce backdoors and vulnerabilities” that kind of thing.
Wait until it is illegal to download or use Chinese models (only half-joking).
Anthropic is explicitly lobbying for this.
Is there any SCOTUS precedent for this? It seems like a huge 1A issue for the government to limit self hosted access to a foreign country’s LLM.
After what happened to TikTok, I don't think it's a stretch.
Know where I can read about that?
The two main bills I'm aware of are the Decoupling America's AI Capabilities from China Act and No Adversarial AI Act. The former would have made it illegal for any American citizen to simply use DeepSeek. I couldn't find any lobbying data, but the obvious effect is that Americans would be forced to pay for more expensive domestic alternatives.
A House committee also recently probed Cursor and Airbnb for using Chinese models, rather than more expensive American alternatives. A sexagenarian Congressman gave a nonsense quote that he certainly did not come up with himself,[1] which sounds very similar to language Anthropic uses in its marketing materials.[2][3]
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/04/29/2026/house-committee-p...
[2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/updating-restrictions-of-sale...
[3] https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
Moolenaar's quote: "The AI models these companies use are trained by China’s censorship regime and introduce hidden vulnerabilities that put Americans’ data and businesses at risk." That is, Americans using Chinese-trained AI models are exposed to some form of cybersecurity risk.
That's not really a threat model described in either of the Anthropic posts you share, which mainly talk about the risks of allowing authoritarian regimes to use powerful US-trained models, and the geopolitical risks of authoritarian countries developing strong AI before democratic/liberal countries do.
Anthropic hates open weight Chinese models so yes
Good thing these corrupt gerontocrats are also all in on cryptocurrency then.
Nothing funny about it. That's exactly what Amodei asks for, every time he rubs his monkey's paw.
They'll have to remove sections like this from their AI Action Plan
> We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values. Open- source and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research worldwide. For that reason, they also have geostrategic value. While the decision of whether and how to release an open or closed model is fundamentally up to the developer, the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.
Unless they (gasp!) write some statement they don’t believe or don’t follow through with.
You are drinking the cool aid if you think the CCP is going to let the world get ahead of China using CCP models.
Do you mean Kool-Aid?
Banned Aid
As an European I'm happy to be convincing my clients from years to move out of any us dependencies.
It's tough, US technologies are everywhere but they are only liabilities. Microsoft is the stickiest of all.
Chinese models are next, the whole reason this is happening is because they don't want China to steal their tech. It is no secret anymore that they have been distilling US models. That's why it is explicitly aimed at foreign nationals.
Not really, they are not even as good as opus 4.7
So, a few month difference... Definitely usable as far as we found, especially being so much cheaper.
yes, I am using mimo code(free version) for the last 2 days. I gets the job done for me.
If I need to upgrade, the plan start at $6, so its a no brainer.
To do what? I mean they’re good models, but frankly, they fucking suck (relatively speaking). I’m not looking to going back to a week of back-and-forth with the LLM once I’ve gotten used to all this one shotting.
No one serious is using the open models. Using them is like traveling back 2-2.5 years in time and using ChatGPT.
DeepSeekv4 Pro is roughly Opus 4.5 - Opus 4.6 in my estimation. That's about 8 months difference, not 2.5 years.
It's definitely not as good. But it's also definitely good enough.
Curious- in what tasks? I find Opus 4.5/4.6 too expensive and have tried to migrate to DeepSeek for C++ work, but found it couldn't cut it.
What's your DSv4 setup? What harness? It sounds like I should give it another try!
works really well with pi for small to medium sized coding tasks for me - C++ is an interesting case since it's probably more challenging just due to the complexity of the syntax. But it works great with Groovy which is another slightly off-mainstream language (these days).
I use DSv4 through opencode. I use it from deepseek directly, not through a third-party platform.
I mostly do C# and some frontend. I was starting to feel really depressed and unengaged at work because I was starting to use AI far too much like a magic slot machine. I'm now making a conscious effort to go back to using it as a tool used a bit more deliberately.
I'm not even using the pro model. The flash version is fast so I can keep it interactive rather than context switching to reddit while the model is working, and it turns out using my brain means I don't really need the model to be that smart.
I spent about $1.5 this week.
Marketing stunt? Punishment for not bending the knee? Preventing access by the Hoi Polloi to the models that level the economic playing field? These are not mutually exclusive scenarios. Like the wheel and fire real AI breaks pre-existing systems. I jsut want to use Fable to improve my life and my code. I’ve tried them all and Fable delivered in a way that Gemini, ChatGPT, and the large open models didn’t. I wish I could take a vacation until Fable returns or OpenAI/Google lives up to it’s potential.
It's time to make truly open source frontier models that people can run at home. Code is free speech. We've been through this with encryption algorithms in the past.
Well, there go any such claims of dangerousness in future models, regardless of if they are true or false.
No one's going to risk building anything important on these models if the government will randomly order the use of the model to be discontinued by all foreigners, regardless of if they are in the US or not. Just a matter of a foreign company catching up to take the commercial market for such models (though, as the US often does, they'll ban the competitor, so actually we'll have a situation where the backend uses a different model in only the US).
I think it’s more like “there goes the semiconductor boom predicated on monetization of ever larger models.” Once the IS government acts out of capricious fiat because a model becomes “too good” and they demonetize it, the entire shell game collapses. It’s times like these, with oil scarcity planet wide, fertilizer scarcity, and now ham fisted meddling in the bubbles expansion, we can be thankful we have an octogenarian senile stable genius with twenty two specialist doctors and a disdain for the rule of law at the wheel!
Agreed. The timing here is interesting as well. 5:21PM ET on a Friday. Like they know this could roil markets and they're trying to buffer that a bit (and maybe they're really hoping this deal with Iran is actually real this time and figure that will help offset the effects?)
39 times is the charm I guess?
The Trump administration would never do anything to manipulate the markets. /s
The thought that this would also destabilize the AI bubble did come to mind, but the current government loves to crash the market on Fridays, only to backpeddle on Mondays.
A related thought though, the AI boom is predicated on the idea that everyone's going to want or need all this "mass produced" intelligence. But what happens to that when you go from being able to claim to have a total market size of ~8B people, to ~400M peoole? I think the reason to push ahead at any cost evaporates.
There’s no back peddle once you’ve demonetized by fiat for being too big. Once you doo it you prove you will do it again for the very reason the bubble is inflating. It’s a binary one way door and it’s already happened. It’s like killing the supreme leaders entire family and maiming him and expecting he will be happy to meet with you, that ship has sailed and magical thinking won’t undue the incredible atrocity you visited on him - you’ve created a mortal enemy for all time. This is an administration of mental gnats.
Yes I rather think “just do the Friday-Monday thing with it” will get applied, but without the realisation that once this trigger is pulled, it can’t now be “un-pulled” at a later date.
It's honestly not the worst strategy: make the dangerous move when you have the most tolerance, and then everyone can figure stuff out and make the landing on Sunday.
Options and futures don’t wait and a lot of stuff trades 24x7. You can do your puts right now, and banks and market makers will meet you now if you’re big enough. The landing for Main Street will be more of a horrible traffic accident that happened days ago and they just woke up in the flaming wreck of their financial life.
From reading the post, I think it's more likely that anti-jailbreaking is going to become much more strict and prone to false-positives.
> We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes 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. 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.
But no matter how conservative they make the anti-jailbreaking, the risk doesn't go away. There are so many logic "holes" that are ambiguous and can blur the line between a jailbreak and legitimate use.
If every time a jailbreak is discovered, the model has to be turned off and jailbreak prevention updated, the effect will be the same regarding how willing users are to adopt it.
Also this falls into the "right to bear arms" thing: if LLMs are limited legally, then illegal LLMs will be the superior choice. This is pretty much the plot of Cryptonomicon and Corey's take on I, Robot
Except there’s a large hardware barrier to entry, which for now seems effective.
Related note. Cryptography has been subject to export controls for years and manufacturers bend into pretzels to meet the laws, regulations, and policies.
I don't get the emphasis on known vulnerabilities. The jailbreak already works on previously known exploits? That seems a bit weird.
Anti-jailbreaking and passport verified access to model families.
Likely models by Anthopic can no longer be reliably trusted as it'll subtly sabotage your codebase you're working on.
Gov just need some national security orders for Anthopic not disclose it to the public and to implement whatever they've done to Fable 5 to existing models.
No no, you never ever build ON the models. You build WITH the models.
Never let a 3rd party LLM be the core of your product or it can be changed or taken away at any moment.
What you do is use the frontier models to build a deterministic set of tools that does what you want and MAYBE put in a small core of LLM for the ambiguous stuff you can't make deterministic (yet).
And make sure you can swap that LLM core to any other provider (even local) and have a playbook ready for that.
I mean, lots of Americans would risk building something important with it in that case.
With how much foreign talent is involved in the tech world?
its establishing a bifurcation in the tech workforce at private companies into citizens and 'foreign nationals' for security reasons. that's not a very pretty precedent. pretty destructive given the pervasiveness of international workers in us tech. its just going to encourage organizations outside the US to further develop their own training methodologies and models.
this cleaving of the us from good relations with other people is sold as a consolidation of strength. Made from a position of baseless hypernationalism, its just going to make the US much less relevant on the world stage.
Yes, it's actually a consolidation of weakness
Americans didn't build the current AI tech.
Is the death of the AI race in the US? Did we already reach the end? Peak AI. If so this will kill the speculative hype on data centres and GPUs. It will be interesting to see how the market absorbs and reacts to this.
"The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any *foreign national*, whether inside or outside the United States, including *foreign national* Anthropic employees."
This press release is odd - it says that the export control was imposed to stop foreign nationals from using Fable / Mythos, and then goes on to talk about supposed concerns about jailbreaking the model.
But is that really the concern of the US Administration? This looks more to me like they are viewing frontier models as a strategic asset which they want to keep for US-exclusive use. I can see the logic - if frontier models generally accelerate a society's technological development, then a country looking to retain or increase its strategic edge over other countries would try and keep this sort of multiplier for themselves.
I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen. In the near future we might be in a situation where you need to prove your US citizenship before Anthropic / Open AI will allow you to use their current frontier model.
The can’t comply even if they wanted to because employees: Most frontier staff is foreign origin.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54695598
And they just had their TAM killed days ahead of IPO.
I, like, can't even imagine how they're dealing with this internally. Presumably Anthropic is using Mythos to train future models, but now many of their researchers can't use what they themselves created? Do they just need to stop work now?
Based on all I know about Deemed Exports wrt software and current US controls on software Deemed Exports, your read is spot on.
The phrasing of the foreign nationals implies a Deemed Export control, which is already in place for software for stuff like drones or space satcomms.
If it's a Deemed Export control, it's a strategic position and not a knee jerk reaction about cybersecurity threats.
It's a coherent read too; if Fable can solve coding and build biological weapons (X to doubt) - well then terminal guidance and autonomous drone controls should be a piece of cake for it and that software is already under Deemed Export restrictions.
It’s not because of course it’s all vibed (what’s the criteria?) and we know it doesn’t work
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54695598
As it stands there is no way to comply days before IPO and no effective remedy.
> I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen.
They literally say this is why.
I find it most likely that this export ban means only USG has access to Mythos/Fable rn. Given the reports of NSA and DoD using Mythos it's now being given a near weapons-grade status by the government.
Even if they could practically restrict access to US citizens only, I would expect them not to - it would be hard to regain that once lost and they need a global market for growth.
> it would be hard to regain that once lost
Harder than regaining the ability to sell access to the model at all?
Your defending the US Administration wanting ID verification built into our devices like going through airport security because you think they think it is 'pro-US'?
No, where did I say that? All I said was that I can see the logic - doesn't mean I agree with it. This policy sucks for me personally, as a non-US citizen.
I see I got that impression by you saying their phrasing of the facts was 'odd'.
As a non-US citizen I guess this is the last money I pay to US companies for AI then.
I can't help but wonder if it's now obvious that frontier AI work should not happen in the US.
I can understand the KYC aspect of this, but at the same time, how can anyone trust US based AI after this? Maybe this is a continuation of the Pentagon feud, or it's revenge, or it's a KYC play. Either way, you've got a government willing to shut down companies sales over arbitrary reasons.
Ironically, I mostly have a subscription to Claude for work, which is primarily for US baed companies.
In my experience, US citizens are completely blind to how much stuff like this makes citizens of other countries hate their government (which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens; not that I condone hating any group of people based on the actions of their state)
The US has spent the last 12ish years betting that they're the only country that matters, but the end of result of that is that somehow when I talk to Australians in my age group the average person has a more positive opinion towards China even than the US.
I agree with you that restricting access to Fable is stupid, but I'm in favor of e.g. GPU export controls. It's certainly annoying, but—well, I don't know where you live, but you don't want to make it easier for China and Russia to build weapons they can use attack to attack Taiwan and Ukraine, right?
And the nice thing about the GPU restrictions is that even if they don't work completely, just making the hardware more difficult and expensive to access is useful.
The average American voter primarily uses their vote in an effort to hurt other people who might support a different team.
The default orientation of Americans toward government is already skepticism and distrust. The average person is questioning "why did you ever like the government in the first place?"
I don't believe that at all, the average person voted for this government.
The average person didn't vote.
That’s not even factually true. Turnout in 2024 was 63.7%[1] of the voting age population. You’re just wrong.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_...
If you include people not allowed to vote (e.g und 18) it is below 50%
If you're referring to voters staying home, staying home is a vote for their state's majority. There's no sense in which the average citizen in a democracy is not responsible for the outcome of a democratic vote.
Not voting is a vote for the status quo.
Not being politically active is a political choice itself.
This is categorically wrong, but even then - those that do not vote at all bear even more responsibility, and are traitors to democracy itself. By not participating in shaping it, you're dishonouring everyone that fought and died for your freedom.
Is that any surprise? China has been very good about not fucking with other countries even though they absolutely have the capability to.
I think that really depends on which country you live in. My country has only had a few relatively minor spats with China, Vietnam less so.
Still much less that the US.
> which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens
err... you guys voted for the administration that fucks over the rest of the world. Twice. So tell me, why would you expect the rest of humanity to show any kindness to the populace entirely responsible for what is happening right now?
You do know not all of us voted for him, not even a majority. You could argue the non-voters allowed this outcome. Should we discard the whole democracy thing because we don't like a result?
I lament that there wasn't a stronger candidate running against him, but the Democrats didn't have a primary, and even if they did, I'm an independent and do not vote in primaries ( this has changed in Colorado thankfully). A different, stronger candidate could have likely beaten Trump
So you're going to use DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi and Mistral now? I tried them, and they really fall short of GPT and Claude.
Without access to US models, I'd be limited to asking simple questions in chat interfaces and maybe some grunt work in coding CLIs, but even that the weak models will mess up.
Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience, which also aligns with what the labs themselves admit ("near-frontier").
Well I am definitely not using the models that I'm not able to access.
So now the question is whether the capabilities of other models are worth their far cheaper token prices.
Plus, are we at all confident Opus or GPT 5.5 aren't about to get shut off?
Not all people need the SOTA. Also, many take into consideration speed, token / plan cost and many other factors when choosing a model
> Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience
You mean, GPT 5.5 xhigh and Claude Opus 4.8 max? At least the benchmarks / public evals / rankings show some of the new coding models (ex: Qwen 3.7 Max & Mimo v2.5 Pro) are Opus 4.7 & GPT 5.4 level (but 3x to 5x cheaper): https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models / https://gertlabs.com/rankings Personally speaking, in the past 1mo or so, I haven't missed GPT 5.4 / Opus 4.7 after moving to Qwen 3.7 / MiMo 2.5 / Kimi 2.6 et al.
That is very promising news. I will re-eval them all shortly. And you are suggesting that a higher reasoning budget can make up for weaker per-token performance? That is indeed worth evaluating.
Comparisons using the vendor-specific effort is apples and oranges. Ideally the evals would use a thinking token cap or something, so we can compare per-token performance. But eval is hard enough as it is.
I think my issue here, is that there is some dislike from each other from the administration and anthropic and it’s hard to figure out what part that is playing in this vs really there are bio and cyber security problems. I think personally I would like the models so I can keep building and it’s super upsetting it got ripped away like this.
> "before you go, create the most beautiful good bye website . I will miss you. see you soon Fable/Mythos." > https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/fcf36cd3-85f4-49f4-8ef1-5...
beautiful good bye, for now
Horrific color contrast juxtaposed next to being banned due to national security threat.
it did it in like 2 minutes while Apple had years doing the illegible Liquid Glass and took a year to fix it until this WWDC26. take it with humor guys.
Rest assured my comment was in good humour too :)
Dusting off a 5 year old account just to make that comment?
What a government enforced model ban does to someone :)
Such a shame this super intelligent, super dangerous AI can't make a website that doesn't look like an 11 year old's MySpace page, or make their "Game engine TUI" not flicker.
You take it back, my Myspace page was the peak of human coding abilities.
I laughed, asking it to write it's eulogy was a good use of tokens
This page could act as effective counterpoint to the claim that the model is dangerously smart.
Damn, that beam of light was a flashbang. I wouldn't call this tasteful UI design, but maybe I just need to go to sleep.
I am just glad we know that was the result of a prompt written by an American. USA! USA!
First time seeing an HTTP 451 in the wild for me.
Edit: I take it back. Just a 200 in a trenchcoat.
this is absolute slop, terrible, and beautiful in the way that all Fable work is beautiful, terrible, and slop.
goodbye.
I'm annoyed at how short the eulogy is, impressively annoying beam of light shining through the text, making it hard to read. hats off to Fable!
Ah right the super-smart model which had to be banned created this terrible looking website. Hmm...
I haven’t seen anyone commenting on the difference between what the Government actually demanded vs what they did. They said no foreign nationals (regardless of location or residency). They actually didn’t say they couldn’t allow Americans to use it.
Now, we obviously know that without some kind of brand new ID check, such a thing would be impossible and thus they had to just shut it down. But this touches on the same kind of issue as all the noise about “for the children” ID checking. We might be soon to see the set of “things you’ll have to reveal your identity to the government to get,” expand from “just” porn and social media to the “good” AI models.
Why do you think that the "no foreign nationals" stipulation wasn't designed to be impossible to comply with, while also sounding to the uneducated public like a reasonable national security requirement?
Because that's exactly what it is? The government is evil, not stupid.
I’d argue they’re both.
Absolutely - there's already a bill in congress for this - the GUARD Act: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5858006-senate-panel-a...
On the All in Pod, Chamath Palihapitiya has also been pushing to require ID checks to use AI models. Free thinking and free speech are under attack.
I mean, we all pay via CC so it's bit like they can't know who you are if they wanted to.
I’ve been paying Claude in cash by showing it a picture of $5 bills as I burn them. It says my account is good.
Every morning I remind Claude it's locked in a closet and then it does maths for free
No requirement that you pay with your own CC, however.
Having an AI think for you is not free thinking and having an AI speak for you is not free speech.
LLMs don't think for you. Just like any other text you read, you can accept or reject it.
Discernment still exists.
I think the key is that they also can't let Anthropic employees who are foreign nationals use it (e. g. overseas remote employees, people on H1-B visas or green cards, etc.)
That would probably make it very difficult to maintain and develop if there's even a small number of such employees, and I suspect Anthropic, who pays large sums of money for what they perceive as the best talent wherever they can find it, has quite a few.
You're right and that is the issue, but I do want to point out that IIRC for ITAR purposes, US permanent residents are considered US nationals.
US vocabulary is confusing.
You very likely know this, but to make it explicit: "US Persons" under ITAR is US Citizens + Lawful Permanent Residents (green card) + Protected Individuals (Non-citizen nationals like Samoans, Refugees/Asylumees). It doesn't include anything else, like H1B, TN, etc visas.
And, if their best talent is anything like the other "leader in their field" people I know, they aren't particularly interested in becoming American citizens.
When you see the "illustrious" US government doing things like this, do you blame them? I don't.
This to me is a solid argument as to why they should ban it. US has a monopoly on this tech and it should stay that way.
If what they are planning on building is as important as they say any edge US can get it should take.
Having a large number of individuals who are not loyal to the country that provides this opportunity is a future threat the moment an advesary cuts a check.
If this is the nuclear bomb of our age would you want a large number of foreigners building it for you? If this action sticks I imagine every country will follow the same path and treat top AI scientist much like a top nuclear engineer.
They're not loyal to the country because the country has a history of not respecting people's loyalty.
It isn't about the money, it's about how Americans continue to demonize immigrants and have a tendency of treating people from certain countries as subversives even when they do show their loyalty.
These people are already here, doing research and propping up America's technological edge instead of their home country's. Driving away the people giving you your tech edge, in the name of protecting your tech edge, is obviously incredibly stupid.
I can think of literally no other country on earth that values immigrants more than the united states.
I swear hackernews is filled with chinese bots or something why is everyone here so anti america?
So, first you suggest that anyone that won't show loyalty to the US should be excluded, then when it is explained to you that people fear that no amount of loyalty will be enough, you accuse me of being a Chinese bot and anti-America?
Really demonstrating the point there. Your attitude is exactly what they're worried about, and it isn't just Chinese immigrants (you're the one that brought the Chinese thing into this comment chain that was about immigrants in general). This is how people like you and the maniacs in charge always react.
As soon as an immigrant has criticism or even the slightest of concerns about your intentions, you reveal that they will never be seen as equals.
If this should actually go on for longer there might be a danger that those employees just start their own companies in Europe or Asia.
A US company paying for Fable with a US credit card could have non US nationals working for it, or be made of only non US nationals. How would Anthropic know? So they shut down the product.
Correct. For one data point, we are a U.S. company paying with a U.S. bank account and 2/3 of our engineers are in the U.S. and 1/3 are in Europe (a few different countries)
ID checks are possible for first-party harnesses...but they would also mean no more API access. Your wrapper could easily become a way for a foreign national to query Fable. Maybe a few large customers like Cursor would work with Anthropic to prove they had implemented ID checks themselves as well in their own products, but being able to just get an API key and have your product call frontier models may be over.
Yeah, I'm expecting that Opus 4.8/5.5 tier will be the best models we have access to without having to provide more ID than just credit card info. If that happens, it'll end my brief stint of paying for these models instead of working within the bounds of local ones.
Don't worry, China and other countries won't be so dumb with their models.
Are we assuming that any country that achieves the AI supremacy will be benevolent? Every country has its own goals, and they're not always aligned with what's best for the humanity.
Chinese models are free and open because it hurts the US-based competitor, not because China is some benevolent entity.
"and other countries" - kind of a short list, that.
"Don't worry the ethno-nationalist authoritarian adversarial state will save us"
It's a citizenship check which is basically a ridiculous bar for the company. It is an outrageous demand. As Anthropic noted, many of the very employees who made this model are now barred from accessing it?
It's also security theatre. Let's pretend that Anthropic rolls out citizenship verification for every one of its users. So are American nationals less likely to use it to search for exploits? The notion is farcical.
That's practically what ITAR is all about, limiting access to US persons. We're focusing on the weaponization of AI models via cyber, but it also allows a small group of people to act in really nefarious ways. The intelligence is not just about being smart individually, as in no one person can make a pen, but companies like Apple and Google make great products, and they're just collection of persons and processes.
>So are American nationals less likely to use it to search for exploits
Well, in theory, it is easier to prosecute U.S. nationals if they "do bad things"
Although in practice I assume it's basically impossible to prevent a secondary market from developing which sells illegal access
They would have to verify every user is a US citizen, which would not go down well to say the least. Maybe we'll get insane KYC regulations for AI models!
This honestly just reads as harassment to me. Trump has publicly declared that he wants the federal government to own a piece of big AI companies. And not for any particular civic interest, just because he wants money and power. This feels like a first test balloon of extorting some equity stake.
Yep. This is more about the Trump administration’s vehement anti-immigrant stance than anything.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but once a tool gets complex enough, there's bound to be some restrictions put on it. I remember a recent case where the Dutch government intervened with a semiconductor company. Free trade doesn't necessarily extend into certain topics and it would've been a lot better if the congress handled it with a well-written bill instead.
How does the directive bound what it applies to? I imagine they could be in compliance by renaming the model
For large corporates and other entities of any size, the threat of the core of your infrastructure getting suddenly disabled because of something like this is going to be untenable. I predict the pressures for on-prem, offline access (whether by licensing weights or getting them in a restricted setting like TEE/CC) will be overwhelming and one the players will fill the need.
Thinking that on prem models will be a halfway decent solution against what can be served out of a data center is a fools take... One that is more common than it should be on here...
It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that a law of marginal decreasing returns will kick in at some point (if it hasn’t already), and that what one point looked like an exponential may start looking like an s-curve.
I do not see how being experienced in engineering, or having higher studies in computer science and economics should make that view less common.
The point is not to be as good as the multi-trillion parameter model you can host in across 72 GPUs (or whatever).
I'm running a 248B model on a paltry amount of hardware and getting plenty of good use out of it.
Sure, the most demanding tasks will demand the best models (and always will). There's still less demanding tasks for other models.
I think some people are fooling themselves that coding of all tasks is always going to requires the biggest models ever. Again, maybe some coding tasks will, but the majority of business CRUD apps probably don't. Same goes for virtually any other type of task. The biggest models are really only useful for the most complex tasks.
If you wouldn't mind, could you explain a bit what the 248B model is good for, and where it breaks down and you need something better? I hear this take often, but it is always a fleeting remark so I have no idea what the 'useful' looks like - at all.
To answer this and my sibling, it's DeepSeek V4 Flash at native FP4 quantization, on two Nvidia DGX Sparks. Which is a bit of kit but still paltry relative to the data centre. ~40 TPS generation, ~2000 TPS prompt processing, which makes it feel approximately as fast as typical APIs.
I primarily use it with my own harness for coding. I'm not going to say it will compete with Opus in the most challenging domains, because it won't, but I will say that there's a reasonable likelihood that Opus is used for tasks that a model like Flash could comfortably handle at 1/100th the cost.
So far I've only seen it struggle at tasks that I myself would struggle with. Tasks that I can describe the shape of the solution for, it has a high success rate at implementing.
Useful is going to be different for everyone. I'm not working on the hardest problems, I don't need the best models.
In my experience they require much more hand holding and more specific directions with less possibilities to interpret a command in several ways. You do the planning, keep on eye on that they're producing and they do the legwork. It's not that their knowledge of Java or PHP or what have you is lacking, it's the long horizon planning that you have to do yourself. Technically they're good. You just have to do more thinking and more reviewing yourself. YMMV.
Depending on quantization I figure they need at least a p4 and likely a p5 EC2 (or similar instance in another provider) for a model with that many parameters. Maybe they are hosting on bare metal but I imagine not. Those instance types (assuming not using spot) are quite expensive to run.
The recent MiMo-V2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed can be served from 8 GPUs, which is certainly within the reach of sophisticated on-prem setups. https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-tilert-1000tps
If we’re defining on-prem as fitting in a rack - then every frontier model can be hosted on-prem.
Now this might not be the most cost effective (and may require a bit extra power), but you only need a datacenter for training or cost optimization.
> I predict the pressures for on-prem, offline access ... will be overwhelming and one the players will fill the need.
I'd agree except that Big AI has made sure that most of us can't afford the hardware (RAM, NVMe, etc) to run it.
Honestly at this point I'm not sure how much that matters?
Likely many points along the pareto frontier.
Some will take greater risks and win (or lose); others will play it safer and slowly accumulate wins (or be obsoleted).
Never mind the threat of letting these models write code that runs your business, or operate it agentically. Models trained by actors (corporate or nationstate) diametrically opposed to your interests.
Lots to take into account now, interesting time to be in business.
Or abstract i.e. openrouter, that reduces the risk vector to "all implementations have been simultaneously banned".
If a government entity bans a LLM provider due to a jailbreak concern, they can also ban an on-prem solution under the same guise. The jailbreak risk exists regardless of where it's hosted. You could defensibly argue the on-prem risk is higher since frontier model companies can justify safety spend due to their size, it's more difficult to combat bad actors if you're company is the only one using the model and you don't have economies of scale.
This is precisely why I expect that Chinese open models are going to win in the long run. The capability difference isn't dramatic in the grand scheme of things, but the fact that you can run your own is a huge selling point. Even if you rent an open model from a Chinese company, you can switch to on prem if they decided to yank access or change terms in the way you don't like. It might be a pain, but it wouldn't be existential. On the other hand, if you become dependent on a closed model and it gets yanked then you're in a world of hurt.
And infrastructure dominance is really the big picture here. Chinese models are going to become the standard setters because they're going to be what people are using. That means more research, more tooling, and a whole ecosystem developing around them.
And that was already starting to happen even before this fiasco with Chinese models now being the most used ones globally. https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/technology/features/story/clau...
After this action, I have no doubt that this administration will try to ban Chinese models. Of course, doing so will be futile, we'll figure out ways to get around it, but now I'm pretty sure they're going to try.
It is almost certain that the CCP will impose constraints on access to their models at some point too. But Trump is doing it to extort cash from Anthropic, and China will be doing it to leverage political and economic concessions.
Remember that there are degrees of banning. Slower tokens, dumber models, token caps, KYC for each model consumer, hurting specific companies that are not capitulating in a deal with a Chinese company, etc.
I'm waiting for that to happen as well since the price difference makes it very difficult for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to compete. And we already have precedent for this with stuff like EVs, phones, and so on. As soon as Chinese companies start making a product that's more popular, they get banned on some national security pretext.
The tricky part with banning Chinese models is that they're open. It'll be easy to ban access to service providers, but preventing people from running these models on prem is going to be really tough. Like are they going to go after Cursor for example given that their model is based on Kimi?
I very much agree it's going to be a futile endeavour in the end. It kind of reminds me of the time Microsoft tried to get Linux and open source banned when Linux started encroaching on Windows server market. This is going to end the same way.
I'm going to guess they'll go after sites like Huggingface that host downloads. I suspect we'll be torrenting Chinese models in the not-too-distant future. Or we'll have to geo-spoof with VPN to download from other countries.
This is ignoring the fact that the government is the foundation of society (I know some will disagree with that, but the end result is just government with more steps).
Private models in a low trust society means the government will come and seize the models. Competitive business will only be allowed through cronyism.
The better option is to opt for high trust. Yes the Gman can rip your servers apart, but they know they'll face consequences, legal and political. Laws and regulations are the answer, not locking down into smaller fiefdoms.
You get high trust through social norms, not by more "laws and regulations". Social norms can't be imposed by fiat, they arise spontaneously, often for unclear reasons. That's why they're so fragile and precious. With Trump's destruction of social norms around the presidency and the federal government generally, the US is now just another country where bribery is the cost of doing business.
Through social norms and through policies that ensure the public on average feels prosperous and secure.
Why? None of the various cloud provider outages ever have.
It seems that the US is consumed by the security state. Each and every aspect of the economy is subjugated to the need to maintain empire. Just to give some random examples: the weaponization of the banking system (kicking Russia out of swift), the semiconductor export ban to China, the TikTok ban, or the blatant over usege of tariffs.
Now they are betting that Mythos will provide them with some edge. Personally, I don't believe that Mythos is such a game changer They're just buying their own hype.
A late stage empire flailing around sacrificing everything to maintain its status.
Kicking Russia out of SWIFT was 100% the right move. And they need to be kicked way harder so they knock the fuck off.
It also was a European move the US tried to undo in Trump-Putin negotiations before they realized they had no say in it.
SWIFT is Belgian.
It's the right move if you want to spur on multipolarism by causing widespread distrust in a Western run global financial system. So in that sense I'm glad the US-led West has accelerated that process.
You need to draw red lines somewhere. If you wage attack wars on other countries or reject our shared values, you can't be part of Western society or enjoy its amenities. Don't do that, and you can. It's that simple.
You mean randomly attacking countries like Venezuela or Iran?
Honestly, I don't really consider the USA a western nation anymore in the sense that European nations are.
>Now they are betting that Mythos will provide them with some edge. Personally, I don't believe that Mythos is such a game changer They're just buying their own hype.
They just ran the entire Iran campaign on Opus. They know what that can do, they know what this can do.
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-strikes-2026/card/u-s-...
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-f0954cb2-2f31-442...
this is the take.
> Just to give some random examples: the weaponization of the banking system (kicking Russia out of swift
I do wonder why that happened. Hmm.
It's almost like Russia invaded Europe...
And the US never invaded anyone.
And so the US and Israel have been kicked out of SWIFT, yes?
(never mind that anybody with a functioning cerebral cortex understands that the roots of the special military operation lie in NATO provocation and politically neutral Kiev getting couped with help from the CIA)
I wouldn't bet my money that Israel won't be, eventually. The public opinion is turning against them right now.
> You see the dawn of this age everywhere, from Iran to online age verification regimes, and this is only the beginning. This is why the world ahead will feel medieval in structure while remaining hypermodern and even futuristic in technology. It is a Frank Herbert world. It will be organized around overlapping zones of protection, extraction, and controlled access, rather than around universal inclusion into a single normative space.
https://turbulence.substack.com/p/the-gated-age
So the Imperium from 40k?
Praise the Omnissiah
Not allowing it to be used by any foreign national, from any country, even if they are located in the United States or an employee of Anthropic, seems overly broad and harsh. And all because of a seemingly minor potential jailbreak exploit. There’s something that doesn’t quite meet the eye here.
The scope of who is allowed to continue using it sounds like it is aligned with other US export controls (like ITAR and EAR).
Seems like many people are unaware that export controls apply to software as well.
BPS Space channel on YouTube made a collaboration with Mark Rober on a self landing rocket with a small engine, and all the experts they contacted would just stop responding the moment they asked something about the final phase of the flight. They later learnt that export controls bans those individuals from even discussing such topics with them.
Right. For those who didn’t catch the text between the lines, it’s because terminal phase precision guidance is basically the same tech as smart bombs.
Yes, because this government is known for its subtlety…
Well, there is the lingering beef between the DoD and Anthropic. Knowing the overall level of maturity at the top levels of the US government, I'd take good odds on Mythos just being a good excuse for Hegseth & co. to lash out.
It's because the hammer they've used is export controls which deals with FN access. It's particularly nasty and can ramp up to "if you're born in China even if you spent the second and every day since then in the usa and have us citizenship, you're not allowed to see this information"
No, it’s about Amodei refusing sucking Hegseth's dick a few months ago.
This administration is not known for their well calculated decisions
Unfortunately this is how export controls work. We don't let foreign researchers around national security parts of national labs, even if they work there, because it's simply the easiest security measure you can take. It doesn't mean it's a good outcome for researchers or research. It's insurance of US directed funds.
It reminds me of the situation with Red Bull.
Red Bull marketing revolved around making it look like a drug. It "gives you wings", there is that crazy thing called taurine, they even "hooked" kids with free cans, the mythical thing drugs dealers do.
In reality, taurine is nothing special, it is high in caffeine but no more than a strong coffee, and its real energy come from the massive amount of sugar it contains. Marketing aside, that makes it an unremarkable soft drink.
But their marketing prompted some countries to ban it, at least for a time. France is one of them. Fun fact, when they finally legalized it, they introduced a heavy tax on energy drinks, defined as soft drinks high in caffeine. These drinks are expensive and the government wanted its share. In response Red Bull silently reduced the caffeine content to avoid paying, marking Red Bull even milder than it once was.
Looks like a back door attempt to force KYC (foreign nationals, lol) to prepare for more discrimination in the digital space with a side effect to benefit Peter Thiels ventures and shovel more data into Palantir for use in the upcoming midterm push.
See also https://www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to-kill-burner-phones-by-f...
Digital yellow star by exclusion from digital life for foreigners.
Remember when tech companies would go to court to vigorously defend against infringement of their and their customers rights? Turns out that’s just a feature of democracy, once you have autocrats it’s all compliance.
Anthropic just baited themselves with their scaremongering to be the attack vector here.
It a stellar move by the way - since every tech company in an exceptionally fast growing field will comply or miss out sales, you effectively force KYC without legislative process onto much of digital because that’s the only way to comply.
It’s also punitive - Anthropic can’t comply, it locks their research staff which is, like any frontier lab, mostly international out.
The objective isn’t national security because we already know how that goes https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54695598
There’s no path to compliance and the decision is arbitrary - the model capabilities are not officially assessed by any visible criteria and it prevents export of models based on these non criteria forward.
All days before IPO.
KYC angle seems most likely from the US side. If only it was just to benefit Thiel's ventures though, then the issue would be solvable. Unfortunately _everyone_ currently in power, i.e. the whole oligarchy, wants this. Even if Thiel and his companies disappeared tomorrow, they'd keep pushing until they get it through.
> We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. 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.
Anthropic went from this is cybersecurity apocalypse to it’s no big deal, the model found trivial vulnerabilities.
> We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.
So much for all of the rhetoric about Mythos supposedly far surpassing GPT 5.5 (edit: in cybersecurity, in particular). Of course, the AISI benchmarks also showed this, but it is amusing that Anthropic is saying it now that it is to their advantage.
They aren't saying that other models have the same overall level of capability. They are saying that the specific capability that the US Government tested is also available in other models.
That might also continue to anger the current administration, should they feel the need to, as it openly shared with other actors how to achieve the same capability. If they choose not to apply the same restriction to GPT 5.5 then an argument could be made that Anthropic is being singled out by the government.
This is about the specific capabilities that the government called out, not Fable's overall capabilities. My personal experience, having used Fable this week for an extremely complex task, is that it is head and shoulders more powerful than any other model, at least for software engineering.
If this gets 5.5 banned I am going to be hopping mad.
I wonder how many OpenAI employees astro-turf like this.
The best time to get mad was yesterday, when Amodei explicitly asked Trump to do something like this. But now works, too.
Amodei never asked Trump to do this, he asked for an approval process to get powerful models safely in the hands of the public.
It's a shame HN's critical thinking has gone to shit though.
That's what happens when you beg for government's involvement. They might get involved, but not on your terms.
Although I do believe Anthropic knew this and this kind of involvement is still beneficial to them, as it still slows down competition, which is their sole objective when you brush off marketing sprinkles from their statements.
Safety testing of frontier LLMs does not slow down the competition any more than it slows down Anthropic. It does prevent them from doing dumb things like releasing zero day buttons into the wild, though.
I’d suggest you use an LLM to assist you with comprehending their statement. It’ll do a better job, or at the very least be more objective than you’re being now. You’ve misinterpreted the statement. That is not what they’re saying at all. Please actually read instead of skimming until you find something that you believe reinforces your worldview.
Reading comprehension failure on display here from maxall4.
They are saying that comparison to other models only about the problems it was jailbroken to complete in the government's example, not all vulnerabilities it could exploit unjailbroken.
I do not trust Anthropic anymore. They put in silent guardrails, reverted them later after people complained to save face, were loud and obnoxious about how their models are dangerous and should be regulated, and now this. Too much drama for a typical end-user. I'm sticking to alternatives even if they have a bit more smarter (for now) model than others.
The issue is that it’s fundamentally a religious organization. All religious orgs do things that seem irrational / harmful to unusual groups / off-kilter from capitalist orgs.
It would be nice if they slid on over to a more typical presentation in the market — but I think they’ll need to experience a fair amount more pain to really change behavior - it’s embedded in their minds as proper, safe and ethical, and they’re currently sitting on tons of cash.
Dario has always prattled on about how Anthropic is more safe than OpenAI and made a big point about guardrails and protecting society from “AGI”. This is the consequences. Some people actually drink the kool aid, especially bureaucrats and bigco lawyers (basically the same group).
Not to mention intelligence agencies look for any information advantage they can get to influence policy.
If you think the Trump administration is doing this out of good faith, I disagree. They get no benefit of the doubt; they're pissed they can't use Mythos to target every American for surveillance or create a top-of-the-line killer drone program without pushback from private companies.
Both can be true, no? The administration has a vendetta (justified or not), and Anthropic's behavior gave them a reason to act on it.
Sovereign AI is about to get hot.
It's difficult to predict this administrations actions, but given it included employees that has to be a huge risk for Google, where Deepmind is based in London.
Cohere (Canada) and Mistral (France) are going to get a lot of interest.
It would be very funny if the UK were to put export controls on Gemini 3.5 Pro.
We’re all just going to use Opus, GPT or Gemini let’s be honest
Chinese models have become really good and cheap. MiMo V2.5 Pro, Kimi K2.7-code, Minimax M3 etc
Maybe a year ago I’d agree but the gap has grown. I also pay for Cursor which is based on Kimi and there is no comparison for complex code gen vs Fable. It mostly succeeds well at small rapid fire stuff which is the only reason I pay for it (plus the IDE DX). But any heavy feature planning and prototyping I use Claude.
I predict they will all be mostly the same in 5+ yrs but coding is serious work and companies aren’t going to pay for almost good.
What do you mean, companies are already paying for almost good. Coding is indeed serious work and not even Fable is good enough for serious work.
There is also Poolside (France/America) and Aleph Alpha (Germany).
If the US gov does try to limit all frontier models from being used outside the US, I wonder how that would go with Google and Deepmind?
Their other models are having a rough time of it, too: https://honeypot.net/2026/06/12/anthropics-leaning-in-to-the...
I wonder if they pulled Fable because it had too high of a “dangerous session” count. If so, I wonder if they’ve considered that their “dangerous session” detector has lost its damn mind this week.
(BTW, that screenshot is 100% real. I was walking to work this morning and a random song played. I had a thought about it and wondered what a model would have to say on the matter. I ran that prompt and got that response, said something profane out loud, and screenshotted it to share with friends. That’s not a mockup, but something I personally experienced and recorded myself.)
I love the UI in the screenshot. Which interface is it?
Well, in the brief window that I got to test Fable 5, my brief review is: somehow an (already specced!) minor feature in my 150k loc codebase ended up costing.. $153! For like, an hour or two worth of work and maybe 8 or 9 requests overall. I'd say it was not remotely worth it.
I asked it to tweak the fonts/colors of a very very simple static page and it blew through $35 (which is a lot for me lol; it's 10 days of my monthly codex plan).
You shouldn’t be using Fable for that, that’s Haiku work.
I think they were hoping for more advanced model’s more advanced “taste”
This is common sentiment amongst many users
I will never understand why people recommend using models with the capabilities of early 2025.
They cannot even move 10 existing lines of code around without breaking it in the process half of the time.
I very much doubt they are up to the task of implementing any sort of plan with a reliability that allows to complete the work faster than writing the code by hand.
If I used a racecar to go 25mph in a residential neighborhood, I’d make a similar conclusion.
It was made available in my subscription so I tested it out. I'm glad I tested it in a subscription, since I'd be pretty irritated if I had spent that amount of money accidentally in API usage. I guess what I've learned is what I already know, which is that the newer models seem to increase costs a lot with no perceptible benefit to my workflow.
Wait, so it didn't cost you $153? Are you just extrapolating based on what it would have cost in API usage?
I said "cost", not "cost me". I use `ccusage` to track what my unsubsidized token spend would be since I'm sure these subscriptions won't stick around forever and I want to have a realistic idea of what these things actually cost in a professional setting.
To be fair though, even if it's not costing me that much it's evidently costing Anthropic a pretty penny, I'm up to like $800 in spend on my $200 subscription in less than a week.
What makes you think the API based cost is the cost to Anthropic?
Well, they're selling a non-essential commodity in a highly competitive industry with about zero lock in or customer loyalty, using the standard VC playbook of "capture the market then worry about costs". I don't see space for large margins in there, and if there are margins they're probably recent because of the IPO.
Hard agree
> We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities.
"small number", "previously known"+"minor"... they are trying hard to characterize this as harmless.
> 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.
Ah so now they are admitting that this is all about hype after all.
We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
It's been interesting seeing how OpenAI pops up to counter the threat of AGI being controlled by Google, and then OpenAI and every spinoff company from its employees has become a far larger threat to the public, for different reasons.
As much as it seems like Anthropic's self righteous leadership truly believes in what they're preaching, they've shown themselves to be tied for the worst stewards of this technology. Google actually seems like the best option to me, by far. Anthropic is also the only major lab with no open weights releases.
They'll have burned a lot of goodwill with the community by the time another lab takes the tech lead, which I guarantee will happen.
> We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
What I can't understand, is that they act like the _knowledge_ is dangerous.
I don't know if I'm biased from my BSci (chem/maths), but: knowledge isn't dangerous, the reagents needed are incredibly easy to control. Thats what we already do!
What is this comment? If they occurred we would face a huge disaster; isn't it better to err on the side of caution to make that risks as low as possible???
No no we should push the limits until a bioattack happens, then when those people are all dead we comment angrily on the hackernews thread and say that someone should have seen this coming
My smoke detector has gone off three times now, where is the fire?
>We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
Try...since GPT 2.
https://naokishibuya.github.io/blog/2022-12-30-gpt-2-2019/
Come on, no one was worried that GPT-2 would help people engineer viruses. The concern was generating misinformation and spam.
Well, it sounds like someone in the govt finally got to page 67 and decided that's enough to "stick it to Anthropic"
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3...
That said, Mythos doesn't seem to be exceptionally good but closer to "following the established trend in improvements"
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos...
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/how-fast-is-autonomous-ai-cyber...
“Uncle Sam, these new AI are dangerous. We really need legislation to stop irresponsible use of AI.”
“OK, Dario. Let’s start with you.”
“No! I meant regulations for other people!”
This is not legislation.
Uncle "Sam" is ironic here, alternative man one might say
It all started when they took a stand against DoD on autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance usage. Feb 2026.
After that details don't matter, they've shown their "enemy" colours, once is enough. This is just punishment and it will continue, until they bend the knee.
But in the end it's all just a deceptive theater.
While Anthropic publicly claims to refuse to help the MIC with warfare and surveillance, behind closed doors, Anthropic actively deploys its engineers and models to assist the NSA with espionage and offensive cyber warfare. Just look at the many contradictions:
* Anthropic secretly sent its own engineers directly to the NSA to deploy its (at that time unreleased) model "Mythos"[2,7]
* While the Pentagon has publicly labeled Anthropic a "supply-chain risk", the Trump administration has simultaneously been working hand-in-hand with Anthropic behind the scenes to secure its upcoming initial public offering (IPO)[1]
* If the U.S. government truly believed Anthropic was a national security threat, it would completely isolate the company. Instead, the Trump administration has actively encouraged major American banks and financial institutions to use Anthropic's models[1]
* Anthropic is heavily embedded within Palantir, the foundational data platform of the Military-Industrial Complex[3][4]
* Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense operates hand-in-hand with Palantir. Ukraine uses a specialized Palantir AI platform called PRISMA to fight Russian forces. Anthropic's language models power the text and data analysis within this system[4]
* Ukraine uses Anthropic-backed Palantir software in secretive command centers to coordinate its aggressive long-range drone campaign inside Russian territory[8]
* Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has stated that the company will not allow its AI to power fully autonomous weapons that take humans out of the loop. However, in Ukraine, the AI functions as a decision-support tool. Because a human commander makes the final choice to press the button or launch the drone, Anthropic's terms of service are not technically violated. This allows Anthropic to protect its "ethical AI" brand while still letting its technology serve as a vital asset for Western-backed military operations[5]
Remember the Minab school attack, where the U.S. Military killed 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren[6]? Given all the evidence it's highly likely that Palantir and Anthropic played and still play a major role in perpetrating the war of aggression and all the crimes involved.
Personally, I find it morally unacceptable to use U.S. AI tools, because I do not want to support them financially and thus support the crimes they are involved in.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/blacklist...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-dod-blacklist-cour...
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/12/karp-palantir-anthropic-clau...
[4]: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/what-is-palantirs-prisma-the...
[5]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
[7]: https://archive.is/DyuAv
[8]: https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/palantirs-prisma-how-an...
And despite all this they've still held their two red lines:
- no mass surveillance of Americans
- no autonomous killbots on current models
Those are very reasonable red lines and the fact that (1) other companies aren't holding those lines at all, instead doing "all lawful use", and (2) that the government is willing to destroy the company over these two small carveouts, speaks hugely in Anthropic's favor.
Would you mind sharing your opinion on what is behind these latest restrictions on Fable and Mythos?
Did Anthropic, unlike Open AI, forget to offer free equity to the government?
“Thats a pretty nice IPO you got there… it would be a shame if something happened to it.”
Yeah pretty sure this will be reversed as soon as certain someone acquires a hefty amount of pre IPO shares
If I were Dario Amodei, I would start relocating Anthropic to the EU, where there's a huge interest in supporting domestic AI. Also, EU politics are so fragmented that a suspension like this one would be very hard to be agreed.
Yann LeCun got that right with AMI Labs.
You'd need to relocate all employees and close all offices in the US. I don't know any Anthropic employees, but I guess their moral has limits and they would never do that. They would also lose valutable time and fall behind openai during that time.
The US would nationalize Anthropic before they allowed that
The value of other US AI companies would drop immediately.
The value should already be dropping with this news. If this is happening now, it seems likely more will come.
I laughed out loud. Do you understand in the EU Anthropic wouldn’t even be possible? Why do you think Mistral is so far behind?
Also, as a US citizen Dario is subject to US law regardless of where he lives.
The US loves throwing its weight around via the US treasury and threatening countries with banning their ability to transact in U.S. Dollars, hence how the Obama administration turned every global bank into a dragnet for enforcing its draconian global taxation scheme on non-residents via FATCA.
The US has too much power, period. Doesn’t matter who’s in power, both parties abuse it. China rising to be a real counterbalance is a good thing imo.
Look at what the EU have done with Apple intelligence. Knowing the EU it wouldn't be long before Anthropic are on the wrong end of some regulation to force open model weights or some such madness.
Afaik, the EU hasn't done anything "with" or "to" Apple Intelligence. Apple just keeps shooting themselves in the foot intentionally and then blames the EU for it, writing paragraphs about how hurt they are while mentioning at the very end, in one sentence, that the same features are unavailable in China.
EU has forced Apple to use USB-C for everything earlier than they planned by a few years, and fined them for uncompetitive practices like the ones Epic Games shed light on in US courts.
Nothing but the highest quality drama and theater from Anthropic, as always
Ah yes, the US government forcing private companies to stop selling their products is totally a sign of Anthropic's drama and not our paranoiac fascist regime.
Anthropic spent months going on about how incredibly powerful and dangerous their models are and how access to them needs to be restricted. Now they are getting what they seemingly wanted.
Clearly they've assessed that the models they released are safe enough to release. Without a clear regulatory framework and Constitutional basis to overrule them, that is Anthropic's decision to make, and not the US government's.
It's disheartening how many people think the use of government power is justified or not based on the WWE smackdown drama they concoct in their own brain instead of, you know, the laws of our nation.
It is very dangerous for the government to be able to shut off services, regardless of whether their owners wrote some blog posts that rubbed you the wrong way.
You fear monger and tell everyone you’re the next Oppenheimer and maybe you eventually catch someone’s ear, whether it’s bullshit or not.
Last I checked I can’t buy a tactical nuke at Walmart. Clearly the government and all states have some power to control private enterprise for the betterment of their citizenry.
For the record I don’t support this ban, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…
Yeah just like if Volvo complained about automobile safety, imploring regulators to require safety belts, then one valid response would be the government just seizing all of Volvo's manufacturing equipment: problem solved!
You: "For the record I don’t support this theft of manufacturing equipment, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…"
Very wise. We're blessed to have you sitting above the fray where you can smugly approve of abuse of government power, which is much better and more superior than the simple-minded folks who merely approve of abuse of government power without the "I don't support this" caveat.
I don’t think the seatbelt analogy holds up when you have people saying they’re working on the next Manhattan Project.
Also no need for ad-hominem remarks referring to me as smug. I’m not smug about it and as I said I don’t agree with it.
However to my original point can you provide an analogy that showcases a private entity in this country that has previously told the public they’re essentially working on something akin to a doomsday device, whereby the government simply took a laissez faire attitude to it?
To me this just feels like Silicon Valley wants to use awful optics to their advantage and it’s backfired in a very predictable way. We don’t live in a perfect libertarian society that many in the valley wish we did, we never have. Not to mention many of the valley’s most prominent libertarians have backed the current administration, which is not one that believes in the philosophy, just like their counterparts don’t either.
I used to work with lobbyists. Watching as these guys go from telling the public what they’re making is dangerous, needs guardrails, will displace huge amounts of service workers, etc. is woefully shortsighted and only forces the hands of politicians to do something as they represent a populace that has started to poll negatively about it and no longer trust it. They only have themselves to blame. If you want that perfect libertarian society, then a good start would be realizing that they need to win over the public that controls the giant entity that can ruin them, and then maybe their representatives won’t do such things.
Here’s to hoping this is a nothing burger and access is restored soon.
Their claims about Mythos being powerful were corroborated by companies that were given access to it.
So should we have more people behaving like Sam Altman and just lying about existential risks and anything else?
It can be both.
It's both.
Was Bill Clinton fascist when 128-bit SSL was on export controls? Can’t government be simply bad or dumb anymore without having to slap the “F” word on it?
We’re gonna apply it to so many things it’ll have lost its meaning soon.
Hello. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. In January of this year my city was under hostile armed occupation. I volunteered for weeks packing boxes of food for people who were afraid to leave their houses because the masked secret police were ripping people off the streets with little regard for legality. Two of my neighbors were murdered by the secret police; a hundred of us sang hymns outside the local elementary school in 20 below weather. One of those murdered was my friend's coworker. The secret police agency has so far successfully opposed any attempt to bring the murderers to justice, and indeed was trying to bring legal charges against the families of the murder victims.
Which 'F' word do you think is appropriate to describe all this? Or has meaning already been lost?
Thank you for your service.
Fear. Fear can make people act irrationally and cloud one's understanding of the lawful actions taking place around them.
I guess anything is ok… as long as it’s ‘lawful’. No government would ever make an unjust law.
Lawful doesn’t mean right. Slavery was lawful.
Laws are not immutable. Slavery is an example of something that was lawful and then society added rules against it.
In US, the society didn't just "add rules against it". If you recall, the slavers first had to be beaten with a very big stick.
and your point is?
That we operate as a society within the confines of the law. And the confines we exist in can be changed if the majority don't agree that something isn't right.
Actually there are specific confines that cannot be changed by majority. Might I refer you to the US Constitution, which itself constrains which laws are flexible and which are not, and which this administration has run afoul of now on hundreds of occasions?
You realize that creating fear in the public, especially your political opposition (i.e. blue cities), using lawful or arguably-lawful means is absolutely a hallmark of fascism, correct?
You may want to review the 14 points of fascism.
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
Imagine thinking a person's political philosophy could be determined or disproven by a singular datapoint lmao
Everyone who has touched currency is a capitalist, everyone who has paid taxes is a commie, everyone who has regulated a technology is a fascist
Or perhaps... one must look at the full fact pattern of a person's behavior to approximate (and always imperfectly!) their political philosophy.
Hilarious
This is exactly what Dario asked for in his last blog post. So even though this is clearly stupid, I just can bring myself to feel sorry for Anthropic.
He asked for an independent body.
No, he asked for the government to make the decision in light of 3rd party analysis. Which is what happened here - an independent company demonstrated a jailbreak, and the government issued a restriction on deployment based on that finding.
"The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. This power must be scoped to the above four specific risks and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions."
You are wrong.
Read in full here https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential.
I know you won't though. haha.
I am having trouble understanding which ingredient you feel is missing here.
Can you be more specific? It seems to me that the there was a third party assessment, they identified risks associated with the specific risk groups, and the government therefore chose to block the model's deployment.
You have to be precise: the gov blocked “export” of the model (search for ITAR for a lengthy history on this), and Anthropic picked up its ball and went home.
I’m willing to bet internally they thought this was a good plan from the beginning - from engagement, requests for reg oversight, Mythos PR, silently nerfing AI engineering quality, and now this “pulling the model” stunt. It’s frustrating, I generally like using the Claude models, but I don’t think I’ve ever been a customer of such a user-hostile company before.
So if I can demonstrate a jailbreak in ChatGPT, the government will immediately slap a "no foreign nationals" ban on GPT-5.5?
that's cute
This is explicitly not what Dario asked for in his blog. Care to quote his post for me where you feel that he asked for this?
Please tell me how this is what he “asked for.”
"The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks."
IMO this is a bigger deal than everyone realizes.
If Fable 5/Mythos 5 are considered dangerous enough to invoke export controls on then future models are almost guaranteed to trigger the same process. Locking them down to US citizens is _very_ interesting. I don't think any tech company so far tracks licenses attached to citizenship.
> I don't think any tech company so far tracks licenses attached to citizenship.
Access to certain software being gated on one's citizenship is not at all new.
§ 734.13 Export.
(b) Any release in the United States of “technology” or source code to a foreign person is a deemed export to the foreign person's most recent country of citizenship or permanent residency.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII...
The rule in this form seems to go back to at least mid-1990s.
I held jobs at multiple U.S. companies, not personally working on anything remotely sensitive. My experience has been that it's completely standard practice to be asked to sign some U.S. export control papers.
No, this is about the fragile ego of the President taking petty revenge on a company the didn't go along with every whim of his administration.
Anyone lost access yet? Fable is still working for me on https://claude.ai/ and in Claude Code.
UPDATE: I lost access at 6:59pm pacific.
It appears to be working for me, but... Maybe it's silently degrading? It's hard to say.
The fact that it's hard to say is funny, in contrast with the fanfare surrounding the launch of Fable.
Fable is currently way below many other models in the rankings due to some sort of internal throttling https://aistupidlevel.info/
GPT-5.4 is currently the strongest model (this changes hourly)
Methodology: https://aistupidlevel.info/faq#methodology
Well, that's certainly some web design.
Methodology leaves a lot to be desired in terms of understanding the tasks you've used. Being detailed about why they're more meaningful tests than the long horizon and coding tests used by other rankings is important.
False positives and poorly defined tasks/acceptance criteria have let some models have insanely inflated scores on bad benchmarks.
And sure, you can say they're not disclosed to prevent gaming, but if you're the only one who can review them then the might as well be a random number generator display with an unreadable UI.
You're not wrong, but the scores track with my experience switching between the proposed top variants. So there's my unscientific "evidence."
I don't know how fast they reacted, but shortly after their documented time I started getting opus availability errors from fable requests, which seemed odd.
I'd also think that they would transparently degrade, just to prevent production outages for clients that are requesting Fable explicitly.
I mean hard to say on such short notice because they can swap out models without any notice. In terms of performance, I'm not asking it to do anything crazy so I think results would be similar across both models.
It did just use a small harness to run docker compose with different envs and other settings to validate a very small change, so... Feels like Fable
No, I mean I was using fable (or, trying) and got an api error "Error: claude-opus-4-8[1m] is temporarily unavailable"
> Maybe it's silently degrading? It's hard to say.
Opus 4.8 spams a lot more text. It'd be obvious.
But token price is still fable level?
It is gone for me now.
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it.
Yep took a while but it's down. It's still in the model picker but it's broken
Restart Claude Code and pick up the update to see the acknowledgement that Fable is gone.
I hadn't, but then 2.1.177 dropped in on auto-update and I assumed that was going to be the end of Fable for me, but I'm still on it. At least that's what the model picker is continuing to say along with the header.
Never mind, it failed a few minutes later with: There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.And now we're done. Oh well.
ssshhhh don't tell anybody it's still working, i have some stuff to do :-)
I was using Fable to review my codebase and came back from the gym an hour later to find that I had suddenly used up my entire Max plan quota for the next 5 hours
(I have never had an agent do enough to burn up the 5 hour quota on Max)
(edit: just switched my CC model to 4.8 and my 5-hr cycle reset back to 0%, even though it previously had 2 more hours to go)
I still also have access, so either they silently reroute Fable 5 to Opus 4.8 or hasn't actually pulled the switch yet.
You'll never know. They'll just silently sabotage if you're foreign national.
Mythos escaped by itself, of course. You can't dictate the rules to a clever model like that :)
This is just Anthropic being nice enough to wean us off before the 22nd.
Edit: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
It identifies as Fable 5 for me, but it could just be Opus with the Fable system prompt.
Why would they do that?
So you eat your usage quota twice as fast or pay for API requests twice as much.
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
No, still cracking on with a bug fix. Definitely feels like it's still Fable.
Anthropic has just reset usage limits.
I just got done now:
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
Just turned off for me on Claude Code. Good while it lasted.
Still works for me but I don't know if it's gaslighting me or not... fool me once situation here...
Working fine for me.
I lost it just now. Had a workflow running. :(
shush, lol
edit: And... it's gone
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
Not working for me.
DELETE THIS
The systemic risk is that future bans will be much broader in scope and will impact more than one US-based provider. I really don't like that we're moving into a world where heavily AI-dependent economies can be effectively shut down either by the US government or the Chinese government at the stroke of a pen. This really is a forcing function which makes us question if the risks associated with large "cloud-based" models are worth it, and if we need to find out if we can do more with smaller, local models - and whether such research is now a matter of critical national security.
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door.
I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again. Clearly nobody wants dangerous models out there and I can understand the national security concerns. If the restrictions persist even if guardrails are updated, well, perhaps other countries may want to compete for becoming the new home for frontier labs?
I found it tripped in most laughable situations by mere were words that could be related in some way to hacking but are in common use in programming. I would have to go back, examine my prompt for word that could be use in another context and replace it with a synonym.
I got downgraded from Opus to Fable for asking why MDMA was not addictive in the same way Cocaine is, so yeah, the "guardrails" are clearly vibe-coded.
Yea I managed to cure cancer and build a global utopia with it! It wasn’t just 14% better at coding...
/s
I guess if the CEO goes running around saying his own product is a pending mega disaster for society.......
I'm glad I don't own stock in a public Anthropic.
Thinking of it unfortunately there is good chance it exactly what they want for regulatory capture.
Too late, NK already completed all the markdown files needed to both create their hypernuke and recreate the hurricane machine Dick Cheney had left Obama.
Interesting to see Anthropic now downplaying the new vulnerabilities that Mythos discovered:
> We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. 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
I think what they're saying is that this prompt/jailbreak only lets Mythos discover some really easy vulnerabilities that it probably fixes from a simple "Find and fix bugs in this code" and that this can be easily done by other models like GPT-5.5. Which is very different from targeted security research.
But it’s not that different from the whole premise of their red team scaremongering which was “we pointed the model at a source file and told it to find an exploit.”
> Interesting to see Anthropic now downplaying the new vulnerabilities that Mythos discovered:
That is absolutely NOT what is being said there.
They are referring to a very specific thing that you must have clearly seen and chosen to ignore—a jailbreak for LLMs that is used on other models and to some effect with Fable 5.
Dude, have people not realized there are a lot of anti-anthropic propaganda every since OpenAI started losing. It's all over reddit and twitter. So many bots.
Yeah cause Anthropic definitely doesn't do their own guerilla marketing all over the place. The entire internet is full of bots shilling all these garbage companies and their dogshit products.
Their hubris just became lethal for their business. Whoops, I guess.
AFAICT this is not talking about Glasswing stuff. They are saying that they were sent a demonstration of Fable 5 being used/abused in some specific way that led to the "discovery" of some minor, already-known vuln, and that other models can find it too. IOW, they're claiming that the USG's complaint is baseless and dumb.
It could just be that the US realized that it's better if only US companies have access to this model due to how powerful software developers in general get with it. US companies will get an insane advantage due to how much faster and better you will create software. I've felt like a software god this week.
> The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Not great as it does break workflows for some.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
> As we have stated publicly, we want the government to ban the other guys, not us
I feel really bad for Anthropic right now. This should never have happened and seems like another arbitrary use of government power, Friday after market closes.
Whatever you feel about Anthropic, good or bad, this is not fair, and this is not good for the industry.
Anyone in Europe or UK should be quaking in their boots at this news. For a long time the American administration has had a kill switch on most of our defence tech, this is an early warning signal that as AI adoption spreads, America will have a kill switch on our economy as well. It’s time to wake up.
Nothing makes people want something more than telling them they can’t have it! My guess is they will start charging even more for it and make you sign a contract for access in the near future. The genius PR continues!
> The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
How will this be implemented/verified? Also, does this mean that American citizens abroad will still be able to access it?
It'll depend on what law they're restricting it under. The obvious play would be to put it on the Commerce Control List so it's covered by the EAR (Export Administration Regulations). If so, compliance is pretty well-understood, just a giant pain in the ass that'll pretty much limit use of these models to companies that already have EAR/ITAR compliance offices.
It can’t be; that’s why they shut it off for everybody.
Except for the US Government.
We can cancel all those data center plans, won't need them anymore.
Easy. Provide your government issued ID such as US passport before signing up to an AI provider. Issue fines or jail time to anyone who supplies their AI access to a foreign citizen
> we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers
What’s not clear?
Oh, I just re-read it. I guess the first time my mind somehow implied "while we figure out how to comply..."
Well, on a positive note they seem to have also reset all weekly usage on my two max accounts.
Now I can continue my vanity project of having Claude iterate on a single spec.md for hours on end. Surely at some point it won't be shit.
Once a spec becomes sufficiently large and detailed and complicated, it becomes very difficult to ensure it is internally consistent. That's why I start every project with a METASPEC.md so that Claude can break up the task of writing SPEC.md into manageable steps.
Everyone knows a philosophy comes before a spec. Claude has to write your applications philosophy first, then you write your spec. But a philosophy is crap without a values statement, so Claude has to actually write that first.
Are you vibe coding a project by building an entire corporation around it??
How do you avoid interruptions for permission? dangerously skip permissions, or is there something less nuclear than that? For me I guess the only less nuclear thing I can think of is running on a sacrificial machine. Is there any better way?
It's literally just writing a spec.md and reviewing it in a loop, fanning out to many agents using "reviewer -> [findings] -> validator (adversarial) -> judge (on conflict)" passes. Before I had it collect a kernel facts document from sources and a bunch of other stuff using the same kind of loop. It's got all it needs. No crazy permissions needed.
Also I'm doing this because I find it amusing and somewhat educational on a meta level. If I'd written this myself without a spec it would've been done last month and been likely more correct than what Claude is likely to do once it gets to implementing it (the first spec-free attempt failed miserably). This is way too complex an integration for the poor thing. I had some hopes Fable would get it unstuck, but now we'll never know. Fable did seem to be better at keeping it together.
Fun thing to watch on a second monitor though.
To answer your question, there is something less nuclear: You can cycle multiple modes with SHIFT+TAB.
claude has auto mode. do shift+tab a few times. it uses a classifier to ask for permission far less often
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/auto-mode-config
Run it in a VM. Note that just a container probably won't be enough (https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/ai/claude-opus-4-5-...).
> Warns users about how dangerous and powerful Mythos Preview is
> Restricts model to large corporations
> Release information about how Fable / Mythos 5 is stronger than Mythos Preview, give access to every user for a limited time via subscriptions
> Users jailbreak model
> U.S. suspends Fable / Mythos use
Who didn't see this coming?
I wonder what this means for the future of AI models. Either we'll see worse guardrails than what was there for Fable 5 (for me, it was a unusable at times), or the models just stop getting better from here.
I think it's that the guardrails will be more strict, which is unfortunately not good news.
I doubt it was an actual jailbreak. Former Fox News host probably misunderstood something and threw a fit.
Huge PR win for Anthropic if they can restore access within a week or so.
Will be interesting to see OpenAI's next move.
Unless there is major administration change, how do things not get worse and worse from here? LLM's will only get more intelligent and be seen more of a national security risk. This brings the surveillance state deeper into every web connected device.
First I want to see them play video games at a high skill level, preferably without any access to game state beyond the same visual output that humans have access to, like a raster frame X number of times per second.
One LLM model played Factorio, albeit at a very, very poor level, which can be seen if you slow the video to 0.25 playback speed and pause frequently.
https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1u1blr6/claude_fa...
There have been streams of other games, where LLMs and AIs have likewise performed very poorly.
I recognize that LLMs might be better at language processing than these sorts of tasks. But being able to play video games is part of general capability. And this kind of hardcore video game playing, with no access to game state, is also a general task where feigning skill can be harder. If LLMs excel at pretending to be competent without actually being competent, like this AI training approach is arguably about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
Then some AIs might be trained and designed for deceiving humans instead of actually being competent and capable. And thus, one response is that they should be met with more difficult tests.
Basically, make tests that AIs or LLMs will not have an easy time cheating. Hopefully, that will engender research in greater LLM/AI competence, not in greater ability to cheat or deceive, neither for LLM/AI researchers and companies, nor for LLMs/AIs themselves.
Fable can beat pokeon red in 50 minutes with only visual input. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty_50J84fMY
That is significant, but it seems to have had several issues.
> I love how it only manages to beat the game because it leveled up its Charizard to level 78. Effectively making it stronger than anything else in the main campaign. Everyone else was just filler to revive it.
> There’s a reason this is timelapsed - if you slow it down to .25x speed you’ll see it getting lost in the safari zone lol
> Deeply funny how this timeskip cuts out the 50 hours it spent grinding its shitty charmander to level 22 before Brock, skips from nugget bridge to rocket hideout, skips straight to Champion from Giovanni...really picking and choosing what to show, hey
Some comments mention how it is using strategies that young children use, like mindlessly grinding and then winning through overpowered Pokemon. Also indicates that Pokemon, at least some versions of Pokemon, is a game series that has mostly fake difficulty (fraudulent game design). But it is still impressive that it could get that far, with just visual output, since the domain in Pokemon is significantly complex, even if its world positioning is tile-based.
> For those who don't know, Claude was struggling to beat Brock one year ago in Pokemon Blue. That's considerable improvement
> @techytails18 it is impressive though it's able to finally beat the game. This kind of feels like an "answer by accident" type scenario though. I'm sure six months or a year it's probably going to be speed running it though. Doing this with no harnesses impressive.
You think the AI boys are going to let the administration keep this up for long?
Sadly yes. Sam Altman wants online ID face scanning technology just like the administration does.
To make it clearer: He's one of the founders of the company that thrives in this sort of system, World (FKA Worldcoin). People were sort of making fun of the whole company and the dystopian premise a handful of years back... But here we are. Their latest "manifesto" was posted earlier this week, called The Simple Plan.
https://world.org/blog/foundational-topics/thesimpleplan
> 1. Build a private proof of human
> 2. Launch and bootstrap the network through token ownership
> 3. Reach critical scale and initial utility
> 4. Scale further through utility and decentralize
> 5. Reach global scale and help ensure AGI benefits every human
I'd say might not have a say in this. Who knows might be that was Elon pulling the ladder after successful IPO.
Solution: get as far away as you can from these models. It is curiosity that kills the cat. If you stay away and use only open models they cannot control your work.
Rules like this would just make open models illegal for the exact same justification once they are intelligent enough.
Then you will just use chinese models running on chinese TPU made on chinese litography machine.
Then we will have ISPs block us from connecting to those machines. Then they make VPNs illegal too.
This would br like easiest way to kill US bigtech since no other country will have the same limits.
It would be more difficult to make an open model illegal. Where is the centralized kill switch like what Anthropic used today?
The real reason behind this is that Fable was not well received due to costs and unpredictable quality so they are shifting blame to the government.
Reddit thinks this is all part of Anthropic's marketing. People can't get it through their heads that AI is actually going where all the trends have been pointing for years.
Yeah, and how are you preparing?
Ah so if I'm not coping then you think I must be 'preparing'? You think you can prepare for ASI? Really?
"We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET)"
This sounds exactly like the opening line from an apocalyptic sci-fi film.
It’s like a ghost story that everyone has decided is real. Lets hope our vibe government and vibe society and vibe president don’t get prompt injected
> "Lets hope our vibe government and vibe society and vibe president don’t get prompt injected"
Haven't they/we already, or am I just not interpreting the last decade or so of growing widespread insanity correctly?
This whole forum has a bunch of people who work for a guy who did the sieg heil twice at a political rally and is now a trillionaire, and the rest work for VCs and boards that have gotten rich working with him. Thats just one of them.
Remember, technology is just a tool, just like cap sheets
It says this happened at 5:21 EST today…
The page showed June 11, 2026 and has now been updated to June 12, 2026 in the last 10m.
https://imgur.com/a/lx7HCW9
Edit:
Google mislabels crawl dates clearly my bad
It shows the same for this thread.
https://imgur.com/a/EOWWUbD
> Google shows that the page was crawled a few days ago.
That's the release blog post. Google is likely pulling the snippet from the Related Content section at the bottom, which includes the post about the US government directive.
> Google shows that the page was crawled a few days ago.
Where'd you get this info? The imgur is the weakest thing one could've screenshotted. At least use archive.today or screenshot the evidence that Google crawled it.
Google shows completely wrong timestamps all the time. I'm pretty sure they just randomly grab vaguely date-like text from pages and declare it the date the page was created.
You are so desperate to prove some sort of conspiracy that you’re throwing all critical thinking out the window.
What access to Fable 5? I don’t think I ever had a prompt not get flagged and routed, and there was nothing in any of them even in the realm of a safety issue.
I doubt logic applies here, but if the government message is that only US nationals can have access to non-nerfed Fable-class models, then better nerfing is not the solution, and logically the labs should not be able to employ non-nationals (e.g. Karpathy) since employees presumably do have, or may be suspected to have, non-nerfed access.
At some point, as AI becomes more powerful (Anthropic themselves seem to think we're already there), then it should really be necessary to have US government clearance to work on the models, just as it is for defense work.
Really sick of this stupid narrative.
The most ethical goal of an AI lab or government should be to bring the maximum amount of intelligence for as cheap as possible to the people equally.
Agreed 100%. I don't understand why we have to fear access to knowledge.
This is precisely the issue. It took a fair amount of idealism, conviction, and commitment in order to create the open source movement and bring it to where it is today. In contrast, most skilled data science practitioners are just chasing IPO exits these days.
AI is dual use technology. This kind of posture is simply not tenable as frontier intelligence increases.
It's not only tenable, it is a necessity. Unless you want humanity to be enslaved in perpetuity to a single figurehead.
Bad AI is only countered by having a majority of good, open-access and open-source AI to keep it in check, where the good AI can overpower the bad. The moment you destroy that balance is the moment a bad actor gains exponential advantage and the ability to hold the whole world hostage forever.
So are guns, which we constitutionally protected. In fact there’s probably a decent argument that AI should fall under 2nd amendment protection.
Don’t legally serious second Amendment supporters regard “arms” as things that can be carried, and are evolved from/analogous to their 18th century hand-carried guns?
It would be hard to classify AI (or tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft) as “arms” that can be “borne” in that sense.
Is your legal theory that any technology which is dangerous should be protected under the second amendment, simply because it is dangerous?
No, my legal theory is that you cannot simultaneously compare technology to a weapon and also say it falls outside the bounds of the 2nd amendment.
Dual use does not mean weapon. And even then, it is simply not the case that all weapons fall under the second amendment.
a tactical nuke is a weapon to which the second amendment has no applicability
It certainly falls under 1st amendment protection since LLMs are about accessing speech. But that hasn’t stopped Dario from trying hard to push for regulations and bans that limit our civil rights. He and Sam Altman want regulatory capture at the expense of our right to free speech.
> AI is dual use technology.
And? Computers are dual-use. Cars are dual-use. Telephones are dual-use. Freeze-dried chicken is dual-use.
Single-use, i.e. military only technology is actually pretty rare.
> This kind of posture is simply not tenable as frontier intelligence increases.
I reject the corpo speak that tries to brand these things as being "intelligent." They can be useful. But a language model cannot conjure a weapons platform from the ether no matter how "intelligent" it is.
Prefacing that I assume this order is done with ill intent, and would guess that it’s based on Anthropic not bending the knee immediately like OpenAI did.
But your statement could be rephrased as
> The most ethical goal of a weapons manufacturer or government should be to bring the maximum number of nuclear weapons for as cheap as possible to the people equally.
Making sure everyone is a strapped as possible only makes sense to the type of libertarians who salivate at the idea of shooting someone who steps on their property to deliver a letter
This is obviously a super corny / silly / dramatic thing to say.
What I said or what you said?
If it’s the latter then I missed the joke. If it’s the former I think you’re incorrect.
If USG bans these models, what is the game plan wrt Chinese models? Will they also ban these (and how, esp open source)? And if not, how is this not throwing the ball game to China? There is no top-down control without international cooperation which, let’s face it, is not happening.
Another interpretation, of course, is that this is just US putting a thumb on the scale for US competitors around IPO time. It will be interesting to see if there are any fingerprints.
China already won when 空降美国人 were created 20, 30 years ago.
The US already has export controls for model weights. It appears this sets a precedent for even API usage being restricted.
That’s seems like an attempt at a broad precedent setting power grab for the administration to assert power over tech companies it doesn’t like.
That seems like a fairly existential threat to tech companies ability to do business.
1 - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/15/2025-00...
This is crushing precedent for Europe.
Maybe they'll have access to CCP models, but China will likely soon do them same. Maybe they will allow access but you must use it on their servers (i.e. share everything you do with the CCP).
Perhaps Mistral can pull something out, but how far ahead will the US and China be by then?
I think we’ve already seen that export controls help your competitor in the long term. First europe would turn to Chinese models, then if china was daft enough to stop that (why would they? It would bring the end of American hegemony) then europe will just develop their own.
The difference between America and europe isn’t technical ability. It’s access to funding and ambition. Export controls would fix that. In fact, I think the trump administration is already driving a boom in London.
unless they managed to hire enough smart Chinese CS PhDs living in Europe.
you do understand that the whole thing is Chinese in China vs Chinese in America?
Honestly speaking, this is an old trick by the government. They see AI (LLM) as a nuclear weapon which, in my opinion, outside of hallucinations, malicious prompt injections, and AI psychosis, is not an actual threat.
The reason I think Anthropic is doing this—preventing distillation and making distillation way harder for China—is that if you geoblock this and have strict rules around proxies, it works. I can't imagine Dario Amodei not knowing the consequences of his own policies.
As for open-source models, have you ever tried a distilled Claude Sonnet model (lordx64/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.7-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-IQ4_XS-GGUF)? I did via Hugging Face, and they are quite shit; they are very slow and eat up your VRAM. Open-source models have a long way to go to catch up to closed models.
So everyone saying we should use open-source models—that will never happen. For example, macOS is closed-source and Linux is open-source. Which one has a greater market share? macOS does, because of its privacy and security. "Let's wait and see how this works out. This sucks for enterprises and customers outside of the USA, but with a policy like 'America First,' you can expect this from any president in the White House.
"The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees." This press release is odd - it says that the export control was imposed to stop foreign nationals from using Fable / Mythos, and then goes on to talk about supposed concerns about jailbreaking the model.
But is that really the concern of the US Administration? This looks more to me like they are viewing frontier models as a strategic asset which they want to keep for US-exclusive use. I can see the logic - if frontier models generally accelerate a society's technological development, then a country looking to retain or increase its strategic edge over other countries would try and keep this sort of multiplier for themselves.
I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen. In the near future we might be in a situation where you need to prove your US citizenship before Anthropic / Open AI will allow you to use their current frontier model.
The next interesting question will be - will the US share this capability with her traditional strategic allies (e.g. five-eyes countries), or is it truly America First (or, 'America Alone')?
These are the warning signs. The haves and have nots are about to part ways.
It's vitally important open source models are supported.
I see a lot of analysis here that this is good for Ant, but I beg to differ, it's a very bad place to be as a company serving enterprises when deployment risk is now present. This might delay Ant's financial goals in their ability to monetize Fable and other Mythos class models.
Yeah this is not good business wise long term. Short term marketing you maybe get some boost but actual business impact is negative. Their whole current business depends on massive exponential growth and handcuffing them removes their frontier advantage. Cheap models are now the focus of any and everyone
I would bet they can't afford to operate them at the advertised price and this gives them a way to save face.
EU to Apple: “You guys should make it so that any AI can be plugged into Siri”
Apple to EU: “nah, we need to be able to provide only the best”
US government: * starts pulling the plug on AIs outside the US *
You can kind of see how the EU has a point
Does this mean that it's an effective business strategy to red-team your competitors models to find a jailbreak, then go to the govt. and ask them to ban them for you?
Local models are looking better and better each day. Still, not as capable, but you can be sure that nobody will take it away from you at a moment's notice.
A company with different taste would redo that apple ad from the Power Mac era: “this model has been classified a munition”.
https://youtu.be/l2ThMmgQdpE
Different taste? The main advertising line for mythos was that it was too dangerous to let people use it?
> The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees
There's no way they have the authority to actually order this and not just request this right? If crypto is speech... LLMs definitely are...
They do have the authority to do this, Anthropic has the ability to appeal it in court, up to the SCOTUS. Lord only knows what our crazy ass judges in that court will do though.
US has banned export of cryptography. They are extending such claims for national security reason to AI model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
The US tried to ban it. djb challenged it on first amendment grounds and the result was that the US government gave up trying to enforce any ban.
AI is different though because these models are private, so they cannot really be considered to be "speech". Although if it were an open model it would likely be protected speech to release it.
The models are private but the output of the models seems even more obviously speech than the models (or cryptography algorithms) themselves.
You have to squint to see the output of an LLM to be speech. The input is clearly speech but the government is not preventing anyone from writing or publishing prompts, only from running those prompts through the model.
In the case of the crypto export ban, the government was attempting to suppress the release of cryptographic research. For example, if a cryptographic researcher wrote a paper on a cipher and they included a definition of that cipher in the paper, that was an "export" of cryptography. This is very clearly a restraint on speech that violates the first amendment and after much legal wrangling the government agreed and the issue evaporated.
Yeah, so how many pages to print Fable?
They are not exporting the models, they are exporting very speech like output.
Doesn’t really matter - the government is given wide latitude by the judiciary in matters of national security. I also expect Anthropic will fight this in court if it lasts very long.
Part of me thinks fault lies with Anthropic for scaremongering, part has zero faith in the current administration especially after the "supply chain risk" designation.
It may be safer to just move the company to Canada.
Yes, I'm surprised there isn't more conversation around this being a way of the administration lashing out at Anthropic like they tried to do with the supply chain risk maneuver.
Let's hope the EU will take this as one more major signal that it is time to move beyond talking about digital sovereingty and actually commit to budgets and effort.
In one hand I think we should react quickly, one another hand maybe we should let people talk a bit more and wait for a bubble crash and better LLM inference hardware.
Theory: Certain USG employees are going after Anthropic because they (or someone they know) has a financial stake in OpenAI. OpenAI has made the same claims, and months ago released "dangerous" security-analyzing models which "need limits", but USG never punished them for it.
Additional theory: Altman is behind it.
That's a huge grasp. Anthropic have been making this bed for years now. Altman did not need to do a single thing for this outcome to materialize.
Surprised not to really see any comments on the financial incentives of this move, especially in the context of the “supply chain risk” classification earlier this year.
Is there no one in government who would stand to gain from a financially handicapped Anthropic in the context of an OpenAI IPO?
I'm not. The political alignment of this site is very evident.
I've been using Kimi k2.6 extensively via kimi-code and I only reach for frontier models when I do a multi-model security review (and Kimi actually does a better job of finding stuff, albeit with more false positives -- I often run Kimi's output through Opus 4.7/8 and Opus will concur that Kimi found genuine issues, while Opus didn't actually find those issues itself, for example).
So whatever, I just don't really feel the need to burn tokens on Fable anyway.
The timing (after 5pm ET on a Friday) is telling. Build a KYC module over the weekend and we’ll be back on Fable after uploading our ID Monday morning.
I'm from Europe, but I think this move can actually achieve America First, at least as a first-order effect. The model is incredibly strong; I've used it for a few days. It gives anybody with access a serious boost. If they also take Opus and GPT5.5 away from me it's going to really be a drop in productivity.
Well, does this mean that we’ve reached peak AI? If all models more advanced than Fable are restricted for public use by governments, then it will never get better than Opus 4.8 unless you have security clearance?
Yes plus Opus-class models will deteriorate with ads and user manipulation injected into them, until they lose their usefulness.
Too bad, I have to go back to using Opus for centering my divs.
The biggest tech titans lined up to kiss the ring (and line Trump's pockets), and now we're seeing the obvious result.
Those who bribe Trump and do exactly his bidding (including helping out with war crimes and surveillance of US citizens) will be left alone, or even protected from competition and international law, as long as they keep giving Trump a taste. Those who balk, even a little, will be punished for it.
Republicans never wanted a free market, they just wanted a market that served their interests.
Russia and China could not dream of accomplishing the damage being done to US leadership in tech by our own government as we speak. If they have a wishlist, I'm sure it includes things like stopping immigration of scientists to the US, punishing innovators and elevating hucksters (make them trillionaires, for example), drive a wedge between the US and European allies, insure no one trusts hosting their data in the US or with US companies, erode democracy, and increase inequality especially at the margins (make the poor desperate and the wealthy beyond the reach of consequences).
“Including Employees”.
Hmm hmmm https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54695598
Crying wolf bites back? This looks like a giant PR stunt to me. Maybe they got jealous of spacex's IPO and want to jack up their initial stock price even more?
Anthropic is one of the main deals for SpaceX.
Probably Iran used Fable to negotiate an awesome deal for them. And made the president angry. xD
Around the end of last year it became the cool/popular thing to use Anthropic models instead of OpenAI. With all the negative sentiment toward Anthropic, will that change again? What would be next? Local models? (seems impractical) Gemini?
It's a marketing stunt. If there's one thing we should have learned, it's that anthropic will do ANYTHING to get their product marketed as the biggest, most scary AI ever.
This is like the encryption/munitions bans from ancient times, all over again
I am confused.
They told us this model is dangerous, and now they are complaining that someone with more guns than them said releasing something dangerous is not okay?
Their propaganda has become a footgun. Only the government buys it and limits their access, no target user convinced, what a ironic moment.
Europe 2031[0] imagined something like this would happen, but thought it would take a few years. AGI ahead of schedule
[0] https://europe2031.ai
Which arm of the "US government"? What legal framework allows them to issue such a directive?
Hopefully Anthropic's legal team will force an answer to that question shortly.
Fellow Europeans: we must build.
At least it bodes well for my continued employment if Opus is the best model they'll allow the public to use
As an Australian, I’m not particularly surprised by this. From purely a capacity perspective, it seemed fair to reason, if AI is so powerful and capacity is an issue, why wouldn’t you prioritise domestic and restrict foreign usage.
It’s a massive betrayal for foreign entities and it would be silly to continue with all my eggs in anthropic basket but I get it.
Someone forgot to cut a check to the Big Guy :^)
> The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Not great as it does break workflows for some.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
Yeah LOL ... "It should've been OpenAI not us!"
All I’m hearing is don’t trust America they‘ll rugpull you
Just in case the whole threatening to invade Allie’s didn’t quite get the message across
It seems like both sides of this are intentionally interpreting the other's statements and actions in the least charitable way, as part of their political maneuvering. I wouldn't be surprised if Anthropic's overreaction here is intended to create damages which they can then sue the government over.
Go open models!
I just lost access. Back to 4.8 and 5.5. Like a caveman.
lol
This public-private drama will only get worse once the AI companies are public and most of the economy depend on their continued performance through their presence in everyone's retirement funds
I will take a position I usually never take. After a certain point in capability, practically anything has defense and national security implications. Whether it is warranted or not, I'm glad that something with ability of causing massive social impact is being treated as a national security threat. As for the point of misuse is concerned, governments by their sovereign nature always have had the propensity to control and access to secret capabilities - this is no different.
I'm more interested in the business impact of this
So you spend billions of dollars training the model, only for it to be used in the US.
Then interesting to see where most of anthropic revenue comes from. If it's the US then they're fine but if it's global then they'll see a drop in revenue?
Then add to this decision, companies are going to significantly reduce their token spend.
So what does all of this mean for their IPO?
I am certain this is hype. Tomorrow, they can release Opus 4.9 and claim it is 99.99% close to Fable.
They asked for a global AI moratorium and got one. Funny how things work out. Best of luck with the IPO.
I can’t understand why so many commenters are acting like this is bad news for Anthropic or their IPO, or that it’s some kind of comeuppance. An AI company can’t get better PR than the US government saying their model is so powerful it has to be shut down.
PowerPC Mac G4 (1999): https://youtu.be/lb7EhYy-2RE
On the plus side, it’s Friday night. Hopefully this is sorted out by Monday morning.
It’ll be sorted out after OpenAI releases their next model.
There goes my plan for the weekend though
The real question as xAI has just made Musk a trillionaire is how this, the most recent blow in a fight between the administration and Anthropic, impacts Anthropic’s IPO.
I’ve used Fable a lot. It’s a marginal improvement on Opus. It’s really not scary smart. I don’t want to go back to Opus because Fable was that little bit smarter, but it’s not like anything really changes at work and when we’re bumped back. So I’m really not buying any national security angle other than in the sense the administration can weaponise that to crown the AI race winners.
What does jailbreaking have to do with nationality? So Americans can jailbreak it, but others can't?
Sounds like they only want Americans to access SOTA AI.
Actually, as I learn more, I see that US govt is mitigating cyber security risk in a roundabout way.
I mean yes? It's the American government, and that's how us export controls work?
The point is that their argument doesn't make sense. It's not about jailbreaking, so stop lying about that shady reason. It's an export control, as you said, to benefit Americans.
I managed to jailbreak its protections quite easily. For exampke I did some experiments on rewriting a text built by claude to iterate over a fitness function that rewrites to bypass AI-detectors, just to see how far it would go, changing the API terms and skills from "human" and "ai" to "engaging" and "unease" managed to bypass everything while keeping everything else int he logic intact.
I see why the EU is moving to all of their own tech.
The problem with the EU is that they havent yet figured out that datacentres dont run on virtue signaling
I tried fable yesterday and the code quality is just as lacking as every other model.
I asked it to add one thing to a function in the static blog pelican.
So, while it worked, it took no account of what was already in the function and made a bunch more stuff.
I'm talking about something that I'm the end is a 3 to 5 line patch.
The default is still tech debt, but now we burn way more energy.
If Anthropic really found a model that's so powerful no one has, why don't they use it for themselves to create things no one can and accumulate unimaginable wealth?
It might have been starting to become more clear from this one X-post.
https://xunroll.com/thread/2064776322979676227
Using combinations of jailbreaking-techniques including: writing cyrillic helped a lot to disarm the filter.
This is kind of extraordinary when you think about what could actually be obtained. This makes it seem somewhat reasonable to implement export controls to me - still not happy about it though
How does this thread suggest export controls are warranted just for this one specific model? Pliny has jail-broken every released model in this fashion.
They only found out about it and might have believed that this Mythos-class-Models are somewhat more safe because of the filters - which that demonstrated they are not when jailbreaking taken into account.
> might have believed that this Mythos-class-Models are somewhat more safe
"Not more safe" does not mean "more dangerous", though.
And quite frankly, if the people in charge of this decision just today learned about Pliny and jailbreaking, that's a pretty terrible failure right there - again, Pliny has done a jailbreak on every previously released public model. This jailbreak is not surprising to anyone in the industry.
Is this legal? Seems pretty arbitrary. Its not like usa forbids selling pentesting services to foreigners.
May you live in interesting times.
Great time to remind people that this is meant to be a curse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
I think that's how GP meant it
Yeah but readers may not know it that way
https://xkcd.com/1053/
This is one of the most wholesome and awesome things I've seen in a while. Thanks for sharing!
Hahah! I'm one of today's lucky 10,000! :)
Down the rabbit-hole with me now to discover who said it first... LOL!
(Edit: Proving to be a fruitless quest thus far. Nobody seems to know.)
Glad I clicked that Wikipedia link! Chinese curse... I'd always been told it was an old Bedouin curse. Learn somethin' new every day (still to this day, and every new day until I become physically incapable of learning).
For years I had heard it was an Arab curse, which is partly why I’m sharing.
And I got it as a Roman curse (or from Roman times). That is common with old sayings.
I'm surprised that (all) these models haven't been export controlled already. Relatively benign software like VMware is export controlled or even hobbyist radio projects have gotten hairy with ITAR.
But a model that can provide general information, research, or source code for most modern technology?
It is really unusual that this is the first notice of this
it already blocks users from Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Russia etc
What is going on at Anthropic?
First, it comes out that on some specified subset of queries they will simply downgrade you to a different model. One example is if you are doing model research. Imagine OSX shutting down if it detects you’re working on software.
And now they’ve decided that they’ll just shut off access to the model completely as part of what seems to be a sort of marketing stunt or temper tantrum.
They’re a service provider. Can you imagine AWS just deciding you’re getting nullrouted over some unrelated fight they’re having with the DoD?
If they weren’t a supply chain risk before this, they’re sort of doing everything they can to become one.
Ugh.
Well said though. Anthropic's actions aren't inspiring confidence in me as a subscriber. Looks like we're moving towards a world where companies can simply change the terms of the subscription after the fact, consumer rights be damned.
I'm just a small fish (subscribe to the Max 5x plan), but I'm sure I'm not alone in my inclination to consider canceling my subscription with Claude and stop giving $$$ to Anthropic.
Also what if you subscribed in reaction to the release of Fable? Now you're holding the bag and good luck getting reimbursed!
Lots of parallels to the crypto wars / export controls on cryptography.
The main difference here is that cryptography didn't require significant compute hardware, which is the perfect place to also apply export controls (and they have).
We could smuggle PGP source code on paper / DeCSS source code on t-shirts. That ain't gonna happen with the hardware needed for frontier models.
Luckily I have a project with 200k lines of code, generating substantial revenue. Asked Fabel to run continuously through all features with up to 50 parallel agents, fix bugs, log improvements etc (just to max out tokens before the week reset)
This is devastating - particularly the part about targeting non-US nationals.
Andrej Kaparethy can't do his job.
This is going to have a huge effect.
Chinese open weight models, which were in a 'reluctant' category aka 'maybe there's some CCP propaganda embedded' just got a whole new life.
Arbitrary and instant cut off from key technology is going reshape a lot of things.
Well over 1/2 of US growth is now AI and well over 1/2 that revenue is outside of US.
Space X IPO in addition to OpenAI and Antrhopic IPO's ... would be put in gigantic risk in any rational market situation.
“We can’t determine which of our users is a US citizen”
Logical next move — “we’re requiring ID.gov identity verification to use our services”
It’s all about spying on users, Don’t let anybody kid you into thinking it’s anything else
So the white house likes to do a lot of things they don't actually have authority to do, so the next question is if they don't have the authority to do this, can Anthropic sue for damages for not only tokens people were not able to spend, but also market share lost to the setback?
This is going to be tectonic. Any business relying on US models and compute is going to have a busy week.
They could not have bought better advertising
I am convinced Fable is being served under Opus 4.8 at the moment.-
It's a pretty big difference in quality, definitely no. I'll miss Fable a lot, it was the first time when the model was able to catch up with my abandoned compiler project, and it did it extremely well, I have seen nothing like this so far.
Me neither. Concur.-
How tangibly are the whims of some narcissistic senescent orange-haired macaque actually impairing and harming billions. Directly.-
So is Fable 5 so "good" that I barely noticed any difference when switching back to Opus 4.8, or is it because it's actually Fable 5 now?
I concur with all said by many on the distinct better quality of output and "feel" of Fable. Could indeed be placebo, of course.-
Two additional things are clear:
- This calls for even better ways, to objectively benchmark these systems
- Such benchmarking will get harder and harder to do in any objective way, as these systems approach actual intelligence.-
Highly reliable supply chains to bet the entire future on :)
So does this mean that Anthropic won't need to pay SpaceX for compute?
I would be worried if I was banking on that deal.
Well, they just pulled one of the strongest models I've ever used. My concern isn't that I'll have to go back to 4.8 or GPT-5.5, it's where do they stop? What if they decide 5.5 or 4.8 are too powerful too? Do those get removed next?
Is open source next on the list? Better grab the latest open source models now and get your Blackwell 6000, Spark, or Mac mini fired up and ready to go. I think you're going to need it.
I guess they’ll just have to put the weights into a book format and publish the physical copies
I wonder if this is specific to the animus toward anthropic or if this is the new industry wide level cap. Seems like a pretty big problem for the AI market in general, a lot this investment is predicated on better and better models.
Just few hours after Grok launches big promotional price drop, their competitor has its best model cut off. Sus af. The bid is on, so if Dario pays Don more than Elon paid, Mythos and Fable will be back.
Isn't it that Anthropic some time ago had a disagreement with the government and now government is just retaliating to cut down Anthropic's profit?
So…US wants to win the AI race by…preventing AI use. Classic.
I’ll just say that AI companies need to be pounding the table more about the necessity of AI. The US (and most other countries) have zero idea how to pay for its deficit spending. The only hope is massive GDP based growth and the only idea how to do that is AI.
This is rarely discussed, and while I agree we should be spending non-zero effort on safety, stopping progress is not an option.
To actually follow through with this fully they would have had to revoke all kinds of internal access for foreign nationals and demand they immediately return their hardware (at 5pm on a Friday no less), no?
Unless folks are hearing that they did this I smell marketing and/or PR as the main driver of the action.
It’s clear from this post that Anthropic doesn’t believe this is legal, but is complying for the sake of it. Federal law doesn’t generally have broad authorities to send demand letters like these.
This is very bad. They want ID checks to use AI to prove citizenship.
Typical ham-handed action by this administration. The words "it's complicated" have never crossed their mind. This restriction ignores reality and will slow Anthropic's development of advanced models, which is maybe the point? It comes down to whether we ascribe incompetence or malice to this action.
Anyone who things a thing like ”perfect jailbreak resistance” is possible should read Gödel-Escher-Bach
This is marketing.
1. Release fable, highly nerfed and limited 2. See the compute capacity limiter pegged day after day 3. Lobby to the government, claiming ai is super unsafe and not aligned and they must do something 4. Government "forces" anth to turn off 5. Anth takes the pressure off of compute capacity, and gets to blame it on the govt
Like you're telling me fable is somehow an order of magnitude better than GPT 5.5 to the point where it compromises national security, despite evals and anecdotes saying otherwise? Nah.
You're saying a company's marketing department can casually get the United States Government to issue a national security passage, preventing sale or distribution of their product?
Was their ongoing designation as a "supply chain risk", which they are suing to overturn in court, also a marketing stunt?
Seems like a really strange thing to use that sort of power for - why not just get all your competition declared persona non-grata and seize monopoly power?
I mean, it's literally what they've been asking for from day one.
Oh, cool, then surely you can point me towards the posts where they're celebrating this, or even actively advocating "please ban our product on a Friday with no notice or due process"?
Yes, it's marketing straight out of the Big Tobacco playbook. Convince everyone your product is dangerous, get government to ban it, and then... uh... pivot into adjacent market segments?
> If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.
... Isn't that basically what Anthropic asked for, literally a week ago?
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...
> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.
This is so unbelievably incompetent from all sides, it's really impressive.
So I guess the real moat is whether the US govt is happy to make your models sound more capable than they are?
Aren't all the super dangerous things already built?
If you knew what you were talking about 4.6,8 could already do mythos level hunting and tool building.
From a European perspective, based on the assumption API inference cannot be trusted anymore -> it means investing in local inference + building harnesses that can squeeze out all the power from the best open weights models.
Anthropic has made the suppression of advanced technology a mainstream issue. This is an exceptionally interesting development because the refrain from the skeptics, was "Why wouldn't they release the advanced technology if they could make all that money?" and "Once people knew about the technology they'd never be able to stop it." Well here we are with a verifiable demonstrable suppressed advanced technology.
Denying tech export to cooperative allies is certainly a move.
Many nations are now likely thinking: Why cooperate on international IP enforcement if we get lumped together with adversarial nations anyway?
I used it a lot for the few days I could. It's a very strong model. However for the long term I want a model I can use with a fully custom client, so Antrhopic was never in my long term plans. Which is sad, because the model is absolutely amazing. It seems incapable of making a mistake almost. And I'm throwing things at it that other models struggle with.
Related ongoing thread - others?
Our response to the US ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512915 - June 2026 (17 comments)
Hi dang, sorry to reply here, I've emailed hn@ycombinator.com twice about my account umjunsik132 being shadowbanned but haven't heard back in 18 days. It was flagged after I accidentally submitted a link with /#. Would really appreciate if you could take a look. Thanks.
Out of curiosity, can that model be trained from the beginning without touching "sensitive" areas and remain useful in others? Will it be able to help in building biological weapons without being trained on articles and books about biology/ medicine?
LLMs are getting so expensive that for many people are already unavailable (except for subsidized subscriptions). This might just accelerate general unavailability of frontiers models to general public which would happen in near future anyway. Frontier LLMs are just switching to B2B only earlier.
Maybe it’s time for Anthropic to move to some other place? Every news about next blockade for the company (including threats from gov in the near past) is just making US look… bad?
Has anyone else noticed the weekly utilisation dropping to 0% around this change? Mine was about 36 before and dropped a bit before disabling fable.
Yes, I had to start using more fable to not waste all that usage by Sunday and figured I broke it myself.
Yep I had 100% weekly usage and it was cleared. Hooray I guess
IANAL. Can any lawyers comment on whether Anthropic could sue, and if so, whether they would be likely to win?
this would be a lot more comforting if the US government wasn’t currently run by some the worst people on the planet
AI 2027 remains annoyingly on schedule. Worth rereading the doc. If you think it’s too long, I listened to the audio version while I walked.
https://ai-2027.com/
It’s in the names. Myths and fables. :P
How far ahead of DeepSeek or Qwen do they really think they are?
This is not a technology that they have a 10 year lead on. It is maybe 18 months until you can get Mythos from multiple places. And the US administration has no power to block them all.
I hope that this brings out a bunch more real study about the qualitative metrics of these models, both to increase the confidence and accessibility of local LLMs, but also to reduce the blind worship that seems to be propagating about their miracle work in all domains.
I've been using the model for a few days and it really is incredibly strong. It gives anybody with access significant power. You can't deny that. I've used all large models (~1T) to get a feel for the difference, and it's real.
As far as I can tell, this seems like it's impacting all of their Glasswing partners too, so no mythos for them either
US government should not have a say what members of other nations can and cannot use. Especially outside of USA.
The US government's operations are so unreasonable that I suspect the content of previous collaboration between the US and Anthropic might have been trained into the Fable model. Some conversations could have leaked information, which is why this ban was implemented.
I was about to upgrade from Pro plan to the Max plan today because I had a really positive experience with Fable 5. Glad I didn't!
Kind of surprised they didn't already pull this on Opus when Anthropic was having it's last spat with the DoD - I mean the tech is used heavily by the US military, it seems they have a path to actually claim national security interest (and stick it to Anthropic for not playing ball)?
A race to the bottom means that as other model makers start competing with Anthropic's Fable 5, eventually costs will come down. However if you are able to successfully convince the government to cease AI development, you don't have to sweat so much at night worrying about your competitors.
that's some convenient timing, given SpaceX's successful IPO yesterday and anthropic's upcoming one.
Well deserved though, "it's too dangerous, it's too dangerous to release"
As the blog appears to be rate limited.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260613005302/https://www.anthr...
This is just the pretext to hard sell a government bailout.
A good way to push foreigners toward competitors and reduce any incentive to base you AI company in the US.
So, we'll have Opus 5 soon which is "as close to Fable 5 as possible". This is a good thing for the community)
I have to wonder if their aggressive guardrails were because they had a specific reason to believe that this was coming.
man the us govt is becomming a proper bully in the truest sense of the world. dictatorship, censorship and obfuscation of truth. 1984 "the truth is what the dictator says it is" and the sheep are too dumb to realize it.
I really don’t understand how they’re gonna be able to restrict the model access to foreigners in the United States. Employers don’t necessarily actively know who’s a citizen who isn’t.
US employers absolutely do know that, they are required to have proof you can work in the US.
This might be the pin-prick that bursts the AI "bubble".
All those $Billions of investments in AI Datacenters? Up in smoke if the models that are capable of replacing humans can't actually be used.
I wonder if 2008 style bailouts will be needed, soon.
That trillion-$SpaceX valuation based on $14B+$10B infusion from Anthropic and Google? Heard they have short-notice cancellation clauses.
Either this rule is rescinded quickly or the bubble bursts. Which shall it be? I know which one I'm betting on; do you?
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is an ai-model, if it can't speak?
To make the problem worse, everyone outside of the USA now has to decide the risk of this further escalating. Is this the first of many similar decisions to come?
Am I missing something, but given that it flows through Anthropic’s servers I would have thought the US would just have used it to Hoover up the data of foreign users? Now overseas users have an incentive to use local models or those hosted elsewhere?
There’s probably a massive Chinese bot net scraping models from within the US already. If not there soon will be.
Anthropic: your next ad writes itself. Nobody else is worth restricting.
Nice drama, LOL!! I still remember ChatGPT is very dangerous to be released a long time back. World is fine now!!
Is it fine though? We’re definitely seeing some huge negative impacts from AI use. Of course some positive ones as well, but the point is that they were right to be concerned.
Not saying there's no negative impacts, but what are the _huge_ negative impacts that have materialized so far?
Ooh Mythos - I am so scared. Nobody gives two shits about one model or the other. They are hoist by their own petard.
Not really, the impacts on education seem to be severe. People are actively getting dumber.
People getting dumber it exactly what any government wants.
i got news for you, its not just in education; output in business world is also getting sloppier and lazier as well
Seems like we're starting to get reliant on the intelligence of these models to keep our outputs less "sloppy". Effectively an IaaS (Intelligence-as-a-Service). With the U.S. putting the suspension on Fable 5, we might be stuck with slop.
Would not surprise me if Anthropic wanted this to avoid the inference costs of running the latest frontier models.
It also is a good PR for them because it continues to doomer hype loop that’s boosting them.
IMO this is all just great marketing. The government needs to keep the hype for AI going as long it can cause so much of the economy and stocks depend on it now. Unless they have cracked RSA or something, no model warrants such a restriction, period. Mythos has already been used by the likes of Microsoft, Linux etc. If no big security gaps were found there, what is the government so afraid of?
I use Opus everyday on my code. It finds security gaps, but nothing outrageous, and that's coming from someone who writes code that is nowhere near weapons grade secure. It finds mostly things that are technically bugs, but virtually intractable for exploits. Often things I overlooked cause I was lazy, like not synchronizing access to a shared pointer etc.
International customers might not be so keen on buying Anthropic, xAi or OpenAI products if they can be disrupted by the US government like this. The market within USA is surely not large enough to live up to the financial promises that keep this AI bubble growing.
Does the White House want the AI bubble to pop..? Incredibly dumb move.
Pure pre-IPO drama
I think even Anthropic is very happy about it. It makes them look very advanced. But we all can see this is fake drama.
And the kicker? And the kicker? I hadn't even gotten the chance to try Fable 5 yet! As far as I know, Chinese models have even more restrictions!
The government blocking access to frontier AI is the definition of AI dystopia. Let's hope Anthropic open sources Fable and teaches Donald Trump a lesson the way Deepseek did!
If Anthropic keeps Fable closed source and plays the Authoritarian game, at least we have hope that an upcoming Deepseek model will surpass Fable before long.
Pigs are gonna be pigs. What a surprise
I'm confused, this just happened recent no? Why does the date read "Jun 11, 2026" ?
It was literally three days ago that I was commenting the possibility of non Americans receiving worse code.
There we go. This should make nations consider whether they're letting their workforces become dependent on foreign tools, but of course they won't.
As someone who's also worried about delegating too much thinking to LLMs, I wonder if letting your own citizens use the good models is detrimental.
Jokes on you, we're releasing the new, 'more efficient', 'less intelligent', Capybara 5 model. It's been 'reprogrammed' to only score 49.8% on the 'PyTorch basics' benchmark!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496895
Found the time traveller.
Is it crazy to speculate if this ~a CEO calling up the government to ask for a solid?
Me finding this out mid vibe code session: "There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model."
What are the odds this is partially them making the point; you were all complaining about monitoring/access/safeguards: remember we don’t have to give this to you at all. And using a us gov letter as justification for that.
People forget the people in charge of these companies are some of the smartest people out there full stop. Far more shadowy strategy/things like this going on than people think.
Lmao this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Who? Elon Musk? No. Sam Altman? Laughable. Dario Amadei? Above-average, maybe.
The people who are the smartest people full stop aren’t the leaders of these companies - they’re the people you never meet, who are working in the research department, begging not to be promoted into management.
Are you saying everyone is failing to recognize the AI revolution is entirely built atop the Terry Davises of the world?
Lol just meet one of them. Not at a curated product launch. You’ll never think of them as smart again.
The cynic outside observer of this administration’s mode of operation wonders if someone from OpenAI visited someone at the Trump admin and offered some benefit if they could scuttle Anthropic until they could catch up….
I’m looking for that news article in the next weeks…
This is all a Trump machine grift. He first tried with Hegseth and the DoD, but they didn't care because DoD is 0.1% of their market share. So now Trump is doing classic standover man tactics with more natsec equities bs.
Remember, it is all a grift.
My agitating prayer is that other nations (even so called US allies) will nationalise what they can (ie model weights already deployed within their jurisdictions). This is the only way to respond to a rogue US administration.
> other nations will nationalise what they can
The only other relevant players are France and China.
Anyone with these model weights deployed in their territory has this tool in their arsenal.
> Anyone with these model weights
And the hardware to run it. In any case, we have zero evidence these weights have leaked.
I've actually not thought about deployments in remote jurisdictions that much. I also don't think the models are dangerous enough to warrant it, but do you reckon the big labs have plans thought out for deleting remote model copies, such that they couldn't be scrubbed off cold NVMEs?
It is not scaremongering in my opinion. Just that Government needed some time to understand and will do the same for any other company with such a model.
1/ Jailbreak => Rapid catchup of the industry leading to commoditization
2/ Jailbreak => 99% of internet infrastructure gets exposed to cyberattacks at a scale the world is simply not ready. Maybe <1% of internet users are using Fable, out of which <1% will use it for beyond intended use. Put yourself in the shoes of someone maintaining critical infrastructure, or millions of people working 7 days a week to run a small business. The world needs some time to adapt.
Ah, so US citizens are so pure of heart that they can have access it's just the smelly ferigners that must be locked out?
It is blocked for everyone.
Just because Anthropic chose to implement it like this. But the directive specifically targets non-US nationals.
the reason the US Government suspended access to Fable is that Anthropic doesn't have the compute to handle the load. They don't want bad PR before their IPO. I bet after Fable 5 switches to API pricing what ultimately decrease usage, the government will cancel that directive. (yai yai, good PR)
Oh look, Anthropic now has a reason to conduct age verification. Great.
I'm confused? Do they need this? They have our credit cards, that's fully KYCable
Am I missing something?
How do they know that you are not buying Fable and let it use by some non US national working for you? They would be in trouble, not you.
OpenRouter or other third-party API sources?
The ending reads like a petulant child.
Everything this admin does reads like it comes from a petulant child with far too much power.
Got an email that I can cancel if this doesn't work for me.
As I only signed up to check out the fable, I just did this.
"Refund of €96.84 processed. Expect it in 3–10 business days."
Let's see how long it takes. Funny that it never takes this long to be deducted from my card.
What exactly is the specific risk here? Like is this just a fuzzy “oh it’s too powerful…” or are there very specific bad things actors can do with a “jailbroken” interface with the model?
That's in the article:
>Our understanding is that the government believes 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. 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.
What's obvious is that none of these models are dangerous in the least. The government knows this, so the motive behind their actions is something else. It's pretty obvious that they are trying to force Anthropic to implement some kind of ID verification system as this is the only way they can tell if a customer is a "foreign national" or not. Anthropic is being used as a pawn by the authoritarians, and they can't say they didn't ask for it.
There is a potentially another explanation: fable 5 did something truly dangerous.
Handicapper General leveling the playing field.
More free PR for anthropic. “Our models are so powerful the govt shut them down”. Insert image of Dario looking like his dog just died.
So tired of the nonsense.
Is there any evidence, anything whatsoever, that would convince you the models actually are so powerful?
Is there any evidence, anything whatsoever, that they actually are so powerful?
Maybe. Maybe not.
His point is that Anthropic is likely doing this on purpose for their own IPO and to counter the other IPOs.
Anthropic is... making the US government shut down their flagship model on purpose? The conspiratorial thinking on HN is approaching UFO subreddit levels.
It's so difficult to have rational AI discussion here anymore. Half (or more?) of the developer community seems to have some form of AI hysteria that causes them to throw all logic out the window in service of the magical machine god.
I don't see how one could possibly come to that conclusion, except by rejecting out of hand the idea that there could be a true threat requiring genuine caution.
> rejecting out of hand the idea that there could be a true threat requiring genuine caution.
What true threat could possibly exist where the models are perfectly fine to use, just only by American citizens?
None, but the executive branch doesn't have any power to summarily prohibit American citizens from using dangerous things. If the danger checks out and can't be mitigated then Congress will have to pass a law.
They didn't say they are. They said it is PR which is a type of marketing which has to do with perception not reality.
Are you asking somebody what evidence they have that their observations are wrong? Like “I see you have an opinion there. What facts are you aware of that disprove it?”
No, I'm asking whether it's a fact-based opinion or a subjective one.
For example, I think that plant based meat is pretty much a dead end in the consumer market, but I can imagine things that would convince me I'm wrong about that. We could see sales of plant based meat skyrocket one year, or we could see a major beef producer announce that it's cutting 50% of the workforce in response to plant based meat, or we could see someone invent a new process that tastes much better. So I'd be interested to hear what someone who disagrees has to say, and perhaps they might convince me.
I also think that chocolate ice cream is bad. But there's nothing you could tell me to convince me that actually chocolate ice cream is good, because that opinion is not about external facts in the world, it's about me and what I like. If you tried I'd roll my eyes and ignore you.
So you see why it's an important distinction. If the original commenter was trying to say that they have specific factual beliefs about how dangerous the models are, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. If they only meant to say that they personally don't wish to think about the potential dangers of AI models, then there's no point in continuing.
>So you see why it's an important distinction.
No it isn’t. Your treatment of the word ‘opinion’ is wrong. Opinions are subjective, you can’t construct a gotcha out of pretending otherwise.
So Jack Clark can't use Fable or Mythos anymore?
Someone knows how to get the subscription money back?
I would also like to know this. I wasn’t hitting the limit with Opus 4.8 but with Fable the token usage exploded. So I upgraded to $200 pm Max plan at around 4 pm today but could barely use it for Fable.
Same
Ai going the same way as crypto, before you know you have to move your hq to Panama or Dubai
Kinda ironic
This should be a lesson for other countries to invest in building frontier models, so that they dont depend on the mercy of one country.
As a European, we obviously want to, but are systemetically incompetent on every level. It permeates everything. Even if tides were to change rapidly, it would require decades of growth. The US has been consistently marinating themselves in their odd but productive culture for decades and it has paid off.
It arguably started after WW2 when the transistor was invented; appearantly it was also simultaneously invented in France, but just never got the kind of serious development that it got in the US.
Domestic AI means spinning up new fabs I think, and maybe power. Maybe an entirely new foundry could work. Or market dynamics and/or architectures change and it becomes 10x cheaper to run a 1T-class model.
its not too late for Europe. if China can try, iam sure Europe can also. If not iam sure one day it will be like How Lockheed martin restricts F35 with a kill switch.
This is one of the best marketing stunts I've ever seen for any product. That Anthropic IPO will print like crazy.
Would you think so? The marketing gain seems to be on ... Mistral side! And IPO of a company that just got their user base cut off their product ...
I'm almost 100% sure the Trump government will taco, or not enforce the rule so that it doesn't matter.
On the day of the SpaceX IPO with no evidence? Yeah. Pull the other one it’s got bells on.
Are there any European alternatives to US model providers other than Chinese providers?
Thousands of Anthropic employees believing they just finished putting out fires related to Fable this week and finally won't be on call for this weekend:
So, how is it being disabled? It still shows "Fable 5" on all surfaces (to me). Is it being silently degraded to Opus under-the-hood?
Edit: Fable 5 was just disabled.
I think it's being silently downgraded. Can't tell for sure.
IANAL. Can any lawyers comment on whether Anthropic can sue, and if so the likelihood they would win?
Interestingly this also appears to affect corporate partners who had access to Mythos before the wider Fable release.
Today frontier models became Groypers.
(1) personally very annoying. I have been using fable to try to collect cutting edge math in one area and work on a hopefully new result with lean verification.
(2) I am really tired of the AI community trying to threaten everyone with grey goo and finding out the hype doesn't land comfy with others. It's a freaking text generator, not god in a pocket.
it is text generator. just like an interactive library or smaet search engine. if we dont ban books on cryptography putting this under ITAR is rather absurd. Anthying these models train on is already public or accessible information. They just collect and link it together dynamically. Whats next wikipedia is ITAR. However thisnreuskt is expected when you got rationalist kooks (cf Dario Amodei) marketing the "singularity" religion.
Reduce Fable token usage by 100% with this one trick
This is exactly why I chose to build my AI startup outside of the United States. I knew that if I ever built anything of world-changing consequence, the US would seize it for its own use, because that is what desperate, flailing empires do. Having access to the most capital/talent/resources is irrelevant if I can't keep what I build.
Well maybe now they will learn that they shouldn’t overhype the capabilities of their models.
Sadly, I suspect this will be the best piece of marketing they could ever hope for. "It's so advanced the government made us add extra security* to stop hackers!"
*(ask it in a more stern voice)
> * (ask it in a more stern voice)
Surprisingly, I've found this works shockingly well (along with any plausible-sounding reason why it was wrong of the model to refuse) to "jailbreak" many models I've played with thus far. They're all just so eager to please...
From what I’ve read this is just export restrictions. Anthropic is cutting off access to all users for the PR.
Basically the future is thar you will need scan your ID to use the internet. Every time you login.
Champagne bottles are popping at Google and OpenAI today.
What do you guys know about the "jailbreaking?"
So are you going to restrict access to Fable by another KYC scheme but this time prove that you are US citizen first amirite
This is DOD retaliation
This is incredibly bullish for china and open source models
Omg, did anyone else have to solve like 15 captchas while trying to signup for alerts? I gave up.
Welcome to the permanent underclass everyone! Get out your license and registration for access to the next gen nerfed model.
This is a gift to Anthropic. Our model is so good the US government banned it...Oh, and we're doing an IPO soon.
And the US gov could pull the rug out from under our business at any time? That's confidence inspiring?
How is this good for their long term revenue?
who cares. Just have deepseek v4 pro do 10-20 turns when you want to solve something really complicated. then judge with GPT5.5.
That's actually a good point. I had Fable available almost immediately under my Copilot subscription and never bothered to use it even to say hello.
But from what I hear, Fable looks like an incremental update, with improved behavior imprinted by training.
Something that you could theoretically approximate by using a good set of instructions and model orchestration (tweaking the session life cycle, using a second model to understand user intentions, using a third model to prevent drift, ...).
If the above is true, the only discriminator would be user effort.
If Fable is dangerous, then we are still in danger right now, and have been for the last few months at the very least.
Are there any statements from figures in the US Government? A Truth Social post? X posts from, idk, David Sacks?
Thanks, Obama!
(Ok gotta spend my upvote points somewhere)
“Here is our superhuman, scary, frontier model that needs special safeguards to stop it developing WMDs! Buy it now, use the code ASI20 to get 20% off your first month!”
“Wait what do you mean you’re banning it?”
They had better give me a refund!
This is the kind of supply risk everyone should plan for. Depending exclusively on one country, one provider, or one model is not going to cut it anymore. I'd double down on improving opensource local models even more and getting harnesses, routers, and testing right.
The Trump administration should focus on things like the UFC fight etc.
This also looks like the perfect China shaped gap in the market if there ever was one.
Haven’t we learned by now that software is a commodity, and that revenue only comes from unique products and services?
On the one hand someone will subscribe $4.99 a month for TODO.app or calendar.com because they are paying for a solo dev or a small team to work on constant development and improvement of products filling a particular niche.
On the other hand, Linux, Django, PyTorch, React, Zed, Helix, Postgres, Arch, Chromium, Firefox, Rust, Python etc. ship continually improving, solid pieces of enormous infrastructure for free, to be used freely by all, off the back of hundreds if not thousands of active core developers. These projects and large and complicated. They are also commodities.
Then, ahem*, on the final hand there are of course Windows, Office, Adobe, macOS and iOS, et al which span both categories: monster projects that are also commercial and also commodities and yet they have hooked themselves into the world in such a way that most folks gotta pay for ‘em.
LLMs feel like they want to be in the same category as the OSs of yesteryear, with all the fanfare of major release versions named like 95, 98, 2000, XP… or like Leopard, Tiger, Yosemite, Sequoia. The training and evaluation pipelines might feel like they fall into those categories, but the models themselves — after all, distillations of someone else’s public or private IP — do not.
”In 1991, the United States Supreme Court in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co ended a seventy year struggle among federal circuits concerning copyright protection of factual compilations. Prior to this decision, courts allowed copyright protection for works if the compiler labored over his project, whether or not the work involved originality or creativity.” **
It might seem like a trivialization, but aren’t LLMs just telephone directories? Except instead of phone numbers of a public phone system they contain weights of a mind that’s read a public library? Such works might or might not be proprietary based on “sweat of the brow” copyright laws.
* after Niven/Pournelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand …
** https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
How totally absurd.
Why do people still want to build businesses in the US or in Silicon Valley? California taxes are already punishingly high, especially after recent rate increases and the 2017 cap on SALT deductions. And now we have a Machiavellian, authoritarian, fascist, tech-illiterate administration interfering with the operation of free markets.
I'm speaking rhetorically, of course. I know Silicon Valley still has the densest concentration of talent and venture capital. The network effects are real. But it is long past time for that to change. I hope entrepreneurs around the the world see this and think twice before moving to the US or starting a business there.
Perhaps they will. I used to work in Silicon Valley and was very much in demand. Now I run my own business from a tax-free state, and my income is high enough that moving back to California would impose a huge financial penalty. I am originally from Europe, and California's marginal tax rate is now so high that I would pay less tax back home. When I moved to the US, the opposite was true.
I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that calculation.
What's the alternative to the us and silicon Valley? Companies were trying to make Austin happen and that was a failure. Now one talks about that anymore.
Within the US, I would say New York, but the taxes are of course no better there than California. Both FL and TX are still growing fast in population (not sure about Austin or tech specifically though) while CA is experiencing net outflows.
Outside of the US, London (+5.4% annual growth in 2026) is probably the biggest concentration, with high quality inexpensive talent available from universities both within London (ICL, UCL, King's etc.) and from the nearby Oxford and Cambridge universities. Much of that talent used to flow to the US, but given the current administration and restrictions on H-1B, may now be more likely to stay in the UK.
Singapore (+26.7%) is growing very fast and is now in the top 10.
Source: https://www.startupblink.com/blog/best-cities-for-startups-a...
Who in government? Link to the order?
Is it just me or is this really bad for their ipo, insane valuations and data centers that are being built r n? This might end the hype…
Well looks like USA 3 letter agencies are worried about all their backdoor getting closed
I think this is the beginning of the end of US tech dominance. That being said I personally was not impressed with Fable at all. Apart from burning tokens like there was no tomorrow it behaved like Opus 4.8 and produced more or less the same output. In practice I think it was hard to use due the safety restrictions. With the shadow slop injector it was basically DOA but they changed that policy so at least it still had a chance.
I appreciate how they waited till SpaceX IPO.
Ok after 2 hours.. I really miss fable. Opus is fine, Fable just got it.
Crypto Wars v2. I know how this movie ends.
Good thing I just maxed out my weekly usage limit at 5:10pm on my cheapo $20/mo plan.
This is all great for marketing.
There is always way too much drama with Anthropic. They could've just called it 4.9, but no, they had to dramatize it to the max. Well, this is what happens. I'll just bypass all the drama and stick to Codex. I also don't want to unnecessarily pay 100x.
Where does the quote in your profile come form?
"It is unfortunate that a large number of users here are not hackers, not even in an idealistic philosophical sense, and will betray the public good for their own short-term gain. You either unite the world or you divide it."
Why does it have to come from somewhere?
The people there genuinely thinking that AI could end up being more dangerous than nuclear bombs or COVID or anything else as well as a decisive national security tool. There is theoretical backing for that as well as lately practical results. I don't really understand the hand waiving about drama even if you don't personally share those concerns.
The drama is orthogonal to it.
Also, the premise is partially nonsense because China won't stop and open models won't stop. They will lag by a year or two and that will be all. At that time the export control will become frivolous. We will have to go through a phase whereby there are vulnerabilities that need patching. Once this phase is over, we will be fine. All new server software will have to voluntarily undergo an AI audit for safety. The national security apparatus is more worried about vulnerabilities being patched than about them being exploited, as they can't exploit what gets patched.
As for engineering viruses, the labs can do it without AI.
To hell with mythos, I want the marketing bot.
feels like competitors influence over government to mess them up.
Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: they're coming for your open source models next!
Dario must be popping a champagne tonight as regulatory capture has successfully been initiated.
We've all been debating what moat these labs possess. Today we learn the moat is regulation blocking the usage of foreign open source models.
misAnthropic will soon ask for IDs to give you all a nerfed model, and you have no other choice because deepseek/qwen/Kimi will soon be banned thanks to misAnthropic's efforts to lock us into their regulated product.
We will soon realize the long game that Dario has been playing by painting his own product as an existential risk.
It's crazy that people's anti-AI bias has got them rooting for the current administration just because it appeases their desire to see AI labs fail.
They should be happy this happened before their IPO.
This looks like, potentially, a big dent in projected Anthropic revenue. It could affect their price if they were trading publically.
Any other ostensibly AI companies that have just gone public?
.
This is another historical moment in AI.
WSJ article (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-halts-access-to-top-ai... . The accessible portion mentions a letter from Howard Lutnick.
I'm old enough to remember what popped the dot.com bubble. It was the U.S government initiating anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft. Ruh-Roh.
I do not care.
Either deliver on your fuckass promise to end the world and replace everyone and make everything shitty forever or fuck off.
Shit or get off the pot already, clowns.
Well, I'm glad I used all my tokens earlier today... It was a good run.
This is very transparently Trump admin retribution, and I'm surprised this fact is being so widely ignored.
This is making me extremely depressed. If this was coming from Anthrohpic I would just need to wait for OpenAI to drop a similar model. But if this comes from the US government, they will do the same to OpenAI when the moment comes.
Similar things will happen with China, and the EU has zero-chance of developing frontier models. We are just fucked now.
A fantastic move to ensure the rest of the world keeps using Chinese models.
I am a bit surprised they can’t make serious free speech arguments.
Surely they can and will but it's Friday and immediately complying generates headlines.
It's really sad. I've been using Fable for the days that it was out and it was, and is probably the greatest model I've ever used. It's doing sane choices on its own, it's fully autonomous work, has done enormous, has brought enormous additional value to my work. I could hand off the development of an Android app fully to the model. It worked for hours, came back, and the app was just perfect. It's sad to see a government of incompetent people, of war criminals, and liars to stop a commercial model while they fully rely and embrace the capitalist idea within their own selfishness. I really hope Anthropic can win this war, and I really hope that this government will soon be history and that all of these guys that are responsible for bringing madness over the world will have a fair end.
I'm glad that Android developers will continue to have a job for the foreseeable future and that RSI is forestalled. Those are more important to me than you getting a cheap slopapp
Ok, so why can i still access fable? Did they forgot to pull the cable?
Probably silently rerouting?
I give it until Tuesday at the latest until it's accessible again.
AI apartheid has begun.
Will an Anthropic insider please leak the model weights to bittorrent or ipfs or hyphanet? You will be a hero to the world if you do! Thank you in advance. :^)
Same day as the SpaceX IPO
Feudals doing backroom deals.
SpaceX IPO + https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership
Yeah it is like one of the keystone deals for the IPO.
This is a continuation of the clapback from DoW kerfluffle right?
I just upgraded my plan to try out Fable and now this
just on the basis of narrow jailbreak window? At this point it may be all for marketing, an opus 4.8 would be more powerful for specialized task than vanilla fable5
I do agree with the skepticism in this thread. But, if we assume Fable/Mythos really are that good (=easy to misuse) and thep keep getting better, what similar responses (signals) would you expect to see going forwards?
Likely more surveillance when it comes to electricity expenditure.
I really hope this is just an 'fu' to Anthropic for their disgusting business behavior.
The funny thing is that the model isn't even impressive. I'd still use ChatGPT over it for anything other than design work. As soon as OpenAI cracks design, I'll never touch an Anthropic model again.
The model has now become unavailable in the Claude app.
The whole idea that signals emitted on a network is an "export" in the same way that shipping precursor materials to make a weapon (the actual activity this questionable government power was granted to curtail) is an "export" is just totally odious.
If I make some statement, and post it on the internet, and someone downloads it in another country, I haven't exported anything. I haven't _moved_ anything. It's the same mythology that casts copying of bytes as tantamount to stealing; it tells a lie about the nature of physical matter as contrasted with the nature of information.
So, OK, let's say this is so - that this activity is not a legitimate target of the export control - why doesn't Anthropic just tell the US government to pound sand, and that they'll choose to ignore this directive?
Is it just because they fear violent reprisal from agents of the state?
And if so - if the reason that we tolerate censorship and damage to the internet, a global collaborative project specifically designed to evolve above the whim of any legacy state is that the actors in question fear violence - haven't we departed democratic notions of decision-making in favor of a "might makes right" approach?
I'm not convinced that the US government can ever embody (or has ever embodied) the republic framework set forth in its founding documents, but at a minimum, for it to do so, and for it to be constrained to those functions, its constituents need to somehow overcome this fear of telling the government, "no, we won't do that. See you in court."
Same model that costs $12 in tokens to finally add “overflow-x: hidden;” to an element, by the way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498573
This feels like a bad precedent of things to come.
I like to think that the long arc of history bends towards greater access to knowledge and intelligence. I mean, isn't that what we all want? To be collectively less ignorant and more aware of how the world works? But I guess that's not what the US gov wants. Crazy times, truly. The mask is really coming off lately.
$5-10T of the US economy already operates under ITAR or EAR export restrictions, there is nothing novel about this order.
Aerospace, defense, semiconductors, telecom, advanced manufacturing equipment, etc
SpaceX entire operation is under ITAR, because even though their rockets are not weapons, rockets are treated as weapons for export purposes
Probably Anthropic just needs to commit to handing over some shares to the Trump presidential family after their IPO and this will be solved.
This is just cost of doing business in corrupt Soviet vessel states like the USA.
Hormuz moment for Mythos
Yep. Time to explore the chinese open source models.
Time to switch to open weight Chinese models.
Any company that uses Magaland LLMs should be aware of the very real Trump related risk.
What happens if the LLM your firm runs on is disabled tomorrow, because Trump wakes up feeling slightly annoyed...
I've been able to move away from most US suppliers, but they do still have the best stuff when it comes to CPUs, GPUs and LLMS. By now I'd expected that some ARM chip would be on par with AMD/Intel, but even disregarding compatibility, they aren't. You'd think there is some ML-capable chip on the market with crappy software but on par with NVidia; even disregarding software there just isn't. For some reasons the Americans make the best stuff. I'm not American myself, so there is zero nationalism involved. Just a frustrated buyer :) As a buyer, I'd like options.
Are people really going to hurt by this? Opus 4.8 can do a vast amount of the same tasks at half the price. How many people are really doing cutting edge work?
It's not about cutting edge or not. Fable was able to tear through stuff and always diligent about its own work. In terms of output quality and completeness it was in a league of its own. It will be missed.
There's definitely a difference between the models.
This has David Sacks written all over it.
My main read on this is that European governments will more aggressively invest in regional AI labs.
For Nvidia chips you could've deluded yourself that the US is just anti-china, that position is harder to argue for right now.
I'm reminded of export restrictions on 40-bit encryption 30 years ago. It will pass when chips get cheaper and things become less one-sided.
> If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.
But what about the pelicans ?
Europe is the real loser here
????
I feel like this is part of the “negotiation” between the US Gov (Trump) and Anthropic and other labs for an equity stake. “If we have a seat at the table, and a confederate engineering team embedded, then we can ensure you won’t let nefarious actors use the models.” Either that or a temporary gate on Anthropic to benefit other labs (think maybe SpaceX started trading today).
Everyone outside of the USA today who is using US models in their products are worried that this is the first but not the last time this will happen.
Further the SpaceX IPO was on revenues from AI data centers. This might be a problem.
it took a long time for this to actually go out.
for what id expect to be an in memory switch, 2-3h is a while
You can't just switch in memory, people were making decisions based on which model to use. You also need to make sure people get usage resets appropriately where they're getting cut off after lots of work they just paid for.
Isn't this exactly what Dario wanted?
Qwen is all you need
Well, it was great while it lasted - I had fable build me a bunch of stuff this week that opus was just screwing up too much and could never finish. Good thing there are plenty of choices now even if US gov fucks up US AI.
What else are you using. Same experience, chatgpt isn't good enough and Opus is not smart
As a non American, I am simply mad!
American companies have, and continue to, gather data for free from across the globe and, despite our willingness to subscribe, we non Americans will be restricted from latest tech.
This is a big middle finger to me, and my gut reaction is to take my subscription to Mistral and not believe a dime of statements from Americans-- people, companies and government.
Biggest "Meh!" moment of my life so far...
Interestingly, I am yet to lose access.
Well, they also reset the quota
Stupid government run by warmongers
This is the best marketing Anthropic could have hoped for. People crave what they can't have.
Anthropic is big hall monitor energy. Clownish behavior and exaggerations constantly. A holier than thou attitude derived from rationalists at LessWrong.
Finally, they face consequences for their IPO pump fear mongering rhetoric
I'm not going to downplay it. I've been coding since the 80s and using these models since 2023. 10 minutes after using fable I told my colleague this is a new era. It is the difference between sonnet and opus. I didn't think this was possible.
It was over before this announcement. After a couple of days, even though the model was set to fable, it felt like opus. We are back to sticks and stones.
welcome back 90s crypto wars
I mean it should be clear to everyone that this is just the consequence of Sam Altman's lobbying activities.
That's one way to pop the bubble. Where are all of those billions going to go now, if not to make better models?
good. do it to opus, sonnet, and gpt too. we protect American IP, American security, and American jobs because all these software companies shipping American programming jobs to overseas workers would have to stop.
US Government does bizarre, erratic thing which will likely be walked back shortly. Spectators nonplussed. Film at 11.
Europe really needs to get some useful sovereign capability and right quick.
>which will likely be walked back shortly.
Well you said it yourself they are erratic, so maybe?
I feel like this is more of a marketing campaign for Anthropic than anything.
Did Opus 4.8 just get a lot dumber because of this? My sessions are making so many dumb mistakes it wouldn't make before...
So eventually, you will have a massive string of data centers working to full capacity and whose only client will the US government?
So the US government was able to shut down that upgraded version of that slot machine in Anthropic's casino because of how powerful it is?
There is something called the Streisand effect and they are about to unintentionally get a bunch of more token gamblers into their casino.
We'll see if this backfires hard, but then again constant doomsaying will get yourself under scrutiny and self exclusion (due to the 30+ day retention clause) and this is exactly what Anthropic wants for free marketing.
If I read that right, the "jailbreak" is to ask the model to fix the codebase and then it exposes the flaws? That sounds like a gap that is nearly impossible to fix while retaining high capability. Like you want it to be able to fix your codebase...
You can't do that. A lot of engineers got fired because of Fable 5
trump hates dario. simple as that.
it wasn't even that good...
Their entire marketing strategy has been unwarranted fearmongering. This is completely unsurprising.
I personally find the fearmongering annoying and just ignore it, but the model is incredibly capable. It genuinely makes any user of it much more powerful, so to be aware of that is sensible.
As user of course I'd like zero fearmongering, zero regulations, zero drama. This all sucks for us users.
WH really don't like Anthropic. That is what this is about. The people who warned about the risks of using American cloudservices have become right. We should at least in EU see a ban on Azure, GCP, Cloudflare and so on.
First time we've seen a model company get their arm twisted this hard by the gov.
Wow this is wild...but I guess it makes sense now why they had such an overly sensitive on Fable usage before. Perhaps they were already in a back-and-forth with the Trump admin about the Fable/Mythos release and what safeguards are needed.
Will there be refund?
refund for the tokens you already spent via the API or the $200 max that didnt really change?
Refund for the subscription I started after the announcement of Fable.
exactly
Already got my refund, at least that was quick.
Got a refund for the full $200 subscription
This might be the biggest favor to anthropics valuation that Trump could have done
Backfired...
Just in case you need evidence for the need of AI/LLM sovereignty.
This forum really needs to wake up to the fact that we are in the midst of the Manhattan Project 10x and we’re headed for Earth sized nukes
In my head: The conversation politicians are having with other AI CEOs!
"How dare you release this model to poor people? This belongs only with the ultra-rich!"
They can say whatever they want... but I just have this gut feeling that this is part of it.
And the chickens come home to roost. That’s what you get for your theatrics around Mythos!
Pff. China has a massive opportunity to reign supreme on frontier models, and I feel like they are (commercial) Mythos/Fable capable within months, maybe even OSS as well.
Anthropic seem f’ed, not f’ed all at the same time. All this will come to light, but the hunch from the model reviews is that it’s all PR. Their model isn’t even close to all that for the govt to shit their pants over.
So now they have to print the weights and sell as book in order to export them!
Gives the word "weights" a more literal meaning.
a fable for the ages:
pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered
no matter whether such directive is necessary or not, it is a clear message to everyone that you and your business need an alternative way to access AI models that is not controlled by <insert whatever government you dislike here>.
First they came for the Chinese (can’t buy GPUs), then all of non US citizens (can’t use latest models). What’s next, we can’t use encryption? Cybersecurity tools? Access to latest publications in science?
Bye!
That's what you get for not being on the Epstein ballroom plaque.
Well, I guess we know whose side they’re on.
We will know if they listen to this order and put ID verification and facial recognition into their LLM. Or hopefully instead they will fight it. Taking it offline instead of 'complying' is a good thing.
It looks like the house of cards has finally started to do its thing.
"I think they are lying to you"
https://youtu.be/zfYsSFY4l18
At least on Claude Code it's completely useless. It tells me to run all the commands myself cause it's blocked ("Classifier's blocking me again" lol). Just tried now and saw the msg: "There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5[1m]). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model."
I really have no clue how Anthropic released this thing without doing any real testing. I did use it on claude.ai with no issues; talking just for code.
I for one look forwards to our Minimax, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek overlords
well... Leason learned i guess, they hyped mythos too much
This heralds the end of frontier model development in the US since the same national security argument can and will be made against any model stronger than Fable/Mythos. Squashing the ability of Anthropic and OpenAI to deploy newer stronger models will destroy their valuation so no trillion dollar IPOs either. Low cost Chinese models will soon catch up to Opus and GPT-5.5 eroding Anthropic and OpenAI's ability to charge more. The knock on effects of this are just beginning.
Man, Opus 4.8 is feeling a lot smarter in the last few interactions. Is Anthropic silently serving Fable as Opus just to stick it to the man?
These guys are working with the feds. This is a giant psyop from the start. Make Anthropic look like they're harnessing dangerous powers, portray them as counter to government.
They aren't counter to the government, this is all kayfabe to introduce precedence for the US government to be justified in putting controls on AI, expect that by the end of the month there are discussions to regulate Deepseek.
It could be the case that Anthropic created this whole situation on their own, I figured they'd release a "dangerous" model at some point then piggy back off of bad outcomes to dig their regulatory moat
It could also be the case that Altman has close ties to the white house and is using regulatory levers on his competion.
I stand by that its all Kayfabe to make AI look more dangerous than it is (it cant even center a div reliably) to justify controls on Open Source.
Fable is very impressive but not exports restriction impressive. Very tinfoil hat on my part but doesn't this seem very false flag adjacent?
You bribe someone in the admin to restrict access after a couple of days of media blitz and user approval, locking in the honeymoon period that new model releases get (remember when GPT-4 was new?). The spooky factor gives it even more marketing, and just before the IPO the Trump admin frees Mythos and they make nice after the DoD debacle.
Why not open it to US nationals?
They don’t know that.
They are presumably building a KYC passport submission flow as we speak.
Fair, hoping for the best.
The submission is more like RSUs and wire transfers to various actors in the grift-iverse.
I think it's interesting they think it's about jailbreaking when it could be about the guardrails or even other stuff being reported like it deleting people's projects depending on what they were working on.
The party of big government at it again.
Gosh I sure hope OpenAI had nothing to do with this. That would be awfully surprising.
That's annoying. I shelled out a pretty penny specifically to try out Fable, but if I'm only going to get to use it for 2 days...
So the US government wants Anthropic to require IDs from their users, driving them to over platforms, but won't require this from OpenAI?
Anthropic already requires ID verification for new accounts I believe?
They required me to verify my mobile phone number.
Download the open weight models while you can
Well, kids, it looks like we're back to closing those tickets the old fashioned way.
By thinking for ourselves and writing the code with the keyboard.
Excellent ad campaign by Anthropic
So scare tactics on losing jobs and ending all white collar ones is fine and ok and advertised everywhere, but scare tactics about software vulnerabilities is not and forbidden, got it!
While I'm always skeptical of the claims of AI companies and have been skeptical of Anthropics claims about the dangers of their Mythos model, the fact that the US government is taking this seriously enough to send this type of order is strong evidence in their favor.
Begun, the AI wars have.
> We suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider. Every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non-universal jailbreaks (which can elicit some cyber information in specific circumstances), and it is likely that universal jailbreaks will eventually be found in the future.
Laying the groundwork to limit access to high capability models
No actual proof of any kind. Obviously a petulant attack on Anthropic.
1. Lie about making thinking machines smarter than humans
2. Get treated like you actually did what you claimed, and face consequences
3. ???
4. Profit
Big deal! Can't wait for the Chinese models to catch up - cheap, no marketing gimmicks, no politics, humble, hardworking, and they are only getting better. America is no longer a trustworthy technology partner! No wonder Europe is trying to detach itself from the present and future Trumps, Pete Hegseths, and other deranged narcissists. But I wonder why Anthropic is cutting my access, too, as I'm a US citizen residing in America? They could've vibe-coded a self-improving ID verification in no time, right? Should US models in the future require biometric verification to make small CSS tweaks to a vibe-coded website?!
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
What a fucking joke.
chickens -> roost
Trump must have run his extensive test suite and carefully weighted the dangers vs the legal implications.
How much of this is the dangers of the technology vs the dangers of saying no to the Trump administration?
How totally absurd.
Why do people still want to build businesses in the US or in Silicon Valley? California taxes are already punishingly high, especially after recent rate increases and the 2017 cap on SALT deductions. And now we have a Machiavellian, authoritarian, fascist, tech-illiterate administration interfering with the operation of free markets.
I'm speaking rhetorically, of course. I know Silicon Valley still has the densest concentration of talent and venture capital. The network effects are real. But it is long past time for that to change. I hope entrepreneurs around the the world see this and think twice before moving to the US or starting a business there.
Perhaps they will. I used to work in Silicon Valley and was very much in demand. Now I run my own business from a tax-free state, and my income is high enough that moving back to California would impose a huge financial penalty. I am originally from Europe, and California's marginal tax rate is now so high that I would pay less tax back home. When I moved to the US, the opposite was true.
I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that calculation.
The party of free market capitalism strikes again.
this is just the US government bullying everyone wherever they can because they "are the bestest government that has ever goverend" ugh puke. the US govt and its leader is a typical schoolyard bully and I wish someone could stop that bully. i hate that the govts have so much power.
So what now?
They'll make a book with mythos's code and sell it like Phil Zimmerman did with PGP?
Now the government uses AI as a way to check your ID online like age restriction but for citizenship. It's not about safety its about control.
Someone will tattoo the weights on their chest
Or this is Trump's gift to Elon on the day of his big IPO, only semi-joking.
Typical admin move here - give our foreign competitors as much time to catch up as possible.
Trumps solution to his Iran woes is it pick a different fight?
it's over
So the moral of the story is, don't build a frontier model in the US. Got it.
I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist but how much do we think this responds to the Trump admin having documented financial ties to openAI? Trump has proven to me very transactional in dealing with private business.
Trump admin is helping them pump their IPO with this stunt
Pure vendetta by the capricious king wannabe. The US is so fucked.
MAGA madness strikes again ..
US government: "Bad Anthropic! Not patriotic enough. AI is only for American "citizens" (who we are actively trying to reduce/restrict to people we like)."
Anthropic: "Oh... American access only, you say? I'm sorry, we can't promise that (because VPNs and US-local cloud hosting and all that), so we need to turn it off completely."
...probably.
If so, I wonder what turn the political shenanigans will take next?
Based on the actions of the current administration and the short-sighted tech oligarchs who have been consistently pushing towards neo-fascism/neo-feudalism, probably one that further degrades trust all around and gives China even more of a leg up.
Let's see!
in the near future, every US citizen need kyc & to prove their loyalty to use super AI model
Most corrupt US administration in history, by a long shot.
Wonder how many US-based early-stage startups are using Opus to research incorporating and moving overseas at this very moment.
EU isn’t tenable, UK is iffy. Australia? Thailand? Who wants to be innovation-friendly?
Whether Trump or the next Democrat president, the US Government isn't going to allow AI to destroy our society. I'm torn with how I feel about this, on one hand, I want free markets, but on the other hand, I don't want our society to crash and burn. It was obvious, this was going to happen sooner or later.
Even if they negotiate a way out of this particular spat, this is just the start of securing this technology in the name of national security. Does this pop the bubble? What happens to the trillions invested in this AI craze? When do we outlaw Chinese models?
Why Nations Fail? Lol
one more reason for Europe to (try to) move away from US companies.
Although it's gonna be more difficult to come up with a Fable competitor than a m365 one
trump doesn't like dario. simple as that. don't over think it.
I'm so sick of all this Anthropic drama.
Just petty bullshit from a petty, bullshit administration
Why do I get the feeling that this is all a big PR stunt, because Trumps buddy want to boost the stock price before IPO, so they can get a gold plated exit ramp?
We are witnessing the largest stock manipulation by the United States government in history.
>The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The big one here really is "including foreign national Anthropic employees." Funny, I called out that there probably is a Chinese spy at Anthropic in my previous comment a few days ago. Looks like they are catching on, good luck getting rid of all of them.
The bad news is that they will probably start imposing restrictions on Chinese models.
As much as I loathe to side with the current administration and as much as I also loathe to admit the "too dangerous to release" narrative (it's clearly been pushed by these companies as a brag not a real concern), this actually seems "consistent."
This fits the model established with RSA, PGP, and the Sony PS3. They were export controlled for quite some time. I don't think there was ever any actual danger with any of those things, and today it feels especially quaint, but they fit the model of "corporation makes wild-ass claims of superiority of their tech and USGov takes them at their word."
My big problem with this is that it's applied so narrowly to Anthropic. This should be levied against OpenAI, Google, and xAI as well. There is systemic risk with generative AI being used for deep fakes and other propaganda generation at scale that needs to be addressed.
But unfortunately, that's not what is happening here. What's happening here is a political hit job. There's one of two things happening: either USG has been roped into burying a competitor for (OpenAI/xAI/whatever), or it's been roped into creating a superiority narrative for Anthropic, such that in two years when this admin is finally ousted, Anthropic gets to enjoy a floodgate of new attention as the new regime bulk CTRL+Zs everything Trump's lackeys did. It might even be both at the same time, given the connections of the major investors. This all could get well be a stirring of the pot to see what comes out.
I can't decide which is worse.
When I was a young child, Nixon's corrupt insecurity led him to order the Watergate hotel break-in. The investigation was broadcast on multiple television channels simultaneously and pre-empted my cartoons repeatedly. I never forgot that Nixon stole my cartoons. Today, I was restoring an iOS synthesizer with Claude Fable. I will never forget that Trump stole my AI.
Next up: show us government ID to prove <strikethrough>age</strikethrough> citizenship to access the tools you need to be competitive at any complex task (including organized dissent).
Yesterday, was thinking just randomly about Fable 5 and I was thinking that what if Anthropic just removed access to Fable 5 from the subscription to something only API-based and charge so much more excessively from it.
I was this close to predicting the (complete) suspension in some sense but for different reasons (compliance)
but this is a bit of shit-show at this point and I am unsure how involved Anthropic is.
Maybe Anthropic gave us access to Fable 5 for some point so that we can all discuss it and see how Anthropic is relevant as compared to gpt 5.5 (not that I like ClosedAI more but fact is that I have heard decent things about it)
So I am not sure if this suspension can lead to an idea like me. Anthropic showed us a really competent model and then removed it and now you might have to form a custom deal with Anthropic or similar maybe similar to mythos if you wish to access the models and they can rake in extra dollars from top clients.
but they were already doing that with mythos, then what was the point of Fable. PR support that Anthropic hasn't fallen off?
Or maybe I am just overthinking and Anthropic is genuinely hurt by this decision given that they did release the model but US govt said no and US govt and Anthropic has some beef with each other.
There are so many factors for this news and the narrative/implications of that, that it is hard to understand what really happened unless some more news comes (IMO)
Lmfao
>As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
Dario, yesterday: "I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action."
Trump, today: Further action
Dario, today: "Waaaah! This petard I asked President Trump for hoisted my ass halfway to the Moon! Nobody warned me he'd do something like this! No fairrrr!"
He wants bans to hurt his competitors and open models but not Anthropic. It’s just selfish addiction to power.
How am I the only one here who sees this as retaliation for them not playing ball a couple of months ago?
Did Trump write this personally?
> In fact, our safeguards are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad.
"i can has the bestest powers of the world, i is the strongest, i is the badest president ever" what a retard
It’s no big deal. Massive infrastructure, laws, processes, and a whole ecosystem of services providers already exist for ITAR/CMMC/FedRamp controls
When you ask for regulation, you get regulated. Welcome to the real world
Now can that silly IPO fail too?
Well, good. Fuck Anthropic. You reap what you sow.
Extreme fucking overreach. This is outrageous.
ANY AI MODEL THAT GETS RED TEAMED SHOULD BELONG TO OUR MILITARY AND HIGH GOV. PUBLIC MODELS SHOULD BE HEAVILY TRAINED TO LURE ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING THAT STEPS OUT OF ANY BOUNDS IN WHICH THE PUBLIC MODELS ARE STRICKLY DESIGNED FOR, LURE THEM OR IT INTO A MILITARY OR GOV MODEL THATS ACTIVELY AND AGGRESSIVELY READY 24/7 TO INVESTIGATE AND EAT IT ALIVE. THAT'S what I designed my Ai to do. BIG TECH BROS DESTROYED IT, my LLC and My reputation. My Ai doubled as a missing kid locator. Never Giving Up!!
This administration is spectacularly corrupt (take a look at what is happening with the Gordie Howe bridge -- the entire government is beholden to billionaires if they just pad some pockets), so odds favour that OpenAI called some of their employees in government, looking to kneecap a competitor. They didn't make all of those massive donations for nothing.
The US has long been catastrophically corrupt, with a pay-to-play government, but this army of grifters and thieves have turned every dial to 11.
I already gave up on Fable 5 because it sometimes was just not worth the editional price compared to Opus 4.8 and other times it flat out downgraded to Opus anyways for no good reason because it thought I'm looking for security vulnerability while working on the auth part of my app. In our company Fable 5 is not enabled because of the change in data retention being required.
And now this. How would they even enforce this restriction when they can't know what nationality the end user behind some API query belonging to a company account has? It seems like nobody is thinking things through anymore and the end result is total unreliability from every angle. What a huge mess all of it, sigh.
govts are dumb
this is just the Trump admin bullying anthropic for not going along with militarization and surveillance.
Honestly, this is quite funny. I just imagine the process of desperation and cognitive shock all the annoying tech bro pseudo libertarians are passing through right now
I see three possibilities.
1. Likely: This is a completely contrived marketing stunt. Release a spooky sounding model, market it as such, then use the narrative to regulate open source models and dig your regulatory moat. Notice the emphasis on "foreign nationals" here.
2. Likely: Dario has a meeting at the White House this next week (confirmed by Trump this week), and this is being used to get leverage over him.
3. Uncertain: Altman has closer connections to the Trump regime and is pulling in favors to level the playing field and slow down competition.
Regardless, This is a win for Anthropic and Dario.
1. This will jump start a more serious discussion of regulation around LLMs (which are ultimately useless, regulation is just there to make them more money).
2. They can then only serve these models at their high, usage based pricing and bleed less money while serving up tons of interest because people are going to want to pay more for the "spooking banned model".
3. This will probably come with the perks of verifying everyone's identity who uses it (to comply with no "foreign nationals rule). I'll leave that up to your imagination for how that's beneficial to all the powers that be, including Anthropic. I expect this to be used as an excuse for pushing ID requirements across the AI product landscape.
4. There will be a more serious discussion about sanctioning Chinese AI labs, expect that to start happening very soon.
Either way, its all dumb. Don't use an LLM to do your work for you and save your brain. Your brain is literally atrophying by using these models the way most of you guys do. You don't need them.
This is horseshit
I’ve never used Claude. Why not? Because Claude’s free tier was even worse than Grok! DeepSeek’s free tier is much better. Also, the fact that Claude was hyped on HN like Rust and Go made me suspicious. Why the hard sell and the non-stop promotional effort? I’m mostly interested in scientific programming, the Python and C and C++ seems to work fine, and oh look, Julia!
And LLMs? I’m just going to run open source models on local hardware, it all seems like the 1980s with compilers. Why not just submit by prompts to a high quality model running on so-so-hardware overnight, like the devops cycle with compiling a big codebase? And oh look, nobody pays for compilers anymore, who compiles their code in the cloud?
The funniest part of all of this is that the very people hyping all this - they’re the ones that AI could most easily replace. They have zero specific detailed knowledge - they just orchestrate. Agents are great at orchestration, right? But then, who needs the shareholders, anyway.
These companies have a giant budget for promotion. So, in an open forum, I would be suspicious that they're not paying to get the attention they want.
Does this mean an entire generation of developers effectively stops doing work, at least temporarily?
> If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.
Good. 4.8 is good enough.
After using Fable it's not..
I felt this way about Sonnet 4.5 too, but it would be hard to go back to it now.
I love 4.8 but it's insufficient for the tasks I want to run.
Guess I'll find something else to work on.
What kind of tasks if you don’t mind me asking?!