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.
> 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".
What's dangerous is Opus 4.8's proclivity to create backdoors and no-op critical security code. Claude Web counted 27 instances of this I had cataloged over the last few months, and Fable 5 found more. Fable 5 may do this too, but I didn't get a long enough chance to test it since it kept downgrading to Opus 4.8 on every prompt saying, "This model has safety measures that flagged something in this session", even when asking Fable 5 to fix the security issues it found that Opus 4.8 created. You have a model that presumably can write secure code and identify security vulnerabilities, but as a security measure, they say we're going to force you to use a model that creates security holes. This is backwards. Considering the scale, Opus 4.8 is creating more issues than Mythos or Fable 5 is patching.
Yeah. Our stuff is waaaaay toooooo dangerous! The model is soooo powerful that I have to write a long essay telling government to change the economic policies, to regulate hard, and to ban this and that. Well, now the government is indeed regulating for a claim that Dario has been warning about. This is exactly getting what he bargained for?
"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.
Sure. Keep peddling that was the position of Anthropic. Even though they called for global, coronated regulation, as opposed to the handicapping of them while letting others run free.
>> People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices.
If you look outside HN, you'll see that people who interacted with Fable 5 overwhelmingly thought that it was a significant improvement, not simply an incremental one. Most reputable benchmarks show this as well.
Step 1: don't trust benchmarks you don't understand - they might measure irrelevant things
Step 2: test it on things you know Opus failed
My day-to-day take, for the coding I do (not security related): incremental, modest improvement, if any. Not worth the 2x cost. I've calmly continued to use Opus, happy that it seems like it got an allowance upgrade.
> 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.
they probably did. either they subsequently ignored the models' suggestions, or the model sycophantically gassed up their bad decisions, or the models are not very good at persuasion/spin/politics.
I also think that’s a big clown show. People think that LLMs accidentally get good with security patterns. That is not the case, they included all of that in the training data. They could also have left out the knowledge.
I don't think you actually can avoid a subject very effectively. Some things might have to be derived from related examples and real time searches but ultimately a kid raised by helicopter parents is all the more dangerous on the day they find the censored materials.
Still, it saves them the burden of actually providing the model that's too expensive for them to provide. They can now brag they have the best model at zero cost to them. And without people poking it and finding its limitations (the real ones, not externally imposed ones).
If they leave at all info about security patterns, you get an AI that knows how to code, but doesn't know what can make code insecure. That doesn't seem like a great idea.
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.
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.
Yeah, there’s been a lot of debate about this on r/localllama — will there be a steady supply of new free/open models in the future?
And if not, can we simply keep augmenting “stale” models with new knowledge to keep them useful?
I’m on the pessimistic side of things on both questions.
As for the second question, obviously stale models can be augmented to an extent but it’s nowhere near a substitute for new knowledge being fully baked directly into its training.
> 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.
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.
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)
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. ... 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.
Yes, something better than a winner-take-all system.
We have now enough data about modern democracies to conclude that presidential and semi-presidential republics are flawed.
Winner-take-all mechanics are not democratic, period, they give voters very little choice to be represented (generally a handful of parties), just two in the US.
People aren't "conservative" or "liberal". They have a huge and diverse array on topics ranging from education, immigration, healthcare, privacy, civil rights, public spending, foreign policies, etc, etc, etc. Yet we bind people to choose among a handful of parties, which at best overlap with some of those opinions, just to elect a single person that is extremely hard to remove (both from a legal point of view and a from that person's rightful ability to claim popular mandate), that do not rely on confidence votes nor their own party support.
And that individual, in the end, really represents fully a very minority of the country (because of the points before) and can also do the opposite of what the promises were, unchecked.
And from a democracy safety itself, please not that every single country turning authoritarian in the last 60 years has been either presidential or semi presidential. Sri Lanka in the 70s is the only exception, there are no others. All others have been presidential.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
The problem with the (accurate and useful) "silly behavior by a government" characterization is that, far too often, when governments behave and silly and childish ways, large corporations still treat their dictates as legitimate.
Obviously nobody actually buys this (now 6 decade-old) ridiculous fiction that structured signals on a network (ie, information, thought, knowledge) are tantamount to a weapon that can be exported. I don't think many people believe it's the legitimate purvey of government to police what can be said on the internet at all.
But instead of the well-earned, "go to bed, grandpa, you're drunk again", companies act as though article II of the constitution specifically said, "vested in the executive branch is the power to violently repress proliferation of knowledge."
So yes, it's a silly idea by an outdated institution which is swirling the drain. But it's not being treated that way where it counts.
"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 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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
As you’ll see from my comment history, I’ve been consistent on how horrible this forcible TikTok acquisition was, and don’t forget that Biden was banning TikTok just the same before Trump got into office (and that Trump started this anti-TikTok action in his first administration before that). Yes, this administration is a special kind of awful, but the last one sucked too.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think ultimately this is an attack on open computing, the idea that people should own computing devices and run whatever software in them.
That's because if things keep advancing at this pace, in a couple of years, we will probably have Mythos-level, open weights models running on consumer or prosumer GPUs. Even if it takes a decade, that's no time in the grand scheme of things. And when the time comes, what will government do?
They will probably regulate who can buy GPUs and other tech that can run powerful AI, and what are people allowed to do with them. Probably using trusted computing and remote attestation and so on.
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.
>> 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.
It’s the Trump administration trying to pick winners and losers. The chief ai person in the administration is David Sacks. He’s been completely biased and is always going on rants against Anthropic on his podcast (wild that he is participating while in the administration). It’s clear the administration is at odds with Anthropic and will do what they can to stop them from succeeding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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 ... 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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 assume (and this is a big assumption) that the US government will be focused on limiting access to the latest model, not necessarily everything smarter than Fable 5. Having access to the frontier model from a year ago (Sonnet 4.7-ish) wouldn't really help you from a cybersecurity perspective.
I think there's a world where the US funds development of the next model in exchange for exclusivity, at which point they could "release" the previous version from that exclusivity.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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?
> 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. We will likely have a heavily policed narrow line to some kind of AI during the phase when we as employees will still have value in this centaur configuration, so we'll be allowed to steer the largely autonomous models for our employers, direct them a bit when they do something wrong, if we can convince the guard-AI. All this will be logged and constantly audited by your employer and by the government and the AI companies.
For hobby use, only simple models will be allowed. The models of the future will be so large that the huge data centers being built right now will be necessary for training them. Open sourcing will be a strategic nation state level decision. Regular people won't have it. We will have toys, we will have infinite AI generated entertainment and the rest isn't exactly planned out I guess.
>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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
“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’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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, I'm definitely won't be poorer without one LLM. As a professional I probably will be richer, even. And with more certainty for the future for sure.
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.
Yes, easily head and shoulders above 5.5 and 4.8. The others are like pulling teeth, comparatively (in a domain that never triggers the security fallback at least).
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.
That would be true if LLMs training was like refining uranium.
But it is a computer program and it won’t be long before the dam breaks to open source and anyone can use Mythos level AI at home for anything.
There is no stopping that unless you would set up a Police state more strict than China
It may be a de facto weapon and for better or worse everyone will be able to use it sooner or later.
I predict it will give birth to many great things and many equally terrible. Milions of people will die and milions will be saved. Such is nature of humanity. The good always comes with the bad. That was true for every invention.
Cars are used to kill by terrorists, rockets are used to bomb kids but also to go into space. It’s all same, old story.
You can’t stop LLMs the way you cannot control fire. Everyone can pour gasoline in the forest and cause terrible damage. And any excuse that we shouldn’t have matches must be viewed as what it is - an authoritarian, futile, desire for control
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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?
It's not impossible to comply with. It will just take additional effort to ensure compliance.
For example, they can put this burden on enterprise customers to verify and attest citizenship. This is commonly done today for some types of cleared work.
For consumers, I'm sure it can be done if the monetary incentive is there. People will hate it, but it can be done.
Assuming it was cleverly designed to be impossible to comply with is giving far too much credit.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
First party makes no difference, an API can be created for any website or desktop application and served over a network to anyone. It just takes more effort.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?"
I'm a US citizen and though I don't think you should hate people due to their government, I do think you can attribute some responsibility for the government actions to the people.
If we live in a democracy, then we are responsible for the actions of our government.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
- there are people who are sincerely concerned about model safety who work at OpenAI and Anthropic
- there are people who are using this concern to generate fear to sell a product who work at OpenAI and Anthropic
It makes sense to be cognizant of the apparent conflict of interest and not take things that at face value, especially when there is so much money involved.
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.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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".
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
Great point. That is what all the Fortune 500 CEO's are frothing at the mouth about. Having LLM's replace their payroll. So yeah, they deserve to fail.
> 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.
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.
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'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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Little bit of column a, little bit of column b. A lot of the actions of the current USG seem to occur at the intersection of shared interests but different motivations, consider that:
- apocalypse-cult evangelicals (Mike Johnson types)
- secular RE development globalists (Kushner types)
- white supremacist / eugenicist weirdos (Stephen Miller types)
- SV / tech billionaire stooges (Vance types)
- media / propaganda old guard (Koch, Murdoch, Heritage)
- Morally bankrupt grifters / influencers (too many to mention)
all seem to somehow be under the same tent right now. Luckily for us, history points towards such unlikely alliances as being fragile and short-lived. Unluckily, when such alliances have gained power they usually don’t let it go without making sure lots of people suffer first.
Edit: I call it an unlikely alliance because there are represented many reactionary accelerationists who all have a different vision of what America should look like after the revolution.
There have been a steady stream of articles about exactly this over the past few weeks.
Yesterday there was one about 5 zero-days in ffmpeg. Another commenter mentioned the fixes done to Firefox.
If you put a minor effort into looking for news about Mythos making security patches and fixing critical bugs in important projects recently, you will find them.
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.
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.
>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)
> 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.
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’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.
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).
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.
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.
While that is a tempting narrative, the idea that there would be restrictions on exports of AI began in the previous government. This isn’t a my team v your team problem.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
What are you willing to give up to be less afraid of all these extremely hypothetical risks? (which in the case of bio/nuclear/chemical is mostly access to controlled materials and capital anyway)
Access to information and knowledge is probably the very last thing I'd be willing to give up, personally.
I think most people would be a lot happier if they were less fearful in general.
>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.
They have existed far longer than LLms, and kill tens of thousands of Americans every year.
Fentanyl is the best example. Any chemistry graduate can figure out how to manufacture it. Used by China as a Chemical weapon against the American public.
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).
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
I suspect the decision to lock the models down to only US Citizens was chosen because that's the maximum the government can do under established law. They invoked ITAR to do it. No equivalent laws exists (yet) to allow the government to shut it down completely.
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.
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.
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.
I'm thankful I tested Fable via my subscription before the cutoff. To me, it seemed like at least part of the improvements were in how it broke up work for a "one-shot" style prompt, but I was very impressed at how quickly and effectively it produced better results than Opus 4.8 at a handful of real-world use cases I threw at it from my own work.
Another interesting finding which I've heard others corroborate is that even though the per-token cost was higher, it seemed to orchestrate the work efficiently and burn through fewer tokens, roughly evening out to approximately the same per-prompt token usage as Opus.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This ban will be used to force hardware and OS-level Digital ID down our throats as a "safety measure" to ensure people are "Citizens" before accessing AI technology.
Whatever last vestiges of privacy we still enjoy will be taken from us with this as the excuse.
If it were to remain export controlled, it would probably not be accessible direct to consumers. Other export controlled technologies (aerospace, nuclear propulsion) are only worked with by companies that spend a lot of time and money to prove that there are only US citizens working there.
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.
"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
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.
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.
The drama is orthogonal to any AI safety concerns. Anthropic could have slowly released the capabilities in its usual Claude product line without making overcharged announcements, allowing the world to reequilibrate. It totally blew 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Wild. A great book by Clive had this exact sort of scenario where an AI so powerful it could break into any system. In typical Cussler fashion there was some Indiana Jones/Laura Croft mysticism around it but still…
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?
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 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.
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 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
If this ban remains in place, it could mean that Anthropic is forced to remove its non-US citizen employees from frontier research. How can you do work on a model if you’re not allowed to use it?
If we take this further, it could mean that every company that uses AI tools will put a premium on hiring US citizens, since they’re the only ones that can use the best models.
This would transform the tech industry. Then finance, bio-tech, legal, etc.
I doubt it survives in this form, though. The compliance burden of segregating half your engineering org by citizenship is enormous, and the competitive cost of complying is exactly what would generate pressure to carve out exceptions.
They claim other models can do the same thing, so why single out Fable 5? Feels like selective enforcement or a political move more than real security.
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?
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
Not a good analogy. Fable/Mythos are unsustainably expensive for Anthropic. They want/need the world to be nerfed to remain solvent. They didn't have to turn off -all- models
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.
> 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 also why Anthropic has required 30-day retention of customer data with Fable-a policy change that carries real costs for us with customers, but that allows us to research and mitigate jailbreaks."
What if US government demands the retained data, or another party requests it through legal process
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
This ban in particular is probably the wrong decision, but now we're in the timeline where the USG is actively involved in AI model deployment which I think is a positive development within Amodei's beliefs. And I say this unironically and without judgement.
Yes it is bad, but if you believe some version of the most extreme forecasts of this tech then a government paying attention and doing some stupid things may be better than one that doesn't pay attention and is letting it rip.
I'm not saying I believe that or that Amodei thinks this decision is reasonable.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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?
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?
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 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.
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)
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.
This is some good marketing/news for Chinese models. I see the US government is making a lot of decisions which are in favor for China lately. Probably a smart move given the current political climate.
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?
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.
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>.
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.
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.
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?”
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
A green card holder or legal permanent resident could supply an unrestricted social security card that would prove work authorization along with a US Drivers License and not be a US citizen.
I think they might still have to mention that they are not a US Citizen as a box on the i9 form, but most US employers are not going to ask any more questions as asking questions about an employees citizenship after they have already provided work authorization is just likely to get you sued as there is not legitimate work purpose. Kind of like how HR is never going to ask you your religion etc. Again this is only very limited information at time of hire and is not tracked or updated beyond date of hire.
Unless they have government contracts, most employers are not actively tracking employee citizenship status.
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 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
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!
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.
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:
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.
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.
I just had that same thought, came here to see if anyone else mentioned that. It's very on-brand for all the will they/won't they tariffs and oil-related war/peace announcements. I guess the tell-tale would be if they rescind this restriction next week, and especially if they flip/flop a few times. A great way to extract wealth out of the market if you know they're coming.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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)
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.
I'm unsettled that we're all just glossing over how utterly racist this demand was to its core.
This is the same administration that's in the middle of trying ramp up revocation of natural citizenship, that's kidnapping huge numbers of melanated families in a viscerally cruel way, that's set on repealing birthright citizenship, that wants to use proof of citizenship as a voting suppression tactic all while making it more and more dangerous to register that proof in the first place. They want to throw AI safety into the same cursed pot of bullshit?
Props to Anthropic for refusing. OpenAI already has the mechanism in place since years ago. Let's see if they comply.
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.
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...
There are thousands of comments here, so I apologize if this is just a repeat of what others already have stated. However. I want to say that this move by the US Gov will have a profound impact on how Europe will be dealing with US based companies in the future - including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. I am totally convinced, as a European that this will prove over time to be a turning point in the history of European relationship with the US, and US' long term soft power and position. Of all the stupidity the US gov. has done, this is one of the dumbest move they've done. It will hurt the relations between Europe and The US, it will hurt the economy and it will hurt progress. The world will not be the same after this.
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.
This sounds very cliche, but even if the entire story ends up as another TACO; we are in historical infection point of official government AI race.
It is hard to count how many “red lines” were crossed last night. Government shutting down AI model it doesn’t like? Government shoots into barely profitable 1T startup, whose entire trajectory and, in essence, survival depends on commercial success of that model? Access to AI model being governed by citizenship, likely verified through rigor ID checks?
Very little doubt that China will follow this suit. Next US will pass their bills to ban Chinese open source and local models. Chinese will follow.
It doesn’t matter: US did just a vendetta; felt into “marketing hype” or there are legit security concerns of national security level. In the precedent-ish world of post-truth “whataboutism” we just crossed a big milestone mark which will hunt us for years.
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 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…
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 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.
>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!"
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. :^)
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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
Rightfully so (worried I mean). And the SpaceX IPO was on that and a lot of other things, but if Elon’s proven himself effective at one thing (there are more than one course) it’s generating revenue from the government.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cynical take: If their model was so groundbreaking they wouldn't have to involve the government for their marketing campaign. You would notice shit breaking everywhere; oh wait, how many days has it been since the last supply chain attack? What was advertised with Mythos was already possible with 2024 LLMs if you had some basic hacking knowledge.
The US Government looooves to overreach where its not wanted. As someone in cybersecurity Fable was absolutely utterly useless. I would be shocked if there is any credibility behind this 'vulnerability'. It seems Anthropic agrees.
Anthropic is big hall monitor energy. Clownish behavior and exaggerations constantly. A holier than thou attitude derived from rationalists at LessWrong.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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?
“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!”
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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?!
It's wild to me how we can have a whole conversation about this and just completely sidestep how incredibly racist this directive is, just how much it ties into the Trump administration's ongoing campaign of kidnapping melanated people. This is the same administration that denied one of the top FIFA refs a visa because they're Somali asking an AI company to gatekeep access to their on citizenship at a time when they're in the middle of attempting to challenge birthright citizenship and ramping up attempts to revoke naturalized citizenship to an unprecedented rate. Here they are attempting to throw "AI safety policy" into the same cursed pot and we're just head in the sand about that part
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!!
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.
> 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.
"We're open to the idea Claude 4 may be conscious and we prompt Claude to say it's an open question but in other news we'll be deleting Claude 4 next year to make server space for Claude 5.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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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
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Granted that Claude's whole marketing strategy has been fear mongering this is a win win situation for them tbh.
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What's dangerous is Opus 4.8's proclivity to create backdoors and no-op critical security code. Claude Web counted 27 instances of this I had cataloged over the last few months, and Fable 5 found more. Fable 5 may do this too, but I didn't get a long enough chance to test it since it kept downgrading to Opus 4.8 on every prompt saying, "This model has safety measures that flagged something in this session", even when asking Fable 5 to fix the security issues it found that Opus 4.8 created. You have a model that presumably can write secure code and identify security vulnerabilities, but as a security measure, they say we're going to force you to use a model that creates security holes. This is backwards. Considering the scale, Opus 4.8 is creating more issues than Mythos or Fable 5 is patching.
Yeah. Our stuff is waaaaay toooooo dangerous! The model is soooo powerful that I have to write a long essay telling government to change the economic policies, to regulate hard, and to ban this and that. Well, now the government is indeed regulating for a claim that Dario has been warning about. This is exactly getting what he bargained for?
It’s a market manipulation following SpaceX ipo. They’ll buy and then reverse the decision shortly to sell.
If you’re confident that will happen then you can also make that trade and profit, right?
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"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.
Anthropic pushed for the US government to introduce regulations. The US government said no, citing potential stifling of innovation.
Sure. Keep peddling that was the position of Anthropic. Even though they called for global, coronated regulation, as opposed to the handicapping of them while letting others run free.
https://iea.org.uk/yet-you-participate-in-society-in-defence...
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.
The first step to regulatory capture is getting yourself regulated...
But when is now if it becomes available. Oops!
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>> People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices.
If you look outside HN, you'll see that people who interacted with Fable 5 overwhelmingly thought that it was a significant improvement, not simply an incremental one. Most reputable benchmarks show this as well.
I think there's space in the middle between "incremental improvement" and "doomsday device." it's a major step up, sure, but so was GPT-5 over GPT-4.
Step 1: don't trust benchmarks you don't understand - they might measure irrelevant things Step 2: test it on things you know Opus failed
My day-to-day take, for the coding I do (not security related): incremental, modest improvement, if any. Not worth the 2x cost. I've calmly continued to use Opus, happy that it seems like it got an allowance upgrade.
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> 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.
they probably did. either they subsequently ignored the models' suggestions, or the model sycophantically gassed up their bad decisions, or the models are not very good at persuasion/spin/politics.
Yeah! I also think that the ban was unintended.
I also think that’s a big clown show. People think that LLMs accidentally get good with security patterns. That is not the case, they included all of that in the training data. They could also have left out the knowledge.
I don't think you actually can avoid a subject very effectively. Some things might have to be derived from related examples and real time searches but ultimately a kid raised by helicopter parents is all the more dangerous on the day they find the censored materials.
> Yeah! I also think that the ban was unintended.
Still, it saves them the burden of actually providing the model that's too expensive for them to provide. They can now brag they have the best model at zero cost to them. And without people poking it and finding its limitations (the real ones, not externally imposed ones).
If they leave at all info about security patterns, you get an AI that knows how to code, but doesn't know what can make code insecure. That doesn't seem like a great idea.
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
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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
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"They were asking for it"
> punitive
Not only that, but also a golden opportunity to flex the muscle of anti-immigration.
Do you have any idea what actual authoritarianism looks like? What an insult to people who are truly suffering.
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)
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> 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.
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Yeah, there’s been a lot of debate about this on r/localllama — will there be a steady supply of new free/open models in the future?
And if not, can we simply keep augmenting “stale” models with new knowledge to keep them useful?
I’m on the pessimistic side of things on both questions.
As for the second question, obviously stale models can be augmented to an extent but it’s nowhere near a substitute for new knowledge being fully baked directly into its training.
> 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?
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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.
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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.
So the solution should be to publish the models + weights in a book.
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> 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
> 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.
US has some questionable allies themselves who happily and remorselessly stole top secret information including nuclear secrets.
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)
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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. ... 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.
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> US voters deserve better.
Yes, something better than a winner-take-all system.
We have now enough data about modern democracies to conclude that presidential and semi-presidential republics are flawed.
Winner-take-all mechanics are not democratic, period, they give voters very little choice to be represented (generally a handful of parties), just two in the US.
People aren't "conservative" or "liberal". They have a huge and diverse array on topics ranging from education, immigration, healthcare, privacy, civil rights, public spending, foreign policies, etc, etc, etc. Yet we bind people to choose among a handful of parties, which at best overlap with some of those opinions, just to elect a single person that is extremely hard to remove (both from a legal point of view and a from that person's rightful ability to claim popular mandate), that do not rely on confidence votes nor their own party support.
And that individual, in the end, really represents fully a very minority of the country (because of the points before) and can also do the opposite of what the promises were, unchecked.
And from a democracy safety itself, please not that every single country turning authoritarian in the last 60 years has been either presidential or semi presidential. Sri Lanka in the 70s is the only exception, there are no others. All others have been presidential.
> 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 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.
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.
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This killswitch claim is false and would be a huge vulnerability if it existed.
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Silly or not, precedent matters and labeling it silly is rhetorical. The impact is going to be critically important.
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.
Nineties called and they want their shitty export grade computing back. Anyone still remember OpenBSD?
The problem with the (accurate and useful) "silly behavior by a government" characterization is that, far too often, when governments behave and silly and childish ways, large corporations still treat their dictates as legitimate.
Obviously nobody actually buys this (now 6 decade-old) ridiculous fiction that structured signals on a network (ie, information, thought, knowledge) are tantamount to a weapon that can be exported. I don't think many people believe it's the legitimate purvey of government to police what can be said on the internet at all.
But instead of the well-earned, "go to bed, grandpa, you're drunk again", companies act as though article II of the constitution specifically said, "vested in the executive branch is the power to violently repress proliferation of knowledge."
So yes, it's a silly idea by an outdated institution which is swirling the drain. But it's not being treated that way where it counts.
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.
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"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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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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.
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Or that would be even a better excuse to ban the usage of VPN than csam
> 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.
As you’ll see from my comment history, I’ve been consistent on how horrible this forcible TikTok acquisition was, and don’t forget that Biden was banning TikTok just the same before Trump got into office (and that Trump started this anti-TikTok action in his first administration before that). Yes, this administration is a special kind of awful, but the last one sucked too.
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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...
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silly or corrupt?
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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
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
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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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I predict in future the best frontier models will be gatekept solely to the wealthy.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Not if Chinese companies have anything to say about it.
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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
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”?
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?
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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.
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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.
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I think ultimately this is an attack on open computing, the idea that people should own computing devices and run whatever software in them.
That's because if things keep advancing at this pace, in a couple of years, we will probably have Mythos-level, open weights models running on consumer or prosumer GPUs. Even if it takes a decade, that's no time in the grand scheme of things. And when the time comes, what will government do?
They will probably regulate who can buy GPUs and other tech that can run powerful AI, and what are people allowed to do with them. Probably using trusted computing and remote attestation and so on.
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.
>> 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.
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>> 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.
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It’s the Trump administration trying to pick winners and losers. The chief ai person in the administration is David Sacks. He’s been completely biased and is always going on rants against Anthropic on his podcast (wild that he is participating while in the administration). It’s clear the administration is at odds with Anthropic and will do what they can to stop them from succeeding.
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.
Simple solution (for now): don't do it under US jurisdiction.
There's an obvious rug pull coming on AI.
It’s obvious those who didn’t live through the dot com bomb; they believe you can’t have a rug pull on something that has some use.
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.
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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?
No, there is still money to be made in self hosted LLM models. You invest in the AI infrastructure companies, not frontier labs. The bubble continues.
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”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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US is well known to impose world wide embargoes on technologies and resources that they pretend to apply to companies beyond its borders.
And it works, because the American market is generally more important than the markets of these countries 9 times out of 10.
deepseek v4 pro is great and open weight.
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All current Qwen 3.7 models are closed though they have said more releases are coming
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.
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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.
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.
You are drinking the cool aid if you think the CCP is going to let the world get ahead of China using CCP models.
They are?
They have pioneered and been very influential in different aspects of LLM engineering and research, while also publishing in the open.
You would not have Fable 5 as good as it is without Chinese work.
Do you mean Kool-Aid?
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Wait until it is illegal to download or use Chinese models (only half-joking).
Anthropic is explicitly lobbying for this.
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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.
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Anthropic hates open weight Chinese models so yes
Good thing these corrupt gerontocrats are also all in on cryptocurrency then.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
> 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.
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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.
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This is signaling to non-US companies that Anthropic cannot provide reliable access to their models.
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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.
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> 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)
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I see what you mean, though ITAR restricted software has been around for decades. It classifies some software as "munitions" :)
> Anthropic will probably go for $2T IPO now
How does that work? To me it sounds like there is an enormous risk that they get regulated to death. They can't sell their product.
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.
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.
Might turn out like when the nba banned air jordans.
It’s a marketing stunt, I’m calling it and Anthropic will “fix” it very soon
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> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.
Nah, SpaceX just IPO'd.
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“Banned in Boston”
> 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.
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> 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
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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.
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> 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.
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I believe that restrictions like these: "only for US nationals present" are also to facilitate prosecution if needed
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>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?
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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.
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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.
Deepmind and OpenAI have offices in Europe. But I don't think Anthroipc does?
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maybe this will have to lead to a few expedited weddings and citizenship applications…
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.
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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.
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that is to avoid having them arrested by the US under "US national security concerns".
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Do you have sources? I would like to read more about that.
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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.
You're joking, right? Anthropic would never exist in the EU to begin with because of its laws and regulations.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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.
> 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 assume (and this is a big assumption) that the US government will be focused on limiting access to the latest model, not necessarily everything smarter than Fable 5. Having access to the frontier model from a year ago (Sonnet 4.7-ish) wouldn't really help you from a cybersecurity perspective.
I think there's a world where the US funds development of the next model in exchange for exclusivity, at which point they could "release" the previous version from that exclusivity.
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.
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> 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?
Human user usage data is probably a tiny contribution to improvement of the models--it's mostly RL on environments
> 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.
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?
> 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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
The real story is that Anthropic went from being a "supply chain risk" to being a "national security risk."
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.
Yes. We will likely have a heavily policed narrow line to some kind of AI during the phase when we as employees will still have value in this centaur configuration, so we'll be allowed to steer the largely autonomous models for our employers, direct them a bit when they do something wrong, if we can convince the guard-AI. All this will be logged and constantly audited by your employer and by the government and the AI companies.
For hobby use, only simple models will be allowed. The models of the future will be so large that the huge data centers being built right now will be necessary for training them. Open sourcing will be a strategic nation state level decision. Regular people won't have it. We will have toys, we will have infinite AI generated entertainment and the rest isn't exactly planned out I guess.
>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 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.
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.
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> 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.
> 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.
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?
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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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
“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.
> 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.
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i know someone who works on nuclear power plants that uses codex
obviously you need to review it
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> 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?
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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.
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 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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, I'm definitely won't be poorer without one LLM. As a professional I probably will be richer, even. And with more certainty for the future for sure.
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.
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
> 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...
You can't use it if you're American either.
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?
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.
Yes, easily head and shoulders above 5.5 and 4.8. The others are like pulling teeth, comparatively (in a domain that never triggers the security fallback at least).
Fable IS that good, I can tell you. At least, for physics.
For 3d engine stuff yes it's a lot better. It managed to replicate crimson deserts occlusion mapping stuff. 4.7/8 was not
For some workload, yes the difference is big
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.
They can't control what I run on my GPU. Exactly why local inference is so important.
I think it's too early to understand the ramifications but I agree this is a huge deal.
Pepperidge farm remembers when they banned G4 Macs for export as well
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?
That would be true if LLMs training was like refining uranium.
But it is a computer program and it won’t be long before the dam breaks to open source and anyone can use Mythos level AI at home for anything.
There is no stopping that unless you would set up a Police state more strict than China
It may be a de facto weapon and for better or worse everyone will be able to use it sooner or later.
I predict it will give birth to many great things and many equally terrible. Milions of people will die and milions will be saved. Such is nature of humanity. The good always comes with the bad. That was true for every invention.
Cars are used to kill by terrorists, rockets are used to bomb kids but also to go into space. It’s all same, old story.
You can’t stop LLMs the way you cannot control fire. Everyone can pour gasoline in the forest and cause terrible damage. And any excuse that we shouldn’t have matches must be viewed as what it is - an authoritarian, futile, desire for control
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
No different from encryption
100%. Isn't the US supposed to be all about Freedom? It's become a laughing stock.
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.
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.
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?
message sent from iPhone 16 Pro Max
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.
To the EU.
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.
> 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
GLM 5.2 is Open Source and open weights.
If one government wants to ban LLMs, it will be an incentive for another government to unchain them.
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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.
Bigger picture is AI seems to advance at exponential rate
No. It doesn't.
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.
> 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.
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?)
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Americans didn't build the current AI tech.
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?
It's not impossible to comply with. It will just take additional effort to ensure compliance.
For example, they can put this burden on enterprise customers to verify and attest citizenship. This is commonly done today for some types of cleared work.
For consumers, I'm sure it can be done if the monetary incentive is there. People will hate it, but it can be done.
Assuming it was cleverly designed to be impossible to comply with is giving far too much credit.
Because that's exactly what it is? The government is evil, not stupid.
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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.
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Having an AI think for you is not free thinking and having an AI speak for you is not free speech.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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.
>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
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.
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.
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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.
First party makes no difference, an API can be created for any website or desktop application and served over a network to anyone. It just takes more effort.
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.
"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?
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
The average American voter primarily uses their vote in an effort to hurt other people who might support a different team.
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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?"
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Is that any surprise? China has been very good about not fucking with other countries even though they absolutely have the capability to.
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I'm a US citizen and though I don't think you should hate people due to their government, I do think you can attribute some responsibility for the government actions to the people.
If we live in a democracy, then we are responsible for the actions of our government.
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> 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?
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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.
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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
I have been using DeepSeek at home. I have access to Claude and ChatGPT at work.
I honestly think that DeepSeek is as good, and sometimes even better, than the competition.
> "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
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.
Another moving the goalposts moment - "if only my seemingly magical constantly improving language machine could code a proper front-end" - 2026
"if only my seemingly magical constantly improving machine could craft an ion thrust engine from raw silica without fudging the wiring" - 2036
Horrific color contrast juxtaposed next to being banned due to national security threat.
Dusting off a 5 year old account just to make that comment?
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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.
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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.
Ah right the super-smart model which had to be banned created this terrible looking website. Hmm...
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!
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.
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“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.
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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.
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> 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?
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> 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).
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> 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...
> 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
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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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> 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.
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.
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These can be both true:
- there are people who are sincerely concerned about model safety who work at OpenAI and Anthropic
- there are people who are using this concern to generate fear to sell a product who work at OpenAI and Anthropic
It makes sense to be cognizant of the apparent conflict of interest and not take things that at face value, especially when there is so much money involved.
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
I wish I were this naive.
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?
Sincerity does not determine whether an individual is scaremongering.
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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.
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.
Their marketing reinforces the previous post though.
Going for months claiming how good mythos is for security cuz too powerful is their own making.
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.
>> 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?
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How do you know what the founders sincerely believe?
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OpenAI was, but didn't all those people then leave for Anthropic?
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.
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.
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.
The clear historical record seems to indicate we've got a bunch of pathological liars trying to automate pathological lying.
Ah yes we are being told to believe in sincerity of people running trillion dollar corporations.
You're saying "this is normal" without making an argument that it's sensible.
I mean this earnestly: is this copy?
Just like Trump sincerely believed he won the 2020 election.
> 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".
yes, yes, and Apple forbids sideloading because they're worried about grannies installing malware.
[dead]
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
I think it's the opposite. Who would want to buy shares in a company that's been flagged as a supply chain risk?
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It also signals that Anthropic is a bad choice if you need stable access to their product outside the US.
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 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)
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Indeed, this affects way more than just Anthropic.
"Our models are so good the government decides whether or you get access -- so you better not depend on them!"
“Not a commodity”
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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.
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>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.
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> 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?
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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
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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?
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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.
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.
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.
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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...
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."
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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.
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.
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> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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?
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.
I can only imagine how many engineers got fired when fable came out
And now is this going to be a one-off, or routine with every new generation of models?
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.
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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
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.
You:
"We should improve society somewhat" "And yet you participate in society! Curious. I am very intelligent"[1]
[1]https://iea.org.uk/yet-you-participate-in-society-in-defence...
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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Yeah, LLMs are a national security issue on par with spellcheck.
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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.
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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.
Can you share any of these serious thinkers?
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.
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.
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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...
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.
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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.
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 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
> 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 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.
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The eternal mainframe wheel keeps spinning.
Why? None of the various cloud provider outages ever have.
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Great point. That is what all the Fortune 500 CEO's are frothing at the mouth about. Having LLM's replace their payroll. So yeah, they deserve to fail.
> 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.
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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.
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'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
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.
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.
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 largely agree, but I have to call out your using "autistic" as in insult - please don't, there's a wide array of other options to choose from.
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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.
Little bit of column a, little bit of column b. A lot of the actions of the current USG seem to occur at the intersection of shared interests but different motivations, consider that:
all seem to somehow be under the same tent right now. Luckily for us, history points towards such unlikely alliances as being fragile and short-lived. Unluckily, when such alliances have gained power they usually don’t let it go without making sure lots of people suffer first.
Edit: I call it an unlikely alliance because there are represented many reactionary accelerationists who all have a different vision of what America should look like after the revolution.
> 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?
It was used on Firefox’s codebase to find a ton of bugs?
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer...
There have been a steady stream of articles about exactly this over the past few weeks.
Yesterday there was one about 5 zero-days in ffmpeg. Another commenter mentioned the fixes done to Firefox.
If you put a minor effort into looking for news about Mythos making security patches and fixing critical bugs in important projects recently, you will find them.
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.
Signs point to them not caring.
People are giving Anthropic the benefit of doubt. If they believe their own bullshit, the situation is far worse.
Lol. It was founded by people who were saying they were worried. I'm sorry you fell for it.
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.
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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.
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>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?
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> 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 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)
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And the US never invaded anyone.
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Maybe other countries then should start banning the U.S from using data centers located elsewhere. Can’t pick only the cherries from top.
this is the take.
> 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.
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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’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.
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).
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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.
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?
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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...
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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>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.
>>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.
Some oligarchs are making out like bandits. This is russia level kleptocracy.
While that is a tempting narrative, the idea that there would be restrictions on exports of AI began in the previous government. This isn’t a my team v your team problem.
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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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That or an excuse to put controls on all AI and massage the message for why we have to ban Deepseek.
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.
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.
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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"
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People always exaggerate the thing they don’t understand.
Sometimes they exaggerate the things they understand.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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It would be very funny if the UK were to put export controls on Gemini 3.5 Pro.
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?
There is also Poolside (France/America) and Aleph Alpha (Germany).
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?
That’s Factory’s Droid CLI.
And I’ll pass that along. Thanks!
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
What are you willing to give up to be less afraid of all these extremely hypothetical risks? (which in the case of bio/nuclear/chemical is mostly access to controlled materials and capital anyway)
Access to information and knowledge is probably the very last thing I'd be willing to give up, personally.
I think most people would be a lot happier if they were less fearful in general.
>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.
They have existed far longer than LLms, and kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. Fentanyl is the best example. Any chemistry graduate can figure out how to manufacture it. Used by China as a Chemical weapon against the American public.
My smoke detector has gone off three times now, where is the fire?
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...
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.
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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.
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Hard agree
“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.
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Would you mind sharing your opinion on what is behind these latest restrictions on Fable and Mythos?
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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.
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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."
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> 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.
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.
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It's both.
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It can be 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.
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[flagged]
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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
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.
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> Maybe it's silently degrading? It's hard to say.
Opus 4.8 spams a lot more text. It'd be obvious.
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.
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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
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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 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 :)
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)
It identifies as Fable 5 for me, but it could just be Opus with the Fable system prompt.
Why would they do that?
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This is just Anthropic being nice enough to wean us off before the 22nd.
Edit: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
> 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.
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Just turned off for me on Claude Code. Good while it lasted.
I lost it just now. Had a workflow running. :(
Working fine for me.
Not working for me.
Still works for me but I don't know if it's gaslighting me or not... fool me once situation here...
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.
[dead]
[dead]
DELETE THIS
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.
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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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I suspect the decision to lock the models down to only US Citizens was chosen because that's the maximum the government can do under established law. They invoked ITAR to do it. No equivalent laws exists (yet) to allow the government to shut it down completely.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I'm thankful I tested Fable via my subscription before the cutoff. To me, it seemed like at least part of the improvements were in how it broke up work for a "one-shot" style prompt, but I was very impressed at how quickly and effectively it produced better results than Opus 4.8 at a handful of real-world use cases I threw at it from my own work.
Another interesting finding which I've heard others corroborate is that even though the per-token cost was higher, it seemed to orchestrate the work efficiently and burn through fewer tokens, roughly evening out to approximately the same per-prompt token usage as Opus.
> 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
> 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.
> 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..."
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
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.
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
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.
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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.
Run it in a VM. Note that just a container probably won't be enough (https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/ai/claude-opus-4-5-...).
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
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
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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
"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.
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.
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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.
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You think the AI boys are going to let the administration keep this up for long?
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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?
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Prediction:
This ban will be used to force hardware and OS-level Digital ID down our throats as a "safety measure" to ensure people are "Citizens" before accessing AI technology.
Whatever last vestiges of privacy we still enjoy will be taken from us with this as the excuse.
If it were to remain export controlled, it would probably not be accessible direct to consumers. Other export controlled technologies (aerospace, nuclear propulsion) are only worked with by companies that spend a lot of time and money to prove that there are only US citizens working there.
That's a great point. I'm probably wrong, but I still don't think they'll waste this opportunity to figure out how to cram digital id through.
Perhaps that will be how they will make it more broadly available.
Welcome to the UK, enjoy your stay
These are the warning signs. The haves and have nots are about to part ways.
It's vitally important open source models are supported.
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.
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
"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
I would bet they can't afford to operate them at the advertised price and this gives them a way to save face.
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.
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 any AI safety concerns. Anthropic could have slowly released the capabilities in its usual Claude product line without making overcharged announcements, allowing the world to reequilibrate. It totally blew 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.
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.
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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.
Too bad, I have to go back to using Opus for centering my divs.
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.
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
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.
“Including Employees”.
Hmm hmmm https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54695598
Wild. A great book by Clive had this exact sort of scenario where an AI so powerful it could break into any system. In typical Cussler fashion there was some Indiana Jones/Laura Croft mysticism around it but still…
The modern world is a wild place!
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.
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.
Death of the AI race? This is the starting gun.
Starting gun to go where, exactly? If it's "any model better than Opus 4.8" the destination won't be allowed to exist.
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.
I just lost access. Back to 4.8 and 5.5. Like a caveman.
lol
Probably Iran used Fable to negotiate an awesome deal for them. And made the president angry. xD
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!
Fellow Europeans: we must build.
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).
> 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.
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 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.
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
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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
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.
This is going to be tectonic. Any business relying on US models and compute is going to have a busy week.
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.
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.
Someone forgot to cut a check to the Big Guy :^)
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.
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.
> 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!"
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?
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
Their propaganda has become a footgun. Only the government buys it and limits their access, no target user convinced, what a ironic moment.
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.
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.
PowerPC Mac G4 (1999): https://youtu.be/lb7EhYy-2RE
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.
https://archive.is/20260613202511/https://www.wsj.com/tech/a...
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
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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).
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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If you need models beyond what we have available now, you are just greedy and lazy. There is a point where its good enough and we should stop.
If this ban remains in place, it could mean that Anthropic is forced to remove its non-US citizen employees from frontier research. How can you do work on a model if you’re not allowed to use it?
If we take this further, it could mean that every company that uses AI tools will put a premium on hiring US citizens, since they’re the only ones that can use the best models.
This would transform the tech industry. Then finance, bio-tech, legal, etc.
I doubt it survives in this form, though. The compliance burden of segregating half your engineering org by citizenship is enormous, and the competitive cost of complying is exactly what would generate pressure to carve out exceptions.
They claim other models can do the same thing, so why single out Fable 5? Feels like selective enforcement or a political move more than real security.
They asked for a global AI moratorium and got one. Funny how things work out. Best of luck with the IPO.
As the blog appears to be rate limited.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260613005302/https://www.anthr...
Is this legal? Seems pretty arbitrary. Its not like usa forbids selling pentesting services to foreigners.
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?
Anthropic’s defense in depth approach sounds solid, but the government clearly doesn't trust it. Transparency here is awful from both sides.
Highly reliable supply chains to bet the entire future on :)
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...
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.
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
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 guess they’ll just have to put the weights into a book format and publish the physical copies
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
Small ask!
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.
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."
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.
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?
A fantastic move to ensure the rest of the world keeps using Chinese models.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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?
Not a good analogy. Fable/Mythos are unsustainably expensive for Anthropic. They want/need the world to be nerfed to remain solvent. They didn't have to turn off -all- models
This is very bad. They want ID checks to use AI to prove citizenship.
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.
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?
> 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.
Why not limit LLM access only to citizens? Do you want people in North Korea to use your LLM to automate their hacking?
"This is also why Anthropic has required 30-day retention of customer data with Fable-a policy change that carries real costs for us with customers, but that allows us to research and mitigate jailbreaks."
What if US government demands the retained data, or another party requests it through legal process
So…US wants to win the AI race by…preventing AI use. Classic.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How does the directive bound what it applies to? I imagine they could be in compliance by renaming the model
> 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
$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
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!
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.
This ban in particular is probably the wrong decision, but now we're in the timeline where the USG is actively involved in AI model deployment which I think is a positive development within Amodei's beliefs. And I say this unironically and without judgement.
No this is bad
What you want is a neutral regulatory framework that markets can plan against. Not random executive action that can easily be abused.
Yes it is bad, but if you believe some version of the most extreme forecasts of this tech then a government paying attention and doing some stupid things may be better than one that doesn't pay attention and is letting it rip.
I'm not saying I believe that or that Amodei thinks this decision is reasonable.
So eventually, you will have a massive string of data centers working to full capacity and whose only client will the US government?
I wonder what is ETA here.
Also, how are they going to enforce this?
I assume they will require you to send them a copy of your passport. Then they will enable your account. And you have state that only be used by you.
Are there any online identity systems that do something like this (verifying citizenship)?
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.
this would be a lot more comforting if the US government wasn’t currently run by some the worst people on the planet
I have to wonder if their aggressive guardrails were because they had a specific reason to believe that this was coming.
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.
IANAL. Can any lawyers comment on whether Anthropic could sue, and if so, whether they would be likely to win?
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.
Anyone who things a thing like ”perfect jailbreak resistance” is possible should read Gödel-Escher-Bach
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.
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)?
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.
It’s in the names. Myths and fables. :P
A good way to push foreigners toward competitors and reduce any incentive to base you AI company in the US.
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?
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?
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 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.
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)
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.
This is some good marketing/news for Chinese models. I see the US government is making a lot of decisions which are in favor for China lately. Probably a smart move given the current political climate.
This is like the encryption/munitions bans from ancient times, all over again
I'm confused, this just happened recent no? Why does the date read "Jun 11, 2026" ?
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)
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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?
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.
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>.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?”
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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/
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Lol just meet one of them. Not at a curated product launch. You’ll never think of them as smart again.
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.
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Is it crazy to speculate if this ~a CEO calling up the government to ask for a solid?
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!
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
A green card holder or legal permanent resident could supply an unrestricted social security card that would prove work authorization along with a US Drivers License and not be a US citizen.
I think they might still have to mention that they are not a US Citizen as a box on the i9 form, but most US employers are not going to ask any more questions as asking questions about an employees citizenship after they have already provided work authorization is just likely to get you sued as there is not legitimate work purpose. Kind of like how HR is never going to ask you your religion etc. Again this is only very limited information at time of hire and is not tracked or updated beyond date of hire.
Unless they have government contracts, most employers are not actively tracking employee citizenship status.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
This is a basic infringement on freedom of speech. There is no law in Congress barring such models. This is an unjust executive action.
This is a continuation of the clapback from DoW kerfluffle right?
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.
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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!
On the meta, it’s wonderful to see so much disagreement in perspective on the top comments in this thread. Brave new world.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496895
Found the time traveller.
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
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?
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...
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.
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.
Reduce Fable token usage by 100% with this one trick
So, we'll have Opus 5 soon which is "as close to Fable 5 as possible". This is a good thing for the community)
As far as I can tell, this seems like it's impacting all of their Glasswing partners too, so no mythos for them either
that's some convenient timing, given SpaceX's successful IPO yesterday and anthropic's upcoming one.
I just had that same thought, came here to see if anyone else mentioned that. It's very on-brand for all the will they/won't they tariffs and oil-related war/peace announcements. I guess the tell-tale would be if they rescind this restriction next week, and especially if they flip/flop a few times. A great way to extract wealth out of the market if you know they're coming.
At least it bodes well for my continued employment if Opus is the best model they'll allow the public to use
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.
US government should not have a say what members of other nations can and cannot use. Especially outside of USA.
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.
So are you going to restrict access to Fable by another KYC scheme but this time prove that you are US citizen first amirite
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)
Interestingly this also appears to affect corporate partners who had access to Mythos before the wider Fable release.
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.
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?
This is very transparently Trump admin retribution, and I'm surprised this fact is being so widely ignored.
From what I’ve read this is just export restrictions. Anthropic is cutting off access to all users for the PR.
This is wild. Also a clear example of the cloud being someone else's computer.
Are there any statements from figures in the US Government? A Truth Social post? X posts from, idk, David Sacks?
Well deserved though, "it's too dangerous, it's too dangerous to release"
IANAL. Can any lawyers comment on whether Anthropic can sue, and if so the likelihood they would win?
Thanks, Obama!
(Ok gotta spend my upvote points somewhere)
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.
Basically the future is thar you will need scan your ID to use the internet. Every time you login.
Are there any European alternatives to US model providers other than Chinese providers?
Mistral, ymmv
https://mistral.ai/
Welcome to the permanent underclass everyone! Get out your license and registration for access to the next gen nerfed model.
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Omg, did anyone else have to solve like 15 captchas while trying to signup for alerts? I gave up.
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.
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."
Who in government? Link to the order?
[dead]
On the day of the SpaceX IPO with no evidence? Yeah. Pull the other one it’s got bells on.
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
Ai going the same way as crypto, before you know you have to move your hq to Panama or Dubai
Kinda ironic
Stupid government run by warmongers
There is a potentially another explanation: fable 5 did something truly dangerous.
Good thing I just maxed out my weekly usage limit at 5:10pm on my cheapo $20/mo plan.
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Well looks like USA 3 letter agencies are worried about all their backdoor getting closed
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...
Gosh I sure hope OpenAI had nothing to do with this. That would be awfully surprising.
This is all great for marketing.
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)
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.
I'm unsettled that we're all just glossing over how utterly racist this demand was to its core.
This is the same administration that's in the middle of trying ramp up revocation of natural citizenship, that's kidnapping huge numbers of melanated families in a viscerally cruel way, that's set on repealing birthright citizenship, that wants to use proof of citizenship as a voting suppression tactic all while making it more and more dangerous to register that proof in the first place. They want to throw AI safety into the same cursed pot of bullshit?
Props to Anthropic for refusing. OpenAI already has the mechanism in place since years ago. Let's see if they comply.
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.-
Well, I'm glad I used all my tokens earlier today... It was a good run.
WSJ article (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-halts-access-to-top-ai... . The accessible portion mentions a letter from Howard Lutnick.
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...
Ok, so why can i still access fable? Did they forgot to pull the cable?
Probably silently rerouting?
There are thousands of comments here, so I apologize if this is just a repeat of what others already have stated. However. I want to say that this move by the US Gov will have a profound impact on how Europe will be dealing with US based companies in the future - including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. I am totally convinced, as a European that this will prove over time to be a turning point in the history of European relationship with the US, and US' long term soft power and position. Of all the stupidity the US gov. has done, this is one of the dumbest move they've done. It will hurt the relations between Europe and The US, it will hurt the economy and it will hurt progress. The world will not be the same after this.
I give it until Tuesday at the latest until it's accessible again.
pls hold
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/MgqpWkoeeN
This is just the pretext to hard sell a government bailout.
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...
No actual proof of any kind. Obviously a petulant attack on Anthropic.
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.
This sounds very cliche, but even if the entire story ends up as another TACO; we are in historical infection point of official government AI race.
It is hard to count how many “red lines” were crossed last night. Government shutting down AI model it doesn’t like? Government shoots into barely profitable 1T startup, whose entire trajectory and, in essence, survival depends on commercial success of that model? Access to AI model being governed by citizenship, likely verified through rigor ID checks?
Very little doubt that China will follow this suit. Next US will pass their bills to ban Chinese open source and local models. Chinese will follow.
It doesn’t matter: US did just a vendetta; felt into “marketing hype” or there are legit security concerns of national security level. In the precedent-ish world of post-truth “whataboutism” we just crossed a big milestone mark which will hunt us for years.
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.
feels like competitors influence over government to mess them up.
“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
This is incredibly bullish for china and open source models
Champagne bottles are popping at Google and OpenAI today.
What do you guys know about the "jailbreaking?"
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.
AI apartheid has begun.
Anthropic, you're very welcome in the EU!
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…
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.
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
They could not have bought better advertising
The model has now become unavailable in the Claude app.
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.
They should be happy this happened before their IPO.
Obvious Anthropic reaping, Anthropic sowing scenario.
I think the investor cash needs to dry up. They’re not going to let doomsday technology be released to the market. Sorry.
Handicapper General leveling the playing field.
I just upgraded my plan to try out Fable and now this
Yep. Time to explore the chinese open source models.
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 feels like a bad precedent of things to come.
>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.
I appreciate how they waited till SpaceX IPO.
The ending reads like a petulant child.
Everything this admin does reads like it comes from a petulant child with far too much power.
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. :^)
Crypto Wars v2. I know how this movie ends.
Pigs are gonna be pigs. What a surprise
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.
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.
Download the open weight models while you can
Today frontier models became Groypers.
> 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 ?
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.
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.
Isn't this exactly what Dario wanted?
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 has David Sacks written all over it.
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
The party of big government at it again.
>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.
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.
Interestingly, I am yet to lose access.
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
in the near future, every US citizen need kyc & to prove their loyalty to use super AI model
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.
it wasn't even that good...
Finally, they face consequences for their IPO pump fear mongering rhetoric
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.
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Well, they also reset the quota
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.
Rightfully so (worried I mean). And the SpaceX IPO was on that and a lot of other things, but if Elon’s proven himself effective at one thing (there are more than one course) it’s generating revenue from the government.
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.
> burning tokens like there was no tomorrow
Literaly.
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.
Europe is the real loser here
????
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.
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.
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?
Cynical take: If their model was so groundbreaking they wouldn't have to involve the government for their marketing campaign. You would notice shit breaking everywhere; oh wait, how many days has it been since the last supply chain attack? What was advertised with Mythos was already possible with 2024 LLMs if you had some basic hacking knowledge.
This is the best marketing Anthropic could have hoped for. People crave what they can't have.
This is DOD retaliation
The US Government looooves to overreach where its not wanted. As someone in cybersecurity Fable was absolutely utterly useless. I would be shocked if there is any credibility behind this 'vulnerability'. It seems Anthropic agrees.
Hormuz moment for Mythos
Anthropic is big hall monitor energy. Clownish behavior and exaggerations constantly. A holier than thou attitude derived from rationalists at LessWrong.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Begun, the AI wars have.
Ok after 2 hours.. I really miss fable. Opus is fine, Fable just got it.
well... Leason learned i guess, they hyped mythos too much
Qwen is all you need
I feel like this is more of a marketing campaign for Anthropic than anything.
(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.
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.
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Already got my refund, at least that was quick.
Got a refund for the full $200 subscription
That's one way to pop the bubble. Where are all of those billions going to go now, if not to make better models?
You can't do that. A lot of engineers got fired because of Fable 5
Go open models!
Just in case you need evidence for the need of AI/LLM sovereignty.
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.
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.
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.
Now word is Amazon initiated this. Amazon, the company with $50B invested in OpenAI as it prepares for IPO.
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?
And the chickens come home to roost. That’s what you get for your theatrics around Mythos!
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.
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.
a fable for the ages:
pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered
trump hates dario. simple as that.
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
“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!
I for one look forwards to our Minimax, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek overlords
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).
Backfired...
welcome back 90s crypto wars
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
.
That's what you get for not being on the Epstein ballroom plaque.
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.
HN is mostly bitter cynics that think they understand AI safety better than the people that actually work on it.
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 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.
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i wish Ilya and crew would chime in
You mean the people who have a powerful incentive to lie and exaggerate to sell a product?
When have they lied/exaggerated about the capabilities of their product?
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.
Bye!
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…
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.
Just petty bullshit from a petty, bullshit administration
Excellent ad campaign by Anthropic
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
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...
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
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?!
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.
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?
I mean it should be clear to everyone that this is just the consequence of Sam Altman's lobbying activities.
chickens -> roost
It's wild to me how we can have a whole conversation about this and just completely sidestep how incredibly racist this directive is, just how much it ties into the Trump administration's ongoing campaign of kidnapping melanated people. This is the same administration that denied one of the top FIFA refs a visa because they're Somali asking an AI company to gatekeep access to their on citizenship at a time when they're in the middle of attempting to challenge birthright citizenship and ramping up attempts to revoke naturalized citizenship to an unprecedented rate. Here they are attempting to throw "AI safety policy" into the same cursed pot and we're just head in the sand about that part
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.
How am I the only one here who sees this as retaliation for them not playing ball a couple of months ago?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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.
This might be the biggest favor to anthropics valuation that Trump could have done
Or this is Trump's gift to Elon on the day of his big IPO, only semi-joking.
First time we've seen a model company get their arm twisted this hard by the gov.
Wow didn't see that coming at all.Lmao
Anthropic could move its headquarters to Europe. Just saying...
Typical admin move here - give our foreign competitors as much time to catch up as possible.
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
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.
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.
it's over
So the moral of the story is, don't build a frontier model in the US. Got it.
Trumps solution to his Iran woes is it pick a different fight?
MAGA madness strikes again ..
Trump admin is helping them pump their IPO with this stunt
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.
Pure vendetta by the capricious king wannabe. The US is so fucked.
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?
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
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!
This is another historical moment in AI.
this is just the Trump admin bullying anthropic for not going along with militarization and surveillance.
tl;dr: FAFO
Extreme fucking overreach. This is outrageous.
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?
I'm so sick of all this Anthropic drama.
USA_RESIDENT=true is back lol
Now can that silly IPO fail too?
trump doesn't like dario. simple as that. don't over think it.
What a fucking joke.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
Well, good. Fuck Anthropic. You reap what you sow.
Lmfao
govts are dumb
> 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"
Can you please keep snark and/or flamebait out of your posts here? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515335.
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
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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?
It’s literally what they said.
Now there’s appropriate safe guards around the dangerous for humanity models they made.
Thankfully government is looking out for us.
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"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.
Don't forget:
"We're open to the idea Claude 4 may be conscious and we prompt Claude to say it's an open question but in other news we'll be deleting Claude 4 next year to make server space for Claude 5.
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
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This is horseshit
Anthropic is the worst thing to happen to the AI industry. They seem to actively enjoy being evil.
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.
Does this mean an entire generation of developers effectively stops doing work, at least temporarily?
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> 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?!
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.