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Comment by SXX

3 days ago

Finally they will pay for all the scaremongering they been doing to sell their models as something so much ahead of all else.

Now they finally found the right fools in audience to believe it.

The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence. This is part of a clear historical record that is available for anyone to Google. Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.

Arbitrary imposition of export controls is also part of the history of frontier tech. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

  • Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them and treat AI like nuclear weapons. They would not be attempting to IPO and they for sure would not sell their weapon-like thing to the general public.

    • I think this is a reasonable point, but a better comparison might be to nuclear energy. I think the frontier labs sincerely believe that AI can be developed at great benefit to humanity, and they clearly want to lead that push, but they also sincerely believe there is a real catastrophic risk.

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    • That's not how nerds think. You can believe there's a high chance of what you're working on being dangerous and still be unable to stop working on it. As Oppenheimer put it, "when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it".

    • Accelerationism is an established political philosophy. Why is it obvious that they are insincere when they could equally think that the only way to control it is to be the ones building it?

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    • Thank you for writing this. It’s such a classic example of ”do what I say not what I do” but in reverse. Why would you ever judge a CEO or company by their statements and not their actions. Scaremongering is incredibly efficient for marketing, the fact that both players are using it to drive monetary gain is kind of a tell.

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    • They believe in the danger of out of control super-intelligence. The generous interpretation is that they believe they can contain it.

    • This assumes that they believe two things which I don't think they do: 1. that the US is the only place where this will be developed, and 2. that the government will be able to handle this better than anyone else.

    • It remains possible that Altman and Amodei are sincere: they might believe that AI is dangerous like nuclear weapons, but there's no way to stop its development (especially since it would need to be stopped globally, not just in the US and countries the US can influence) and they consider themselves to be more likely to do a good job of it than their competitors.

    • No, that's what *you* would apparently do.

      Some of us think it's bad for governments to have unequal access to nuclear weapons, as it turns a deterrent into a gun-in-a-knife-fight that lets them stab whoever they want with impunity, lest they shoot anyone who tries to interfere.

      See: Russia invading Ukraine.

    • Perhaps more like nuclear power? Potentially very beneficial but also dangerous.

      JFYI for-profit companies make pretty OK nuclear power plants

    • This. People who care about animal cruelty dont go building largest ever meatfarms and slaughterhouses.

      People who opposing arms manufacturing and gun violence dont jump to work for gun companies.

      People who really want AI benefit all humanity dont stick working with lying CEOs who want to convert company from a non-profit.

      Etc. So many examples.

      12 replies →

  • “OpenAI's CEO says he's scared of GPT-5”

    https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/op...

    Marketing or actual fear? We’ve got 5 and 5.5 out now… he compared 5 to the Manhattan project. AI may one day be an economic Manhattan project but GPT 5 wasn’t it.

    It’s a meme because they overdo it.

    • At some intelligence capability there can be catastrophic risk, the fact that we don't yet have any catastrophe doesn't mean the risk wasn't real. It's similar to new viruses which don't lead to outbreaks, the correct takeaway isn't "oh you were insane to panic bc nothing happened". There is small risk (and increasing) of huge harms with each improvement

      6 replies →

    • Every public statement out of a CEO's mouth is marketing. It would literally be violating fiduciary duty to be saying anything else.

    • Also fable was good but not Manhattan level project, i honestly did not find a major difference between it and gpt 5.5

    • Imagine for a few minutes, and really let it sink in what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one. The open weights original pre consumer grade version. Then, even then you know that it's the worst and dumbest its every going to be, The next time you blink it's exponentially more. Some people don't think about what an exponential curve really means. Others are sitting in the front seat trying not to shit themselves and appear like reasonable normal people. How one responds to that is as unknown as what's going to happen after we cross that line, but it's coming and holy shit so many people haven't even wrapped their head around how much bigger it is than the petty human things we distract ourselves with. Being in awe and terrified and wanting to run and to be apart of the most significant thing in our entire existence of being sentient is normal. We have nothing to compare it to. Nothing to base predictions on. We ar about to have company for the first time. We're going to have a conversation with something other than ourselves since we formed the ability to speak. One minute to the next will pass q It's all or nothing. Like it or not. It's too late. buckle up.

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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.

    • Fat government contracts, consulting, safety services, and exclusive tender access all follow from this regulation too.

      The sensation I’m left with is a handful of goons making up new IPO math thanks to a specific constellation of political forces, using access and favour with those forces to bake themselves into the defence industry, and that the taxpayer and investor will be left holding the bag when reality rears its head. But in the short term, even as a clear ploy, it’s super profitable for all the oligarchs and hedge funds flush with recovery cash.

      Like Enron, there was big profits to make if you knew what they were doing. Tinkerbell math with undeniable profit potential for a select few.

  • > OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence

    Why would they sell there services to Palantir and/or to the military then?

    • Because the US military and it's contractors are good?

      "Why did they open an orphanage instead of pouring acid into a town water tower?!?"

  • > Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

    They don't. LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence and everyone working on LLMs knows this (with a few eccentric exceptions).

    • > LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence

      The "never superintelligence" part I'll buy, though only in the sense of sample efficiency and generalisation ("quality superintelligence"), as they clearly have a superhuman breadth of skills, and run at superhuman speed.

      "Never" out-of-control is obviously falsified by the already existing headlines about times they've gone out of control… in part, in some cases, because of their superhuman speed.

      5 replies →

    • "LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence" might be relevant if there weren't many hundreds of researchers working (at OpenAI, Anthropic and elsewhere) on AI designs not based on the transformer (LLM) architecture.

      2 replies →

  • > 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.

    • > GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.

      No, it was "let's set a precident while these things are not too dangerous, c'mon guys we know y'all can reproduce this easily".

    • GPT-2 was absolutely too dangerous to release at the time OpenAI made that statement. It’s only safe now because the specific risks they cited were dependent on the public’s lack of knowledge that such systems existed.

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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.

  • > 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.

    • Yes it is funnily true but it was for fake news generation and not it's cyber capabilities.

      Another fun little gem of information, government has something called Mayhem

      > the autonomous Robo-Hacker AI called Mayhem that’s now in charge of protecting the Pentagon’s most critical systems

      Guess Mythos and Mayhem had a chat

    • It was about spam and scam generation which mostly was true as we can see...

  • 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

  • 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.

    • We can argue over the definition of scaremongering and what people we’ve never met “really think”, or we can argue over what the actual risks of AI are. I know which one I’d prefer…

  • I 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?

  • 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.

  • > 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.

  • There is a huge difference between the company founder saying something like that and the us government saying so.

    "Our product is so good the US had to make it illegal for foreigners" is a hell of a marketing slogan.

This is good PR for them. They get to tweet about how scary and powerful their models are in the lead up to their IPO.

  • This just made any closed LLM a huge supply chain risk. Everybody was aware of this possibility, but now it actually happened. It's like having nuclear weapons vs. firing a nuclear weapon.

    Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.

    • Switching between LLMs takes all of 30 seconds - there will be no hesitation to adopt whichever LLM is performing the best.

    • > Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.

      Not really. There aren't any other choices, and the PRC also heavily utilizes export controls [0].

      This is why sovereign AI has become important, as can be seen with EU NatSec uses cases tending to use Mistral [1] and Indian governments starting to use Sarvam [2].

      That said, for most commercial usecases, older generations of Opus as well as enterprise grade GPT and Gemini are fairly good.

      The distilled OSS models are alright for hobbyists but if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini (most hobbyists don't get access to these) you see how far behind the open weight models are.

      Even in China, traditionally open minded models teams like Alibaba's Qwen are looking to become more restricted given the org changes [3].

      Also, Corporate RFCs now demand final say on model used and depending on the geo, this can be a dealbreaker (eg. An American financial institution will absolutely blacklist a vendor if they use a Chinese model and same in reverse and European defense vendors mandate sovereign EU models depending on the opportunity).

      [0] - https://www.allbrightlaw.com/EN/10475/f9d4055e47e81afb.aspx

      [1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/mistral-defen...

      [2] - https://www.sarvam.ai/blogs/partnerships-with-indian-states

      [3] - https://www.ft.com/content/b39da303-3188-447b-8b65-3dd8dad8b...

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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.

    • You're mistaken, this is a cratering of the userbase inside and outside of the US. The ban is on any foreigner whether abroad or living in the USA, so Anthropic has no choice but to completely shut down access to the model for the whole world including the US.

      Their IPO is well and truly fucked now. This also means no other frontier lab in the US is allowed to exceed Opus 4.8 capabilities.

      If you're a luddite or a decel you should literally be dancing in the streets right now. And, if you're a tankie you'll be dancing right next to them. And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.

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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.

  • 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)

    • Another sibling thread already called this out, but mentioning here: it's not "USA only", it's "US citizens only" (and I'm not entirely sure how dual-citizenship interacts with this, but I assume you can't sell to them, either, since they are by definition also foreign nationals). A private company only being able to do business with folks they can verify are solely US citizens (who themselves are also willing to submit verification of said citizenship to a private company), has a relatively small pool of potential users.

      And so if this policy holds, Anthropic has functionally had Fable killed by government intervention, and in a logically consistent world, this would imply all other US-based AI labs may also never exceed existing (read: Opus) capabilities.

      What interesting times we live in, indeed.

      5 replies →

  • "Our models are so good the government decides whether or you get access -- so you better not depend on them!"

This affects more than just Anthropic. It's a game of thrones and everyone using this technology loses. I wouldn't cheer for that.

  • >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.

  • > It's a game of thrones and everyone using this technology loses

    Everyone? There's worlds outside of the United States government overreach.

It's ironic isn't it? All the marketing of how dangerous and powerful Mythos is and the government went "bet".

  • Anthropic's marketing is playing 5D chess. 4D was telling everyone it is dangerous, they knew the government would take the bait and shut it down.

    Or maybe Anthropic isn't playing chess at all - these models sell themselves they are so useful and the Reddit/HN crowd is just full of larping tech bros commenting conspiracy theories non stop.

Yeah is funny anthropic going overboard with "omg this model is so dangerous guys!!!" and then the US government going "okay... well, that sounds bad, let's ban it".

Serves them right

  • Should they lie and say the model is not dangerous?

    • If you're actually worried then do the right thing and don't make the model, or do make the model and admit you are doing it to make money.

      You don't get to have your cake and eat it by making the (supposedly) world ending model but also getting on a moral high horse.

      It's the hypocrisy and obvious mendacity that's obnoxious to me.

      Having said that, OpenAI is just as bad (probably worse) and they're friendly with the admin, so this isn't really a case of any kind of justice unfortunately

      3 replies →

This is OpenAI and Meta using their leverage over the White House to screw over their competitor.

  • It's Anthropic facing consequences for their years long marketing plays. They're so greedy and narcissistic as a company and culture they believed they were special enough to be excluded from sanction internally, and that their behavior would only affect their competitors or would lead to outcomes positive for themselves: ergo, they get to hold the keys to the castle. Like Dario said in his negotiations with the DoW, he wants a seat at the big boys table. It's all about power for him.

    Unfortunately though, they're not smart enough to realize the long term damage to the industry that they're doing without any hint of remorse will negatively affect them and will have the opposite effect: Highlighting how imperative it is we all switch to open-source and remove our reliance entirely from them.

    So not only are they going to take the whole industry down out of their own greed and stupidity and ruin it for everyone in the short term, but they're going to put themselves and the other labs out of business in the long term. Well done Anthropic. Well done Dario. You played yourself. 5d chess.

They obviously want heavy regulation to make sure they do not have to compete long term. This is all just part of the base strategy.

  • It's a stupid strategy that will put the rest of the world ahead of the US on AI. Anthropic's value will suffer for it.

Based on this, it seems like the Trump admin would have targeted them even without the "scaremongering":

> To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.

  • > the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models

    Is this Dario leveraging it into a ban on open models?

    • No, he specifically gave a proprietary OpenAI model as an example (unless you meant OpenAI models instead of open source models)

  • Anthropic is almost solely responsible for the fear narrative around AI at this point. It has been their culture since the beginning, strongly pushing this into the zeitgeist at every opportunity, releasing bogus papers to frame things as highly dangerous and that their AI is a conscious sentient being.

    Step 1: "OMG, the AI hacked a researcher eating a sandwhich in the park!"

    Step 2: Journalists use that great clickbait to generate profit, which generates publicity for Anthropic

    Step 3: Rinse repeat

    If the threat of LLMs was treated relative to the actual capabilities of them, and we weren't all being lied to by Anthropic and their army of millions of social media bots and backing media companies and mouthpieces, we'd be going in a much healthier direction. Working out the kinks/supply chain risks and developing sound, long-term countermeasures to the ACTUAL risks.

    The only threat to the world is if progress is not open-sourced, democratized and in lockstep with capability. The moment it becomes a scenario of: Only a small group get access to frontier intelligence, is when it gives that small group power over everyone else in the world, and wildly increases the risk of a nuclear level event that WILL be exploited eventually - as the divide between the haves and the have nots accelerates in an exponential fashion. Bad AI is countered with an abundance of good AI that has been used to stay ahead of bad AI. The moment your bad AI outpowers the army of good AI it is game over for humanity. The strength of open-source and open-access AI is the difference between humanities permanent enslavement or extinction versus a prosperous future.

    It doesn't help that most of the employees at Anthropic have willingly sold their souls out of short term greed and gaslight themselves into thinking that they're actually doing the right thing to justify their own greed to themselves, while building up an echo-chamber and culture of feel good lies within the company so they can sleep at night, and pat each other on the back. They go along with this because they get paid massive chunks of money from Anthropic, and their shares will be worth more money if Anthropic can swallow the worlds economy at the expense and enslavement of everyone else. What good is that money when you have to sell out humanity in the progress though. You, at Anthropic, is that the legacy you want to leave?

    People need to start calling this out before it's far too late. If you work at Anthropic - time to start talking to your colleagues in an honest manner.

  • 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.

    • You’re telling me this testimony isn’t sincere marketing for how revolutionary and dangerous his product will become?

        OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies at Senate artificial intelligence hearing | full video“ (2023)
      

      "My worst fears, are that we cause significant - we the field, the technology, the industry - cause significant harm to the world...If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong and we want to be vocal about that."

      https://youtu.be/Pn-W41hC764

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."

    • Actually, they got even more than what they wanted:

      * Free marketing before the IPO, demonstrating how already powerful their frontier models are.

      * Governments to intervene in the rollout of these frontier models and blocking their access to whoever they want.

      * A strong reason to apply these further restrictions onto releasing powerful open weight models to the public. (which is entirely a business threat to them.)

      Given that they accepted funding from the Gulf states [0] despite it conflicting with their own "principles", I think we are well beyond the point of what they write / say vs to what they are actually doing.

      This drama just tells us that the government declared them as the winner that has the most powerful model.

      [0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-to-seek...

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    • They begged to be regulated and now they're being regulated. The company doesn't get to pick and choose the exact form of the regulations they get and in this case they got more than they bargained for. Maybe next time be more careful with the messaging.

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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.

  • > 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.

    • They didn't get banned by the government. The government says they they want to track the Identity of everyone who uses it. Same way they track identity when using an airplane.

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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.

    • Wow unsure why you are getting downvoted. It’s just odd. I just don’t get the skepticism towards this model. It’s released and it’s amazing. The hype was real and I can see why the researchers were anxious about releasing it.

  • I did not see that?

    It's way more _proactive_ than the old models, sometimes in ways it shouldn't really be proactive. But it produces _more_ slop than 4.8, and I have not seen any real breakthroughs from it.

    Edit: to give an example, I'm working on integrating a self-hosting auth provider into our app. So I gave it a prompt to create a "bootstrap" script that would create pre-configured settings for the local installation.

    Fable did it. And then proceeded (unprompted) to test it by killing the running server, removing the database, re-initializing and (trying) to verify that the bootstrap produced identical results.

    Well, yeah. Great. I can see how this "bias for action" works for security research and one-shot projects, not so sure about regular development.

    I just tried that with Opus, and it produced a similar bootstrap script but did not start the test by itself.

    • Ah that I will admit. It gets shit done one way or another haha. This is why a sandboxed environment and a reproducible test DB is key here. I give read only access to my dev DB to my Claude, really removes the temptation that it increasingly has to “cheat”. E.g. doing something hacky and fixing the DB manually in a way that doesn’t solve the problem everywhere.

      Personally I love when the AI has this amount of problem solving. But you have to build the environment around it that encourages solving problems right the first time, versus taking the easy way out and hacking out a solution.

      It’s just all about constraining the behavior of the LLM into productive and permanent directions. The more advanced it gets, the more it feels like designing engineering processes rather than coding. Personally it’s a fun change of pace and it’s giving me a lot of opportunities to look at the project in working on at a wider lens. I find having to pump out features makes you myopic in a sense. I really miss the control I had over writing it all by hand, but I love just being able to build software. At the end of the day, what do you want? That’s the question I’ve had to grapple recently.

      Personally I don’t mind switching gears to the bigger picture of why the software exists and what purpose it serves

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    • This honestly sounds like a tweaked system prompt more than anything. Maybe it is an attempt to make the model appear stronger?

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.

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.

    • you need to be 8yo to believe Chinese are going to give you SOTA models at low prices. being open is not compatible with the Chinese culture.

      Chinese here, no racism card here please.

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  • 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.

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.

  • 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.

  • I also do not understand this. Now they are labelled as precious US tech that could be not used by anyone else, because president heard about the jailbreaking for the first time I guess. With this genius logic they soon be banning GPT 5.5.

  • No it’s not. A company that finds itself the target of potentially crippling government intervention is not an attractive investment.

    • It might be if all you're seeking is large-cap stocks with lots of volatility you can leverage that are here to stay for the long haul. Also, the market doesn't seem to believe that Trump will be in power forever.

  • 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.

    • > "No way the US is going to nationalize a tech company regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable."

      You simply cannot apply any sort of actual logic to the reasoning of the current U.S. government's actions... They just "do stuff" because they feel like it, with no clear thought whatsoever of any potential consequences that may occur.

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    • The CEO of Anthropic himself has said AI is like a nuclear bomb when justifying export controls on Nvidia chips. How many private companies control nuclear bombs?

    • Trump has already (with Altman directly egging him on) talked about the US taking a share in (i.e. partially nationalising) the AI companies. Has he not called a meeting about this next week?

You call it scare-mongering. Others, serious thinkers and leaders in the AI and national security space, believe, maybe not scare-mongering enough.

AI is a national security issue. Best accept that as fact, or you won't see it coming.

  • Anthropic and US Government, there can be only one right in this situation.

    I think David Sacks is right, if you are saying you are building nuclear bombs, then prepared to be regulated like one.

    There is no eating it while having it

    • I agree completely. If these things are so dangerous that they turn every person into an advanced persistent thread actor, capable of causing untold cyber destruction (oh, and they can make bio weapons etc), then they should be treated like the weapons they are.

    • > Anthropic and US Government, there can be only one right in this situation.

      And just to be clear, that's a maximum of one right in this situation.

  • 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.