Comment by gen220
1 day ago
Amazon is a large Anthropic shareholder (>5% of the cap table).
I think it’s impossible to interpret the actions of their executives here without considering this information.
1 day ago
Amazon is a large Anthropic shareholder (>5% of the cap table).
I think it’s impossible to interpret the actions of their executives here without considering this information.
To me it reads like the execs at Amazon told the feds about some capability they were excited about, and the government officials either didn't understand it fully or overreacted to some small feature, panicked and went to ban it.
Amazon has a ton of internal politics just like any other large organization. It's entirely possible there's a faction that is trying to kneecap another faction within Amazon with this.
When you fire the bottom x % you have incentives to kneecap your “colleagues” to preserve your own job
I agree! The concerns must have been very serious indeed to overcome Amazon's strong incentives to not bring them up and let Anthropic keep pulling in the revenue from their new frontier model.
Or they're trying to hype up an investment...
That doesn't really make sense. If Amazon wanted to build hype, wouldn't they have talked publicly about this? What's the point of working hard on a hype strategy and then delivering it only in private to government officials?
3 replies →
Begs the question why they didn’t present that info to Anthropic directly and if they did why they didn’t act
It does. Anthropic mentions (https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access) they consider jailbreaks that "provide no Mythos-specific uplift" to be minor findings; perhaps they couldn't agree on what kinds of capabilities were unlocked by the jailbreak Amazon found.
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That's one potential interpretation. There are many others.
Hyping an investment, as mentioned.
If they have continued access, being able to use the tool when others cannot to get ahead.
Amazon's incentives are not so clear or simple as your first interpretation. It's important to think about these things beyond a moment's glance. With practice you will improve!