Comment by carlossouza
21 hours ago
Of course, Amazon wanted this to happen.
They own 20% of Anthropic.
Anthropic bleeds cash. They have to raise capital.
There are only 2 ways: an IPO or follow-ons from existing investors.
If the IPO gets delayed because of these restrictions, Anthropic will be forced to raise more capital from existing investors.
And existing investors (Amazon) will end up owning more of Anthropic at a cheaper valuation.
There's a much simpler explanation: Amazon's business is selling cloud services. Amazon is constantly under threat of attack and anything that disturbs the balance between attackers and defenders is bad for Amazon. Amazon also needs to keep their AWS customers safe.
This is Amazon prioritizing their 100% stake in AWS over their 20% stake in Anthropic. It's also possible that Amazon knows things that are not public.
The fact that Amazon is willing to report this despite owning shares in Anthropic and being close to a liquidation event points to whatever they found being actually serious.
Why would they have launched Fable on Bedrock if they knew they were going to be shutting it down a day later?
I'm just stating facts:
- Amazon's CEO knew what he was doing and the possible consequences
- Anthropic must raise cash, and there are only 2 ways: an IPO or follow-ons
- If the IPO is blocked, existing investors will be able to increase their stake on Anthropic at a very attractive lower valuation
- Amazon has 20% of Anthropic: so, they benefit from it
"Amazon's CEO knew what he was doing" is not a fact. That's speculation.
When it comes to highly technical, fast moving developments like frontier AI and blue team / red team perspectives, I could see any CEO getting out over their skis. Now mix in some incompetent Trump admin officials, including apparently Howard Lutnick. I am guessing many of these people don't understand the subject matter very well at all.
They would have no internally/externally defensible justification to stop the launch as they are partners/part-owners of Anthropic. They would have to let the rank-and-file keep moving on the Fable launch.
IIRC Anthropic models haven't all been available on day 1, so it does feel like a deliberate choice, especially since they are partners/part-owners like you say. No one would have bat an eye about some corporate PR thing "blah blah mythos is too powerful and too intelligent and so we've decided to focus our capacity on Opus 4.6/4.7/4.8 for now until we have the proper safeguards in place blah blah"