Comment by chasil
8 hours ago
(reposted)
As I understand it, ITAR regulations for export controls have just been applied to any form of Mythos. These are overseen by U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, and forbid foreign nationals from access to any form of Mythos, either within or outside the U.S.
Only U.S. citizens and immigrants that are holders of a "green card" may now access Mythos.
It appears that Anthropic does not have internal controls to implement these restrictions in any form, so the only option was to shut Mythos down.
Penalties for ITAR violation can reach ten years in prison and a million dollars per violation. (I can post a link to those details if there is any interest.)
As long as Anthropic is a U.S. company, there is no escaping this.
https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/how-a-warning-from-amazon-led...
This is how the US gov does business now, capricious and vengeful.
Textbook retaliation for not letting them use an abliterated version of Claude in weapons systems.
This effectively renders any US closed model useless for any foreign company. Could happen to OpenAI, Google, etc. Too much of a risk to implement something that can be yanked out because the company didn’t behave the way they want.
Looks like it’s time for Kimi, Z, Deepseek to take the front row. They’ll catch up in a few months anyway. Kimi code 2.6 is crazy good
This is a suicide shot for the American economy. The numbers only lined up for AI to rescue the USA from its debt if it captured a significant portion of the world's AI spend, and while it was a longshot before, there's basically zero percent chance the world trusts American AI when the government is pulling strings.
It was a zero percent chance anyway. Look at Europe working to leave American software behind in recent years. And it was greatly accelerated by leveraging American AI to build the exit.
You can read it all over HN. It's about weakening American influence and building Eurocentric economies and influence. And exercising the same level of choice that Americans prefer as well. Americans also want to escape Google, Microsoft and Apple and more. They've all been caught investing too heavily in government influence and thought control (aka marketing).
And on the other side of that, an American company that deprives the US of AI for defense, is defacto weakening American defense because competition militaries will gain a technological edge by simply taking control of AI companies in their country which the US hasn't done (yet).
There are very valid arguments on both sides, I think.
> The numbers only lined up for AI to rescue the USA from its debt if it captured a significant portion of the world's AI spend
The numbers lined up if those companies created something resembling AGI, the USA companies captured a large share of the world, and there was lack of competition so those companies could capture a large share of the value.
None of those items were ever going go happen.
Consider this quote from the main article...
"When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone."
This is fearful stuff on all sides, and none of the people involved might realistically be able to navigate the danger.
the whole thing playing out as expected. if you think about it, the only question is the timeline.
the next model with a gap to mythos as mythos is to opus will be controlled technology from the get-go. the one after it may be top secret.
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That part just sounds like hyperbole at best, conspiracy at worst.
By that logic, anybody who values safety has a god complex? It’s absurd…
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I never really understood this "US person" restriction. There are 350M people in US, mostly citizens and green cards holders, surely some of them could be working for a foreign power.
They don't even need to know they are. You can assume that if the model becomes available again, a lot of people will find themselves working for companies distilling these models that just happens to ultimately do work for foreign entities, whether or not the people accessing the models knows or not.
> As long as Anthropic is a U.S. company, there is no escaping this.
Reminds me of the RISC-V Foundation → RISC-V International move to Switzerland. Around the time some dumbass Republicans tried to impose export restrictions on a set of open, world-wide used specifications.
Pandora's box has been opened, and there's no closing it. Capable AI models will be everywhere.
Could Anthropic relocate to a different country?
They cannot do it. Apart from all the practical, technical and talent reasons, it would still be exporting forbidden stuff.
The signal is clear enough though for the next Anthropic..
Individuals can leave, but the company cannot transfer restricted intellectual property.
Europe has extradition treaties, so the U.S. can force anyone in Europe back to the U.S. for criminal indictment who demonstrates inappropriate possession of this technology.
Would be very hard to demonstrate that they did that. If all employees move to some country with a slow legal justice system and strong labor laws, they also recreate the training data because that can be transferred, they can train another version in said country which is perfectly legal.
Can you demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that the model weights have been transferred? No. Will the EU judges move to extradite said individuals (and many are EU citizens)? Also no, especially in the face of spurious accusations. And even if they were open to, you can stonewall everything and you will probably outlast any US administration pursuing that.
Well, force is a strong word… it’s still just accords, that the US doesn’t seem to be valuing lately… so if they say no, what’s the US going to do? Start a war over a company?