Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April. Wayback Machine if you don’t believe me: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.
This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old. LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls. These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
This is a strange plea for optimism.
Sincerely or not, judgement is yours, Dario has been begging for regulation. He has been talking about how Claude models are distilled by foreign adversaries. And now the regulation is here.
What makes you think this situation that the CEO of Anthropic is asking for it temporary? Do you not believe Dario was sincere?
How ironic it is that multibillion AI companies are complaining that their models are being distilled (read: used without permission) while the current top players trained their models on stolen data...
We still have to see what will happen when people "uncopyright" Disney movies, Microsoft software, ...
There are three issues here:
1. Identity verification as a way to validate real-personness and mitigate distillation by e.g. North Korea
2. Identity veriiication as a way to limit model usage to US residents / citizens
3. The level of model which will be subject to identity verification, today and as time goes on
It’s a mistake to conflate the three and form a rock solid opinion of exactly what will happen from here to the heat death of the universe. Everything about AI is moving quickly. I doubt Dario would claim to have a perfect roadmap not subject to change.
My personal guess is that just like export controls on CPUs, this will apply differently to different regions, and will change over time. Especially with US political instability and increasing anti-science policy, I cannot imagine Dario or anyone else would want to surrender the EU and other markets to become a US-only company.
But whether I’m right or wrong, one thing I’m not is certain. I can’t imagine how anyone could be in the current situation.
Do you sincerely believe Dario wants Fable to be restricted to US citizens only?
Why else would they demand age sniffing?
I do not want to give my private data to any company, yet alone those hostiles US companies that obey the orange king. Insanity has to be contained, not allowed to spread outside of the USA. So, no to age sniffing.
The UK is also suspect here. I don't understand why they are even worse than the USA here. Someone needs to fix the UK legislation - it is by far the worst. On audits they regularly detain people and pat them down. See Auditing Britain or DJ Audits; the US Audits on the other hand almost never reach that level of escalation. Something is fundamentally flawed in the UK.
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I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models. This effectively kills my usage of anthropic for anything beyond their 4.8 models.
> I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models.
I can't speak to your specific use of Anthropic's models, but I find it interesting that people will identify themselves (to set up and pay for an account) and provide all sorts of personal (and often sensitive if not confidential) information to these models on a daily basis, but balk at a 5-minute identity verification.
It’s not the five minutes that I balk at, it’s entrusting a third party with all they need to steal my identity. But of course, they’ll never get hacked…
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It is because you think the contention is about being identifiable, while that is hardly the case.
Most people understand or at least accept that in order to facilitate payments and a company to follow various laws that are generally understood as "good for all" (like AML and tax avoidance), but require ID to access is not the same.
It is identical to accepting to paying for National Parks car pass or camp ground fees but protesting access fees. Not the same thing.
It is just the standard performative outrage over and over. The same person will be uploading their ID a few days after it is introduced.
So many people have internalized an anonymous audience that they are performing to in terms of what they think the anonymous audience wants to hear that they can't tell what is their own actual thoughts and motivations.
That is why the motivation changes two weeks later and the ID gets uploaded.
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Well, if all the data people uploaded to these models provided ironclad personal identification, would Anthropic need to have these identity verification processes? They could have directed Claude to disconnect all non-citizens when the order came, for example. Perhaps they don't to frighten people with that ability. But most likely all the inputs together only add to a rough identity hash.
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This decision has, effectively, turned LMMs into a supply chain risk.
Before this incident I’d gladly use any anthropic LLM in production features. Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.
> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.
If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".
If the software your business depends on can't run indefinitely without getting permission to operate from someone else's systems, then you're perpetually at risk of someone else tanking your business because they decided that you can no longer use that software.
Anyone doing product integrations should recognize it’s a perpetual risk but why stick to the platform that will require US citizenship demands for future models especially when there are other labs with reasonably comparable performance that don’t require this?
Anthropic didn’t have to beg for the government to deem their models a security crisis.
> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight. If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".
I'm pretty sure that a US government export restriction / ban / etc. would count as a force majeure invalidating all the fancy wording you could wish for on a piece of paper.
The only way to actually control is to self manage in an environment you control.
The long term goal of LLMs is to automate most white collar work, so wasn’t that a risk you faced anyway? Like Amazon basics, which took all the easy to replicate goods they saw on their marketplace.
Crypto export ban lasted only about 45 years. :)
You're way off the mark, and probably viewing this as an American.
If it happens once that means it can happen which means it can happen at any time.
When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.
> When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.
Completely agree.
You're acting like you can't just switch which llm you are using in around an hour.
I mean...use opus/fable when you can, if down the road your access gets cut then just switch to kimi or whatever.
Yeah, this sucks, but you're being really dramatic and acting like you can't switch llms with basically no lock in. Getting something like your email cut off would be a real thing to be concerned about, but this isn't that.
> These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
The big problem American policy makers (and business leaders) don't understand is that they tend to minimize or ridicule extremely serious events.
There's a pre-Greenland and post-Greenland annexation threats for European Nato allies, and it is non reversible. EU allies do not forget that the US (the only country to ever call article 5 or to gather NATO allies for operations) has both mistreated the alliance, and has been the only power to threaten militarily EU countries.
Same happens here. Business-level wise, you seem to be talking with a very American-centric point-of-view, like these events are minor and temporary issues and we're all here waiting to throw money at an abusive relationship.
But this is not how we operate in EU. None of us can afford to build their operations based on uncertainty of US export controls. The damage is here and many of us are replacing Claude/GPT subscriptions with shared opencode servers using GLM and DS4.
Might be slightly worse? Probably. But we can work on it, harness it, get experience, and even update back to American models at some point. But we're no longer going to be building assuming US models availability.
> We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past.
But not on a SaaS whose continued availability you'd rely on.
In any case, your optimism is bordering on naivety. The world has seen how the US can easily disregard anything and act arbitrarily - sanctions, tariffs, shutting down access to SaaSes - and this will not be forgotten. As you say, administrations change. Even if next time around there are competent adults in the White House (which really isn't a given), do you really want to bet your business on that not changing 4 years later?
There's a reason why all the big cloud providers are constantly shouting about their "sovereign" solutions. The US has broken everyone's trust and there is no going back on that.
> This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old...
I think, this is all a culmination of rapidly eroding trust and soft power between US & its allies for the past 3y.
What allies?
You threatened to invade Canada and Greenland.
You surely don't think you're coming back from that?
They will obviously come back from that no questions about it. It’s like an abusive relationship that CA/EU can’t fully eject from, there will always be hope of conciliation because the benefits both ways are so massive and the relationships are so entrenched, it will take much more than DJT and Republicans/dark enlightenment technocrats to completely fracture these alliances.
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What, all of us? I would suggest that Russia's proxy leaders threatened to invade both those places specifically to weaken US alliances and hurt NATO.
So when did we become Russia? Better you should ask, should we become Russia, would we like it? We've only begun to experience the damage of it and I figure part of the plan is that once we notice and object to what's been done to us, it'll be too late.
You are mad if you think we are not the target here. This is not about hurting Greenland, it's about hurting US and people elsewhere should take note because you are subject to the same tactics and the same influences.
> What allies?
> You threatened to invade Canada and Greenland.
> You surely don't think you're coming back from that?
Trump threatened. Those were unserious remarks by an unserious person who's 80 years old. If that was all it takes to permanently demolish those alliances, they were never actually there.
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Over-reliance on a single LLM is probably not a good idea, no matter who owns it.
> past 3y
since January 2025
it’s been a loooooooong year and a half
US controls on cryptography software lasted _20 years_. If there's something I'm absolutely certain of, and I'm certain of very little in the fields of AI and of politics, it's that Fable will be utterly irrelevant in 20 years time.
> Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April.
Well, irrespective over as to whether this is the case, the blog entry from claude came yesterday, aka June:
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-ver...
So, why the two months delay here? If they felt all was already said, they would not have had a need to repeat what they wrote two months ago already that mandatory age sniffing is required for all claude users.
What makes you believe this is about export controls rather than harvesting data?
What makes you believe he belives that?
The sentence does not state he believes the ID check is for export control purposes
In fact, earlier in the comment, he argues the ID check dates back to April
Because of this sentence?
> LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls.
Mass surveillance and all the other that gets associated with mass surveillance
Export controls have typically been for physical goods. Don’t remember the last time it was used for an API
You should look up the words "crypto wars". There were absolutely very annoying attempts by the US government to limit encryption, forcing every software maker to maintain two editions of their software: one targeting the domestic audience with no restrictions, and one "international edition" which had to intentionally weakened encryption (as in ship with shorter key lengths).
Have we all forgotten PGP already? (Not an API, but certainly not a "physical good")
> We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
Yeah, in the long everything will happen, from 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 being the winning Powerball numbers to heat death of the universe, but as the colloquial goes "ain't nobody got time for that!"
Once an institution or person has proven that they will take adverse action against you, it is foolish to bank on them again.