Comment by nlh
8 hours ago
Here's a copy of the letter that Commerce sent to Anthropic (note who it'a NOT addressed to...)
Source: https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2072103733715194048?s=20
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June 30, 2026
Tom Brown Chief Compute Officer Anthropic 548 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94104
Dear Mr. Brown:
Since the issuance of my previous letters, dated June 12, 2026 and June 26, 2026, Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
In light of these actions and commitments, as well as the Bureau of Industry and Security's evaluation of the diversion risks now presented by Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, the controls in the June 12 letter are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.
Commerce reserves the right to reevaluate the decisions made in this letter and the necessity of reimposing a license requirement, should circumstances change or should Anthropic fail to adhere to its commitments.
If you have any questions about this letter, please contact me or the Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler, at (202) 255-1864.
Sincerely,
Howard W. Lutnick
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"Taken Steps"
Looks like Anthropic paid the Danegeld. Now they'll never get rid of the Dane.
South of Watling St you're ok.
I mean, they did eventually get rid of the Danes.
The Danes colonised England. They never left but merged with the existing population.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Danelaw
Jeff is now going to have to change his number. Can’t imagine all the calls or messages he must be getting now
You don't think public officials have official numbers?
For those who haven't been following this closely, who is the missing addressee?
Dario Amodei (Anthropic's CEO) had previously been directly liaising with the government and apparently it wasn't going well.
Any news why?
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Mildly surprising they lifted export restrictions for Mythos too. Isn’t that Fable minus the safety layer?
Apparently, you won't be able to use Mythos OR Fable for coding. From their announcement...
> routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8.
But it’s available in Claude Code. I’m hoping that’s a typo missing a word or two in the sentence.
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Where is that?
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It was likely a dealbreaker for Anthropic, since the export control excluded Anthropic’s own foreign employees from being able to access Mythos internally. Naturally, this makes model development hard.
Presumably they reached a backdoor agreement.
You're suggesting a for-profit company both hobbled it's own product and is actively lying about doing so. The only way that's true is if the Trump admin has crawled all the way up Anthropic's ass. But by all accounts, this is just another 10% effort by Trump and friends.
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Presumably there are different levels of safety. I assumed Fable was a nerfed Mythos, and not just via safety harnesses but actual model degredation.
I don't think this is the case just because of the 'fallback' method they described, where suspicious requests are routed to Opus 4.8. If the model was degraded for certain categories of knowledge, then they'd probably be fine letting the model answer to it. IMO, of course
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Anthropic claims the only difference is the draconian bans on cybersecurity and biology queries.
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How many people are going to call Jeffrey Kessler? lol.
> note who it'a NOT addressed to
The CEO is also not the addressee of shipments of urinal cakes.
There is a deep, deep ignorance of export controls on HN, and I fully expect it will play out as another 500 comment thread of snark and incorrecting each other while blaming the government and not understanding a word of it.
FWIW an Empowered Official is not the person who cleans the espresso machine.
Ha! But sorry, Dario has failed at this part of the job. It’s good that Tom is there and that there is plenty of other strong talent there.
Dario's job is to be a cheerleader.
He likely does not have the domain knowledge nor is authorized to be the recipient of such a letter.
And that's ok. His role is to hire others competent in export matters. It's a learning experience for them.
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Your comment, genius. Makes me miss n-gate dotcom, which hasn't been updated since 2021. This comment would make a great entry. If you aren't familiar with it, you really want to be.