I don’t know if it’s just me, but yesterday’s US decision to ban access to the Fable model feels like an epochal shift in the “AI race,” something on the scale of the Trinity test.

It is hard to count how many boxes were ticked yesterday:

A government shutting down an AI model it doesn’t like? A government revoking tens of billions of dollars in revenue from a barely profitable $1T startup whose entire trajectory, and in essence its survival, depends on the commercial success of that model? Access to an AI model being governed by citizenship, likely verified through rigorous ID checks?

Imagine that the model is made available again next week. Can we trust it, or trust the changes imposed by Anthropic to comply with the US? Likely not. Can we trust that the US government will not have access to the non-restricted model for its own cybersecurity operations? Likely not.

There is little doubt that China will start to follow suit. We already see Chinese companies slowly scaling back their openness, and there are rumors that this trend will continue. Now we can expect Chinese companies to start releasing redacted models or limiting access based on nationality or location.

It feels like the US government opened Pandora’s box yesterday and pushed us into the territory of a weaponized AI race, with more restrictions, control, and regulation of access. Even if, in the end, this is all another TACO story or a “marketing campaign” from Anthropic, the damage is very unlikely to be undone.