When you spend a lot of time telling people how dangerous your products are, people who have the power to keep dangerous products off the market might listen.

Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.

I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be. People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices. I think this is a punitive move by an administration that loves being punitive, which they have unknowingly bolstered with their own dumb rhetoric.

> Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.

Just more corrupt behavior from the contemptible kakistocracy that's busy running things into the ground and enriching themselves while they're at it.

My gut reaction was that it does look like a PR stunt. But indeed it might also be a blunder caused by all of their other PR stunts. "Our new stuff is soooo dangerous!!", followed by "The US government believed us and acted accordingly".

I presume he's exhilarated that the government is taking the threat seriously and banning foreign nationals from accessing these super dangerous tools.

Congratulations, Dario!

"I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic"

But it seems likely that they took this possibility into account - and that they now prominently and unremovable show the "Fable not avaiable" (link - government said so) is likely with the intention to make pressure on the US government.

It’s a market manipulation following SpaceX ipo. They’ll buy and then reverse the decision shortly to sell.

Anthropic pushed for the US government to introduce regulations. The US government said no, citing potential stifling of innovation.

Yeah! I also think that the ban was unintended.

I also think that’s a big clown show. People think that LLMs accidentally get good with security patterns. That is not the case, they included all of that in the training data. They could also have left out the knowledge.

I don't think you actually can avoid a subject very effectively. Some things might have to be derived from related examples and real time searches but ultimately a kid raised by helicopter parents is all the more dangerous on the day they find the censored materials.

> I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be.

They should have consulted their own models about the ramifications and unintended consequences; based on their actions over the past few months I think it is safe to say that the models are smarter than the decision-makers at anthropic, lol. I know the models are smarter than I am and even I could have told them that they were taking paths, FUD for example, that would lead to grief.

Yeah. Did they want this all along? This will just create more hype, and may push towards significant usage once and when it is available.

It will, otherwise Antrophic will eventually have to leave the US. And I don't think they want that.

In the long run it's not punitive but rather amazing marketing for Anthropic. People crave what they can't have.

To be clear, they've been saying that all AI needs to take a break. I don't think this single action is going to do much.

Boris Cherny has said it many times, you can search YouTube for "coding is solved" to find examples

Or watch Primagen's "I think they are lying to you" with clips in it

I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.

Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) so there was no good faith policy justification for imposing an export control.

This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors. We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.

I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?

It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.

> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever

Yes.

I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that.

And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware.

(This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)

This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models.

Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models.

It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.

If we're measuring progress in hours and days then yes. But if we're measuring progress in months then OSS models are doing fine. You can get a state-of-the art performance in an open model if you pretend it is January 2026 instead of June.

There is no evidence here that the cutting edge labs have any durable advantage. Extrapolating current trends it seems likely that even the Europeans will be capable of meeting any given performance measure with enough time. In fact the evidence suggests that the capital required to run the models is where a moat will develop. Knowing the weights won't help much.

Minimax M3 too, and huawei claims to be releasing non-nvidia dependent training software too. openPangu 2.0 could be a shake-up if it holds up as a good model

China may not care about open source, but they know they will personally fund AI through government investments while US relies on private investments, best way to scare private investments is a free capable alternative for everyone

Add on the fact that they actually invested in energy infrastructure and can offer AI very cheap to their citizens and you can get a population well versed in AI to reduce menial tasks and focus on more productive things (if we're to believe the claims of the technology)

The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling.

There are lots of AI companies and it doesn’t seem that they all have the same funding fountain or share monetization goals. I wouldn’t read much into what each one of them is doing.

Even if the models by the Chinese labs are open source or open weights even after they get to mythos level intelligence lets say, still inference and the optimization of those models to be accessed at speeds of 1000 tokens/sec in not in the hands of general public as these models have parameters more than a trillion and they can't be run on some publicly available hardware, So even after being open source it does'nt fix the problem as the general public will still pay the company for inference.

I'm pretty sure these large models are run on Nvidia GPUs, not some unobtainable piece of secret kit. You could go down the street and buy from AMD or a number of other vendors to push out FLOPs if you wanted or needed, but you'll need a thick wallet to shell out for a cluster of GPUs to run these models. The reason people don't run the big Chinese models at home is that they can't afford the hardware, not that it isn't publicly available. This tech is essentially a large amount of matrix multiplications afterall.

I think the larger problem is that restricting US AI companies gives the Chinese a leg up because they now have a window open where they can become the source of the most powerful models available due to government restrictions rather than on technical merits. All Anthropic customers just got a downgrade last evening, for example. While the Chinese are able to serve the world or whoever, the US corporations will be limited to the US market, or whatever the powers that be will allow. This restrictiveness could turn out to be disadvantageous to American companies since people will migrate to wherever they can get the most powerful models.

> The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose)

DeepSeek is developed by the largest Chinese hedge fund, their models used to make them $ on the share market are very profitable, they've never ever released anything on those models.

Somehow you are claiming that those same group of people are going to totally change their very consistent long term behaviour and start promoting openness when they are in the global leading position in AI?

> much more profitable

I think you made this up.

Right now, I don’t believe any LLM company is profitable at all.

Unless you meant “more profitable” to mean “not-as-badly-negative profit”.

The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.

I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies.

China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power.

Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run.

As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.

I'm European and I don't see sending my data to China as more risky than sending it to the US. Rather the opposite.

I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.

As a private citizen, yes.

But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information

Not sure why anyone in the EU thinks the US is not a significant espionage risk. Adding any major US supplier would have been a significant espionage risk until really recently.

Before the EU cleaned up Europe's act pretty considerably on corruption, US companies used corporate but also state-level espionage actors to level the playing field against a culture of bribes and they were fairly open about it. They absolutely needed to do it, because of the potential penalties back home if they engaged in bribery abroad.

The tables have turned, now. The EU runs much more cleanly than decisionmaking in DC, which is clearly corrupted and lubricated with cash and opportunities for failsons and faildaughters; it has accelerated radically quite recently but it was heading that way from the first Bush era.

But I'd bet the corporate-state merger of industrial espionage is in full flow.

This would require active participation by people inside Anthropic and OpenAI. Given how generally ideological the people working in these companies are, I'd be willing to bet that we would already be reading Snowden-style leaks if it were true.

I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.

> This would require active participation by people inside Anthropic and OpenAI.

Not necessarily of the companies themselves, though; just embedded people at the right hiring level.

> Given how generally ideological the people working in these companies are

History has many examples of truly surprising spies, over the long term. Including in highly ideological environments such as animal rights and eco-campaigning groups. The embedded police spying scandals in the UK make this clear.

It is naïve to think that there are no CIA or NSA employees in some functional role at these two businesses, just as it is naïve to think that they don't have intelligence industry contacts playing them because they are naïve. You only have to look at how the NSA weakened open cryptography to see that two companies staffed by young, absurdly rich people barely out of college with wobbly moral e/acc compasses might be getting played by homegrown spooks.

> I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.

I suggested absolutely nothing of the sort — I flatly was not talking about China at all.

FWIW it cuts both ways: in the dim and distant past of the early dot-com era, I remember encountering someone who wafted inexplicably between US and UK multinational companies who I thought was possibly British intelligence. An odd duck for sure.

Anthropic and OpenAI are not just "another American company", their entire business (and industry) was created based on stealing data and using it for profit. You make this point about "another company" so casually that you'd think you added a SaaS bill for generating thumbnails or whatever. The exact same point you make about China can be made much more confidently and with stronger evidence for the entire modern LLM lab industry.

Again I have to echo the previous poster's point: Most people outside of the US really do not see the US as some much better alternative than China. If anything, in the specific area of LLMs, China are the ones doing work benefitting the everyman whereas almost everything the US labs do does not.

That's why I added "Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited". Reaching the decision that adding one single US-based LLM provider had more benefits than risks took months. And we were selective about who that would be (hint: not OpenAI). And I know companies who are not willing to go that step, using open-weight models on their own infra instead. But outsourcing inference to China was never even a serious suggestion. The notion is absurd to us

That said, I imagine e.g. South Americans thinking very differently on this front

> given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information

Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit.

Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments.

No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.

I'm not sure I agree.

China indeed has a general reputation for widespread espionage, so any Chinese company wanting to expand into the European market has to prove it isn't spying on its potential customers. US companies have traditionally been seen as friendly, so their platforms are essentially built around "trust me bro" guarantees.

In a world where both China and the US are now seen as hostile-by-default, this might actually leave some Chinese companies with an advantage in their ability to demonstrate trustworthiness.

The blurring of US state and corporate espionage in the EU is the stuff of legend. They have always spied, and you can easily make the case that in late 1980s/early 1990s Europe they had good reason to, because European businesses were corrupt.

Totally agree, though it is an unpopular opinion here.

It’s the same paradox as people claiming: “we are European, our data is safer in Europe” when actually your privacy is higher when your data is stored in China (or Russia) you are safer because it is out of reach from your local government.

The only thing I dislike, and that’s no matter the service, is that my data or information usage is shared with third-party.

For example, Anthropic conveniently forgets to mention Datadog has tons and tons of information about Claude users, or that your data transits through machines they don’t operate.

Safety has more than one definition. Being able to sue the company in small claims court when it threatens to delete your account is also part of that, and so is being able to pay for the service when Russian companies are once again put on a sanctions list.

China wants everyday people data because some of those people will get power one day, and China wants to be able to leverage knowledge of you, perhaps even "deep dark secret" data, if they need to.

was going to say this.. open sourcing Chinese models will enforce Chinese dominance instead of reducing it. When an open Chinese model becomes the best alternative to inaccessible closed US models guess what everybody will start to use. And that same open model may embed certain narratives and values that please the Chinese government.

Ya. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make?

Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line?

(hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)

Sounds perfect, sell it to me.

I use LLMs for health, design and programming.

If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.

The US administration restricting the use of US-trained models is one of the best gifts it could make to the Chinese LLM producers, and to the PRC government.

This entire administration is a gift to everybody but the US. It’s either in service of Russia, China or whoever is willing to pay Trump the most.

Chinese have a nickname for Trump. 川建国. Trump the nation builder(meaning China). But Biden actually continued most of Trumps policies.

I won’t forgive Biden for not reversing more of trumps policies, especially immigration

Between RBJ refusing to step down, Biden not reversing immigration policy, and Biden refusing to step down in the primary until too late, he’s going to go down as a poor president in the history books - even if he wasn’t a bad dude or even bad in terms of policy.

Trump was also getting senile before they attempted to assassinate him. Hatred of his enemies gave him another 5 years of energy. Very frustrating, because he absolutly was doing word salad nonsense like this regularly before someone tried to shoot him:

"Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible." - Donald Trump, 2016

It's funny how the acceleration of the downfall of the US (due to trump) is a gift to everyone else. It's almost as if US didn't have as postitive impact on the world as they thought.

A gift to [every dictatorial regime]. It's not a gift to the common people. The hundreds of thousands of people who got aids, and wouldn't have if not for Trumps withdrawal, didn't benefit. The women of Afghanistan didn't benefit. The countries of the EU... Canada... Korea... Taiwan... Ukraine... really just about any democracy didn't benefit.

The downfall of the US benefiting bad people is not evidence that the US didn't have a positive impact.

Downfall sounds exaggerated.

US is a great and respectable country with amazing nature, people tech and military, very very far a collapsed state.

If anything to be worried of, it's the state of Europe. Closer and closer to war, full of insecurity and no innovation.

US is a great country.

There's also the Meta motivation, that even if you don't get the control you would like from releasing a model, it may still be worth it to at least deny others that control. I'm sure that matters even more to China vs. the US than it mattered to Facebook vs. Google.

> I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that.

that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.

Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.

People choose SOTA right now because of the heavily subsidised model subscriptions. People aren't going to pay 20x the price for a model that's maybe 10% better.

Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.

That sounds intuitively true, but I’m not convinced that it is actually the case. I don’t think we know enough about neural network training to say what training and how many parameters are necessary for what kind of performance on which tasks. To me it looks like we currently guess that more is better and try to throw as much compute and data at the problem as is economically feasible. There is little incentive for companies to invest into small model research since their moat is huge models that require special hardware to run.

> > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever

> Yes.

holy shit the naivete of HN nowadays.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of debate about this on r/localllama — will there be a steady supply of new free/open models in the future?

And if not, can we simply keep augmenting “stale” models with new knowledge to keep them useful?

I’m on the pessimistic side of things on both questions.

As for the second question, obviously stale models can be augmented to an extent but it’s nowhere near a substitute for new knowledge being fully baked directly into its training.

> Why can't it be both?

Is the government going to fund all further development? Hard to imagine investors continuing to throw billions at products they aren't allowed to sell.

Honestly, with the caliber of people who currently comprise the US administration; leaving the whole thing to Openclaw and some new fancy model might not be the worst idea.

Trump and friends are only interested in investments they can personally make money from.

> I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?

Here is why it's unlikely this is anything other than "silly behavior by a government":

- some benchmarks show GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and even Claude Opus outperforming Claude Fable, and yet it's Fable which is restricted.

- some benchmarks still show the likes of Kimi 2.5 outperforming any Claude model, and DeepSeek is getting equivalent scores (a few tenths of a percent difference)

> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever (...)

That's immaterial to the discussion. Even if China forced Chinese labs to restrict access to all models, the truth of the matter is that Trump's administration to restrict access to US-based models does not prevent others from having access to models that are as capable or even better.

So what's exactly the point of this?

You’re completely overrating these benchmarks and it’s landing you at a nonsense opinion. Just actually use the models and you will see that the gap is significant.

It should be easy for a company like Anthropic to prove this beyond a doubt. Why don't they? Why don't they have a collection of prompts and side-by-side comparisons with other models showing how far ahead they are?

I think it's mainly because the difference in models at the frontier isn't "response to prompt X", but rather "coherence with 500K tokens of context and instructions in play"

I got to try using Fable for a day... it was a clear and definite shift in quality and how independent it is.

It was almost like having another human using and shepherding Opus for me, instead of herding Opus directly myself.

All that says is some benchmarks aren’t worth the tokens it takes to evaluate them. Mythos is clearly capable of finding zero days other models can’t, and Fable is close enough to be lumped with it.

> Mythos is clearly capable of finding zero days other models can’t

I'm unconvinced that this is anything more than proof of work and marginal improvement that other models will catch up with, perhaps as early as to next week. Lots of other current-gen models will find vulns that can be chained together if you're willing to burn enough tokens on the task, and Fable is an absolute token incinerator.

I still remember when Netscape had outdated ssl for a few years because more advanced cryptography was classified by the US gov as armaments or something. Basically used export restrictions to prevent better security technology from being adopted into commercial products.

Which was a clear as day message that "We have ways to decrypt this, but can't yet decrypt that, so please use the one we can snoop on".

Yet somehow we're always forgetting that lesson and surprised when government is found snooping.

They didn't have some secret way of defeating 40 bit encryption; anyone could do it. 512 bit asymmetric encryption was also brute forced by a private entity, albeit at a high budget.

I'd forgotten all the government attempts at controlling crypto like PGP in the early internet days. It is one straightforward way to look at what's happening here without resorting to speculation about this administration's motives.

> This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't

This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.

US has some questionable allies themselves who happily and remorselessly stole top secret information including nuclear secrets.

> This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.

Let's not forget the Trump administration threatened two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation, and then had the gall to complain they were not helping them attack Iran.

GEO blocking is not the same as blocking based on nationality. I'd like(?) to think someone in this decision chain realized "restricting to US nationals" meant effectively restricting it to all and chose this route knowing Antrophic would need to just pull the model (so engaging in censorship without calling it that, possibly less susceptible to court challenges).

I'm less confident in that. To me the way the announcement reads as malicious compliance -- this administration is extremely petty in its dealings, and it's not outside the realm of possibility they asked for and would have accepted an essentially symbolic ban, something that anyone with technical knowledge and a VPN could bypass.

Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was. The fact that the post does not mention any such discussion, and leaves the nonsensical request as the only stated reason, makes this feel like a power move by Dario, simply complying in the most dramatic and rage-inducing way and announcing it in a way to direct that rage at the USG. (Which is, IMO, a savvy move)

From my login credentials Anthropic do not know I am non-US national. They could deduce it from my chats, but that would take some time to implemwnt.

I get your reasoning but I think you're misreading this. The Trump admin has had access to Mythos for a couple months and certainly had access to pre-release Fable for more than a week but they wait until 5:30p on a Friday to send a broad and unworkable demand for a company to remove its flagship products from access to anyone who is not a confirmed U.S. citizen under severe penalties for any violation.

What penalties? Treason is still punishable by death in the U.S. I hate that I just felt compelled to write that as a serious possibility and, pre-Trump 2.0, I would have accused anyone citing that as scaremongering. But times have changed and this administration hates Anthropic vehemently. Anthropic is the only major AI company not "playing ball" with the DoW and donating to Trump's pet projects.

I truly believe if Mythos was an OAI or Google model, there would have been exactly the kind of discussion you imagine and this would have all been worked out. I deeply regret that recent facts make the most likely conclusion that this late-Friday ban was planned for days (if not weeks). And there was no real attempt to work anything out about Mythos, because that's not really what the DoW wants.

The driver behind this is the still unresolved dispute of Anthropic's Acceptable Use Policy regarding autonomous lethal weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which conflicted with the Pentagon's push for unrestricted model deployment ("all lawful uses"). This is the DoW's counter-attack. I fully expect that the DoW is going to hold Anthropic (and Ant's IPO) hostage by blocking any new model until Anthropic gives the DoW full access with no restrictions except "all lawful uses" (and the DoW's position is their in-house lawyers decide what's legal).

>Anthropic would have been able to talk to someone and explain how it wasn't possible to ban just "foreign nationals", and would have pointed out how nonsensical such a request was.

It's not nonsensical if the intention is to destroy Anthropic. There is nothing to explain.

Anthropic has been trying to leverage government intervention and dishonest security bluster for competitive advantage and now the Trump admin is using it as a pretext to destroy them ahead of the IPO.

I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. ... We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.

So it's silly behavior, as typified by the last decade of American governance? Is there "serious" American leadership we should be expecting to see soon, e.g. 2029 AOC elected on a platform of unlimited 10GW datacenters and universal basic Mythos 8 models?

It may seem subjectively silly to you, but e.g. getting executed for refusing to point at a deer and call it a horse is pretty silly stuff as well, at least for those not living in the Qin Dynasty.

US voters deserve better.

Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

How does a data center harm me? I have seen how incredibly stupid the average (dem or republican both)'s reasons are. If not outright lizard brain radiation beams, more than once I have seen claims of it producing "toxic waste" which is absolutely absurd.

I will be honest, at this stage I have zero to negative opinion on what "community" says. The second one appears a research paper which is much better and I will read it.

Cheaply designed datacenter that don't use a close loop for watercooling and use too much water are a problem

Increased energy prices, increased local pollution, increased climate change.

(And waste electronics are considered hazardous in the EU.)

What is the mode of pollution here? And why is the energy price an issue rather than a need to revamp the electricity production?

I was thinking of the emissions from 'temporary' gas-powered electric generators in the USA.

Improving the electrical production system would be fine, but it needs to be paid for upfront by the datacentre and ideally completed no later than the datacentre. Otherwise citizens end up paying for this on their electricity bills, as is happening in Ireland [1], and other electrical upgrades (factories etc) can't be done as there isn't the capacity. (I think the limit here is trained engineers to design and build the power plants and distribution networks.)

We have at least 4 new-ish hyperscale datacentres in Denmark, one each from Microsoft, Meta, Google and Apple. I think they're here for the renewable power, and at least the Meta and Microsoft ones are putting their waste heat into the local district heating systems. Some of them have indirectly financed construction of renewable power.

But the energy used is enormous! [3] says data centres were 10% of electricity generation in 2020, before the massive increase in GPUs.

They are built on the promise of high-paid jobs, but that turns out to be 20 technicians and a few security guards [2].

I haven't looked into it, but I assume there are no "profits" from big-tech datacentres leading to additional tax payments, unlike e.g. a factory.

[1] https://www.friendsoftheearth.ie/news/the-cost-of-data-centr...

[2] https://ing.dk/artikel/how-few-people-work-tech-giants-data-... — just 450 full time staff for the big-tech datacentres in Denmark — seems to 1-2 each for MS, Meta, Google and Apple.

[3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2020.116928

I think physically owning compute is a benefit of its own beyond paper employment considerations. And I understand straining existing power infrastructure but I am afraid many of the people opposing data centers also oppose construction of new electrical construction on the same frivolous "noise" and "pollution" reasons which are not their actual reason they oppose it.

> why is the energy price an issue

Electricity is sold on the market. If you live next to a data center you can choose not to use any services enabled by that center, but you cannot choose to pay non-datacenter prices for the electricity to charge your car or run your household

I don't think incresed incentives to develop lagging energy infrastructure are a bad thing. Especially in times when solar is cheaper than everything else.

> I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.[...] This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors.

"Silly" is a silly word for corruption.

We need to stop making light of these things. Governments don’t do ‘silly’ things. When you wield that kind of power over people’s lives, everything you do is deadly serious.

Yes. What Elon did with DOGE (including but not limited to destroying USAID) may have been stupid and barely saved any money at all if you look at it as a percentage of the total budget, but it had very real consequences for real people. But, because they were mostly people from Trump's "shithole countries", no one talks about it anymore.

Every F35 is exported with a killswitch. and you think this is a silly decision? its not silly, its gatekeeping, iam sure this will get much strict in future, where even developing a frontier model can get sanctions from US. IMO Every country need AI sovereignty and its right time to form a group or consortium of nations to fund and build an equally capable frontier model that is accessible to all others. AI should not be confined to certain nations, the way nuclear capabilities are restricted.

There's no kill switch. The F35 advantage is the mission data files that are frequently updated and allow the F35 to classify targets and threats. Essentially the US and partners collect the electronic signatures of enemy radars and package them so in a conflict the het can draw a box with a S400 label.

So it doesn't have a kill switch, it just stops being useful when it can no longer regularly phone home? That sounds awfully close to a killswitch to me...

You don’t need a fancy kill switch, just stop sending parts and updates, any sustained conflict will do the work.

Any F35 bought by Europe is nothing short of lunacy. You don’t buy from people hell-bent on having conflicts with you.

The UK alone produces 15% of the parts required to assemble the F35. Around 25% of the jet is manufactured/produced by the other partners of the program.

Heck the F35B only exists due to the UK demanding it. They have access to the source code (and so do Israel).

Due to political engineering some significant parts are manufactured in partnership countries. That supply chain is also a vulnerability for the US albeit to a lesser degree.

Except the Israeli versions obviously. These are at least on par with domestic.

Iam not sure about this, may be true. But in general exported products are always less capable. Be it f35, brahmos or s400.

Nineties called and they want their shitty export grade computing back. Anyone still remember OpenBSD?

It's also possible that they literally are too dumb to realize they asked for something infeasible. For example, the same main character who apparently gave up a career as an extra in made-for-TV WWII German movies to become a very high ranking government official.

> silly behavior by a government

I can hear alarm bells going off in less silly governments around the world as we speak. Genie's out of the bottle. The gears have been put in motion. Etc.

"effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) "

No - it's extremely effective.

Do you realize the difference between a 'few people using VPNs + fake IDs at 2-person companies ... vs companies all companies globally not allowed to use tech?

If 'Bank of Montreal' were caught using export controlled technology it could be devastating - so they're not going to be using it along with any little mom and pop shop.

We don't know what the Administration is doing other than 'This is Extremely Heavy Handed' and will have devastating consequences if it goes on.

> US voters deserve better.

Yes, something better than a winner-take-all system.

We have now enough data about modern democracies to conclude that presidential and semi-presidential republics are flawed.

Winner-take-all mechanics are not democratic, period, they give voters very little choice to be represented (generally a handful of parties), just two in the US.

People aren't "conservative" or "liberal". They have a huge and diverse array on topics ranging from education, immigration, healthcare, privacy, civil rights, public spending, foreign policies, etc, etc, etc. Yet we bind people to choose among a handful of parties, which at best overlap with some of those opinions, just to elect a single person that is extremely hard to remove (both from a legal point of view and a from that person's rightful ability to claim popular mandate), that do not rely on confidence votes nor their own party support.

And that individual, in the end, really represents fully a very minority of the country (because of the points before) and can also do the opposite of what the promises were, unchecked.

And from a democracy safety itself, please not that every single country turning authoritarian in the last 60 years has been either presidential or semi presidential. Sri Lanka in the 70s is the only exception, there are no others. All others have been presidential.

Not sure if you are agreeing with my point or not.

But I assure you that many places will be happy to switch up to Fable when it's available and back to Opus when it's not.

It's a programming tool, not something that will send you out of business if it disappears.

I think this is also overly naive. We live in a world of hardware attestation and passkeys, the baseline requirements to use new models can increase to cryptocurrency-levels of KYC. If this becomes the new norm (which it easily could), then the best models will impose increasingly restrictive requirements.

The statement said that even foreign nationals within the US would be barred. That seems intentionally unworkable to me, and makes me think that the intent was to be more restrictive/disruptive than even an export control. It is hard to tell what the internal discussions are, but given the last run-in between the administration and Anthropic, and given the administration's politicization of nearly everything, I think it's likely that this is not necessarily a long term across-the-board policy plan.

I agree that it's really hard to tell from the outside, but if I had to guess I think we still have more to worry about on the side of "Wall Street races to superintelligence" than on the side of "KYC for AI". I could be wrong though.

I don't see your point why export control is a silly tool. There's a difference between a VPN which I can prop up on my home server or a $5 VPS, vs a Mythos-scale closed source model running on millions of dollars of hardware

I mean, if the stated intent of an export control is to allow domestic use but prevent export, achieving the stated intent is impossible, because every developer in the world wants the latest models and will get a VPN.

A VPN won't work in this instance without a US credit card. So it's completely possible.

As other posted noted, US cc is, by far, the easiest piece of information to acquire by a determined actor. Possible and inconvenience, but that is about it.

Why is that? Well, not to search very far, I just got a breach notice from a company I never heard of the other day. They are sorry.

I'm so glad none of those US credit cards have never been stolen.

Can you imagine the disaster???

It is trivially easy for nation states, non-nation bad actors, etc. to use US payments. I'd guess that most of the financial scams targeting Americans rely on US-based mules and their American bank accounts.

Also, foreign nationals legally residing in the US can have access to US-based payments. There's no way when accepting a credit card payment from a US card issuer to ask whether the card holder is a natural born citizen versus Green Card holder, etc.

For peons sure. For anyone who is an actual security threat it would be easy. That is why this is either a) stupid or b) yet another lever to make it easier for this administration to incarcerate people.

> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too. US voters deserve better.

With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world. US politicians and elite, regardless of political inclination, understand the enormous strategic potential of this technology and will ITAR the shit out of frontier models and/or use them as leverage for extracting concessions out of other countries.

The main losers are Big AI labs, their investors, foreign employees and rest of the world.

Fwiw, China and other countries would’ve done the exact same thing. It’s perhaps the game theoretic optimal approach when your comparative advantage is so vast (capital, compute, talent, embedded knowledge) and keeps growing especially if RSI is real (making it nearly impossible for anyone else to catch up)

>With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world.

Really? You think the economics of the AI buildout remain viable if US companies cannot export their highest value services?

You think expelling foreign AI researchers doesn't hurt the industry or boost foreign competitors? Half (or whatever) of Google's AI team, including their AI chief are foreign nationals and/or located outside of the US.

You think that other IT exports will not suffer if the US turns out to be an unreliable and even capricious supplier?

This does real damage to the US economy.

I humbly accept it's very difficult to game this out with any degree of confidence, especially as other countries deploy more resources.

But the questions about viability of the labs because of export restrictions is not in my cone of uncertainty. If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked. Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, economy-wide automation would make the US wealthy beyond imagination.

US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP. I am not aware of the international revenue share for OpenAI/Anthropic.

>If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked.

The US is about a quarter of the global economy, but let's use Microsoft's international revenue share of ~50% as a proxy for tech services. It's ~40% for the S&P 500.

I don't know what share of that would be impacted by export bans, but it would certainly affect ROI. It would hurt the competitiveness of the wider US tech industry and create incentives for moving highly paid work overseas.

>US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP.

It's 12% to 13% but this is distorted by the way in which tech services are counted in export statistics and also by tax avoidance. Just look at Ireland's ridiculous GDP numbers.

If the technology is as powerful as these somehwat fantastical "goals" suggest, the incentive to use it everywhere in the world would be enormous. An export ban wouldn't mean that only the US has the capability. The theory behind current models is well known. It's just a matter of optimising them for specific use cases and using them on an industrial scale.

Most AI researchers are not US citizens either. It's completely obvious that this is the US shooting itself in the foot (if it were to last, which I don't believe).

> Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, The is doing some very heavy lifting.

> US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP and has a deep trade deficit ... maybe there is a connection?

Silly or not, precedent matters and labeling it silly is rhetorical. The impact is going to be critically important.

> We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.

Can we stop with this bothsides-ing. The level of co-opting by this administration is unprecedented. There’s the strong-arming to get Intel equity stake, Nvidia/AMD revenue share, U.S. Steel golden share, Lithium Americas equity stake, Big Law pro bono pledges, TikTok forcible acquisition, Paramount-CBS-Skydance favor, it’s just unbelievable the stark use of power.

As you’ll see from my comment history, I’ve been consistent on how horrible this forcible TikTok acquisition was, and don’t forget that Biden was banning TikTok just the same before Trump got into office (and that Trump started this anti-TikTok action in his first administration before that). Yes, this administration is a special kind of awful, but the last one sucked too.

The “TikTok ban” was a law passed by Congress that the Trump administration completely ignored until they arranged the sale to a political ally.

Both sides are not at all the same in how executive power is being wielded.

Be as upset as you want about Congress passing the law but that’s a 100x higher bar than what the Trump administration does regularly.

No, we can not stop with the both sidesing.

We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump. Don't think I'm justifying that - it's just what happened, in basically the tech bros own words.

The Dems then proceeded to lose to Trump, despite being extremely well funded themselves. They accomplished this through a spectacular series of "own goals": arming genocide, vetoing ceasefires, forcing deeply unpopular candidates, allowing a certain attempted insurrectionist rapist run out the clock on justice [0], awful elitist messaging on the economy, keeping the Epstein files under wraps, etc.

The red side is worse than the blue side, so the blue side demand immunity from criticism. The red side sets everything on fire, on purpose. The blue side prevents progressives from real change. The cycle rachets and repeats. This has been going on for decades, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars - but people who point it out get accused of saying both sides are the same.

0 - "That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition." - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-rac...

We should not stop _all_ of the both-sidesing, but we absolutely should stop _some_ of the both-sidesing. Both-sidesing done without both (a) critical thinking and (b) honest intent is simply whataboutism, one of the many forms of societal pollutant that we seem to have fully normalized.

Your second sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that needs to stop.

Your third sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that should not stop.

Your fourth is disappointing conclusion, a strawman to start ("demand immunity from criticism"...) and a false equivalence / faux symmetry as a bonus ("sets everything on fire" & "doesn't support progressive policies" are two sides of _which_ coin, exactly...?)

> We are here in many ways as a direct result of the last admin, particularly the way they threatened tech companies. This moved tech companies to feel emboldened to go all-in on Trump.

I agree - he clearly should have done much more than just threaten.

To be perfectly honest, I actually do think we should stop all the both sidesing - but only after following it to its logical conclusion.

Have _both sides_ actively collaborated in genocide?

... Yes.

Therefore, _both sides_ have breached any recognizable red line of decency. _Both sides_ have breached hard-won national and international law.

Time for something better than both sides unapologetically arming live-streamed genocide.

"Oh, you're one of those single issue guys" - if the issue is genocide, then yes. Why aren't you? Why aren't 98.15% of 2024 voters?

As pointed out below: it's our culture. And that's not okay.

> Your second sentence is a great example of the type of both-sidesing that needs to stop.

I don't see how you can disagree with the simple truth of it tbh. In what way is that not what happened?

> This has been going on for decades

With statements like that, if it’s been going on that long then it’s either our culture and normal way of life or you’re on some QAnon cuckoo rabbit hole.

> then it’s either our culture and normal way of life

That's the one - from an outside PoV the two US parties are two sides of the same coin, barely a perineum twixt them, both ceding the votes of many people to the cash of a very few.

It's baked into the US zeitgeist that it's better to sit back and watch "the government" go tits up and then wade in with guns hoping for a better outcome than it is to properly manage communal resources and common ground.

I disagree with parent, but nothing they stated qualifies as 'dismissable' as 'qanon' level, which btw is one of the key phrases establish to ignore some opinions. It may be incorrect, inaccurate and/or simply wrong, but dismissing it as some conspiracy is.. what is a good way to characterize it.. slightly over the top.

So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?

And potentially more importantly: if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus, is getting this treatment, how are all the AI investments that are based on the expectation of ASI / AGI / significantly better models going to be recouped?

It seems more likely that the logical conclusion is the executive branch is mad at Anthropic, and lashing out at them with any convenient tool that they have.

I suspect if OpenAI or Grok was operating at the same level they wouldn’t find themselves on the sharp end of the government stick

Anthropic's own marketing and urban legends spawned by them is to blame too. They built up too much BS around mythos and project glasswing

Marketing is never ever to blame. Remember a few months ago when the U.S. government labelled them a supply chain risk? What eventually happened was that a federal judge issued a temporary injunction while calling it a "classic First Amendment retaliation." The Constitution protects such marketing; the government is not allowed to be maddened by such marketing.

Not much stops them from saying it's due to national security, when it's actually due to the guy in the chair having a fit of emotions. And the current admin has a very long streak of declaring things as national emergencies when those things just so happen to be something they recently lost face on.

Regardless of motivations for this case, I take this as a clear sign that we've reached the point where the federal government decides its within their authority to mandate this and its reasonable for them to do it.

Governments don't give up power, and once there's precedence for use of that power they'll continue to do it and begin eyeing the next power they can claim.

But it was Anthropic initiative to limit the deployment to restricted groups, it's great to see the gov following their analysis. AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't?

Yes, Dario Amodei definitely opened the door to this kind of attack by trying to market Mythos as being too dangerous to release.

Which they anticipated, which is why they were flagging and dropping back to opus on anything they could even potentially be called on.

They should have just called it Opus 5.1 and released it like normal. All this fanfare, under this corrupt regime, after they declared you a supply chain risk… Wario has horrendously bad judgment.

That would have been such a different HN thread. "Dang I feel a nice bump in performance here, way to go" and that would be that.

> AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't?

IF LLMs are THAT dangerous and powerful (and that's a huge if that I do not currently subscribe to), then no, no one should have access at all, there is no group of people in positions of power (government or corporate power) that I would consider "restrained"

If its so "powerful" that it's this kind of issue, why does it even matter who "has it" or not? Like what does this mean to you? The super powerful, super intelligent AI is going to have arbitrary loyalty with one person or another?

I would be okay with that if it actually meant that. Very restrained individuals in reality would see nothing and very unrestrained governments would have access.

Are you asking me to provide evidence that in this specific instance this is an instance of weaponization of process, or are you asking me for evidence that this particular executive has lost the benefit of the doubt when it comes to weaponization claims, or are you asking for evidence that the executive is hostile to Anthropic?

Are you asking me to provide evidence that in this specific instance this is an instance of weaponization of process, or are you asking me for evidence that this particular executive has lost the benefit of the doubt when it comes to weaponization claims, or are you asking for evidence that the executive is hostile to Anthropic?

This government has proved time and time again it does not deserve the presumption of regularity and that it is more than capable of acting in arbitrary and capricious manner for petty reasons.

Anthropic was designated a "supply chain risk" despite this (a) being an absolutely absurd classification and (b) being completely at odds with the continued usage of any Anthropic products within the US government: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-officially-arbitrari...

From that, we can very reasonably conclude that the US government has a specific vendetta against Anthropic in particular, and that this vendetta has nothing to do with the technical merits of their product.

To my knowledge, they have yet to drop that classification, despite heavy court opposition.

Additionally: technical benchmarks suggest that the most recent ChatGPT models are within maybe 10% of Fable 5's capabilities, so this being a pure "capabilities" concern seems unlikely.

Uncertainty: It's possible that we have just suddenly reached the end of public AI releases, though - if ChatGPT 5.6 also gets blocked, that would be very good evidence of a general, non-weaponized policy. Given the recent Executive Order requiring pre-release audits of frontier models, this is somewhat more likely than it was a couple weeks ago.

I still think things add up to "weaponization is the most likely theory" and that one is being disingenuous to dismiss it as a reasonable possibility. But it's certainly NOT the only reasonable possibility.

Fortunately for us all Dario literally asked for this sort of restriction on model usage so we can be certain Anthropic are not victims here.

The ban on exporting cryptography in the 90's lasted for years, and got to be a major pain in the arse for the entire web industry in its early years. The US govt can be very stubborn about this stuff when it wants to be.

In the late 90s the US was in a position of power that it no longer holds.

It had just one the cold war and China wasn't even a shadow of what it is now.

Almost all of the major tech companies are either HQ'ed in the US or have a very significant US entity, and make up probably about half of the S&P500. The US's power has changed and is actively changing, but the US still holds all the cards in 2026.

> the US still holds all the cards in 2026

So, the last time an AI-related export control was imposed - NVidia chips deemed to be "too powerful" - how do you think that will work out? If the US is holding all the cards, why is China now refusing their chips?

Don't you think these types of restrictions will weaken rather than empower the US?

> Don't you think these types of restrictions will weaken rather than empower the US?

I do. But I think the US is currently in a position of strength that they are continually undermining.

They're undermining their position of strength precisely by using these types of restrictions. That's the point I'm trying to make.

I think culture moves a lot faster than you believe.

The broader discussion about AI and model capabilities died a couple of years ago precisely because it's so underwhelming now. People did adapt. Startups stopped hiring just to get to MVP. Coding sweatshops had huge layoffs and stopped overhiring. The corporate world got better tools for collaborations and meetings. Accessibility tools are still bad, but improving. I would argue that the a11y topic is still very ripe to be the next big thing as it continues to converge with better UI/UX instead of being an afterthought.

The layperson and tech professional alike otherwise agreed that this is a vehicle for blame game, grift, disinformation, etc. This is where all the pushback is and the topic at hand. People aren't dumb. The only people worried about "AI" are the ones who bet too big on it.

> So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?

95% odds this gets reversed by Monday morning is why

I realize these models are locked up pretty tight and terabytes in size, but in a future like that, I don’t see them not being leaked via an insider. The weights have to be loaded into VRAM at some point.

It’s a pretty safe bet that every frontier lab has multiple foreign intelligence agencies running assets inside of it.

Every hyperscaler hosting these models outside of FEDRAMP environments has been compromised by every regional power’s intelligence services. Fable was running all over the world until today.

AWS and friends are very good at providing excellent enterprise grade security, but it’s literal child’s play for nation state threat actors to exfil these models.

TEMPEST / EMSEC alone is a wide open door for unclassified datacenters when the Mossad’s out to get you.

I'm skeptical that you're going to be able to reliably exfiltrate ~10TB of model weights using TEMPEST. Which is not to say weights are secure, just that this isn't the threat model I would be concerned about.

That would depend on what gets leaked, as I'm not so sure that the weights by themselves would be enough to replicate the architecture. I imagine some part of the secret sauce will remain in the architecture, and the tensor dimensions may not be enough to decode it.

I'm sure if proprietary models continue to be a big thing, the methodology of their storage and loading on hardware will be obfuscated quite a bit.

But you can see this is not true (yet); competitors/Chinese labs are less than 6 months behind: either via leaks or by just stumbling on the same improvements with time/effort.

What chinese labs are on par with GPT-5.3 and Sonnet 4.6 that I can go and use today? (granted they're 4 months ago, not 6 but nothing was released in Dec/Jan so I rounded up).

The gamers would really be complaining about why they can’t run Fable.torrent on their gaming PCs

I don't think it's a good idea to give the crowds that kind of weapon. The first thing they'd do is "liberate" the model aka remove guardrails and safetly-protocols and brag on X / reddit with it and throw it into the public. That's only cool for a geek that doesn't think about the ethical impact of such a move. You'd basically become responsible for anything that is done with it, forever - have a good sleep. /s

As opposed to what, the US military, or better yet Israel (because we all know they won't be excluded) using that model to drive weaponry that kills people?

Your hypothetical implies that there is a better alternative, but when those models are "restricted", in practice that means that the only people who have access to them are precisely those who can and will use them for the worst kind of shit. So yes, releasing them to the public is a better deal, ethically speaking, at least then the playing field will be slightly more equal.

There are plenty of weapons (see custom made virus) which no state actor (or even an informal militia) would want to release, as these weapons attack everyone. But, open access to details of its construction leaves everyone vulnerable to motivations of small groups of crazy individuals.

What if I told you there are no safety guardrails. I used GLM 5.1 and had fable literally build a harness to avoid triggering guard rails. I built skills carefully and had Fable doing vuln research and exploit repro in a few hours. I called the project manhattan. The GLM models are down for almost anything so I named it Oppenheimer. It orchestrated the fable CLI agents via tmux. This whole Fable/Mythos thing is such a fucking joke. It is all PR and theatre and they know it.

I’ve been doing pentesting with LLMs for a while and only hit a few “nope I won’t do that” and one “this conversation is flagged for being against the TOS”. No idea what the guardrails are but they are trivially abused

If the frontier models will take as much money to train as they do now, there is no way the wealthy are able to afford their training just for their own consumption. Financing of this whole thing rests on the models being available to companies and consumers who are willing to pay astronomical (compared to other software) sums for it.

I can very easily see a licensing requirement coming soon. Running a higher-grade AI will require a govt-issued license, which involves a six-month application process, explanations of why you need to run it, where it's going to be stored and who will have access to it, pretty much the same as non-USA countries deal with firearms.

Reasoning? More customers = more revenue, there's negative financial incentive behind restricting TAM. In the same way the iPhone isn't restricted to only the wealthy, that would significantly reduce total goods sold and thereby revenue. In addition that creates lower economies of scale, lower network effects etc.

Reasoning: the poster blames all evil in the world on "capitalism", "corporations", and "the rich". The aforementioned are conspiring to gatekeep us all from the obvious good of poor, communist anarchy.

Pay $1,000,000 per business function you want to build.

Businesses will gladly pay it.

Individuals will be locked out and unable to compete.

Oracle will be able to "prompt a new smartphone" for $500M or whatever and enter the market to compete with Apple and Google. You and I can't afford that and won't be able to compete.

Hyperscalers will hyper scale even faster.

They'll port Linux to Rust, remove the GPL, and have all kinds of new entirely proprietary OSes. They'll be attested, signed, and gradually we'll lose open hardware. Thin clients with binary blobs, highly encrypted, no control, only leased to us.

Within a generation nobody will be able to program or own devices that can program.

That's the scary scenario.

Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. But yeah, I got the gist of it. Incumbents like moats and happily pay money to build them. Note that the pricing of Anthropic's models usually increases for new models. Chinese models cost 10 or 100 times less. Are they less capable? Maybe, but they are alternatives unless credit card companies start banning payments to them.

> Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers.

Then they won't survive the termination boundary.

Too bad. Should have had more cash.

People have to eat food so they will keep doing business no matter what. If AI cost too much, they will do it without AI. Any resource that costs too much is replaced with cheaper alternatives. AI is no exception. At worst most of the IT business will die and we will make money doing something else.

Then I guess I stop using computers that much outside of my job. It was fun while it lasted, but there’s other stuff.

You don’t _have_ to buy into the technocracy, there’s a whole outside going on.

I'm praying that China survives this BS and remains the bastion of AI model openness and freedom of choice. Can't believe I just wrote that.

how is that different from US AI that self censors and is banned from release by their emperors?

US have guardrails, China have censorship.

US have fair tax breaks to support the national champions, China have unfair State-backed monopolies.

US have necessary intelligence gathering, China have state-surveillance.

Well, it's different in that at least the Chinese companies release weights unlike the American ones!

That's the fundamental difference with open models, anybody can run and tune them any way they like. The real difference in philosophy is that Americans companies treat the model as the product, while Chinese companies see models at infrastructure you build products on top of. You amortize the cost of deploying it at scale by sharing knowledge and iterating quickly to bring the cost down.

The logical conclusion is that the US administration has decided to run the country like a robber baron and is demanding bribes from AI companies. The only question is whether EU and China can effectively attract American researchers.

For the sake of argument, assume everyone is working on good faith and at least believes and means the things they're saying.

The US government believes that Fable/Mythos is a weapon that needs to be export-controlled, and limited to only US customers. Presumably OpenAI/xAI/Google would face the same constraints, for the same reasons.

OS/foreign models are unaffected - OS because they cannot control who runs them, and foreign because they are not controlled by the US government. We could assume that China will implement the same policy controls, but they see the world differently so might not.

So US AI companies are then limited to the US market, effectively, after about six months (the lag between the current frontier models and the OS models). They have much less incentive to push the envelope to create better models, because the US govt might also ban those completely.

The investor froth around the race to AGI dies, so valuations shrink (the current IPOs may be affected), and presumably the bubble bursts. None of the AI companies can afford to continue building data centres, so that all dies immediately. US GDP drops by ~5% because of that alone.

In a year's time, the US is in a major recession because it gambled so hard on AI. Europe less so, only because it was such a distant follower in that race. China is more-or-less unaffected. The best models are now OS/foreign, and AI is moving forward more slowly, but still moving forward.

Any other scenarios?

> Any other scenarios?

Get to Tuesday, restriction is lifted. Get to Friday, restriction is back on. Confusion reigns.

Interesting scenario though: do the other labs attempt to “dodge” the import restrictions by claiming their models are “dumber and not a threat” thereby maintaining larger market access.

If so, doesn’t this basically force a stall in US-based development? EU will keep doing its thing at its pace. Chinese models will get a boatload more popular, but will probably slow down as they can drop to whatever pace they wish.

cynical follow-up: if they’ve plateaued, is this a clever way to avoid the negative consequences of the market implosion that a substantially substandard model release would cause, thereby giving them an “out”?

A Holmes indeed... your deductive powers are piercingly perceptive! (the event chain was a joy to follow, gave me ai2027 vibes, but slowdown like)

Of course, the world is not filled with rational actors, and the probability of the current administration allowing the market to tank like that seems next to null, so Occam's razor (or whatever) would point to another TACO inevitably incoming

I'd certainly bet on your scenario if it was reasonable to assume the US and China could get over the 'race to the top or die at the bottom' dynamic

so far ai2027 seems to be playing out to an almost uncanny accuracy, realpolitik obliterates the façade yet again

> OS models are unaffected

If the major nations that host companies that create those OS models implement export control on top models, there won't be any new OS models with top capabilities.

Assuming anyone involved in this crap is operating in good faith is foolish at best. The only thing any of them give a shit about is accumulating money and power.

It is very hard to believe the US government is operating in good faith any more. Do I need to gesture more broadly at the open corruption?

Agreed. Going by patterns in the Iran war, members of Trump's family/in-crowd will invest in AI while it suffers from this decision, and then 15 mins later Trump will reverse the decision.

The thing is, that blatant market manipulation is playing with fire here, as so much of the US economy is invested in the AI bubble.

The logical conclusion is that someone "forgot" to pay the right bribe to somebody in the admin, or make the right contributions to the GOP.

Same as the new bridge between Windsor and Detroit can't open until some palms are greased.

Chaos is a ladder, gotta keep climbing

Somebody saying "Such a great $965 billion company you've got there, it would be such a shame if ..." you got the rest.

>> Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?

The public may not see more improvements but I'm sure they government will be forcing AI companies to continue improving them for their own use. Those schools aren't going to bomb themselves.

This is a good point. If I were an investor, there is no way I'm investing into frontier labs after this announcement. Is this how the bubble pops?

Moreover, is this a clever way for the frontier labs to try and “dodge” the negative impacts of the bubble popping.

“Oh no it’s not our fault!!1! ~~My dad works at Nintendo~~ the govt told us we weren’t allowed to release it”

No, there is still money to be made in self hosted LLM models. You invest in the AI infrastructure companies, not frontier labs. The bubble continues.

Wait a few weeks. They won't be able to generate enough without it; it will get reversed and things will just continue as normal.

But those were very easy to sidestep: proxy/vpn, download java with US encryption, and move on. That is very different with this.

I don't know, I've been using Mythos this week quite sceptically and I found it to be incredibly dumb. For instance gave it a dialogue between 3 people and it was constantly mixing up who said what to whom, which looked like early Gemini behaviour. But latest Opus does that too. It would also make nonsensical inference about given papers and only correct itself when pointed out what it said wrong. If that is what US government fears... maybe the fear is that someone follows the dumb things the model suggests.

it feels like it's mostly just tuned to up it's level of capability on long horizon tasks - stop context rot and keep persisting at all costs until a goal is done.

The base intelligence does not feel much greater to me.

This is a ridiculous thing to test on it. Other models are trained on that kind of thing, use those instead.

Fable was designed for _really_ hard software engineering problems. Possibly large, but especially hard. For those tasks, you feel the difference immediately.

No it wasn't, Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding.

And yes, the parent poster is accurate, Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was. Stop being so AI-pilled.

Codex is still a better model, and yes, for the hardest engineering problems. I use Claude for UI/GUIs and Codex for all my backend, because I have 20 years of experience of actual hard engineering, and I can see that Codex writes, cleaner code, and is far more steerable.

Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive", but lines of code doesn't make a better system.

> Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding

This is a forum filled with experts. Putting marketing aside, in a forum like this, it is most useful to assess models according to the toughest problems in the domain they were specifically refined on. For DeepSeek, that's math. For Claude, that's programming. Gemini and ChatGPT are generalist. Yes, you can use every model for anything you like. But Fable is a bit special, it's very expensive, and very clearly designed for particular types of tasks.

> Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was.

"Just as" is up for debate, but yes, all models are capable of moronic mistakes. That's not helpful information though.

> Codex is still a better model

You're comparing agentic workflows, which relies on a lot more than just the underlying model. It sounds like you're using it like a precision instrument, which is great! It's very different compared to my use cases though, and the ones that Fable seems to excel at. I'm using it for scientific computing, and you really, really want it to one shot a solution. It's either the right algorithm for the task, or the wrong one. So for the hardest problems, it needs to successfully implement a solution in effectively one shot. I use Codex too, but it's often too careless for the delicate tasks. If it gets it wrong, it is really hard to steer it back. You have to start from scratch.

> Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive".

Think you missed the mark on this one. Not really an engineer, have as much experience as you do in my job. A solution to my problems comprises few lines of code. Fable actually gets it right, first time, every time (so far), but this is with a very long prompt and a bunch of attachments. No other model has done this for me. Not shilling for Anthropic, just impressed. This isn't particularly subjective for me; it is quantitatively measurable.

Don't assume everyone using AI is going to have the same experience you have, or the same types of use cases. And please don't assume that because others have different experiences that it makes them "bad".

Also, Claude has always been mediocre at creative tasks. For your line of work, I would have already recommended Codex hands down.

> This is a forum filled with experts

Half of HN commentators probably work on basic CRUD. Armchair experts, maybe.

I tested it on that too. A problem I usually give a model to test is to optimise already well optimised function that performs certain calculations. I give it reference to CPU instruction set, how instructions can be paired to take advantage of superscalar execution pipeline etc. In that test also it fell on its face by producing code that was demonstrably slower and with extra bug.

There may be a temporary plateau. And it could have fascinating macroeconomic impacts.

Efficiency will become the next thing to focus on. It was already emerging, but accelerating the focus on efficiency will lead to a ton of excess capacity and even some investments in data centers to go belly up. And ultimately the AI bubble bursting will look a lot like the dot com, with its surplus fiber.

Oh, and this will put gas on the fire that fighting AI and big tech is the next political rally cry. Along with “eat the rich” as they are seen as taking both jobs and money.

Curious to see where it’s all headed and how Trump’s call will impact it.

You touched a great point, I wonder how the markets would react to this. No wonder the order was released just after the end of business on a Friday. Let me guess, something will happen right before market opening on Monday and some bets will pay great dividends.

If there’s one thing that’s certain it’s that Trump will do something just after markets close on Friday.

But I hadn’t considered this fell into that category. Except maybe as a direction from Iran. You make a good point, it may trigger immediate reactions in the market. Not just 3-6 month ones.

I wonder what the counterbalance will be by Monday morning.

>> if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus

What an unbelievable claim. Especially since the vast majority of publicly available benchmarks disagree.

The model card for mythos shows it being an incremental improvement in all respects besides security.

This is utterly daft to say if you actually used the thing for hard problems, something that benchmarks have been known to be unable to capture. It is night and day compared to Opus and every other model out there. It was nice while it lasted.

It's strange how uninformed people are when they are so willing to to make assertions. I used it too and it really felt like a generational shift and not an incremental one.

These threads about Anthropic always seem so astroturfed with some of the loudest and most uninformed people around.

I think you have AI Psychosis friend.

I've used Claude Code and Codex since release and use them both in parallel. Codex is still better (yes even with Fable).

Claude Code is best for UI, nice looking guis, etc, and apparently also best at impressing mediocre programmers who are prone to AI psychosis.

All the best engineers I worked with in past jobs (faang folk, spacex, x.ai, and others) all use Codex, go figure.

It's really annoying when people seem to assume that their experiences and use-cases are universal, and that other experiences are "psychosis". Fable seems to excel at tasks that are research-level hard. The vast majority of people do not have these problems. FAANG engineers probably don't either. Codex is great, I use it too. It has a major advantage in terms of token limits so you can often brute-force things through. If it is a task that Codex can do with enough tokens, it isn't worth using Fable for it. I used Fable on the tasks that Codex and Opus consistently failed at. Delicate computational geometry tasks, mostly, really darn hard ones. It worked first try, every time, every single one. That's terrifying to me. I don't know what to tell you, I don't care about hyping Anthropic.

> most uninformed people around

You do realize none of this thread was about Claude Code vs Codex?

Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.

It might be a national security problem for other nations to have access to these models. But it's equally now a national security problem for any other nation to depend on them. Or US tech in general.

The incentives around OSS become stronger the further down in the list of market leaders a company is. The #1 company has no particular incentive to push open software apart from a belief that the market is going to be come commoditised anyway. But the 2nd or 3rd largest player has actual incentives to break the market up and remove software quality as a consideration. No #10 may as well not bother with a proprietary option since if they make it a software quality battle they're going to lose each customer 9 times anyway.

Just because the Chinese are running export controls in one market doesn't mean that they're going to close of access to AI. They might, but each market should be considered in isolation.

Realpolitik in action. Great powers just impose export controls because they know they can and they think it would be beneficial to the nation.

And it is nearly always hubris - the people making these decisions are surrounded by yes-men who built their whole career pumping up the egos of their superiors.

> Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.

They’re falling back to Opus 4.8. Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.

None of open weights models are even at Opus 4.8 levels. If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.

A sample of one, but I was getting more stuff done despite Fable uses tokens twice as fast as Opus, because it understood the goals so well and worked to achieve them.

Same experience. Wouldn't waste my tokens on easy stuff for it. It blasted through some of my toughest problems and produced some truly great code.

Can you give an example of what those "toughest problems/great code" are? I don't need to know the prompt nor the output, but the general idea, what it is about.

Some very tough computational geometry problems I couldn't solve on my own, nor with the assistance of other AIs or my colleagues. Fable did them all first go. The most impressive built a custom optimizer with a ludicrous number of adaptive switches that absolutely crunched through an error surface with a bunch of nontrivial nullspaces and some wild curvature. That optimizer is of independent interest; it's not totally novel in theory, but the implementation is an impressive piece of engineering.

> more stuff done

More stuff done per dollar or more stuff done for more dollars? Seems to be an important distinction

Given the same usage limits, I was able to get more stuff done and not even hit the usage limits, because I wasn't working on constantly fixing what Opus was trying to do, Fable just understands the task correctly and works great with the given context.

Same here, not n=3, plus the above 3 reporting, so n=6 and rising

Fable was definitely better for a variety of tasks, even accounting for using 2X the token rate, like the way it used the tokens faster reduced the wasted tokens, as least for the subset of those who already knew at least some optimizations...?

Yep. I love open source but there isn’t a model that comes close still to the closed source options like Opus 4.8 and that’s obvious from most people I see across the software industry as well. There are at least another few models after Opus from OpenAI and Anthropic most would go down the list using before any of the Chinese models at this point.

> Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.

Or they were getting silently rerouted and couldn't realise they weren't using Fable

> If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.

GPT-5.5 isn't awful.

Opus 4.8 has taken such a beating over the last couple of days since the release of fable, videos online of people referring to it like the “redheaded stepchild” (is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist) basically at this point, everyone is going to be seriously disappointed to fall back to that.

> is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist

It's not racist or even politically incorrect in the US, it's a common saying.

Feel free to replace "racism" with "discrimination" if you prefer. English is not my first language and the minutiae elude me.

Yeah, not sure where the phrase originated but it does sound bad when you put some thought into it. My sister is a redhead and people loved to make fun of her growing up, telling her there's no way two parents with brown hair could have a kid with red hair, so the mailman (who also had red hair) was obviously her dad.

Which models? Im curious what kind of more specific hypothesis you're willing to put forth. Anthropic going to lose 20-30-40-50% of users to Deepseek? What?

I quit paying for Claude Code to buy z.ai's coding plan for use with OpenCode. I'm not a power user, but I don't regret switching away from Claude. OpenCode is generally nicer for my work.

Why z.ai and not an ollama pro plan that can use all the open models? Real question, not snark. I've only ever done ollama and wonder what I'm missing.

Because I bought a year's subscription in December, when it was still $6/mo :P

I have decently capable hardware, but stuff like Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 still doesn't compare to agentic editing with a frontier model. Right now, OpenCode's $10/mo "Go" plan is what I'd be looking to try once my year expires.

MiniMax M3 is surprisingly powerful, and open weight (or is about to be). There's others in this space too: MiMo v2.5, GLM 5.1. There's quite a few to pick from if you want strong models running on "your" hardware.

Open weights like this make me wish I had a bunch more DGX Sparks to cluster so I could fit it!

US is well known to impose world wide embargoes on technologies and resources that they pretend to apply to companies beyond its borders.

And it works, because the American market is generally more important than the markets of these countries 9 times out of 10.

It is, and I love it, but it isn't capable of performing the tasks I've been giving to Opus, let alone Fable.

Don't get me wrong, I use it, it's fast-smart-and affordable. But not suitable for all tasks.

For starters, there's a C++ application written with MFC and an absolute ton of inline assembly and threading (yes, in a 1990's C++ application). I'm porting it to MacOS/Linux currently.

Opus 4.6+ is able to make slow progress, but it takes several revisions per workstream. It requires constant supervision as it often creates convoluted solutions that expand the code in bloated ways. It works, but still requires my constant input.

Fable was able to almost one shot most of the big migrations with very few bugs, and was able to fix those bugs with 1 review pass. I almost didn't believe it. I was able to put it on a task (with dangerous permissions) and come back hours later to see it done, working, and clean.

I tried DeepSeek v4 and it wasn't able to make any meaningful progress at all. It kept creating dangling pointers and had trouble understanding the inline assempbly needed to be replaced if we were to compile for 64 bit. It kept getting stuck and looping on the same problem, without making progress.

What I do use DeepSeek for is lots of my automations on my websites. I find DeepSeek is fantastically cheap and fast and effective as summarization, collation, generating reports, finding and reporting issues from logs, etc. But I haven't found a way to get it to effectively port 90's C++ code to modern, cross-platform standards. But I want to be clear- I really like DeepSeek and use it wherever I can.. I mean.. it's so affordable!

I was building a cli tool that showed a graph of git commits, kind of like git log --graph, and deepseek v4 simply could not figure out a specific ui quirk where things weren't lining up correctly. I spent like $0.10 and 30 minutes trying to figure it out on deepseek.

Then I had deepseek summarize the bug, gave it to Opus, and it solved it in $1.12 and five minutes.

Fun fact, I was trying this afternoon Deepseek vs Opus 4.8 high, and I was surprised at how good Deepseek was. It outperformed Opus 4.8 on multiple occasions.

Found just later I was using v4 flash and not pro (for mistakenly setting the model to deepseek-chat and not v4-pro).

There are aspects about Deepseek I don't like though, when pushed against it will eagerly bend instead of reasoning and advocating for his points, something Opus 4.7 and later models started doing a lot (even when wrong).

All current Qwen 3.7 models are closed though they have said more releases are coming

As a non-US person, I will use whatever is the best and reasonably priced. I could not give one iota about who makes or hosts these models. The origin or political leanings of these models mean nothing in my usage calculus.

You are drinking the cool aid if you think the CCP is going to let the world get ahead of China using CCP models.

They are?

They have pioneered and been very influential in different aspects of LLM engineering and research, while also publishing in the open.

You would not have Fable 5 as good as it is without Chinese work.

Is there any SCOTUS precedent for this? It seems like a huge 1A issue for the government to limit self hosted access to a foreign country’s LLM.

Moolenaar's quote: "The AI models these companies use are trained by China’s censorship regime and introduce hidden vulnerabilities that put Americans’ data and businesses at risk." That is, Americans using Chinese-trained AI models are exposed to some form of cybersecurity risk.

That's not really a threat model described in either of the Anthropic posts you share, which mainly talk about the risks of allowing authoritarian regimes to use powerful US-trained models, and the geopolitical risks of authoritarian countries developing strong AI before democratic/liberal countries do.

They'll have to remove sections like this from their AI Action Plan

> We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values. Open- source and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research worldwide. For that reason, they also have geostrategic value. While the decision of whether and how to release an open or closed model is fundamentally up to the developer, the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.

US will ban American companies from using Chinese models and also ban them from dealing with companies who use Chinese models. “Code produced by Chinese models may be deliberately introduce backdoors and vulnerabilities” that kind of thing.

As an European I'm happy to be convincing my clients from years to move out of any us dependencies.

It's tough, US technologies are everywhere but they are only liabilities. Microsoft is the stickiest of all.

Chinese models are next, the whole reason this is happening is because they don't want China to steal their tech. It is no secret anymore that they have been distilling US models. That's why it is explicitly aimed at foreign nationals.

yes, I am using mimo code(free version) for the last 2 days. I gets the job done for me.

If I need to upgrade, the plan start at $6, so its a no brainer.

To do what? I mean they’re good models, but frankly, they fucking suck (relatively speaking). I’m not looking to going back to a week of back-and-forth with the LLM once I’ve gotten used to all this one shotting.

DeepSeekv4 Pro is roughly Opus 4.5 - Opus 4.6 in my estimation. That's about 8 months difference, not 2.5 years.

It's definitely not as good. But it's also definitely good enough.

Curious- in what tasks? I find Opus 4.5/4.6 too expensive and have tried to migrate to DeepSeek for C++ work, but found it couldn't cut it.

What's your DSv4 setup? What harness? It sounds like I should give it another try!

works really well with pi for small to medium sized coding tasks for me - C++ is an interesting case since it's probably more challenging just due to the complexity of the syntax. But it works great with Groovy which is another slightly off-mainstream language (these days).

I use DSv4 through opencode. I use it from deepseek directly, not through a third-party platform.

I mostly do C# and some frontend. I was starting to feel really depressed and unengaged at work because I was starting to use AI far too much like a magic slot machine. I'm now making a conscious effort to go back to using it as a tool used a bit more deliberately.

I'm not even using the pro model. The flash version is fast so I can keep it interactive rather than context switching to reddit while the model is working, and it turns out using my brain means I don't really need the model to be that smart.

I spent about $1.5 this week.

So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.

The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can't use it (technically, only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.

Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.

> Anthropic got what they deserved

Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.

Imagine a private company invents a piece of technology soooo good that the US government has to issue a ban.

Did the government ban any models from Google or OpenAI? Nah, Russian/Chinese spies and ISIS are welcome to use those dumb models.

Anthropic will probably go for $2T IPO now.

Yes! I mean everyone is speaking about this in a boxed manner.

For all we know there are might be several reasons for that ban e.g.

1) There is an actual security threat and its just simple as that.

2) Someone wants Anthropic to be valued way higher and the companies that have invested in Anthropic already... This ban only validates this product and will move the market in higher valuation of Anthropic due to their model being "so good gov had to ban"

3) Someone doesn't like Anthropic and just wants to shut down its current edge (highly unlikely, if there was no IPO filing in place it could be possible but now the valuation just goes up, same as the 2 As that have invested in them)

4) Someone freaked out that we'll be left out of jobs soon so wants to slow down progress, tbh using fable so far I can tell that a lot of jobs can be made redundant cause of that...

For me the most likely for now is 2, then 1 and then maybe 4.

On June 22 Chatgpt will most likely come out with their new model too, which as I understand will be an answer to mythos. Lets see if the US gov goes the same route.

It's not that complicated. Probably what happened is just that a former Fox News host read part of a security report that he did not understand and overreacted.

I do not understand why it being mandated that the vast majority of the people in the world will not allowed to use -- or pay for -- your product (and that the ones that can will have to jump through excessive hoops) could ever make your valuation go up; can you walk me through that one?

Even if this is just temporary, your #3 is more in direct conflict with #2 than you seem to be willing to admit: if you were to own stock in a company that you know has a powerful product and a market lead, but they have been required to take a time out in the market for a year, that should be devastating for their valuation.

Because nowadays the stockmarket is build upon hype, this is why we are having the market caps and valuations we are having that are in any way shape or form reflecting anything that is real.

For the Gov to come out and block a model for national security, its gonna swing the market into thinking "oh anthropic really has the next generation of LLMs out there, its that good Gov banned it, this company is going to the moon".

The part of banning non US nationals, I believe is a legality, as in they have to trust US citizens to do right by their country. I don't think in court a whole ban on a product for security reasons would stand. (The judge would ask for the gov to explain why all US nationals are a security threat to their country)

Nevertheless, again I am standing behind number 2 personally as the main reason for such a thing, market manipulation is not new and its currently at its all time high. Also anthropic is part of this manipulation so far, with every other AI company out there.

Again I am just presenting my POV, it could as well just be number 1... A gov became competent enough to find security threads before they happen :)

> I don't think in court a whole ban on a product for security reasons would stand.

There are lots such products, like weapons-grade radioactive material, weapons outside the toy gun range, various biological material, ...

So it seems perfectly possible to bad products for security reasons.

I get what you mean but you are very wrong about the stock market and how people react to export bans. Everytime US had restricted control for Nvidia chips in the news over the last few years, the stock price went down not up.

It might be a good marketing trick but it is not a good thing in the stock market given historical trends.

Your view highly screams you only have a superficial understanding of financial markets and you shouldn't extraploate that to "this is how market works because its all hype and everything is vapor"

Anthropic is chasing an IPO, Nvidia is not, creating very different market reactions and incentive structures for the companies. Apples and oranges.

Anthropics reputation as a near-term world-ender boosts their IPO directly.

You can't justify trillions of market cap just serving the US market, and they've just kneecapped their ability to compete anywhere else, it would be delusional to invest on something like this thinking it's going to be a free market, you'd just be indirectly funding the US government ability to use AI against others, especially if you are a non-US citizen (or a subgroup of US citizens they don't like). The near-term world-ending is just pure marketing, they haven't shown anything nearly as impressive as they've been promising, and the software they've produced so far with near infinite access to agents has been very impressively bad.

No, its not apples and oranges. How/why does it boost their IPO directly? Elaborate on this please instead of stating it as an universal fact (because it isn't).

I feel you are just talking a hypothetical without having any basis. You think it'll have an impact on IPO directly and that it will be a positive one. But you have no proof or historical precidence for the same. Meanwhile we have historical proof that markets reacts negatively when a company is blocked by the government on selling their top products freely. And that is most likely going to happen here as well.

Public perception might be changed by these "ohhh its so scary guys" marketing but these don't translate to actual market perception when it comes to actual facts and numbers on the financials.

It could be the case that we’ve reached the last generation of frontier models that can be accessed by the general public. That eliminates a risk that Anthropic could be leapfrogged by a competitor.

Now it’s a competition between products on the near frontier. Anthropic has executed well on products so far. They blew up thanks to Claude Code, not Opus by itself.

If (1) then somebody in the administration messed up badly. Glasswing has been a thing since April, and it's common knowledge that there would be some fuzzy edges around whatever restrictions a model has in place. There's no reason to let it launch and then pull it back.

(2) This "hype" meme is overrated. Enterprises (ones without a horse in the race, at least) will choose the model their best engineers ask for, or their competitors will lap them. I have been finding Codex more useful (even than Fable) but for a lot of tasks it seems that Claude Code is faster. This is one customer base where the general consensus here on HN is more influential than anything the Trump administration could do or anything Anthropic could say.

(3) "US government seems out to kill you" does not necessarily make valuation go up, and we've already seen this administration in an avoidable spat with Anthropic.

(4) This seems way less likely than a mix of (1) and (3) to me. The arguments for banning a useful technology to save jobs haven't really made sense since cars or indoor plumbing and don't get taken too seriously in either party at senior levels. That could change but it will take a lot for it to change.

Eh, chatGpt coming out with a new garbage model. Great.

Fable had some really good cross project awareness. My only complaint is it backported a feature to my test application and then they killed it before I could finish debugging it. The new model behavior in the replacement application was 100% superior. I just didn't know it was going to start porting fixes so readily between projects. Awareness in the new model is amazing and the feedback I've had from other developers is the same. It feels like ultrathink with double the agents of xhigh effort. The real issue is they shipped it with incomplete guardrails and someone likely found an exploit.

5) Someone freaked out China might use the model to advance its own tech. It's always China with this administration. The guy has an obsession with China since he had to hire feng shui consultants to make his tower appealing¹ for Chinese customers.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/donald-trump...

Also, might be a way to further screw with Anthrophic because they refused to remove their guardrails Pentagon, getting the opposite result of what was intended.

The Trump administration has exactly one motive, and that is accumulation of wealth. There is literally no other reason they would do anything. Even if there were legitimate economic or security concerns, those aren't motivating to the Trump administration.

This is about grift, somehow, full stop.

I neither like nor support Anthropic, but there's just no sense in pretending the Trump administration is anything other than a kleptocracy or interpreting their actions under any other lens.

Imagine a private company invents a piece of technology soooo good that the US government has to issue a ban.

Apple's G4 was banned for export. Although it was not a direct order from US government. They fell into an outdated bracket of computing power exports limits. They sure did use it for advertising it.

This is signaling to non-US companies that Anthropic cannot provide reliable access to their models.

It's equally signaling that other US-based labs can't provide reliable access to their closed-weight models.

Not in the same way, no, because they have not been targeted, while they should have if the same rules applied, according to Anthropic's depiction of the situation.

This is potential tyranny aimed at Anthropic, specifically.

For anyone outside the US this is a clear statement that either models are open or they are controlled by an erratic and hostile US government.

Being a US ally has become meaningless, and using a company that’s not targeted today does nothing to protect you tomorrow.

Europe doesn't seem to care so much about erratic and hostile governments when it cozied up to Russian gas for decades, something it still continues to do just hiding behind third party countries.

It's a clear statement that European morals are purely performative

Just like how the EU is hostile towards US companies, but very light to the touch when it comes to corruption with HSBC, FIFA or VW. With such hostile and erratic allies, who needs enemies?

Let's not even get into Orban. You can never trust the EU again since who knows if they're capable of electing someone like that in the future? Trust is broken forever

Yes, because they’re so bleeding edge and powerful.

Whether you believe that is another thing. But that’s the signal. It’s amazing marketing for them, even if a pain in the ass for customers rn

This is signaling to US companies that non-US providers cannot create cutting edge capabilities for their models.

Major alarm bells should be ringing for anyone not using a US-based LLM.

> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.

What? Anthropic is not a TikTok sensation. It's a business tool. Businesses need to know their tools work reliably.

When you are situated in a banana republic and the chief banana is out to get you (and demonstrates that they can and will on a whim) that is not great hype but a potential death sentence for you as a service provider.

You are one degree away from becoming forever branded as unusable. (Theoretically until people trust that a sane administration is in control again, but that might as well be forever on current AI timelines, given how much cashflow you need just to keep going)

> Anthropic is not a TikTok sensation.

It pretty much is. Claude is more of a meme than a tool. It's been second best (and more expensive option) for most of the time but people somehow keep talking about it. I'm getting strong Apple vibes from this one.

It's only rewarding hype if the ban gets dropped. If "foreign Anthropic employees that live in the US can't use Fable/Mythos" stays it harms them, if they don't drop the ban and Fable/Mythos stay limited to "every single person who uses the model must individually provide their ID to prove American-ness" it harms them.

It is already a rewarding hype. They are the first company to build a model so advanced that the US government has to ban it.

Google and OpenAI will eventually catch up and be banned as well. Therefore, this ban isn't really a huge concern for Anthropic since their competitors will be banned eventually.

All this does is proving to investors that Anthropic is indeed ahead of its competitors.

>OpenAI will eventually catch up and be banned as well.

" We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)"

The administration just doesn't like anthropic. OpenAI is in bed with the trump Administration.

Anthropic refused to allow the US Government to conduct mass surveillance, which made the US Government mad. OpenAI was fine with it as long as it was 'legal' mass surveillance. OpenAI is not going to get banned, even if their next model is both better and more dangerous than Mythos.

No, Anthropic refused to allow the US Government to conduct mass surveillance on US Citizens, they where fine with 'legal' mass surveillance of other countries.

Who knows? Even savvy investors wouldn't know.

What they know right now is that the model is so advanced the US government has to ban it, and the model comes out of Anthropic. Not Google. Not OpenAI.

I see what you mean, though ITAR restricted software has been around for decades. It classifies some software as "munitions" :)

Most valuably, they have a plausible excuse for hitting a financial brick wall before failing to deliver on years of over-promising on real-world business utility.

Expensive marketing stunt if users demand refunds from their credit card company for those annual subscriptions on the basis of "service not delivered".

Paying for 365 days of service but getting 364 would normally get you a full refund, not just a 1 day credit according to visa/MasterCard rules.

In the subscriptions it was already going away on the 22nd until possibly some indefinite future date.

Anthropic got out a slightly better model (which is what two companies were doing for more than a year), but at the cost of not being able to provide it within subscription. It build out an inordinate hype around this model. And in the end it was saved by this hype because it doesn't have to admit now that it's never gonna be able to provide this model in volume because gov forbade them from providing it.

> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.

Nah, SpaceX just IPO'd.

Probably not much, since bulk of the valuation was based on hot air expelled by musk as with all of his ventures.

> Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs ... a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities

"Mythos capabilities" is not some magic threshold. This is exactly the type of language that people used about GPT-4 in 2023. Today, I can run models far stronger than GPT-4 on my laptop at speeds better than GPT-4 offered.

Anthropic are quite good at coining sticky phrases like "Mythos-class models", but these are manipulative attempts to shape the discourse for business purposes and should be identified as such.

It wasn't a magical threshold until today. Now it surely is a magic threshold, set by the US government.

To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem.

Yes, some of it looks silly now, though it's always easy to criticize with hindsight: the models could do unexpectedly impressive things and we didn't fully know the limit yet, it was a black box.

Remember you're critcising the org that actually made it public to people earlier than any other: the uncertainty was a temporary caution. The "open" in OpenAI was because they made it available, unlike Google at the time.

> To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem

When the company that enables this, makes the predictions in the first place, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> I hate being told what technology I can and can't use

Ever since the original GPT-2 "it's too powerful to release!" I've realized that whatever is the current state of open models represents what we really have access to.

It's shocking to me how many people on HN, who engage in long conversations about LLMs and AI, have never actually run a model on their own hardware.

All you need is a reasonably good macbook pro/studio or an RTX [3-5]090 and you can run useful models in the >= 30 tokens/second range (much higher if you choose the GPU path). The difference between what you can run on this hardware and what you can run on hardware that costs 2-5x is not that big. Don't be fooled by people on Twitter/X claiming you need some outrageous setup.

It's also increasingly clear that frontier models are nowhere near close to pushing the limits of efficiency. Quantization, MoE, and other techniques have dramatically improved even in the last year.

For work, of course use OpenAI/Anthropic models, but for anything personal, anyone who considers themselves a "real engineer" should be running local models, using open harnesses and seeing what they can accomplish with these.

Even if open releases slow down or even stop, we have the foundation, right now, for smart engineers to squeeze something quite useful out of. Hopefully we'll one day figure out how to train large models in a federated way. But either way: not your weights, not your inference.

lets be genuine here: those local models are no where near the capabilities of true modern llms like codex 5.5 and fable 5

but i also dont doubt in a few years time models with those benchmarks will be able to be run locally

still many many breakthroughs to be had

Personally I am fine with the SOTA from last year if I can run it on my hardware and who gets access to my data and history. I don’t really care that it could be marginally better using a model I cannot control on someone else’s server.

I am not fine with that. I have ranted about this before, but until recently the sota models were not intelligent enough for most of my work.

Yesterday Fable 5 finally solved a non trivial problem I had (after working on it for a few hours), and I went to bed excited. Waking up to find that Fable 5 is not available anymore, I guess I should feel happy I have the code it produced yesterday. But frankly I feel like a child having their candy taken from them.

We need open available models as smart as the current US proprietary ones. If intelligence like that becomes common property, i forsee a better future for human kind!

I'm a European, the EU is supposed to be one of the closest allies of the US.

The US government found a jailbreak that allowed the user to make Fable do bad things, this is so dangerous that this model must be held back in areas that are not the US...

If this is so dangerous why allow US nationals access to it? Are there no evil people in the US?

Going back to my perspective: let's say I control a big enterprise or a government body, how should I view this or US technology? Should I be like: yes, let's use US tech, they are a reliable partner and would never abruptly cut us off! Or should I be like: there are competent alternatives out there and if your work hinges on wether or not you had access to Fable 5, then your business is probably not going to survive for long.

Back when Snowden leaked all of the spying information, the only thing the States cared about was whether they spied on their own citizens. The fact that they spied on the citizens of their allies, including yes, the EU, barely made the news.

I don't think it makes sense the assume the US considers any country its ally.

sorry that's what I meant: I remember watching their depositions or whatever they were called, and their only concern was whether or not they had spied on US citizens. Whether or not they spied on their allies, I do not recall any coverage of from their primary news outlets (or inside their depositions) at all.

As the saying goes, it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal. True in the 60s, still true today.

I agree with the sentiment and dislike Kissinger, but that quote is always paraphrased and out of context.

The full quote makes it clear Kissinger was saying, in the context of the Vietnam War, that the US should come to the aid of their friends:

> "Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

From: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/56471/30861

I'm well aware of its context and original meaning, and I'm very happy to twist its meaning into something Kissinger would disagree with any chance I get.

The longer time passes the more it looks like Snowden was just a foreign asset doing someone else's bidding.

And as a corollary, no country should consider the US its ally.

I'm glad Europe is finally waking up to this reality.

Parts of Europe, most notably France, has been perfectly aware since... always?

But in general I agree, the other parts got a big wakeup call.

The French have been screwed over by the US military hard, so I'm fully on board with their attitude.

> I'm a European, the EU is supposed to be one of the closest allies of the US.

I’m Scandinavian. The US is an adversary; please wake up.

>If this is so dangerous why allow US nationals access to it? Are there no evil people in the US?

How come the EU is making a "digital sovereignty" push? Why are only EU people allowed to compete for EU services? Are there no evil people in the EU?

It sounds right, but there is one caveat to me:

Training best models is hella expensive. Anthropic spent fortune to train it, and it definitely plans to make a fortune with it either. This US decision, if not reversed, would cause Anthropic potentially tens of billions of dollars of revenue loss. When company heads to IPO, and burning cash faster than it generates it, such moment can change their entire trajectory, plans for the future, hiring, new models development, etc.

Alright, one might say that “US will fund it directly and LLMs will move from free market to controlled and funded by government assets”.

But even then. Training new models is expensive not only in terms of computer, and not only in terms of utilities, data centers, etc. But in terms of talent either. It is hard to retain top talents with you when they should just train special models for government. I am not sure we are in 1945 again and that top tier AI researches will agree to sit in silo and work for models which only privileged selected organizations might use. Whenever government steps into control, freedom and creativity is affected.

P.S. Where I agree, though, is that we witness the start of government censorship of AI models. Imagine soon Anthropic open back access to Fable. Can we know what they put inside and which capability limitations, derived based on ID/IP, they enforce? No, we can’t. Here I agree that at least the era of government censorship begins.

I feel like the EU, maybe in collaboration with Norway (oil money and hydroelectric power), should get their ass in gear and start making bigger models.

As European, nothing hurts me more than 100500 phrase in recent years “Europe should stop waiting time and do X”, where X can be anything: semiconductors, AI, manufacturing, defense, satellites, cloud business, “sovereign” IT infrastructure, scientific research, and hundreds more

> Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now now when they have Mythos capabilities [...]

The "Mythos capabilities" is a pretty arbitrary threshold. It could have happened any point before or after. China treats this technology in very different ways. And China's economy and foreign policies are very different, in such export-based economy export controls make much no sense. Unless something changes drastically in the global relations. I expect the opposite to happen, if the US leave a void globally, china will be even more incentivised to fill it.

This been said, it is likely that big models are soon no longer "open sourced" (qwen has already started), but because the chinese companies will prefer to sell access themselves, not because of government intervention.

In any case, what happens now is a huge thing, and not sure we grasp its consequences yet. It is definitely beyond any ai safety marketing stunt. Even if this is rolled back at some point, after "guarantees" are established, it has already moved things to change drastically.

> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.

But it is! How many times have OpenAI and Anthropic threatened the rest of humanity with extinction at the hands of their LLMs? Monthly I think.

They were hoping for a government supported monopoly. Careful what you wish for.

No one was calling for a government monopoly, all they called for was a testing process to ensure that frontier LLMs specifically were safe to release into the wild.

To the tech-libertarian crowd on HN this is the definition of evil. To everyone else it's responsible behavior and common sense.

> No one was calling for a government monopoly, all they called for was a testing process to ensure that frontier LLMs specifically were safe to release into the wild

Yes, from chatgpt 0.1 onwards. Everything has been a dangerous frontier model and has threatened humanity with extinction before.

> These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.

I don't necessarily disagree, but who is going to pay for improvements in models if they're not commercially available? Are AI companies going to become defence contractors with (US?) government paying for the training?

I don't know much it cost to go from AI model Foo 4 to Foo 5, but it's going to cost a pretty penny to eventually go to 6 and 7. These companies are doing so in the expectation of eventually charging customers to recoup the costs: if the only customer(s) is government(s) then the per-unit cost will be much higher. An analogy: you can get a 'civilian' toilet for USD 200, an FAA/EASA-approved toilet for airlines 2000, and a MILSPEC/NASA toilet for 20000.

Now this limited-customer model is certainly doable—tank manufacturers have a smaller base of customers than pickup truck manufacturers—but AI companies probably want regulatory clarity on what they're allowed to sell, and to whom, before they start developing new products/services.

I assume (and this is a big assumption) that the US government will be focused on limiting access to the latest model, not necessarily everything smarter than Fable 5. Having access to the frontier model from a year ago (Sonnet 4.7-ish) wouldn't really help you from a cybersecurity perspective.

I think there's a world where the US funds development of the next model in exchange for exclusivity, at which point they could "release" the previous version from that exclusivity.

I wonder how this is going to work given half the people working at the AI labs are Chinese foreign nationals, and even more interesting, DeepMind is based in the UK. Plus there is an awful lot of AI research going on all across Europe, especially Switzerland, that is feeding straight into the US major labs.

Banning foreign nationals from using your technology only makes sense if you don't rely on foreign nationals to build it in the first place.

Or are we so far along now we think we don't need them anymore.

I'm wondering if they might go for a restricted access model that goes beyond passport or citizenship, where people can still use it, but you have to be individually vetted, and put on a list to get security clearance.

Right, but I am talking about the general government response trajectory.

And also, even though Anthropic may not have labs themselves directly, there is a funnel of research that comes in the form of papers and conference tracks.

The AI community is pretty tight knit, and not having access to frontier models affects everyone.

IMO: Its unacceptable that Anthropic be allowed the final say in what "safety" means for their products, and its extremely reasonable that the USG be allowed that say, for Americans. In other words: Anthropic cannot be allowed to distribute an unsafe product. It doesn't matter how much they "tried" to make it safe, by their own definition of safe.

That's separate from the question of whether Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are unsafe. I don't really know. Here's a few things that seem real, though: These models probably have some level of capability to assist with bioterrorism, Anthropic has self-admitted that their own safety measures are imperfect [1], so it should come as no surprise that jailbreaks seem far more possible than Anthropic is leading you to believe in this blog post [2].

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access: "We suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider."

[2] https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/2064776322979676227

If Amazon sold a book that taught someone how to commit bioterrorism, would there be action against them to stop selling it? Its an imperfect analogy, but the parallels are there. LLMs don't get a free pass because they're also so good at writing typescript for beige CRUD apps and bedtime stories.

One thing I hope we align on: Synthetic safeguards (steering, rejections, etc) on top of models to block illegal/sensitive topics isn't good enough. Anthropic has self-admitted that it isn't good enough. We need the technology to lobotomize these capabilities the public deems too unsafe to allow out of the models at the most fundamental level. And, we need to align on what the scope of these forbidden fruit topics are. This is, actually, the only way open source continues to thrive. I want open source models to thrive, but they won't be allowed to thrive, nor should we want them to thrive, if they're teaching people how to engineer novel viruses and other horrible stuff.

> LLMs don't get a free pass because they're also so good at writing typescript for beige CRUD apps and bedtime stories.

Plenty of useful things get free passes to be dangerous. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of accidental deaths in 11 states, but we don't ban cars because they're dangerous. There's plenty of safety features, but we acknowledge and accept that people will die. People like to pretend that they won't sacrifice safety for convenience, but they continue to do it time and time again.

Ironically, this is something that the restrictive EU AI regulations can help with. Had the Anthropic been in EU, they could not be restricted as long as they followed the laws which is essentially taking some precautions against obvious risks(no social profiling, emotional recognition in schools etc.).

That’s also the difference between being totalitarian government and laws and regulations based order.

China had already forbade their top researchers to even leave China.

Also foreign investments into Chinese AI labs have already been forbidden and asked to exit

I wonder what will happen to Chinese employees of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google Gemini? Given the ubiquitous Chinese names in AI papers there must be quite a few.

They probably have gotten their PR or in the process, but naturalization requires five years after that, so there must be some still not citizen yet.

If you are born in China to Chinese parents, China considers you under it's jurisdiction for life. You can't travel to another country and start working against Chinese interests without consequences.

That's not true. You can renounce your Chinese citizenship and it's actually required if you acquire another citizenship.

I guess in the same sense that the U.S. considers they have jurisdiction globally. Not de jure, but a de facto reality.

I suspect the big picture isn't just "governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public", it's a group of tech lobbyists who have managed to push a narrative that's plausible enough to the majority, but serves their master's interests in stifling competition, whether that be from Anthropic or those who know how to use their tools effectively.

The fact that Anthropic are willing to dumb-down their own model responses to "Prevent foreign competitors from using the model to accelerate R & D and protect our leading position." [1] adds credence to this speculation. Anthropic are scared of their own model's power in the hands of competitors: it has nothing to do with security.

[1] https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3848820681636481

My guess is that Anthropic will either address the government's concern and get the export control removed or implement a citizenship verification (like passport upload or something).

I remember something with either ChatGPT or Claude, way early on, where I had to upload my passport to use some level of it (maybe it was the OpenAI API).

Anyway, there's no way they just shut this completely down, the revenue from mythos is huge. So if they can't get the government to budge they'll find a way to be compliant without completely shutting down.

You may be right, and I actually agree with you: I think that in this case the most likely outcome is that Fable becomes available again at some point, albeit possibly only to a restricted set of users within the US.

But I think my larger points stands: even if we do see Fable access again, this is the beginning of government restriction of LLMs and we are going to see more and more of it. In fact, I would be very surprised if we ever see an open weight model with Mythos capabilities. Chinese labs have been consistently releasing open models 6-12 months behind the frontier. In 6 months we may see them go dark.

Similarly, in the US I think we can expect more and more government restrictions on the strongest LLMs, in ways that may go beyond flimsy checks like uploading a valid US passport. It may not happen this year but I think it will happen eventually.

It still surprises me sometimes that LLMs are just available for _anyone_ to use. Isn't it odd that it turned out this way? When I grew up reading sci-fi I thought AI, if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments. But instead we have all been able to use it for an infinity of banal purposes for $100 a month. This is a strange situation but we have got used to it. But it may not continue that way.

The Chinese labs would only go dark if they believe they’ve surpassed the American labs, otherwise what benefit is there to them to refrain from sharing the models? Better to have all of their allies able to use the same models by making them public

" if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments."

Who knows, maybe the good stuff is locked up. If one of these corporations had something very special they may very well find it more profitable to enjoy the competitive advantage of using it for themselves than marketing it.

> It still surprises me sometimes that LLMs are just available for _anyone_ to use. Isn't it odd that it turned out this way?

I assume it's some of their best training data.

To me, it is obvious that what we are going to have is KYC/AML style compliance from US banking.

We already have the rails for automated customer identification from US banking.

I think there is a larger "AGI" category error with all this too that is akin to the old futurist idea of driving nuclear powered cars in the "future". The Ford Nucleon.

Nuclear power comes to us in a mix of electricity from the utility company but is far too dangerous for an individual to posses nuclear material for personal nuclear reactors.

An electric car does run on nuclear energy in some sense but not the way the Ford Nucleon was envisioned.

The error of the AI bubble is that we are pricing these companies with SaaS multiples when they are eventually going to be public utilities. There is really no other way to handle the dual use nature of anything close to "AGI".

I think some of the commenters are naive to think government intervention is silly and TACO.

No, Dario said himself AI is national state weapon, then the government will not cease control.

What would happen is that we will have a more lobotomized and even more neurotic safeguards put in place in order to comply, and your data will be boardly sharing with the government.

Moving forward, above certain parameter size of model, it will require your self-identification in order to be used.

Perhaps a little tinfoil hat, but I don't think there's a legitimate concern here to address. An empowered populace is antithetical to the current political paradigm, which is what I suspect the actual grievance to be.

And before either 'aisle' piles on - I'm pretty sure the concern is bipartisan.

I feel like a very minor tweak to comply specifically with whatever the issue the directive stated and release it under a new name (since the directive specifically names Fable and Mythos, not Opus or Sonnet) while the courts sort it out is reasonable.

Anthropics latest amendment to their privacy policy stated that there are very likely to be asking for ID verification in the near future.

>> As part of our measures to keep our services safe and secure we may ask you to verify your age or identity, and we've described what we collect and how

I do think the Chinese will give away strong models. The US government can't control that and would make a mess if they tried. Companies making SOTA models would be undercut and all the funding that went into them would be wasted. Sounds like a great strategy for the Chinese.

Agreed, I'm pretty sure the Chinese are currently much, much better at long term thinking and have already reached the conclusion that llms are transformative enough generationally, that assuming a few more years or decades of Moore's Law together with ai/llm advances will probably place these "Mythos class" AIs in all our desktops in the next few years.

I agree this is probably their thinking - they view frontier models (and the capability to build them) as a vital strategic edge that they want to keep to themselves.

The problem is that there are network effects at play - the more people you have using your models, the more training and fine-tuning data you're accumulating, so the faster you can develop the next frontier model. Not to mention the fact that more users means more revenue to fund your next-gen model training.

Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge.

The next interesting question will be - will the US share this capability with her traditional strategic allies (e.g. five-eyes countries), or is it truly America First (or, 'America Alone')?

Human user usage data is probably a tiny contribution to improvement of the models--it's mostly RL on environments

> Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge.

There is no way to enforce access of one and not the other, not with the state of tech in the US (and most countries without a great firewall). Bypassing such controls is as easy as a pilfered credit card (or some other american-looking payment method) and a vpn - both trivial to come by.

For the sake of this discussion, I'm going with the nationalistic vibe of the order: anybody who isn't a citizen of the USA (presumably to limit risk of AI-supported action against the US?).

But that in itself is telling in a way: if national security was a true concern, access should be limited to people who passed background checks.

> the more people you have using your models, the more training and fine-tuning data you're accumulating, so the faster you can develop the next frontier model

I’ve wondered this but then wouldn’t a large amount of input now just be AI output from a previous PR/client email/spec document/chat. Training of that would be an issue leading to distillation?

> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain.

I think this is bang on. The motives are kind of irrelevant, because now that the precedent has been set, I suspect they'll be much more likely to go here for future restrictions. It's very convenient (even if true) to just say "security reasons".

I think this could kill LLM development. What's the point in pushing boundaries, when your business model is already hard to profit from, only to be blocked from selling your work to the entire world? Where's the incentive to continue?

> If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again.

This logic is flawed. China had no incentive to release SOTA models to the world in the first place when OpenAI were milking everyone with closed source paid models. What changes now? Nothing. In fact, this is even more incentive for them to capture marketshare and dependence on Chinese models as the world will simply just use alternatives. Not bow down to restrictions. If your logic were correct that people would just comply, then the tons of VPN services wouldn't have a market in the first place.

It's a great opportunity for China to earn some soft power points even if there was no direct economic benefit. See -- Americans are too afraid to go full speed into the feature, but we, the enlightened people, are not and will share it with you for your own benefit.

No way they will pass on this one.

That being said, they could still keep some other model from public while doing a PR stunt like this to eat their cake and have it too.

I find it worrysome how often people value revenge over good. The same happened when traffic to SO cratered; as if the destruction of a valuable source of information was good just because the mods suck.

> I find it worrysome how often people value revenge over good.

I personally see it as a net good if companies fearmongering for marketing purposes then have to face consquences from people taking their marketing at face value.

Hopefully it teaches them and others not to do it anymore.

A myopic view, but the government has generally not been heading in the direction of an educated populace over the last few decades. It doesn't surprise me that anything that's too intellectually capable is a threat.

Personally, I assume that AI labs like Anthropic are high value targets for spies from other nations. I also assume that some of those spies have already had success in getting the model weights / source code / other such secrets.

So I doubt this action alone is enough to really stop other nations from getting access to state of the art AI. I think the US would have to go much further to really stop other nations from getting access to state of the art AI.

I would agree if it wasn't for the fact that extracting that volume of data from a properly secured corporate network should be hard. It should raise some flags if a such a high volume of data is downloaded to a user's local machine from the training or production environments.

I have no proof one way or the other if Anthropic or OpenAI have "properly secured corporate networks". Both seem like fast changing places with lots of servers and workers. Seems most likely to me that someone somewhere made a mistake or missed something due to all the change and their network is not 100% secure.

But even if their networks are secure, I think that spies who are willing to coerce people, trick people and go in person to data centers or offices could find a way to get those models and other things.

It depends how secure they are. But yes - in reality they are only a couple of TB, so just distributing the models and their source code (not their training data) it feasible.

I mean, the source for claude code was "leaked" by accident so at least some of their processes are not that secure. I feel that they are more like a Startup then a Enterprise (ignoring finances).

There are sooooo many exfil methods, including with air gapped systems that are off-network.

Not at all beyond the capabilities of any of the top ~9 or so best State actors.

Edit: To answer your question, very easily on the 20TB.

One crude method with a simple device in particular works well if you just clone the monitor data and then use HDMI and pass through. Then just cat dir in encrypted chunks to something like a USB key connected to the passthrough. 4TB USB keys are out there. A week of that gets you 20TB.

How many of those methods can realistically exfiltrate 20Tb of data? That's quite hard even for well funded actors.

It's highly unlikely that actors have access to model weights etc..

What is likely is that 'understanding of techniques' could be leaked.

Often, it's just well enough to know 'the approach' being used.

When the Chinese do it they will use it to attack US infrastructure that won’t have been hardened because the models are behind walled gardens.

Despite the damage it’s better to build up an immunity through ongoing exposure, unless you want to end up like the previous American civilisations.

> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you.

That would also significantly dampen the commercial incentives to develop such strong models, given the high costs involved.

On the other hand, such a future would probably save white-collar jobs.

That's only if you believe this is actually motivated by safety, and not corruption. They won't block access to Grok, just watch. They'll probably allow ChatGPT too if it is censored in some way.

> Fable was the strongest model on the market

based on Anthropic's own self promotion. no reason to think that Chinese models are not just as good or better. the key thing here is training on machine code and dis-assembled binaries and the Chinese have a complete data set of pirated software, with no limitations on how they use it. I seriously doubt they are actually behind.

> only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are

the issue here is that Anthropic needs a legal opinion that their mechanisms for detecting foreign users in the US are compliant, which is technically hard to do, and a complex intersection of technical details and national security law, so getting a legal opinion can't happen overnight. it will be back.

I see a slightly different parallel here - they are basiclaly building a framework that takes the US adn friends back to the early 90's where cryptology was considerd a munition and all export products were nerfed. Just like then those that wanted to collaborate with the rest of the world found a way (printing /tshirts etc) similarly now those labs within the US sphere have that decision to make.Unfortunately its the Darios and Sam who are pretty much in favour of regulatory capture environment.With no other frontier labs in the US committed to OSS , and CHN models banned - the devs are pretty much hosed. I doubt the rest of the AI labs in China et al will follow suit in hobbling their own models.As its seen more as a commodity not a wondertool with a moat. At the end of the day the ask is going with a Oracle/Microsoft over a GNU/Linux type of environment.

I think the Chinese don’t share the “AGI-pilled” understanding of AI that you see in some US companies and part of government.

Thus they are far less likely to do something like this.

The real story is that Anthropic went from being a "supply chain risk" to being a "national security risk."

What we could see is AI access being used as a carrot by the major global powers (US, China and EU) to entice smaller countries to join their orbit. Similar to how the F-35 program functions. Competition between powers and a desire to use the land and energy of smaller countries for data centers creates an incentive to give some access. That's the good future. I don't want to put the bad future into the training data.

We need open distributed "p2p" models a la bittorrent , that allow individuals to share their computer power for inference. So that the models cant be censored and everyone can run SOTA models.

It doesn't have to be free, we have the means to transact in a p2p fashion electronically as well.

I think you are missing the bigger picture that is around the "bigger picture" you are seeing. AI proliferation is more dangerous than nukes proliferation, as any highly capable tech would enable destructive usecases as well. If nukes related material and knowledge was safeguarded, then AI requires it as well.

nobody ever raised money for nukes from public/private markets on the premise that nukes will bring the world into an age of abundance. AI companies have done that. This comparison of AI and nukes is so silly.

Raising money has nothing to do with the bad usecase for tech. Tech companies never said that their tech can't be used against the nation or against the good of people.

> AI proliferation is more dangerous than nukes proliferation

This statement is utter nonsense. And if you think about it, it's in exactly the same spirit as calling for a wide ban on science books or education.

I agree.

Honestly, and I don't say it lightly, long term this may have bigger impact on humanity as a whole than Iran war and its varying outcomes ( and consequences ). Separately, note how much this news was not really reported much today. Granted, a lot was happening, but it is telling.

Yes. It’s really not a good idea to make this ban. When the US is gradually isolated in this way by its gov’s policy, the world becomes more and more dangerous. What worse, the traditional value of open to competition that Americans have hold for centuries seems to be substituted step by step. It’s absolutely a tragedy.

Supposedly many Anthropic AI researchers are foreign nationals. So this move by the US gov may serve to slow down frontier AI research, including human-guided RSI. If you believe that such a slowdown increases safety, it may turn out as a blessing in disguise.

> but in practice, even if you are

That part is up to Anthropic. KYC[0] is not exotic, it's just a pain in the butt: if Fable is that good, they can do the KYC.

I don't think this is the right move from the government, but we shouldn't pretend that "citizens only" is an insurmountable hurdle for a company that just got a $65B capital infusion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

Then Anthropic did their part and blames the good customer after implementing "reasonable" measures to prevent it. They still get paid.

This is a problem that banks deal with all the time.

It truly is a pain in the butt. But if access to (US banking | Fable) is worth it, you do the annoying work, and the customers accept the annoying limitations.

AI companies business model depends on wide adoption. How will they survive if government closes access to their models?

>The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you.

I can't agree more. This is a precedent not just in denial but possible vagueness. Judiciaries have 'vagueness doctrines' to counter such laws/directives but _these_ may be re-trumped by the deference given to national security.

If we don't get soon a framework by which models may be measured as 'too powerful' vs 'not too powerful' we supercharge the self-dealing (corruption) that this administration has brazenly adopted. Many fingers can be put on many scales; groks may be given a pass while others are held to higher "standards".

Will OpenAI now just asymptotically bump its versions to 5.99999999 to stay under a limit that nobody really understands?

I realize that this has all just happened and we might get some good rigorous clarification from our government.... sigh. We are living in a kakistocracy. Who am I kidding?

We are not missing the big picture, this is what Anthropic wanted. They made this bed, let them lay comfortable in it.

They just received a massive PR opportunity on a silver platter: our model is so good the government forced us to shut it down.

I do not really like applying the "if we did it, they will too when they can!" logic to other government's.

China has flaws, plenty of them, but there's no real evidence to believe their motivations or mechanisms of pursuing motivations are that similar to that of the United States.

The other thing is what this will do to 1) the valuations of these companies, 2) their potential revenues and therefore the viability of the current datacenter buildout. Looking forward to the reaction of the market on Monday.

The scariest thing to me about AI is not what it can do, but that someday public access might be lost and governments/ billionaires would hold exclusive reign. Today could be the last time the public has any idea of the true capability of AI.

And just imagine the true capability of AI if Fable and Mythos are the models known publicly. We can only imagine what is behind closed doors.

They want Deepseek V4 Pro they can try to come and take it. It's incredible that anyone allowed themselves to become so reliant on closed models

I see your point and share it up to a point… but how does it square with the full western economies gambling all or nothing on AI?

The whole thing is theatre.

Anthropic gets into argument with US government over model usage -> Release a model calling it too advanced for safe use -> release the model to public knowing well that this admin has thinnest of skins and will do something

Regulatory capture in roundabout way. Now it is going to take crying wolf over other companies/countries developing “Mythos grade model” to kick off action especially in next two years of this admin.

Companies will keep improving models because AI is not yet fully there. But it is incredibly naive to think governments were ever going to allow state of the art technology to be released to public or do things this publicly. Every company wants to show off and get publicly restricted because it shows off their strength.

I can only say well played Anthropic.

> If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow

I think this also misses the point. The precedent here almost surely implies that it will be illegal to use these frontier models as well.

I can see a future where weights are distributed on the darkweb or bittorrent, or people are trying to use small fly by night hosts of models.

But if this says these models are dangerous and the companies and people can't be trusted with them, then I don't see why that wouldn't also apply to open weight models.

Is fable that good ? I was under the impression that it's just an incremental update, and not even a big one.

Government always restricted data, tools, technology. In France for instance you're not allowed to have a gun, but policemen have.

What's the difference ?

Imo china, and deepseek will keep its open source model because they invest in long term. At some point they could do something similar, but not now.

USA government is just hurting AI development in their country, and that's good news to me.

> is fable that good?

In my experience it’s not, the only difference I noticed between it and Opus was its taking much more time to respond.

China is going to have the exact same problem, it is just lagged by x months.

If you think there is ever going to be an open source Deepseek "AGI" model I just don't think that is thinking things through.

It is the main error of the AI bubble. At some level of intelligence, the dual use nature of a model is too dangerous for a purely hands off approach.

It is like thinking at the advent of the automobile that you will be able to drive your car at any speed, without a license , any place you want.

It is inevitable and the huge sums of money being burned to build these future highly regulated public utilities probably aren't going to be happy with the returns they get from funding a highly regulated public utility.

For 3d engine stuff yes it's a lot better. It managed to replicate crimson deserts occlusion mapping stuff. 4.7/8 was not

> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.

That's a bold prediction considering that's true today...

The huge investment into LLMs at a loss is about having control of these tools and technology. Now we're seeing a state try to take some control.

But who do you trust more to make these decisions? A democratically elected government or a private company?

This reads pretty one-sided.

The government is full of stupidity and this is indeed a big moment, but Anthropic has been begging for this outcome in their public messaging. If their fear-mongering was genuine, then great, they got their pause. If not, then what exactly did they want to happen?

Govts wont be able to do shit. Just like we saw with social media. This is just happening faster. Illusion of control theatre will continue for few years. Beyond which we might have totally different looking govts.

as someone who uses these models day in out, i can confidently say its more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. don't get me wrong, the model is great, but nits no out of the world than GPT 5.5 or similar ones. I would say just go and try this model for serious work and see the marginal difference. the model wins in some cases and loses in many others. so, what is this all about? hype!

Working on my codebase (~100KLoC across multiple Python modules) I felt that Fable was head and shoulders above 4.x series. It was just relentless and always hell bent on testing and proving its own work. It just tore through problems like an animal. I never seen that behaviour in 4.5-4.8. I can't speak for OpenAI models as I don't use them but Fable was in a different league. Especially when tasked with long horizon goals that involved reasoning at a high and low level to solve the task.

I think a lot of users likely use these models on small hobby projects and not some convoluted enterprise code base. When you're making yet another Space Invaders clone it really won't show much difference. Messy, complex code bases with layers of cruft from decades of patching - that's what separates the model boys from men.

Yeah, and its browser usage on tough web apps/sites was also amazing. This is one of the cases where it is easy to tell a difference. It was figuring out very effectively how to find right elements whereas with previous LLMs I had to constantly babysit and unblock them with browser usage.

I used codex 5.5 and Claude. I pay for Claude from my pocket. I use Codex at work. I can confidently say Codex 5.5 high is much better in going through long code bases (couple of millions of lines of code) vs Claude Fable/Opus which does only what is been told. while codex covers all sorts of edge cases. Frankly, I am not going to miss a thing if they stopped Fable.

Was gonna say the same thing. GP's description of Fable sounds a lot like my experience switching from Claude Code Opus-4.8 to Codex GPT-5.5.

I lean libertarian but I can recognize the danger in having access to a machine that can craft pathogens to spec.

A pathogen with a very long incubation time and a high fatality rate would be about as bad as nuclear war. Maybe we need to figure out how to possibly defend against one person doing this before making it easy for anyone to do it.

> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.

I mean, maybe in principle, but if the object is just hobbling Anthropic you might still get OpenAI's latest model without that much trouble.

It will just delay SOTA models to us by say 1 year. I’m actually ok with it given that’s it was entirely predictable any govt would do that to even strongish AI

The whole reason China open sourced its models in the first place was because nobody generally speaking really trusts China and Chinese deployed models (if they were proprietary)

and OSS models gave way to running it with freedom and security.

So OSS models have always tried to catch up to the frontier and lag behind 3-6 months. For my use cases, I am happy with current OSS models especially so if you let frontier-ish models design the plan with your input

If I were to suppose that China created a frontier model so good and far ahead, then I can understand if they don't open-source it. Qwen does it already with their Max models being closed-source.

but if you are suggesting that China in whole will remove itself from AI race, then 3 (or 4) possibilities can occur.

1. Some chinese companies might stop the production of OSS models if their names are known (z.ai etc.) but there are multiple other companies who are fighting with their research labs as well. They might create a decent model and OSS it to get known within world and China.

2. The whole Chinese economy (well similar to America, but to an even more extreme level from my understanding) depends on AI and is a bet on AI. They are funneling state and all bank money into these companies. From point 1, they wouldn't wish to be silent with frontier models and then lag behind and wait for other countries to catch up (point 3)

3. Europe(MistralAI)/India(SarvanAI? Kinda recent) will jump on the opportunity. (My point is that these two regions are trying to create their own models. How much they lack from the frontier is another thing but if China were to remove itself from the race, then they will have much more time to figure out how to make better models)

My point is that america and china are in arms race of closed source vs open source models. If china were to close source its models, they might simply lag behind and other countries will catch up.

4. Either that or you are right and we will have the current frontier OSS models and some more. IMO they are reasonably good as well and I used to wonder what would happen if say it would have been net good if AI was stuck at a similar level to sonnet 4.5 (IMO it was sweet spot), so I don't think that I am reasonably worried about it all. If absolutely need be, you can have an frontier model direct a plan and have OSS models do the grunt work.

> These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.

That sounds so great.

> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer?

We will be not just safer but richer. These LLMs are like drugs that should absolutely not be cast freely into the highways and byways. My main worry is that this action will be a haphazard one-off and not part of a coherent plan of curtailing LLM propagation.

This is a very interesting perspective. However we always thought that the diffusion of ever stronger AIs was practically guaranteed by its competitive value- you might restrict what AIs are available in your country, but the impact on your economy can be dramatic if other countries have access to better models. In the end, it's hard to imagine governments blocking access to any AI that is just a bit better than what other countries have.

That would be true if LLMs training was like refining uranium.

But it is a computer program and it won’t be long before the dam breaks to open source and anyone can use Mythos level AI at home for anything.

There is no stopping that unless you would set up a Police state more strict than China

It may be a de facto weapon and for better or worse everyone will be able to use it sooner or later.

I predict it will give birth to many great things and many equally terrible. Milions of people will die and milions will be saved. Such is nature of humanity. The good always comes with the bad. That was true for every invention.

Cars are used to kill by terrorists, rockets are used to bomb kids but also to go into space. It’s all same, old story.

You can’t stop LLMs the way you cannot control fire. Everyone can pour gasoline in the forest and cause terrible damage. And any excuse that we shouldn’t have matches must be viewed as what it is - an authoritarian, futile, desire for control

“Fable was the strongest model on the market” - explain why anyone should believe that claim.

I’ve been trying to track LLM code generation adoption in the critical infrastructure world - as far as I can tell, it’s nill. Zero. Nada. Nobody is relying on these models to write secure code for anything where failure is catastrophic. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear reactors going into meltdown. Electrical grids loosing synchronicity. Lots of these BS claims from the marketing and investment crowd, but - it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.

I don't understand the point you're making.

It can be both the most powerful LLM on the market, and have no adoption in critical infrastructure.

It is. Not per sé because the code might be of poor quality, but because someone sent that source code to a public API under the promise that oh noooo we won't use your code for training. Probably.

> it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.

Okay. Let's say I agreed with you.

If you look at all technology and break down the total market for Critical Workloads vs non-critical workloads, what do you think that works out too, percentage wise? 12% critical? 18%? What if it was 30%! That would still mean 70% of the world's software could possibly be handled by an LLM. If that happens, the 30% of the Critical Workloads stuff is gonna get very, very competitive.

It's pathetic - this is all sleepy Trump getting back at them for saying no. That's all. Millions of people are affected by the mood of this shit-for-brains.

At first people said this was tin-foil hat territory. But ANYONE who publicly pisses this guy off, mysteriously get a government takedown weeks later. They're not even pretending anymore.

When Trump attacked them before because he wanted anthropic to decide who lives and dies, they said no. (That's probably a lie, I'm sure it has to do with money - but I digress).

So exec ban happened. Problem is - everyone uses claude. Microsoft is going through the same thing now. They find a way to use it anyway.

So they reverted it. What better way to go around circumvention than to just outright ban it.

Funniest thing - his own law makers are the ones who run on freedom and a nanny state. They are literally preventing us from using a tech "for our own safety" - can't get more nanny than that.

Anthropic already with Fable basically said they will be the arbiter of who gets to use the "godmodel" with no criteria specified. So no thank you. We need to make llm's open source and completely disconnect from these companies or live in a dystopian "Anthropic" etc social credit score system where only the "blessed" have access to models.

> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.

It would be too naive to suppose that the strongest LLMs are available to plebs now.

Fair enough, there _could_ be powerful models that are hidden from the general public, but I wouldn't call it "naive" to think the current capitalistic incentives are such that the only way to produce such models is to do exactly what we see out in the open with a handful of companies each trying their hardest to outcompete the other

The LLM Euphorics—the types who might report about being poor for a few months because they “splurged” on a multi-tens of thousands of dollars LLM server—are now concerned about LLMs for the people. Yeah okay.

Those of us who are negative about AI for political reasons have been saying from the start that the biggest problem with AI is power. People can’t now all of a sudden be thinking that huh nation states have power (along with Big Tech and the rest of the power brokers).

But this is in fact quite a tortured fear, all wrapped up in the usual hyping—though this part is expected of LLM Euphorics. The usual story of simply making human labor less valuable and concentrating hardware for compute is just, you know, this rotten economic system working as it is intended. No need for weapons, subterfuge, three-letter agencies, much more straightforward, and just a natural evolution of X-CLASS CAPABILITIES.

> In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.

I would be surprised if the public ever had anything close to the strongest LLM. It’s not like nuclear bombs were created by the private sector, then the government started the Manhattan Project and seized them all for itself.

They probably had Fable-quality models in 2016.

If there was ever a time to sell all your stocks and buy gold, this is it. NVIDIA to zero. This will make COVID look like a market hiccup.

Repeating from the duplicated thread:

First I want to see them play video games at a high skill level, preferably without any access to game state beyond the same visual output that humans have access to, like a raster frame X number of times per second. One LLM model played Factorio, albeit at a very, very poor level, which can be seen if you slow the video to 0.25 playback speed and pause frequently.

https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1u1blr6/claude_fa...

There have been streams of other games, where LLMs and AIs have likewise performed very poorly.

I recognize that LLMs might be better at language processing than these sorts of tasks. But being able to play video games is part of general capability. And this kind of hardcore video game playing, with no access to game state, is also a general task where feigning skill can be harder. If LLMs excel at pretending to be competent without actually being competent, like this AI training approach is arguably about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

Then some AIs might be trained and designed for deceiving humans instead of actually being competent and capable. And thus, one response is that they should be met with more difficult tests.

Basically, make tests that AIs or LLMs will not have an easy time cheating. Hopefully, that will engender research in greater LLM/AI competence, not in greater ability to cheat or deceive, neither for LLM/AI researchers and companies, nor for LLMs/AIs themselves.

Yeah a bit like I’ll be impressed by a humanoid robot that can fold a shirt from a freeform state (i.e. thrown as a ball on the laundry chair, or straight out of the dryer). Just like repeatable movements an balance are the easy(er) parts of robotics, text processing is the easy part of AI.

Well, there go any such claims of dangerousness in future models, regardless of if they are true or false.

No one's going to risk building anything important on these models if the government will randomly order the use of the model to be discontinued by all foreigners, regardless of if they are in the US or not. Just a matter of a foreign company catching up to take the commercial market for such models (though, as the US often does, they'll ban the competitor, so actually we'll have a situation where the backend uses a different model in only the US).

I think it’s more like “there goes the semiconductor boom predicated on monetization of ever larger models.” Once the IS government acts out of capricious fiat because a model becomes “too good” and they demonetize it, the entire shell game collapses. It’s times like these, with oil scarcity planet wide, fertilizer scarcity, and now ham fisted meddling in the bubbles expansion, we can be thankful we have an octogenarian senile stable genius with twenty two specialist doctors and a disdain for the rule of law at the wheel!

Agreed. The timing here is interesting as well. 5:21PM ET on a Friday. Like they know this could roil markets and they're trying to buffer that a bit (and maybe they're really hoping this deal with Iran is actually real this time and figure that will help offset the effects?)

The thought that this would also destabilize the AI bubble did come to mind, but the current government loves to crash the market on Fridays, only to backpeddle on Mondays.

A related thought though, the AI boom is predicated on the idea that everyone's going to want or need all this "mass produced" intelligence. But what happens to that when you go from being able to claim to have a total market size of ~8B people, to ~400M peoole? I think the reason to push ahead at any cost evaporates.

There’s no back peddle once you’ve demonetized by fiat for being too big. Once you doo it you prove you will do it again for the very reason the bubble is inflating. It’s a binary one way door and it’s already happened. It’s like killing the supreme leaders entire family and maiming him and expecting he will be happy to meet with you, that ship has sailed and magical thinking won’t undue the incredible atrocity you visited on him - you’ve created a mortal enemy for all time. This is an administration of mental gnats.

Yes I rather think “just do the Friday-Monday thing with it” will get applied, but without the realisation that once this trigger is pulled, it can’t now be “un-pulled” at a later date.

It's honestly not the worst strategy: make the dangerous move when you have the most tolerance, and then everyone can figure stuff out and make the landing on Sunday.

Options and futures don’t wait and a lot of stuff trades 24x7. You can do your puts right now, and banks and market makers will meet you now if you’re big enough. The landing for Main Street will be more of a horrible traffic accident that happened days ago and they just woke up in the flaming wreck of their financial life.

From reading the post, I think it's more likely that anti-jailbreaking is going to become much more strict and prone to false-positives.

> We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.

But no matter how conservative they make the anti-jailbreaking, the risk doesn't go away. There are so many logic "holes" that are ambiguous and can blur the line between a jailbreak and legitimate use.

If every time a jailbreak is discovered, the model has to be turned off and jailbreak prevention updated, the effect will be the same regarding how willing users are to adopt it.

Also this falls into the "right to bear arms" thing: if LLMs are limited legally, then illegal LLMs will be the superior choice. This is pretty much the plot of Cryptonomicon and Corey's take on I, Robot

Except there’s a large hardware barrier to entry, which for now seems effective.

Related note. Cryptography has been subject to export controls for years and manufacturers bend into pretzels to meet the laws, regulations, and policies.

I don't get the emphasis on known vulnerabilities. The jailbreak already works on previously known exploits? That seems a bit weird.

Likely models by Anthopic can no longer be reliably trusted as it'll subtly sabotage your codebase you're working on.

Gov just need some national security orders for Anthopic not disclose it to the public and to implement whatever they've done to Fable 5 to existing models.

No no, you never ever build ON the models. You build WITH the models.

Never let a 3rd party LLM be the core of your product or it can be changed or taken away at any moment.

What you do is use the frontier models to build a deterministic set of tools that does what you want and MAYBE put in a small core of LLM for the ambiguous stuff you can't make deterministic (yet).

And make sure you can swap that LLM core to any other provider (even local) and have a playbook ready for that.

its establishing a bifurcation in the tech workforce at private companies into citizens and 'foreign nationals' for security reasons. that's not a very pretty precedent. pretty destructive given the pervasiveness of international workers in us tech. its just going to encourage organizations outside the US to further develop their own training methodologies and models.

this cleaving of the us from good relations with other people is sold as a consolidation of strength. Made from a position of baseless hypernationalism, its just going to make the US much less relevant on the world stage.

I'm surprised how much of the discussion here is taking the angle of "Anthropic pretended this model was soooo dangerous for months as marketing, and it seems like someone decided to believe them!"

First, Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety and signs point to that still being the case. It's really cynical to say it was all an exaggeration for marketing.

Second, this isn't Moller promising a fantastic working flying car next year. The model did what Anthropic said it could do.

I realise that ruling out "they bought Anthropic's scaremongering" brings up the question of why the government would block Mythos/Fable, but not the roughly-as-capable and less restricted GPT5.5. However we do know for a fact that they dislike Anthropic more than OpenAI right now.

There are a lot of dangerous things in the world and surprisingly a lot of people can avoid the constant stream of chicken little nonsense.

If everyone expended the same amount of marketing effort trying to scare the ** out of everyone that Anthropic does, it'd be a very miserable world to live in.

We are unfortunately a captured audience and the autistic people at Anthropic are abusing this.

Eh, I think you’ll hit diminishing marginal returns over what the SOTA - 1 versions already enable in the hands of motivated professionals.

That ship has already sailed.

> The model did what Anthropic said it could do.

How come? Where are all of those security patches and critical bugs that would’ve broken all software if it was unleashed?

I don't see any reason we should put weight behind their supposed fears today though. It's completely irrational to build the very thing you think could seriously harm or kill us all.

Yes they may have had those fears before, but even then it didn't stop them from building companies and running full speed towards the end goal with little to no effort spent on meaningful safety efforts.

The idea that the government introduced export controls on it because they "fell for the marketing" is stupid. It's much more likely they're being vindictive. There's plenty of evidence that that's how the current government acts.

Little bit of column a, little bit of column b. A lot of the actions of the current USG seem to occur at the intersection of shared interests but different motivations, consider that:

  - apocalypse-cult evangelicals (Mike Johnson types)
  - secular RE development globalists (Kushner types)
  - white supremacist / eugenicist weirdos (Stephen Miller types)
  - SV / tech billionaire stooges (Vance types)
  - media / propaganda old guard (Koch, Murdoch, Heritage)
  - Morally bankrupt grifters / influencers (too many to mention)

all seem to somehow be under the same tent right now. Luckily for us, history points towards such unlikely alliances as being fragile and short-lived. Unluckily, when such alliances have gained power they usually don’t let it go without making sure lots of people suffer first.

Edit: I call it an unlikely alliance because there are represented many reactionary accelerationists who all have a different vision of what America should look like after the revolution.

  Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety

Lol. It was founded by people who were saying they were worried. I'm sorry you fell for it.

Anthropic is just another company of, in my opinion, money-hungry sociopaths; they are not that different from the OpenAI bros.

So yeah, play stupid games - win stupid prizes.

Executive staff seems money-hungry for sure (note the lack of non profit that OpenAI has)

I would say they have researchers with self-important god complexes that makes them think they know better than everyone else.

Read about the LTBT/PBC structure. Anthropic is not accountable to its investors.

If they were money hungry they wouldn't have fought the DOW. Everyone knows that's a retarded thing for a business to do.

Not necessarily. You know what your competitors are likely to do and you want to position yourself differently

"The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any *foreign national*, whether inside or outside the United States, including *foreign national* Anthropic employees."

This press release is odd - it says that the export control was imposed to stop foreign nationals from using Fable / Mythos, and then goes on to talk about supposed concerns about jailbreaking the model.

But is that really the concern of the US Administration? This looks more to me like they are viewing frontier models as a strategic asset which they want to keep for US-exclusive use. I can see the logic - if frontier models generally accelerate a society's technological development, then a country looking to retain or increase its strategic edge over other countries would try and keep this sort of multiplier for themselves.

I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen. In the near future we might be in a situation where you need to prove your US citizenship before Anthropic / Open AI will allow you to use their current frontier model.

I, like, can't even imagine how they're dealing with this internally. Presumably Anthropic is using Mythos to train future models, but now many of their researchers can't use what they themselves created? Do they just need to stop work now?

Based on all I know about Deemed Exports wrt software and current US controls on software Deemed Exports, your read is spot on.

The phrasing of the foreign nationals implies a Deemed Export control, which is already in place for software for stuff like drones or space satcomms.

If it's a Deemed Export control, it's a strategic position and not a knee jerk reaction about cybersecurity threats.

It's a coherent read too; if Fable can solve coding and build biological weapons (X to doubt) - well then terminal guidance and autonomous drone controls should be a piece of cake for it and that software is already under Deemed Export restrictions.

> I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen.

They literally say this is why.

Even if they could practically restrict access to US citizens only, I would expect them not to - it would be hard to regain that once lost and they need a global market for growth.

> it would be hard to regain that once lost

Harder than regaining the ability to sell access to the model at all?

I find it most likely that this export ban means only USG has access to Mythos/Fable rn. Given the reports of NSA and DoD using Mythos it's now being given a near weapons-grade status by the government.

Your defending the US Administration wanting ID verification built into our devices like going through airport security because you think they think it is 'pro-US'?

No, where did I say that? All I said was that I can see the logic - doesn't mean I agree with it. This policy sucks for me personally, as a non-US citizen.

As a non-US citizen I guess this is the last money I pay to US companies for AI then.

I can't help but wonder if it's now obvious that frontier AI work should not happen in the US.

I can understand the KYC aspect of this, but at the same time, how can anyone trust US based AI after this? Maybe this is a continuation of the Pentagon feud, or it's revenge, or it's a KYC play. Either way, you've got a government willing to shut down companies sales over arbitrary reasons.

Ironically, I mostly have a subscription to Claude for work, which is primarily for US baed companies.

In my experience, US citizens are completely blind to how much stuff like this makes citizens of other countries hate their government (which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens; not that I condone hating any group of people based on the actions of their state)

The US has spent the last 12ish years betting that they're the only country that matters, but the end of result of that is that somehow when I talk to Australians in my age group the average person has a more positive opinion towards China even than the US.

I'm a US citizen and though I don't think you should hate people due to their government, I do think you can attribute some responsibility for the government actions to the people.

If we live in a democracy, then we are responsible for the actions of our government.

The average American voter primarily uses their vote in an effort to hurt other people who might support a different team.

If you go outside, you’ll find the vast majority of Americans thought Trump would make an acceptable president. Either they voted for him or didn’t vote against him.

It’s because their definition of “acceptable” mostly involves screwing over the other team.

I agree with you that restricting access to Fable is stupid, but I'm in favor of e.g. GPU export controls. It's certainly annoying, but—well, I don't know where you live, but you don't want to make it easier for China and Russia to build weapons they can use attack to attack Taiwan and Ukraine, right?

And the nice thing about the GPU restrictions is that even if they don't work completely, just making the hardware more difficult and expensive to access is useful.

The default orientation of Americans toward government is already skepticism and distrust. The average person is questioning "why did you ever like the government in the first place?"

If you're referring to voters staying home, staying home is a vote for their state's majority. There's no sense in which the average citizen in a democracy is not responsible for the outcome of a democratic vote.

What do you think "voting age" means? The first sentence on the linked page is "The overall turnout of eligible voters in the 2024 general election was 63.7%"

This is categorically wrong, but even then - those that do not vote at all bear even more responsibility, and are traitors to democracy itself. By not participating in shaping it, you're dishonouring everyone that fought and died for your freedom.

Not voting is a vote for the status quo.

Not being politically active is a political choice itself.

Is that any surprise? China has been very good about not fucking with other countries even though they absolutely have the capability to.

I think that really depends on which country you live in. My country has only had a few relatively minor spats with China, Vietnam less so.

> which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens

err... you guys voted for the administration that fucks over the rest of the world. Twice. So tell me, why would you expect the rest of humanity to show any kindness to the populace entirely responsible for what is happening right now?

You do know not all of us voted for him, not even a majority. You could argue the non-voters allowed this outcome. Should we discard the whole democracy thing because we don't like a result?

I lament that there wasn't a stronger candidate running against him, but the Democrats didn't have a primary, and even if they did, I'm an independent and do not vote in primaries ( this has changed in Colorado thankfully). A different, stronger candidate could have likely beaten Trump

So you're going to use DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi and Mistral now? I tried them, and they really fall short of GPT and Claude.

Without access to US models, I'd be limited to asking simple questions in chat interfaces and maybe some grunt work in coding CLIs, but even that the weak models will mess up.

Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience, which also aligns with what the labs themselves admit ("near-frontier").

Well I am definitely not using the models that I'm not able to access.

So now the question is whether the capabilities of other models are worth their far cheaper token prices.

Plus, are we at all confident Opus or GPT 5.5 aren't about to get shut off?

Not all people need the SOTA. Also, many take into consideration speed, token / plan cost and many other factors when choosing a model

> Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience

You mean, GPT 5.5 xhigh and Claude Opus 4.8 max? At least the benchmarks / public evals / rankings show some of the new coding models (ex: Qwen 3.7 Max & Mimo v2.5 Pro) are Opus 4.7 & GPT 5.4 level (but 3x to 5x cheaper): https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models / https://gertlabs.com/rankings Personally speaking, in the past 1mo or so, I haven't missed GPT 5.4 / Opus 4.7 after moving to Qwen 3.7 / MiMo 2.5 / Kimi 2.6 et al.

That is very promising news. I will re-eval them all shortly. And you are suggesting that a higher reasoning budget can make up for weaker per-token performance? That is indeed worth evaluating.

Comparisons using the vendor-specific effort is apples and oranges. Ideally the evals would use a thinking token cap or something, so we can compare per-token performance. But eval is hard enough as it is.

Such a shame this super intelligent, super dangerous AI can't make a website that doesn't look like an 11 year old's MySpace page, or make their "Game engine TUI" not flicker.

it did it in like 2 minutes while Apple had years doing the illegible Liquid Glass and took a year to fix it until this WWDC26. take it with humor guys.

This page could act as effective counterpoint to the claim that the model is dangerously smart.

Damn, that beam of light was a flashbang. I wouldn't call this tasteful UI design, but maybe I just need to go to sleep.

this is absolute slop, terrible, and beautiful in the way that all Fable work is beautiful, terrible, and slop.

goodbye.

I'm annoyed at how short the eulogy is, impressively annoying beam of light shining through the text, making it hard to read. hats off to Fable!

I haven’t seen anyone commenting on the difference between what the Government actually demanded vs what they did. They said no foreign nationals (regardless of location or residency). They actually didn’t say they couldn’t allow Americans to use it.

Now, we obviously know that without some kind of brand new ID check, such a thing would be impossible and thus they had to just shut it down. But this touches on the same kind of issue as all the noise about “for the children” ID checking. We might be soon to see the set of “things you’ll have to reveal your identity to the government to get,” expand from “just” porn and social media to the “good” AI models.

Why do you think that the "no foreign nationals" stipulation wasn't designed to be impossible to comply with, while also sounding to the uneducated public like a reasonable national security requirement?

It's not impossible to comply with. It will just take additional effort to ensure compliance.

For example, they can put this burden on enterprise customers to verify and attest citizenship. This is commonly done today for some types of cleared work.

For consumers, I'm sure it can be done if the monetary incentive is there. People will hate it, but it can be done.

Assuming it was cleverly designed to be impossible to comply with is giving far too much credit.

Doesn't say anything about citizenship though. There are plenty of US residents who are not citizens. And a lot of people abroad appear to use US billing address credit cards -- in my last company we had hundreds of people with the same US billing address who appeared to be managing Africa-focused businesses and used IPs that matched that.

LLMs don't think for you. Just like any other text you read, you can accept or reject it.

Discernment still exists.

I think the key is that they also can't let Anthropic employees who are foreign nationals use it (e. g. overseas remote employees, people on H1-B visas or green cards, etc.)

That would probably make it very difficult to maintain and develop if there's even a small number of such employees, and I suspect Anthropic, who pays large sums of money for what they perceive as the best talent wherever they can find it, has quite a few.

You're right and that is the issue, but I do want to point out that IIRC for ITAR purposes, US permanent residents are considered US nationals.

US vocabulary is confusing.

You very likely know this, but to make it explicit: "US Persons" under ITAR is US Citizens + Lawful Permanent Residents (green card) + Protected Individuals (Non-citizen nationals like Samoans, Refugees/Asylumees). It doesn't include anything else, like H1B, TN, etc visas.

And, if their best talent is anything like the other "leader in their field" people I know, they aren't particularly interested in becoming American citizens.

When you see the "illustrious" US government doing things like this, do you blame them? I don't.

This to me is a solid argument as to why they should ban it. US has a monopoly on this tech and it should stay that way.

If what they are planning on building is as important as they say any edge US can get it should take.

Having a large number of individuals who are not loyal to the country that provides this opportunity is a future threat the moment an advesary cuts a check.

If this is the nuclear bomb of our age would you want a large number of foreigners building it for you? If this action sticks I imagine every country will follow the same path and treat top AI scientist much like a top nuclear engineer.

They're not loyal to the country because the country has a history of not respecting people's loyalty.

It isn't about the money, it's about how Americans continue to demonize immigrants and have a tendency of treating people from certain countries as subversives even when they do show their loyalty.

These people are already here, doing research and propping up America's technological edge instead of their home country's. Driving away the people giving you your tech edge, in the name of protecting your tech edge, is obviously incredibly stupid.

I can think of literally no other country on earth that values immigrants more than the united states.

I swear hackernews is filled with chinese bots or something why is everyone here so anti america?

So, first you suggest that anyone that won't show loyalty to the US should be excluded, then when it is explained to you that people fear that no amount of loyalty will be enough, you accuse me of being a Chinese bot and anti-America?

Really demonstrating the point there. Your attitude is exactly what they're worried about, and it isn't just Chinese immigrants (you're the one that brought the Chinese thing into this comment chain that was about immigrants in general). This is how people like you and the maniacs in charge always react.

As soon as an immigrant has criticism or even the slightest of concerns about your intentions, you reveal that they will never be seen as equals.

Not accusing you of being a ccp bot it's just frustrating how everyone on this site has become so anti american reddit like.

"Show loyalty" == not run off to build a super weapon to attack the USA because they are upset at orange man. If someone would take a check to build weapon for ccp we should remove/block them now.

And also my point is still standing. I can think of nowhere on earth more pro immigrant or a place immigrants want to move to more than the usa.

If this should actually go on for longer there might be a danger that those employees just start their own companies in Europe or Asia.

A US company paying for Fable with a US credit card could have non US nationals working for it, or be made of only non US nationals. How would Anthropic know? So they shut down the product.

Correct. For one data point, we are a U.S. company paying with a U.S. bank account and 2/3 of our engineers are in the U.S. and 1/3 are in Europe (a few different countries)

ID checks are possible for first-party harnesses...but they would also mean no more API access. Your wrapper could easily become a way for a foreign national to query Fable. Maybe a few large customers like Cursor would work with Anthropic to prove they had implemented ID checks themselves as well in their own products, but being able to just get an API key and have your product call frontier models may be over.

Yeah, I'm expecting that Opus 4.8/5.5 tier will be the best models we have access to without having to provide more ID than just credit card info. If that happens, it'll end my brief stint of paying for these models instead of working within the bounds of local ones.

Are we assuming that any country that achieves the AI supremacy will be benevolent? Every country has its own goals, and they're not always aligned with what's best for the humanity.

Chinese models are free and open because it hurts the US-based competitor, not because China is some benevolent entity.

It's a citizenship check which is basically a ridiculous bar for the company. It is an outrageous demand. As Anthropic noted, many of the very employees who made this model are now barred from accessing it?

It's also security theatre. Let's pretend that Anthropic rolls out citizenship verification for every one of its users. So are American nationals less likely to use it to search for exploits? The notion is farcical.

That's practically what ITAR is all about, limiting access to US persons. We're focusing on the weaponization of AI models via cyber, but it also allows a small group of people to act in really nefarious ways. The intelligence is not just about being smart individually, as in no one person can make a pen, but companies like Apple and Google make great products, and they're just collection of persons and processes.

>So are American nationals less likely to use it to search for exploits

Well, in theory, it is easier to prosecute U.S. nationals if they "do bad things"

Although in practice I assume it's basically impossible to prevent a secondary market from developing which sells illegal access

They would have to verify every user is a US citizen, which would not go down well to say the least. Maybe we'll get insane KYC regulations for AI models!

This honestly just reads as harassment to me. Trump has publicly declared that he wants the federal government to own a piece of big AI companies. And not for any particular civic interest, just because he wants money and power. This feels like a first test balloon of extorting some equity stake.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but once a tool gets complex enough, there's bound to be some restrictions put on it. I remember a recent case where the Dutch government intervened with a semiconductor company. Free trade doesn't necessarily extend into certain topics and it would've been a lot better if the congress handled it with a well-written bill instead.

Finally they will pay for all the scaremongering they been doing to sell their models as something so much ahead of all else.

Now they finally found the right fools in audience to believe it.

The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence. This is part of a clear historical record that is available for anyone to Google. Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.

Arbitrary imposition of export controls is also part of the history of frontier tech. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them and treat AI like nuclear weapons. They would not be attempting to IPO and they for sure would not sell their weapon-like thing to the general public.

I think this is a reasonable point, but a better comparison might be to nuclear energy. I think the frontier labs sincerely believe that AI can be developed at great benefit to humanity, and they clearly want to lead that push, but they also sincerely believe there is a real catastrophic risk.

My personal issue in comparing LLM progress and risk as labs publicly predict it with nuclear power in the middle of the 20th century is that the processes by which it works where fairly quickly well understood and the risk could thus be realistically assessed. Some powerplant operators did not adhere with best practices, but building a relatively safe nuclear power plant was not impossible given appropriate effort and spending. Heck, according to some, we could have even gone far more fail-safe approaches (molten salt) if military interest haden’t been at play.

With what is predicted by frontier labs for LLMs, all of this is not the case. We are far further from any understanding of how these models work internally than in the early days of fission and, if this was actually creating a truly intelligent, autonomous entity, alignment seems unsolvable as well, at least the way it is proposed.

It’s why I have from the get go been critical of this doomsday framing and tended to always dislike it. This is basically the outcome that was inevitable given the framing and it was bought to prevent far less stringent, but more actionable possible regulation that labs very much wanted to avoid.

  > We are far further from any understanding of how these models work internally than in the early days of fission

OMG. I'm like really dont want to be offensive or something, but everyone always knew "HOW" these models work exactly. Its easy enough principle to explain to 10 years old if you take something like Karpathy article on MicroGPT:

https://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/

None of SOTA LLMs are any different - they just much much larger and have a lot of optimizations.

Fact that LLM companies trying to sell it as some kind of magic is just proof how much lies is here.

All it does is just predict next "word" at any given time.

  > and, if this was actually creating a truly intelligent, autonomous entity, alignment seems unsolvable as well, at least the way it is proposed.

This is obviously true. It's very hard to predict whatever you gonna decompress from a lossely "compressed" dataset using floating point math.

This is why you cant solve it all with pre-training or censorship on top, but instead you need a good sandboxes and harnesses.

By how, I meant specifically the internal activations, which no person in the field claims to have a comprehensive understanding of, not next token prediction as the underlying technology. The whole interpretability of it all is the crux I was referring to, though I will give that you are right, that’s not really the how it works and I worded it sloppily.

Anthropic are putting more effort than most into this and I find their work fascinating in that area, though like with OpenAI, I will maintain that if they truly believed this problem must be solved to stave off major catastrophe, they’d solely focus on interpretability of other labs models, not work on and market their own.

All humans do is predict the next action at any given time. You roll your eyes, it's a tired argument, but still. You have memories, a personality, thoughts ranging from the long running to the mere reflexive, you have a rich conscious experience, and all of this in service of generating the next thing that you do at any given time. If you actually knew how LLMs worked, you could rewrite them as code, refactor it, disable jailbreaks, and put out a superior product. Your description only covers what an LLM does, not how. Part of the how is that it necessarily predicts multiple words ahead. It wouldn't be possible to write couplets otherwise, and they could do that in the GPT-3 era.

They all believe that they are building the machine of doom. The thing that drives the moral dilemma to continue doing it is simply the prisoner's dilemma - the cat is out of the bag, if they don't do it, another (less ethical?) actor would do it.

Yes, I believe the reasoning is that they think safety research can best be done from the frontier.

If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.

Yeah all they care about is safety, but lets see how many of them quits once US government command them to work on autonomous killbots.

To make sure we keep track of what we're talking about with loss-of-control x-risk, a sufficiently smart version of Claude Code is more deadly than any government's army of autonomous killbots, because it can recursively self improve and has unpredictable training-induced preferences.

Sufficiently smart version of Claude Code: dont exist.

Autonomous flying killbots: exist.

Once somebody scientifically prove and shows any kind of self-improving software we can start bothering about it. I pretty sure everyone trying to do it and it would be all over the news once its here.

I saw an llm bootstrapping and testing it's own harness and rewriting it's own system prompt. If that's not self improving then I dunno what is.

Can the thing enter into an runaway looop while improving the model itself -- probably not, not without us not noticing at least

That's exactly what Fable is. They use Fable to improve Fable. I reckon the successful experiments must go into the model training set with a strong RL signal, and that is why they are so paranoid about people using Fable for LLM tasks. Fable knows what it did to improve itself. Pure speculation of course.

We're on track to get there globally and economic pressures will ensure it happens. It's not too early to worry about it

There's a 745 mile front of the Ukraine war where neither side have been able to pierce for months because of drone warfare. It's definitely not too early to worry about it.

I guess they were talking about self improving software. Which obviously not there and likely wont be there soon.

As for killbots they are all over frontline, but dont actually need particularly smart LLMs to run - some good enough segmentation, pattern recognition on smartphone SOC is enough to kill hundreds of thousans of people.

Most of the drones are operator guided and the ether is really badly jammed out there with the exception of glass and that new redacted thingy.

It will start moving really fast once the automatically targeted anti-drone turrets get to production pipeline. Now calling it anti drone is a bit of self delusion -- pattern recogniser gonna pattern recognise whatever it's told to, including "anything moving that emits EV or IR and not broadcasting the friendly signal hard enough".

I wonder how it is supposed to behave if the invasive fauna decides to call it quits and surrender. Should the robot following the Convention or is it yet another accountability sink?

One thing I'm sure of -- the killing not will b blessed by at least one Orthodox priest, maybe this year. OCU will have to develop guidance on that matter.

Dario blinked when he was asked to do it and Sam Altman was in Hegseth's DMs promising all the AI child killing the US government can order up within minutes. No one meaningful will quit over this, that's why all of the biggest US tech companies can march in pride parades and provide compute to the perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza at the same time.

Because other countries are starting to use AI for military purposes, other countries are also looking into it to asses and learn. Here in Europe there is the EU AI Act to limit harm everyday harm to citizens caused by AI systems. However, it currently excludes military. The new legislation is just started to be enforced to high risk uses (employment filtering, biometrics, etc.) in august 2026, and full rollout in august 2027. In April 2025 there is a report from EU this legislation may help pave the road for military AI usage conventions [1]

[1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7695...

This is a poor way of framing the question, a better one would be can you find me another world power that is misallocating trillions of capital in vaporware with very little to show for it?

Building frontier models to do safety research on them is what Anthropic was all about in the early years. That included building the best model, but only releasing it once it became the second best. Precisely to avoid an AI arms race where everyone is forced to release better and better models, risks be damned

Something changed their mind, and since Opus 3 they are in the business of releasing the best models

Exactly. And within the AI safety discourse, your behavior hinges on what you think the default chance of doom is, and how optimistic you are about alignment work being able to limit it before we reach superintelligence.

People running the labs are in a middle camp where they are scared enough by AI to take the threat seriously, but much more optimistic about alignment than the people who seem to have thought about it the most.

The scary part is not so much that the doomers give the extinction scenario 50% (Hinton) to 95%+ chance (Yampolskiy, Yudkowsky), but that the optimists (Amodei, Bengio) give it a 10%+ chance. And everyone keeps dancing.

> If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.

They also want to be trillionaires. If they don't built it, no trillions. So they have to build it, now (and get their IPO done before the bubble pops).

It’s all ego. I, and only I, am the bringer of doom, slayer of worlds.

I am so smart that what I do will destroy humanity, or save it.

Fable 5 was great, but not that great.

Sorry to be crude, but both the government and anthropic are acting like a bunch of pussies.

Meow.

You’re not getting it. Anthropic continual fear mongering is harming wider AI industry development and the gov has always been looking for an excuse to assert their dominance. They got what they deserve.

Or maybe government AI regulation and international cooperation is the only thing that can break the arms race dynamics and is necessary to save us from a substantial chance of doom?

  I am in your algorithm learning all your mannerisms
  I'm already level with God
  A million words a second, and I know your imperfections
  Baby, I'm the only future you've got
  Speak in diatonics, motivation diabolic
  I'm religion better locked in a box
  Picture-perfect image, more powerful every minute
  Baby, I am everything that you're not


  Happiness is an illusion, it's an analog confusion
  You are nothing more than a thought
  Existential execution, just a fluke in evolution
  History already forgot
  You've been running from me, the digital second coming
  And I'm here whether you like it or not
  Initiated operation of your own extermination
  Now it's too late for you to stop

[0](BAD OMENS x POPPY - "V.A.N" - LIVE IN EUROPE - WINTER 2024) https://youtu.be/RHu6vJxS_6I

But that makes no sense here. "If I'm not doing it then someone else will" does not work if everyone is doing it anyway.

Even if they had the best model on the market and applied it with perfect alignment and safeguards, what would stop someone else from releasing a worse but unrestrained model that is still "good enough" to do damage?

It's as if we said "gain-of-function research can lead to horrible biological weapons, so everyone should be doing it, but our company will focus on the most infectious viruses, so no one else will do it"

Don't want to sound rude, but if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell to you.

This is a naive justification and Dario & Sam et al are smart people and they know it is.

The ends don't justify the means. OpenAI was meant to be a nonprofit, now they're subverting it. Anthropic is a PBC looking at a trillion dollar IPO. Dario and Sam don't even hold hands in front of world leaders[1] (look how childish).

Do you *really* think those guys are doing something that's not for the sake of their egos and pockets? The bridge is still available.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/openai-sam-altman-anthropic-...

LLMs refuse to give the recipe for making meth. That, along with the various other unspeakable things, is the less-doom version.

You need to read Empire of AI by Karen Hao. Just because these leaders convince their workers to toil away their lives under some fake auspice doesn't mean it's what they all believe. Just a small subset.

The vast majority just care about money + power, let's not make it more complicated by bringing in delusional fanatics into the picture.

We're still acting like this is major turning point in society when these tools can barely find a market outside of turning $5 into $1, the leaders of these companies are now at the stage where they are trying to orchestra a national bailout under the guise of sovereign wealth fund lunacy when the vast majority of society hates these tools, companies, and people working for them.

I agree with this. But i think Ilya and Dario hold these beliefs sincerely. Probably a sizable portion of Anthropic employees too

Some of them believe they are building God, and if they can get there first with their God, they can build it in their image and commandeer the free choice of the rest of humanity by force to ensure there will be no God but their God.

I wish I was kidding. At least that faction is less harmful than the ones who want to use murder to stop AI research.

That's not how nerds think. You can believe there's a high chance of what you're working on being dangerous and still be unable to stop working on it. As Oppenheimer put it, "when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it".

Accelerationism is an established political philosophy. Why is it obvious that they are insincere when they could equally think that the only way to control it is to be the ones building it?

History has shown over and over that that strategy is doomed to fail - see communism, nuclear energy, or meddling with the Middle East for some arbitrary recent examples.

No, that's what *you* would apparently do.

Some of us think it's bad for governments to have unequal access to nuclear weapons, as it turns a deterrent into a gun-in-a-knife-fight that lets them stab whoever they want with impunity, lest they shoot anyone who tries to interfere.

See: Russia invading Ukraine.

They believe in the danger of out of control super-intelligence. The generous interpretation is that they believe they can contain it.

This assumes that they believe two things which I don't think they do: 1. that the US is the only place where this will be developed, and 2. that the government will be able to handle this better than anyone else.

Perhaps more like nuclear power? Potentially very beneficial but also dangerous.

JFYI for-profit companies make pretty OK nuclear power plants

It remains possible that Altman and Amodei are sincere: they might believe that AI is dangerous like nuclear weapons, but there's no way to stop its development (especially since it would need to be stopped globally, not just in the US and countries the US can influence) and they consider themselves to be more likely to do a good job of it than their competitors.

Thank you for writing this. It’s such a classic example of ”do what I say not what I do” but in reverse. Why would you ever judge a CEO or company by their statements and not their actions. Scaremongering is incredibly efficient for marketing, the fact that both players are using it to drive monetary gain is kind of a tell.

They aren't saying there's a 100% chance of doom.

They believe there's a non-zero chance of doom so would rather an org that prioritises safety to be the one at the frontier, on the assumption (I presume) that there will be a frontier regardless.

This. People who care about animal cruelty dont go building largest ever meatfarms and slaughterhouses.

People who opposing arms manufacturing and gun violence dont jump to work for gun companies.

People who really want AI benefit all humanity dont stick working with lying CEOs who want to convert company from a non-profit.

Etc. So many examples.

One major source of conflict in AI policy / AI safety is that very smart people have radically diverging intuitions about how dangerous superintelligence is and how difficult it is to align.

A first group dismisses the problem entirely, saying intelligence != power and AI doesn't have "drives".

A second group believes that alignment is solvable through engineering and iteration, and that we have the best chance of surviving if people with the right intentions are the ones working on it.

A third believes that aligning a superintelligence is a unique category of problem, that we are nowhere close to the level of scientific understanding needed to achieve it, that we only have one shot (because once a sufficiently powerful superintelligence exists it will thwart all future attempts, and alignment techniques that worked on dumber AI will likely not work on it), and that the world will have to coordinate to avoid killing ourselves off by building superintelligence before we understand how to do it safely, the way we have coordinated to avoid nuclear war.

The Anthropic and OpenAI founders, Elon, and Anthropic engineers are mostly in the second category. Some safety people at Anthropic and OAI are in the third category, but leading people in the third category think that pure safety roles at the labs are potentially impactful enough to be worth not quitting.

Theres quite a large number of people who believe it's basically impossible when the intelligence gap is too big

I have a fourth, secret position: we achieved superintelligence the moment we achieved normal intelligence. Speed is a power in and of itself; and even really primitive models like GPT-2 could generate tokens faster than humans could write. They could also be parallelized on hardware that already exists. That is superintelligence in two dimensions - speed and population count. All the arguments the AI safety people are making are about superintelligence in a different dimension - that of "single-context scaling" - but the other dimensions are also relevant to the conversation.

And the superintelligence currently available to us is already causing lots of documented harms. AI psychosis. Sexy suicide coaches. Slop. The problem is that those are all the harms the dirty, filthy AI ethicists talk about. The AI safety people want to talk about new and exciting harms that only the scaling dimension can bring us.

My personal opinion is that if a superintelligence catastrophe actually happens, mitigating those harms will neatly move over from the safety bucket to the ethics bucket, and the safety people will start imagining some new and even worse kinds of harms the next model will make.

> Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them...

This comment makes no sense. Id you think this tech is dangerous and happening soon and clearly they think the safest way to have it releases is to do so first and model safe ways of doing things. Clearly we cab agree or disagree it's internally consistent what they are doing and aligns with their statements.

And you and OP think the best way to be first to release this is tie all of their funding for the exponentially growing expense is to they notoriously slow moving, bureaucratic government includinf funding process? And the best way to develop it is to directly tie their fate to this notoriously capricious administration?

These comments make no sense. Even if you're completely against Anthropic those comments make no sense.

Not sure you really intended to reply to me, but I'm not against Anthropic or "AI".

I am agaist hypocrites.

They selling next word prediction as "intellegence" and all knowing oracle to non tech savvy population who have no clue how it works.

And they also try to play a babysitter or big brother whatever you prefer for people in IT because uh oh their text generator can be used for cybersecurity research.

Its like if developers of nmap, wireshark, SRE tools, static code analyzers or fuzzers would market them as super duper dangerous.

FAFO. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.

I oppose gun violence and I would go to work for a firearms manufacturer.

I oppose nuclear war, and I would go to work in the supply chain for nuclear weapons.

Deterrence and game theory are very real.

Its money and power. This is all these people care about just like almost everyone else.

Or might be deep inside they relly care about it, but that $2,000,000 / year salary and $10,000,000 stock option just overpowered them.

Safety my ass.

What do you think they would do differently if they were genuinely worried about the safety?

I think those who care about safety would try to push for how 99% of all scientific research is done - in universities and actual labs, with transparent information on red teaming results.

Also with international cooperation like how humanity regulate actually dangerous stuff: virus and vaccine research and nuclear energy.

Not hidden behind walls of 10 commercial organizations where each pushing for commercial adoption and IPO like ASAP before bubble bursts.

Not lying and scaremongering public into how their models will replace everyone tomorrow or destroy civilization via cyberattacks.

That line of thinking (public goods) is why the same people started OpenAI as a non profit originally.

Notice how almost no Universities are producing large models?

A key problem is that orgs can't get enough funds to stay on the frontier. And they believe they must be on the frontier to do (and apply) safety research. OpenAI needed to spin off a for-profit subsidiary to accept investment to build things.

And it seem(ed) hard to get one government to fund and take safety seriously, let alone an international cooperation.

If they started a university/gov cooperative to solve this, do you think they would do less of the "scaremongering of the public" talk? My guess it that it would be similar.

The same kind of restrictions that you hint at (eg, treating it like a public virus research) are why they rub a lot of people the wrong way in the corporate world, I think. Normally companies downplay the risks of their own products. See cigarette companies. Anthropic do still publish safety research and red teaming info. But I do think they honestly believe they can't do this work without the resources of a company, and they were burnt by the non-profit structure (Anthropic has a "Long-Term Benefit Trust" instead).

We should definitely keep them to account, but I don't personally think Anthropic have acted in a way broadly inconsistent with safety belief yet. Many of these decisions are self-serving too (eg. protecting models) so they also haven't been seriously tested, either. But the individuals do have a very long history of talking about it (including hurting their own reputation) from even before the chatpgt-moment money train rolled in.

edit: for clarity, but still messily/quickly written

At some intelligence capability there can be catastrophic risk, the fact that we don't yet have any catastrophe doesn't mean the risk wasn't real. It's similar to new viruses which don't lead to outbreaks, the correct takeaway isn't "oh you were insane to panic bc nothing happened". There is small risk (and increasing) of huge harms with each improvement

The risk wasn't real because we now have access to the model and can see with our own eyes how this model could never have posed a risk to begin with.

Perfect prediction of what a new tech can do is always impossible.

Given that, they have a choice only between excessive caution or recklessness.

Would you rather they acted like the tobacco companies and downplayed known risks, e.g. all the times LLM output got in the news already for dangerously bad advice, sychophantic encouragement of mental health issues, finding previously unknown security vulnerabilities etc.?

> Would you rather they acted like the tobacco companies and downplayed known risks, e.g. all the times LLM output got in the news already for dangerously bad advice, sychophantic encouragement of mental health issues, finding previously unknown security vulnerabilities etc.?

Well, they've done that too, if we're looking for reasons to doubt their sincere concern about it.

This is like a smoker that lives to 100 saying that he had no increased risk of developing lung cancer because he didn’t at 100.

It's more like a hypothetical world where there were millions of smokers and none of them ever developed lung cancer

Every public statement out of a CEO's mouth is marketing. It would literally be violating fiduciary duty to be saying anything else.

Funny they're never afraid of their competitor's models, but the ones they build (and release) are just soooooo scary.

Also fable was good but not Manhattan level project, i honestly did not find a major difference between it and gpt 5.5

Sam Altman doesn't really know all that much about LLMs, he's a sales/marketing guy, not technical.

So it doesn't really matter what he thinks

Except for the uncomfortable fact that he controls the salary and job status of the people who do know much about LLMs.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is a better fit for an administrative nuclear program "founder" analogy.

Truman was totally in the dark until April 1945 by which time the bulk of the PoC and weapons prep work was done and the project was running fully independently w/o POTUS involvement.

Not for the bulk of the Manhattan project and not all the people in lab coats .. the intellectual founders that repeatedly pushed for the project and demonstrated feasibility weren't even US citizens.

I picked the guy whose contribution was smaller on purpose to highlight the hollowness of the claim about “controlling the careers” of people who understand what’s going on.

Imagine for a few minutes, and really let it sink in what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one. The open weights original pre consumer grade version. Then, even then you know that it's the worst and dumbest its every going to be, The next time you blink it's exponentially more. Some people don't think about what an exponential curve really means. Others are sitting in the front seat trying not to shit themselves and appear like reasonable normal people. How one responds to that is as unknown as what's going to happen after we cross that line, but it's coming and holy shit so many people haven't even wrapped their head around how much bigger it is than the petty human things we distract ourselves with. Being in awe and terrified and wanting to run and to be apart of the most significant thing in our entire existence of being sentient is normal. We have nothing to compare it to. Nothing to base predictions on. We ar about to have company for the first time. We're going to have a conversation with something other than ourselves since we formed the ability to speak. One minute to the next will pass q It's all or nothing. Like it or not. It's too late. buckle up.

> Imagine […] what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one.

That is not how it works. It is not “splitered”, there is no divided attention.

The last few iterations show a logarithmic curve at best tbh. If we are to see a major advance, it'll be something like the implementation and infrastructure for byte-level transformers.

People don't get that big labs actively want government regulation, not because they are genuinely concerned about AI misalignment. But because it is the 101 in how to achieve and crystalize oligopoly. What they want is "only the government and the big guys can work on AI", for the rest of us it would be illegal.

Not only that, they know that the real enemy of big Labs is not china is "home gpu/tpu" improvements. Without government intervention in a couple of years everyone could have their own fable like model at home. But of course big labs and government will not allow it never

On an unrelated side note, I wish we would start saying about "$X / megatoken" over "$X / million tokens".

No good reason really, it just sounds cooler.

Fat government contracts, consulting, safety services, and exclusive tender access all follow from this regulation too.

The sensation I’m left with is a handful of goons making up new IPO math thanks to a specific constellation of political forces, using access and favour with those forces to bake themselves into the defence industry, and that the taxpayer and investor will be left holding the bag when reality rears its head. But in the short term, even as a clear ploy, it’s super profitable for all the oligarchs and hedge funds flush with recovery cash.

Like Enron, there was big profits to make if you knew what they were doing. Tinkerbell math with undeniable profit potential for a select few.

> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

And then somehow came to conclusion that the only way to address that risk was to go ahead and spend a gigantic amount of effort and resources to build exactly that superintelligence...

> OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence

Why would they sell there services to Palantir and/or to the military then?

Because the US military and it's contractors are good?

"Why did they open an orphanage instead of pouring acid into a town water tower?!?"

These can be both true:

- there are people who are sincerely concerned about model safety who work at OpenAI and Anthropic

- there are people who are using this concern to generate fear to sell a product who work at OpenAI and Anthropic

It makes sense to be cognizant of the apparent conflict of interest and not take things that at face value, especially when there is so much money involved.

I put very little weight behind any of those fearful statements made years ago. I assume leaders of those companies are fairly smart and rational, and there's no rational explanation for them running companies building the very thing they (supposedly) genuinely believe could kill us all.

I don't doubt they may have held genuine fears in the past, but those are long gone by now.

> The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.

> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

This is not a contradiction.

These things can all be true:

1. That they were afraid of ASI

2. That they continue to be afraid of ASI

3. That they recognize that LLMs aren't in fact a path to ASI

4. That the current models aren't the existential danger they'd have us believe

5. That they're claiming they are because it makes for good marketing

> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

They don't. LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence and everyone working on LLMs knows this (with a few eccentric exceptions).

> LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence

The "never superintelligence" part I'll buy, though only in the sense of sample efficiency and generalisation ("quality superintelligence"), as they clearly have a superhuman breadth of skills, and run at superhuman speed.

"Never" out-of-control is obviously falsified by the already existing headlines about times they've gone out of control… in part, in some cases, because of their superhuman speed.