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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
> 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.
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?
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 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.
Marketing or actual fear? We’ve got 5 and 5.5 out now… he compared 5 to the Manhattan project. AI may one day be an economic Manhattan project but GPT 5 wasn’t it.
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
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.?
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
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence
this means nothing
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
If you want to be taken seriously, provide data, proof, so that any outside observer can independently come to the same conclusion instead of taking your word for it. Asking people to trust you for [reasons?] and that you somehow for some reason are right and the other is wrong regardless of if they agree or not. This is the imposition of a viewpoint instead of winning your case, which is not a sensible point of view, and definitely not how you influence opinions.
Not at all. The writing is on the wall, and they want you to be locked into paying absurd subscription rates for neutered models while they internally use all of that money to run the unrestricted models to clone all of our businesses and swallow the economy. It really does not take a genius to see the long term play by Anthropic. They're a scummy company and have done everything in their power to lead to a scenario like this, but this isn't the exact scenario they bargained for because it affects their own employees and big foreign buyers. Instead, they'd rather have all of the decision making power themselves.
"LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence" might be relevant if there weren't many hundreds of researchers working (at OpenAI, Anthropic and elsewhere) on AI designs not based on the transformer (LLM) architecture.
People are working on lots of things all the time, so far, nothing has approached the efficacy of the transformer architecture.
LLMs didn't emerge by chance, they are the culmination of decades of research intersecting with brute force engineering rigor in a perfect storm of innovation. You're not just going to stumble into an alternative approach by dumping loads of cash into research.
So if I claim I am a communist who doesn't want to ever get rich and then someone dangles a billion shiny dollars in front of me to just simply grab and own, you think I'd still be a communist then?
If you go around saying “I’m a communist, I believe in communism, I think it’s very important that we establish communism”? Sure, absolutely. Engels was pretty rich.
> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere
GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.
We can argue about sincerity, but I don't think we can argue about utter historical incompetence in assessing the risks. It's one or the other.
Either way the evidence seems to indicate we should not listen to AI companies about the risks of AI. Which is not to say that there aren't risks, just that the dealer is the least credible review.
GPT-2 was absolutely too dangerous to release at the time OpenAI made that statement. It’s only safe now because the specific risks they cited were dependent on the public’s lack of knowledge that such systems existed.
The amount of self-confidence and belief it takes to get a company through the funding rounds and burn through borrowed money to rise to the top requires an absurd amount of self-delusion.
We can argue over the definition of scaremongering and what people we’ve never met “really think”, or we can argue over what the actual risks of AI are. I know which one I’d prefer…
Yes we do. Dario said GPT2 is too dangerous to release. He’s dishonest since that’s obviously not true. This theater is about holding onto power and control. And about limiting competition.
>> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
Oh please. Do people really believe this or shit like "Don't do evil". Companies get founded by all kind of people and ideals. They all go out the window quickly.
This just made any closed LLM a huge supply chain risk. Everybody was aware of this possibility, but now it actually happened. It's like having nuclear weapons vs. firing a nuclear weapon.
Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.
> Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.
Not really. There aren't any other choices, and the PRC also heavily utilizes export controls [0].
This is why sovereign AI has become important, as can be seen with EU NatSec uses cases tending to use Mistral [1] and Indian governments starting to use Sarvam [2].
That said, for most commercial usecases, older generations of Opus as well as enterprise grade GPT and Gemini are fairly good.
The distilled OSS models are alright for hobbyists but if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini (most hobbyists don't get access to these) you see how far behind the open weight models are.
Even in China, traditionally open minded models teams like Alibaba's Qwen are looking to become more restricted given the org changes [3].
Also, Corporate RFCs now demand final say on model used and depending on the geo, this can be a dealbreaker (eg. An American financial institution will absolutely blacklist a vendor if they use a Chinese model and same in reverse and European defense vendors mandate sovereign EU models depending on the opportunity).
If you’re talking about TSMC Arizona they aren’t fabricating at N3 until end of next year at the earliest, N2 isn’t slated until “end of decade”. I think they’re manufacturing Blackwell there which is N4 / 4nm
Compute was constrained. There is a lot happening, especially with chinese chips which currently points to a massive upcoming increase in non-US capacity.
Also, the EU, Japan, SK, ASEAN, and India are not supportive of using Chinese tech after China export controlled rare earth exports last years [0].
Software supply chain regulations also make utilizing Chinese software risky for ExChina players and make using ExChina tech risky for Chinese players.
Expect to see RFCs now demanding visibility into what models are used and right of refusal - this is already the norm in F1000s. Similar ones are likely to arise in the EU as well with some of the upcoming industrial policy changes being proposed.
> if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini you see how far behind the open weight models are.
I really do feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is often better than current Sonnet is, in the general case.
Opus 4.7 is a solid step above Sonnet, and Fable was a solid step above Opus 4.7. I've only had Fable for a few days, obviously, but I was decently impressed after Opus 4.8 being a downright disappointment for me (it's just too buggy; I had it go out of control 3 separate times on things Opus 4.7 never had any trouble with.) I still ran into limitations. It's not world-endingly great.
So, based on that, I think DeepSeek V4 Pro is, ignoring multi-modal capabilities, about a couple solid steps behind. Assuming model iteration will continue to decelerate, especially as Anthropic heads into IPO, I'm guessing that DeepSeek will probably be able to strike back with something further along. Of course we'll see how able and willing they are to stay open weight, but they've done well so far so, no reason to doubt them at the moment.
(There are some models that claim to be ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro. I've tried some of them and really not been that impressed. Maybe it's a me issue.)
Now I reckon that most people just simply don't really need Mythos/Fable for most of what they do and using Mythos/Fable tokens in place of Sonnet-tier models would not make any sense. At my job we already mostly just use Sonnet as it is. I'm sure there is some cutting-edge research where you want the absolute best model available and sure, in that case, you're stuck with Anthropic for the moment.
But is that really everyone? After all, while Mythos was dominating the hype cycles, quite a lot of impressive LLM-assisted CVEs dropped that were not linked to Mythos.
They've already been labeled a "supply chain risk". Probably not a good idea to upset the regulators more. Maybe tomorrow Opus will be declared too dangerous for the public.
You're mistaken, this is a cratering of the userbase inside and outside of the US. The ban is on any foreigner whether abroad or living in the USA, so Anthropic has no choice but to completely shut down access to the model for the whole world including the US.
Their IPO is well and truly fucked now. This also means no other frontier lab in the US is allowed to exceed Opus 4.8 capabilities.
If you're a luddite or a decel you should literally be dancing in the streets right now. And, if you're a tankie you'll be dancing right next to them. And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
>this is a cratering of the userbase inside and outside of the US.
Is it really? It was limited release anyway (like hypebeast merch!). Everything people are gonna talk about for a week is gonna about how Fable was so cool that it got banned by the feds. If it's just the Trump admin being the Trump admin, Amodei is just gonna have to pay up as a racket / marketing expense. Or it is like I'm suspecting and this was pre-bribed and the ban is kabuki theater.
>And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
The funny thing is that solar and batteries advancements are actually this, not LLMs, but your framing kinda fits anyways.
it may be really good pr, but it's really bad for their IPO. If their market for future models is usa only, their potential revenue is cut by 50% at least. (and it's even worse because it means Europe, India, and China will all have companies making their own models that anthropic needs to stay ahead of)
Another sibling thread already called this out, but mentioning here: it's not "USA only", it's "US citizens only" (and I'm not entirely sure how dual-citizenship interacts with this, but I assume you can't sell to them, either, since they are by definition also foreign nationals). A private company only being able to do business with folks they can verify are solely US citizens (who themselves are also willing to submit verification of said citizenship to a private company), has a relatively small pool of potential users.
And so if this policy holds, Anthropic has functionally had Fable killed by government intervention, and in a logically consistent world, this would imply all other US-based AI labs may also never exceed existing (read: Opus) capabilities.
And they don't have to actually serve expensive model compute and this all goes away once they contribute to the right charitable organizations and patriotic causes funneling money to the right people.
This is quite clearly corporate capture of the white house by a competitor influencing policy, but it's hard to imagine something that plays more into anthropic's hand. They now own the model that was so good the US government made them shut it off.
Yeah but doesn't all the ai stuff kinda either way exacerbate the issues we might have with IP? Like, if it wasn't already the case that such laws are fundamentally sided with huge pools of capital who arbitrarily "own" different sequences of bytes, it certainly is now. It's like its trying to destroy intellectual property and then put this deranged hyper-financial game of energy expenditure in its place.
Just like “rule of law” and “family values”, “the troops” and some other stuff, free markets were never something they really care about.
The reality of Republican free markets were about compounding and growing big business and resource extraction at the expense of everyone else.
The rest is all about convincing suckers that getting kicked in the balls is good for them. The most obvious example being farmers. Most aspects of agriculture have been consolidated into oblivion and the markets are not super functional. 80% of the dairy operations in my state are out of business. 60 companies dominate eggs in the US - there used to be 3 in my city.
The big difference between left and right is that leftish politics are based on everyone being equal, and rightish politics accept that some are more equal than others.
It’s not such a terrible tension to live with. We can have, say, equal rights to life while also allowing unequal rights to gold nuggets. You might have more gold nuggets than I do but we both have the right to live in peace.
The far ends of the spectrum though involve, respectively, redistribution of gold nuggets to all, and at the other end a commitment to survival of the fittest that extends to viewing any kind of market regulation as commie bullshit.
A completely “free” market is likely incoherent, but under normal terms - probably degrading since the 1970s. And very predictable if wealth can buy you power to change the system.
Trump ran as on the Republican ticket, he had been a lifelong NYC Democrat up until he ran for president.
Republican != Conservative… and in reality Trump is neither, but at the same time, the type of Democrat he was no longer exists. It’s also a mistake to confuse Republican for Establishment GOP.
You're using terms incorrectly. Conservatism has nothing to do with free market.
The people who care most about free markets are liberals (called libertarians in the US).
Presumably you mean to say "Republicans". And your answer is "under Trump". But it's important to note that Trump merely took the Republican party back to its roots. Traditionally, Republicans were more protectionists than the Democrats. Regan changed that, and Trump reverted.
But what annoys me about people who criticize this change, is that it often comes from people who don't believe in free markets.
---
As a side note, I think the reason Americans use these terms so wrongly is because of the 2 party system. It forces all ideologies into two camps and for Americans "conservatism", "libertarianism", "nationalism", "fascism" are all the same.
Yeah is funny anthropic going overboard with "omg this model is so dangerous guys!!!" and then the US government going "okay... well, that sounds bad, let's ban it".
It's Anthropic facing consequences for their years long marketing plays. They're so greedy and narcissistic as a company and culture they believed they were special enough to be excluded from sanction internally, and that their behavior would only affect their competitors or would lead to outcomes positive for themselves: ergo, they get to hold the keys to the castle. Like Dario said in his negotiations with the DoW, he wants a seat at the big boys table. It's all about power for him.
Unfortunately though, they're not smart enough to realize the long term damage to the industry that they're doing without any hint of remorse will negatively affect them and will have the opposite effect: Highlighting how imperative it is we all switch to open-source and remove our reliance entirely from them.
So not only are they going to take the whole industry down out of their own greed and stupidity and ruin it for everyone in the short term, but they're going to put themselves and the other labs out of business in the long term. Well done Anthropic. Well done Dario. You played yourself. 5d chess.
Based on this, it seems like the Trump admin would have targeted them even without the "scaremongering":
> To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Anthropic is almost solely responsible for the fear narrative around AI at this point. It has been their culture since the beginning, strongly pushing this into the zeitgeist at every opportunity, releasing bogus papers to frame things as highly dangerous and that their AI is a conscious sentient being.
Step 1: "OMG, the AI hacked a researcher eating a sandwhich in the park!"
Step 2: Journalists use that great clickbait to generate profit, which generates publicity for Anthropic
Step 3: Rinse repeat
If the threat of LLMs was treated relative to the actual capabilities of them, and we weren't all being lied to by Anthropic and their army of millions of social media bots and backing media companies and mouthpieces, we'd be going in a much healthier direction.
Working out the kinks/supply chain risks and developing sound, long-term countermeasures to the ACTUAL risks.
The only threat to the world is if progress is not open-sourced, democratized and in lockstep with capability. The moment it becomes a scenario of: Only a small group get access to frontier intelligence, is when it gives that small group power over everyone else in the world, and wildly increases the risk of a nuclear level event that WILL be exploited eventually - as the divide between the haves and the have nots accelerates in an exponential fashion. Bad AI is countered with an abundance of good AI that has been used to stay ahead of bad AI. The moment your bad AI outpowers the army of good AI it is game over for humanity. The strength of open-source and open-access AI is the difference between humanities permanent enslavement or extinction versus a prosperous future.
The difference between OpenAI & Anthropic is that OpenAI didn't do multiple big media pushes about how their models are so scary and dangerous.
OpenAI's models are very good, they have refusals + a government ID verification story for cyber access (I don't think they prevent non-US nationals, but I don't know this). What they don't have is Project Glasswing and all the hand wringing about how they're going to end the world in public.
I hope Anthropic pulls their head out of their ass and just starts acting like a normal company.
You’re telling me this testimony isn’t sincere marketing for how revolutionary and dangerous his product will become?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies at Senate artificial intelligence hearing | full video“ (2023)
"My worst fears, are that we cause significant - we the field, the technology, the industry - cause significant harm to the world...If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong and we want to be vocal about that."
Are you kidding man? Have you tried the new model for coding? It's absolutely incredible. After using it, I really see why they were so concerned. The jump in my workflows feels as large as the jump from 3.5 to 4o (OpenAI). It's just that good.
Issues I'd been kinda circling around for weeks, long standing errors in some long-running sync operations for a project I'm working on, all solved the same day the model dropped. Just incredible. And it's effectively a lot more token efficient I find as well (less so with sub-agents). Just areas where Opus 4.8 would occassionally get confused or venture down the wrong direction, just doesn't happen nearly as much as with Fable 5.
Like what is everyone who is dissing on this model / Anthropic using day to day? For me it's just an incredible jump in intelligence. So much so and so quickly after the modest bump from 4.8, that I really can understand why they are starting to shout warnings.
It's way more _proactive_ than the old models, sometimes in ways it shouldn't really be proactive. But it produces _more_ slop than 4.8, and I have not seen any real breakthroughs from it.
Edit: to give an example, I'm working on integrating a self-hosting auth provider into our app. So I gave it a prompt to create a "bootstrap" script that would create pre-configured settings for the local installation.
Fable did it. And then proceeded (unprompted) to test it by killing the running server, removing the database, re-initializing and (trying) to verify that the bootstrap produced identical results.
Well, yeah. Great. I can see how this "bias for action" works for security research and one-shot projects, not so sure about regular development.
I just tried that with Opus, and it produced a similar bootstrap script but did not start the test by itself.
It's a huge jump across the board. I was really impressed with its ability to test usability in Claude for Chrome. Very opinionated but in a good way. It was good while it lasted.
I can't tell whether you think Fable/Mythos aren't capable, you think it's good the US government is shutting down this business model of all things for "safety", or both. Either way, ick.
They're enjoying the schadenfreude of Dario "AI is so dangerous, we really need to ban and regulate everyone" Amodej getting his models banned by the US government.
They didn't get banned by the government. The government says they they want to track the Identity of everyone who uses it. Same way they track identity when using an airplane.
I would more easily guess that it is a revenge of Trump for Anthropic humiliating him when he wanted to use it without control for military purpose. And indeed it used against them their own marketing allegations.
This is what Anthropic wanted and they want this to apply to all other frontier models providers (including themselves) that release powerful models.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
No, it's not what they wanted. As it says in your quote, they wanted "a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles."
Actually, they got even more than what they wanted:
* Free marketing before the IPO, demonstrating how already powerful their frontier models are.
* Governments to intervene in the rollout of these frontier models and blocking their access to whoever they want.
* A strong reason to apply these further restrictions onto releasing powerful open weight models to the public. (which is entirely a business threat to them.)
Given that they accepted funding from the Gulf states [0] despite it conflicting with their own "principles", I think we are well beyond the point of what they write / say vs to what they are actually doing.
This drama just tells us that the government declared them as the winner that has the most powerful model.
Yep and they also want to only exempt models below some level of compute or capability from this process. In other words, if an open model ends up being competitive, they’ll use regulations to ban it.
They got what they claim they wanted for PR purposes. Like when a billionaire says they should be taxed more, or when Sam Altman says the public should get some of that AI wealth.
Foreign national is anyone who doesn't have legally recognized citizenship of the USA. So citizens living abroad aren't barred, nor would dual citizens be.
> What is a “foreign national” is more what I’m wondering.
The following quoted text is from the Definitions section of 8 USC § 1101, which is reproduced at [0]. (Though, you will probably have to scroll up a bit to be able to read subsection (a)(21), which is the thing I'm linking to.)
(21) The term “national” means a person owing permanent allegiance to a state.
(22) The term “national of the United States” means (A) a citizen of the United States, or (B) a person who, though not a citizen of the United States, owes permanent allegiance to the United States.
(23) The term “naturalization” means the conferring of nationality of a state upon a person after birth, by any means whatsoever.
From this, it's fairly clear that a "foreign national" is someone owing permanent allegiance to a foreign (that is, non-US) state. What's not immediately clear to me is whether a US citizen can also be a "foreign national", [1] and how that would affect access to things from which foreign nationals are barred. [2]
EDIT: For a more official source of this information, you might be able to check out [3] and/or [4]. After examining and interacting with those pages, one might see why one might go to an unofficial source for casual inspection of this information.
A "foreign national" is any person who is not a US Citizen:
"The United States Department of State defines a “foreign national” as anyone who is not a “U.S. person.” A “U.S. person” is any one of the following: U.S. citizen; Lawful permanent resident (green card holder); and “Protected Person” i.e. political asylum holder." [0]
A foreign national is a person or organization who is not a citizen of the United States, and who is a citizen of a foreign country. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses the term "alien" to refer to a person who is not a United States citizen, and does not use the term "foreign national."[1]
Y’all really have convinced yourselves that people in the industry are far, far smarter than they are, and far more manipulative than they are.
You see the state of the country and you think it’s a nefarious master plan instead of a bunch of opportunistic people taking advantage of an overworked, overstimulated populace who forget to vote or believe stupid slogans on TV.
Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out????
They have spoken publicly about how they want open models banned (they call them Chinese models).
They might not want this specific action, but they do want regulation on their own terms. That really is regulatory capture.
> Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out
They don't think is is "idiot stuff" - they are doing it openly and shouting to everyone who will listen! Read Dario's latest essay[1]:
> Many policymakers are showing increased openness to taking action, and it's been encouraging to see our peers come around to the same positions we've been advocating for over the past few years.
[snip]
> Thus, in 2025, Anthropic supported transparency legislation, helping to pass SB 53 in California, RAISE in NY, SB 315 in Illinois (in early 2026), and advocating for a transparency standard at the federal level.
[snip]
> It is time to go beyond transparency to more serious and binding regulation of AI.
> I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action.
> The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks.
I'm not sure why you think they don't want to be "found out"!
Let's leave aside the "smarter" part, since I made no claim to the effect and I don't think it's very relevant in the first place.
Do you really not think that people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei angle for regulatory capture? It happens in every other industry, from automobiles to tax preparation software. Why do you think that AI is any different?
Let's see their private journals, private conversations, messages to peers, all meetings and every side conversation, and then tell me its unintentional.
Thats incredibly infuriating to hear someone say.
Obviously no one is absolute control of everything but physics is essentially shows nothing other than information determinism. There has to have been a thought of intention in the minds of these people as they play in the largest arena publicly.
"No one is doing it intentionally because I think theyre dumber then I think other people think they are"
"They're taking advantage of people intentionally"
"People dont have political power to do anything about their victory laps"
don't think so; retail investors would see this as a barrier that the government can place anytime they want, and assume that government intervention is constantly lurking in the shadows.
I also do not understand this. Now they are labelled as precious US tech that could be not used by anyone else, because president heard about the jailbreaking for the first time I guess. With this genius logic they soon be banning GPT 5.5.
It might be if all you're seeking is large-cap stocks with lots of volatility you can leverage that are here to stay for the long haul. Also, the market doesn't seem to believe that Trump will be in power forever.
> "No way the US is going to nationalize a tech company regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable."
You simply cannot apply any sort of actual logic to the reasoning of the current U.S. government's actions... They just "do stuff" because they feel like it, with no clear thought whatsoever of any potential consequences that may occur.
The CEO of Anthropic himself has said AI is like a nuclear bomb when justifying export controls on Nvidia chips. How many private companies control nuclear bombs?
Trump has already (with Altman directly egging him on) talked about the US taking a share in (i.e. partially nationalising) the AI companies. Has he not called a meeting about this next week?
I agree completely. If these things are so dangerous that they turn every person into an advanced persistent thread actor, capable of causing untold cyber destruction (oh, and they can make bio weapons etc), then they should be treated like the weapons they are.
And gps guided missiles were doing that since the 80s. Humans are already really good at killing each other. Yeah it sucks the tech will be used for that.
Blocking any leading edge AI model changes nothing. We (humans) have a long history of determined attackers finding creative and unexpected solutions.
What the AI we have, the stuff that is already PUBLICLY AVAILABLE, is good enough to shrink the time for developing one of those creative solutions into a working tool/weapon.
Nobody with even a modicum of understanding of how LLMs work believes any of this. These 'serious thinkers' are just grifters preying on the feeble minded.
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 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.
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.
As it happens, the current number-two article on HN is about a similar consequence of Chinese export controls--a car manufacturer developing electric motors that do not use rare earths:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The two main bills I'm aware of are the Decoupling America's AI Capabilities from China Act and No Adversarial AI Act. The former would have made it illegal for any American citizen to simply use DeepSeek. I couldn't find any lobbying data, but the obvious effect is that Americans would be forced to pay for more expensive domestic alternatives.
A House committee also recently probed Cursor and Airbnb for using Chinese models, rather than more expensive American alternatives. A sexagenarian Congressman gave a nonsense quote that he certainly did not come up with himself,[1] which sounds very similar to language Anthropic uses in its marketing materials.[2][3]
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.
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
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For large corporates and other entities of any size, the threat of the core of your infrastructure getting suddenly disabled because of something like this is going to be untenable. I predict the pressures for on-prem, offline access (whether by licensing weights or getting them in a restricted setting like TEE/CC) will be overwhelming and one the players will fill the need.
Thinking that on prem models will be a halfway decent solution against what can be served out of a data center is a fools take... One that is more common than it should be on here...
The point is not to be as good as the multi-trillion parameter model you can host in across 72 GPUs (or whatever).
I'm running a 248B model on a paltry amount of hardware and getting plenty of good use out of it.
Sure, the most demanding tasks will demand the best models (and always will). There's still less demanding tasks for other models.
I think some people are fooling themselves that coding of all tasks is always going to requires the biggest models ever. Again, maybe some coding tasks will, but the majority of business CRUD apps probably don't. Same goes for virtually any other type of task. The biggest models are really only useful for the most complex tasks.
If you wouldn't mind, could you explain a bit what the 248B model is good for, and where it breaks down and you need something better? I hear this take often, but it is always a fleeting remark so I have no idea what the 'useful' looks like - at all.
Depending on quantization I figure they need at least a p4 and likely a p5 EC2 (or similar instance in another provider). Maybe they are hosting on bare metal but I imagine not. Those instance types (assuming not using spot) are quite expensive to run.
Or abstract i.e. openrouter, that reduces the risk vector to "all implementations have been simultaneously banned".
If a government entity bans a LLM provider due to a jailbreak concern, they can also ban an on-prem solution under the same guise. The jailbreak risk exists regardless of where it's hosted. You could defensibly argue the on-prem risk is higher since frontier model companies can justify safety spend due to their size, it's more difficult to combat bad actors if you're company is the only one using the model and you don't have economies of scale.
This is ignoring the fact that the government is the foundation of society (I know some will disagree with that, but the end result is just government with more steps).
Private models in a low trust society means the government will come and seize the models. Competitive business will only be allowed through cronyism.
The better option is to opt for high trust. Yes the Gman can rip your servers apart, but they know they'll face consequences, legal and political. Laws and regulations are the answer, not locking down into smaller fiefdoms.
You get high trust through social norms, not by more "laws and regulations". Social norms can't be imposed by fiat, they arise spontaneously, often for unclear reasons. That's why they're so fragile and precious. With Trump's destruction of social norms around the presidency and the federal government generally, the US is now just another country where bribery is the cost of doing business.
Some will take greater risks and win (or lose); others will play it safer and slowly accumulate wins (or be obsoleted).
Never mind the threat of letting these models write code that runs your business, or operate it agentically. Models trained by actors (corporate or nationstate) diametrically opposed to your interests.
Lots to take into account now, interesting time to be in business.
This is precisely why I expect that Chinese open models are going to win in the long run. The capability difference isn't dramatic in the grand scheme of things, but the fact that you can run your own is a huge selling point. Even if you rent an open model from a Chinese company, you can switch to on prem if they decided to yank access or change terms in the way you don't like. It might be a pain, but it wouldn't be existential. On the other hand, if you become dependent on a closed model and it gets yanked then you're in a world of hurt.
And infrastructure dominance is really the big picture here. Chinese models are going to become the standard setters because they're going to be what people are using. That means more research, more tooling, and a whole ecosystem developing around them.
After this action, I have no doubt that this administration will try to ban Chinese models. Of course, doing so will be futile, we'll figure out ways to get around it, but now I'm pretty sure they're going to try.
I'm waiting for that to happen as well since the price difference makes it very difficult for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to compete. And we already have precedent for this with stuff like EVs, phones, and so on. As soon as Chinese companies start making a product that's more popular, they get banned on some national security pretext.
The tricky part with banning Chinese models is that they're open. It'll be easy to ban access to service providers, but preventing people from running these models on prem is going to be really tough. Like are they going to go after Cursor for example given that their model is based on Kimi?
I very much agree it's going to be a futile endeavour in the end. It kind of reminds me of the time Microsoft tried to get Linux and open source banned when Linux started encroaching on Windows server market. This is going to end the same way.
I'm going to guess they'll go after sites like Huggingface that host downloads. I suspect we'll be torrenting Chinese models in the not-too-distant future. Or we'll have to geo-spoof with VPN to download from other countries.
> You see the dawn of this age everywhere, from Iran to online age verification regimes, and this is only the beginning. This is why the world ahead will feel medieval in structure while remaining hypermodern and even futuristic in technology. It is a Frank Herbert world. It will be organized around overlapping zones of protection, extraction, and controlled access, rather than around universal inclusion into a single normative space.
Not allowing it to be used by any foreign national, from any country, even if they are located in the United States or an employee of Anthropic, seems overly broad and harsh. And all because of a seemingly minor potential jailbreak exploit. There’s something that doesn’t quite meet the eye here.
It's because the hammer they've used is export controls which deals with FN access. It's particularly nasty and can ramp up to "if you're born in China even if you spent the second and every day since then in the usa and have us citizenship, you're not allowed to see this information"
Unfortunately this is how export controls work. We don't let foreign researchers around national security parts of national labs, even if they work there, because it's simply the easiest security measure you can take. It doesn't mean it's a good outcome for researchers or research. It's insurance of US directed funds.
Well, there is the lingering beef between the DoD and Anthropic. Knowing the overall level of maturity at the top levels of the US government, I'd take good odds on Mythos just being a good excuse for Hegseth & co. to lash out.
I do not trust Anthropic anymore. They put in silent guardrails, reverted them later after people complained to save face, were loud and obnoxious about how their models are dangerous and should be regulated, and now this. Too much drama for a typical end-user. I'm sticking to alternatives even if they have a bit more smarter (for now) model than others.
Dario has always prattled on about how Anthropic is more safe than OpenAI and made a big point about guardrails and protecting society from “AGI”. This is the consequences. Some people actually drink the kool aid, especially bureaucrats and bigco lawyers (basically the same group).
Not to mention intelligence agencies look for any information advantage they can get to influence policy.
If you think the Trump administration is doing this out of good faith, I disagree. They get no benefit of the doubt; they're pissed they can't use Mythos to target every American for surveillance or create a top-of-the-line killer drone program without pushback from private companies.
It is not scaremongering in my opinion. Just that Government needed some time to understand and will do the same for any other company with such a model.
1/ Jailbreak => Rapid catchup of the industry leading to commoditization
2/ Jailbreak => 99% of internet infrastructure gets exposed to cyberattacks at a scale the world is simply not ready. Maybe <1% of internet users are using Fable, out of which <1% will use it for beyond intended use. Put yourself in the shoes of someone maintaining critical infrastructure, or millions of people working 7 days a week to run a small business. The world needs some time to adapt.
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.
I wonder if they pulled Fable because it had too high of a “dangerous session” count. If so, I wonder if they’ve considered that their “dangerous session” detector has lost its damn mind this week.
(BTW, that screenshot is 100% real. I was walking to work this morning and a random song played. I had a thought about it and wondered what a model would have to say on the matter. I ran that prompt and got that response, said something profane out loud, and screenshotted it to share with friends. That’s not a mockup, but something I personally experienced and recorded myself.)
It all started when they took a stand against DoD on autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance usage. Feb 2026.
After that details don't matter, they've shown their "enemy" colours, once is enough. This is just punishment and it will continue, until they bend the knee.
We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
It's been interesting seeing how OpenAI pops up to counter the threat of AGI being controlled by Google, and then OpenAI and every spinoff company from its employees has become a far larger threat to the public, for different reasons.
As much as it seems like Anthropic's self righteous leadership truly believes in what they're preaching, they've shown themselves to be tied for the worst stewards of this technology. Google actually seems like the best option to me, by far. Anthropic is also the only major lab with no open weights releases.
They'll have burned a lot of goodwill with the community by the time another lab takes the tech lead, which I guarantee will happen.
> We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
What I can't understand, is that they act like the _knowledge_ is dangerous.
I don't know if I'm biased from my BSci (chem/maths), but: knowledge isn't dangerous, the reagents needed are incredibly easy to control. Thats what we already do!
>We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
> We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.
So much for all of the rhetoric about Mythos supposedly far surpassing GPT 5.5 (edit: in cybersecurity, in particular). Of course, the AISI benchmarks also showed this, but it is amusing that Anthropic is saying it now that it is to their advantage.
They aren't saying that other models have the same overall level of capability. They are saying that the specific capability that the US Government tested is also available in other models.
That might also continue to anger the current administration, should they feel the need to, as it openly shared with other actors how to achieve the same capability. If they choose not to apply the same restriction to GPT 5.5 then an argument could be made that Anthropic is being singled out by the government.
This is about the specific capabilities that the government called out, not Fable's overall capabilities. My personal experience, having used Fable this week for an extremely complex task, is that it is head and shoulders more powerful than any other model, at least for software engineering.
I’d suggest you use an LLM to assist you with comprehending their statement. It’ll do a better job, or at the very least be more objective than you’re being now. You’ve misinterpreted the statement. That is not what they’re saying at all. Please actually read instead of skimming until you find something that you believe reinforces your worldview.
They are saying that comparison to other models only about the problems it was jailbroken to complete in the government's example, not all vulnerabilities it could exploit unjailbroken.
It's difficult to predict this administrations actions, but given it included employees that has to be a huge risk for Google, where Deepmind is based in London.
Cohere (Canada) and Mistral (France) are going to get a lot of interest.
Maybe a year ago I’d agree but the gap has grown. I also pay for Cursor which is based on Kimi and there is no comparison for complex code gen vs Fable. It mostly succeeds well at small rapid fire stuff which is the only reason I pay for it (plus the IDE DX). But any heavy feature planning and prototyping I use Claude.
I predict they will all be mostly the same in 5+ yrs but coding is serious work and companies aren’t going to pay for almost good.
Looks like a back door attempt to force KYC (foreign nationals, lol) to prepare for more discrimination in the digital space with a side effect to benefit Peter Thiels ventures and shovel more data into Palantir for use in the upcoming midterm push.
Digital yellow star by exclusion from digital life for foreigners.
Remember when tech companies would go to court to vigorously defend against infringement of their and their customers rights? Turns out that’s just a feature of democracy, once you have autocrats it’s all compliance.
Anthropic just baited themselves with their scaremongering to be the attack vector here.
It a stellar move by the way - since every tech company in an exceptionally fast growing field will comply or miss out sales, you effectively force KYC without legislative process onto much of digital because that’s the only way to comply.
KYC angle seems most likely from the US side. If only it was just to benefit Thiel's ventures though, then the issue would be solvable. Unfortunately _everyone_ currently in power, i.e. the whole oligarchy, wants this. Even if Thiel and his companies disappeared tomorrow, they'd keep pushing until they get it through.
Methodology leaves a lot to be desired in terms of understanding the tasks you've used. Being detailed about why they're more meaningful tests than the long horizon and coding tests used by other rankings is important.
False positives and poorly defined tasks/acceptance criteria have let some models have insanely inflated scores on bad benchmarks.
And sure, you can say they're not disclosed to prevent gaming, but if you're the only one who can review them then the might as well be a random number generator display with an unreadable UI.
I don't know how fast they reacted, but shortly after their documented time I started getting opus availability errors from fable requests, which seemed odd.
I'd also think that they would transparently degrade, just to prevent production outages for clients that are requesting Fable explicitly.
I mean hard to say on such short notice because they can swap out models without any notice. In terms of performance, I'm not asking it to do anything crazy so I think results would be similar across both models.
It did just use a small harness to run docker compose with different envs and other settings to validate a very small change, so... Feels like Fable
I hadn't, but then 2.1.177 dropped in on auto-update and I assumed that was going to be the end of Fable for me, but I'm still on it. At least that's what the model picker is continuing to say along with the header.
Claude Code v2.1.177
Fable 5 with low effort · Claude Max
~/testing
Never mind, it failed a few minutes later with:
There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
I was using Fable to review my codebase and came back from the gym an hour later to find that I had suddenly used up my entire Max plan quota for the next 5 hours
(I have never had an agent do enough to burn up the 5 hour quota on Max)
(edit: just switched my CC model to 4.8 and my 5-hr cycle reset back to 0%, even though it previously had 2 more hours to go)
This is exactly what Dario asked for in his last blog post. So even though this is clearly stupid, I just can bring myself to feel sorry for Anthropic.
No, he asked for the government to make the decision in light of 3rd party analysis. Which is what happened here - an independent company demonstrated a jailbreak, and the government issued a restriction on deployment based on that finding.
"The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks."
Ah yes, the US government forcing private companies to stop selling their products is totally a sign of Anthropic's drama and not our paranoiac fascist regime.
Anthropic spent months going on about how incredibly powerful and dangerous their models are and how access to them needs to be restricted. Now they are getting what they seemingly wanted.
Clearly they've assessed that the models they released are safe enough to release. Without a clear regulatory framework and Constitutional basis to overrule them, that is Anthropic's decision to make, and not the US government's.
It's disheartening how many people think the use of government power is justified or not based on the WWE smackdown drama they concoct in their own brain instead of, you know, the laws of our nation.
It is very dangerous for the government to be able to shut off services, regardless of whether their owners wrote some blog posts that rubbed you the wrong way.
You fear monger and tell everyone you’re the next Oppenheimer and maybe you eventually catch someone’s ear, whether it’s bullshit or not.
Last I checked I can’t buy a tactical nuke at Walmart. Clearly the government and all states have some power to control private enterprise for the betterment of their citizenry.
For the record I don’t support this ban, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…
Was Bill Clinton fascist when 128-bit SSL was on export controls? Can’t government be simply bad or dumb anymore without having to slap the “F” word on it?
We’re gonna apply it to so many things it’ll have lost its meaning soon.
Hello. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. In January of this year my city was under hostile armed occupation. I volunteered for weeks packing boxes of food for people who were afraid to leave their houses because the masked secret police were ripping people off the streets with little regard for legality. Two of my neighbors were murdered by the secret police; a hundred of us sang hymns outside the local elementary school in 20 below weather. One of those murdered was my friend's coworker. The secret police agency has so far successfully opposed any attempt to bring the murderers to justice, and indeed was trying to bring legal charges against the families of the murder victims.
Which 'F' word do you think is appropriate to describe all this? Or has meaning already been lost?
> Warns users about how dangerous and powerful Mythos Preview is
> Restricts model to large corporations
> Release information about how Fable / Mythos 5 is stronger than Mythos Preview, give access to every user for a limited time via subscriptions
> Users jailbreak model
> U.S. suspends Fable / Mythos use
Who didn't see this coming?
I wonder what this means for the future of AI models. Either we'll see worse guardrails than what was there for Fable 5 (for me, it was a unusable at times), or the models just stop getting better from here.
I think it's that the guardrails will be more strict, which is unfortunately not good news.
1. Release fable, highly nerfed and limited
2. See the compute capacity limiter pegged day after day
3. Lobby to the government, claiming ai is super unsafe and not aligned and they must do something
4. Government "forces" anth to turn off
5. Anth takes the pressure off of compute capacity, and gets to blame it on the govt
Like you're telling me fable is somehow an order of magnitude better than GPT 5.5 to the point where it compromises national security, despite evals and anecdotes saying otherwise? Nah.
You're saying a company's marketing department can casually get the United States Government to issue a national security passage, preventing sale or distribution of their product?
Was their ongoing designation as a "supply chain risk", which they are suing to overturn in court, also a marketing stunt?
Seems like a really strange thing to use that sort of power for - why not just get all your competition declared persona non-grata and seize monopoly power?
> 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. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
How will this be implemented/verified? Also, does this mean that American citizens abroad will still be able to access it?
It'll depend on what law they're restricting it under. The obvious play would be to put it on the Commerce Control List so it's covered by the EAR (Export Administration Regulations). If so, compliance is pretty well-understood, just a giant pain in the ass that'll pretty much limit use of these models to companies that already have EAR/ITAR compliance offices.
Easy. Provide your government issued ID such as US passport before signing up to an AI provider. Issue fines or jail time to anyone who supplies their AI access to a foreign citizen
Reddit thinks this is all part of Anthropic's marketing. People can't get it through their heads that AI is actually going where all the trends have been pointing for years.
Interesting to see Anthropic now downplaying the new vulnerabilities that Mythos discovered:
> 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
I think what they're saying is that this prompt/jailbreak only lets Mythos discover some really easy vulnerabilities that it probably fixes from a simple "Find and fix bugs in this code" and that this can be easily done by other models like GPT-5.5. Which is very different from targeted security research.
But it’s not that different from the whole premise of their red team scaremongering which was “we pointed the model at a source file and told it to find an exploit.”
> Interesting to see Anthropic now downplaying the new vulnerabilities that Mythos discovered:
That is absolutely NOT what is being said there.
They are referring to a very specific thing that you must have clearly seen and chosen to ignore—a jailbreak for LLMs that is used on other models and to some effect with Fable 5.
AFAICT this is not talking about Glasswing stuff. They are saying that they were sent a demonstration of Fable 5 being used/abused in some specific way that led to the "discovery" of some minor, already-known vuln, and that other models can find it too. IOW, they're claiming that the USG's complaint is baseless and dumb.
If Fable 5/Mythos 5 are considered dangerous enough to invoke export controls on then future models are almost guaranteed to trigger the same process. Locking them down to US citizens is _very_ interesting. I don't think any tech company so far tracks licenses attached to citizenship.
> Google shows that the page was crawled a few days ago.
That's the release blog post. Google is likely pulling the snippet from the Related Content section at the bottom, which includes the post about the US government directive.
> Google shows that the page was crawled a few days ago.
Where'd you get this info? The imgur is the weakest thing one could've screenshotted. At least use archive.today or screenshot the evidence that Google crawled it.
Google shows completely wrong timestamps all the time. I'm pretty sure they just randomly grab vaguely date-like text from pages and declare it the date the page was created.
What access to Fable 5? I don’t think I ever had a prompt not get flagged and routed, and there was nothing in any of them even in the realm of a safety issue.
Too late, NK already completed all the markdown files needed to both create their hypernuke and recreate the hurricane machine Dick Cheney had left Obama.
The timing (after 5pm ET on a Friday) is telling. Build a KYC module over the weekend and we’ll be back on Fable after uploading our ID Monday morning.
If USG bans these models, what is the game plan wrt Chinese models? Will they also ban these (and how, esp open source)? And if not, how is this not throwing the ball game to China? There is no top-down control without international cooperation which, let’s face it, is not happening.
Another interpretation, of course, is that this is just US putting a thumb on the scale for US competitors around IPO time. It will be interesting to see if there are any fingerprints.
> 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
There's no way they have the authority to actually order this and not just request this right? If crypto is speech... LLMs definitely are...
They do have the authority to do this, Anthropic has the ability to appeal it in court, up to the SCOTUS. Lord only knows what our crazy ass judges in that court will do though.
The US tried to ban it. djb challenged it on first amendment grounds and the result was that the US government gave up trying to enforce any ban.
AI is different though because these models are private, so they cannot really be considered to be "speech". Although if it were an open model it would likely be protected speech to release it.
Doesn’t really matter - the government is given wide latitude by the judiciary in matters of national security. I also expect Anthropic will fight this in court if it lasts very long.
I see a lot of analysis here that this is good for Ant, but I beg to differ, it's a very bad place to be as a company serving enterprises when deployment risk is now present. This might delay Ant's financial goals in their ability to monetize Fable and other Mythos class models.
Yeah this is not good business wise long term. Short term marketing you maybe get some boost but actual business impact is negative. Their whole current business depends on massive exponential growth and handcuffing them removes their frontier advantage. Cheap models are now the focus of any and everyone
This is kind of extraordinary when you think about what could actually be obtained. This makes it seem somewhat reasonable to implement export controls to me - still not happy about it though
How does this thread suggest export controls are warranted just for this one specific model? Pliny has jail-broken every released model in this fashion.
They only found out about it and might have believed that this Mythos-class-Models are somewhat more safe because of the filters - which that demonstrated they are not when jailbreaking taken into account.
Kind of surprised they didn't already pull this on Opus when Anthropic was having it's last spat with the DoD - I mean the tech is used heavily by the US military, it seems they have a path to actually claim national security interest (and stick it to Anthropic for not playing ball)?
I would also like to know this. I wasn’t hitting the limit with Opus 4.8 but with Fable the token usage exploded. So I upgraded to $200 pm Max plan at around 4 pm today but could barely use it for Fable.
Theory: Certain USG employees are going after Anthropic because they (or someone they know) has a financial stake in OpenAI. OpenAI has made the same claims, and months ago released "dangerous" security-analyzing models which "need limits", but USG never punished them for it.
I'm more interested in the business impact of this
So you spend billions of dollars training the model, only for it to be used in the US.
Then interesting to see where most of anthropic revenue comes from. If it's the US then they're fine but if it's global then they'll see a drop in revenue?
Then add to this decision, companies are going to significantly reduce their token spend.
Am I missing something, but given that it flows through Anthropic’s servers I would have thought the US would just have used it to Hoover up the data of foreign users? Now overseas users have an incentive to use local models or those hosted elsewhere?
A race to the bottom means that as other model makers start competing with Anthropic's Fable 5, eventually costs will come down. However if you are able to successfully convince the government to cease AI development, you don't have to sweat so much at night worrying about your competitors.
Don’t legally serious second Amendment supporters regard “arms” as things that can be carried, and are evolved from/analogous to their 18th century hand-carried guns?
It would be hard to classify AI (or tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft) as “arms” that can be “borne” in that sense.
It certainly falls under 1st amendment protection since LLMs are about accessing speech. But that hasn’t stopped Dario from trying hard to push for regulations and bans that limit our civil rights. He and Sam Altman want regulatory capture at the expense of our right to free speech.
And? Computers are dual-use. Cars are dual-use. Telephones are dual-use. Freeze-dried chicken is dual-use.
Single-use, i.e. military only technology is actually pretty rare.
> This kind of posture is simply not tenable as frontier intelligence increases.
I reject the corpo speak that tries to brand these things as being "intelligent." They can be useful. But a language model cannot conjure a weapons platform from the ether no matter how "intelligent" it is.
Prefacing that I assume this order is done with ill intent, and would guess that it’s based on Anthropic not bending the knee immediately like OpenAI did.
But your statement could be rephrased as
> The most ethical goal of a weapons manufacturer or government should be to bring the maximum number of nuclear weapons for as cheap as possible to the people equally.
Making sure everyone is a strapped as possible only makes sense to the type of libertarians who salivate at the idea of shooting someone who steps on their property to deliver a letter
This is the kind of supply risk everyone should plan for. Depending exclusively on one country, one provider, or one model is not going to cut it anymore. I'd double down on improving opensource local models even more and getting harnesses, routers, and testing right.
The Trump administration should focus on things like the UFC fight etc.
This also looks like the perfect China shaped gap in the market if there ever was one.
Anthropic has made the suppression of advanced technology a mainstream issue. This is an exceptionally interesting development because the refrain from the skeptics, was "Why wouldn't they release the advanced technology if they could make all that money?" and "Once people knew about the technology they'd never be able to stop it." Well here we are with a verifiable demonstrable suppressed advanced technology.
So the white house likes to do a lot of things they don't actually have authority to do, so the next question is if they don't have the authority to do this, can Anthropic sue for damages for not only tokens people were not able to spend, but also market share lost to the setback?
I'm surprised that (all) these models haven't been export controlled already. Relatively benign software like VMware is export controlled or even hobbyist radio projects have gotten hairy with ITAR.
But a model that can provide general information, research, or source code for most modern technology?
It is really unusual that this is the first notice of this
> The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Not great as it does break workflows for some.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
I wonder if this is specific to the animus toward anthropic or if this is the new industry wide level cap. Seems like a pretty big problem for the AI market in general, a lot this investment is predicated on better and better models.
It’s clear from this post that Anthropic doesn’t believe this is legal, but is complying for the sake of it. Federal law doesn’t generally have broad authorities to send demand letters like these.
The biggest tech titans lined up to kiss the ring (and line Trump's pockets), and now we're seeing the obvious result.
Those who bribe Trump and do exactly his bidding (including helping out with war crimes and surveillance of US citizens) will be left alone, or even protected from competition and international law, as long as they keep giving Trump a taste. Those who balk, even a little, will be punished for it.
Republicans never wanted a free market, they just wanted a market that served their interests.
Russia and China could not dream of accomplishing the damage being done to US leadership in tech by our own government as we speak. If they have a wishlist, I'm sure it includes things like stopping immigration of scientists to the US, punishing innovators and elevating hucksters (make them trillionaires, for example), drive a wedge between the US and European allies, insure no one trusts hosting their data in the US or with US companies, erode democracy, and increase inequality especially at the margins (make the poor desperate and the wealthy beyond the reach of consequences).
Part of me thinks fault lies with Anthropic for scaremongering, part has zero faith in the current administration especially after the "supply chain risk" designation.
It may be safer to just move the company to Canada.
Yes, I'm surprised there isn't more conversation around this being a way of the administration lashing out at Anthropic like they tried to do with the supply chain risk maneuver.
Glad I clicked that Wikipedia link! Chinese curse... I'd always been told it was an old Bedouin curse. Learn somethin' new every day (still to this day, and every new day until I become physically incapable of learning).
Are people really going to hurt by this? Opus 4.8 can do a vast amount of the same tasks at half the price. How many people are really doing cutting edge work?
The point is that their argument doesn't make sense. It's not about jailbreaking, so stop lying about that shady reason. It's an export control, as you said, to benefit Americans.
Me finding this out mid vibe code session: "There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model."
Haven’t we learned by now that software is a commodity, and that revenue only comes from unique products and services?
On the one hand someone will subscribe $4.99 a month for TODO.app or calendar.com because they are paying for a solo dev or a small team to work on constant development and improvement of products filling a particular niche.
On the other hand, Linux, Django, PyTorch, React, Zed, Helix, Postgres, Arch, Chromium, Firefox, Rust, Python etc. ship continually improving, solid pieces of enormous infrastructure for free, to be used freely by all, off the back of hundreds if not thousands of active core developers. These projects and large and complicated. They are also commodities.
Then, ahem*, on the final hand there are of course Windows, Office, Adobe, macOS and iOS, et al which span both categories: monster projects that are also commercial and also commodities and yet they have hooked themselves into the world in such a way that most folks gotta pay for ‘em.
LLMs feel like they want to be in the same category as the OSs of yesteryear, with all the fanfare of major release versions named like 95, 98, 2000, XP… or like Leopard, Tiger, Yosemite, Sequoia. The training and evaluation pipelines might feel like they fall into those categories, but the models themselves — after all, distillations of someone else’s public or private IP — do not.
”In 1991, the United States Supreme Court in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co ended a seventy year struggle among federal circuits concerning copyright protection of factual compilations. Prior to this decision, courts allowed copyright protection for works if the compiler labored over his project, whether or not the work involved originality or creativity.” **
It might seem like a trivialization, but aren’t LLMs just telephone directories? Except instead of phone numbers of a public phone system they contain weights of a mind that’s read a public library? Such works might or might not be proprietary based on “sweat of the brow” copyright laws.
Jokes on you, we're releasing the new, 'more efficient', 'less intelligent', Capybara 5 model. It's been 'reprogrammed' to only score 49.8% on the 'PyTorch basics' benchmark!
> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.
What exactly is the specific risk here? Like is this just a fuzzy “oh it’s too powerful…” or are there very specific bad things actors can do with a “jailbroken” interface with the model?
>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.
What's obvious is that none of these models are dangerous in the least. The government knows this, so the motive behind their actions is something else. It's pretty obvious that they are trying to force Anthropic to implement some kind of ID verification system as this is the only way they can tell if a customer is a "foreign national" or not. Anthropic is being used as a pawn by the authoritarians, and they can't say they didn't ask for it.
What are the odds this is partially them making the point; you were all complaining about monitoring/access/safeguards: remember we don’t have to give this to you at all. And using a us gov letter as justification for that.
People forget the people in charge of these companies are some of the smartest people out there full stop. Far more shadowy strategy/things like this going on than people think.
Lmao this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Who? Elon Musk? No. Sam Altman? Laughable. Dario Amadei? Above-average, maybe.
The people who are the smartest people full stop aren’t the leaders of these companies - they’re the people you never meet, who are working in the research department, begging not to be promoted into management.
“Here is our superhuman, scary, frontier model that needs special safeguards to stop it developing WMDs! Buy it now, use the code ASI20 to get 20% off your first month!”
“Wait what do you mean you’re banning it?”
They had better give me a refund!
E: I emailed them and got an AI email that said
"Hi Joe,
Thank you for reaching out about your Claude Max subscription refund request.
I attempted to evaluate the refund eligibility for your JG Games account, but unfortunately an error occurred during the process. I'm unable to complete your refund request at this time.
I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."
My agitating prayer is that other nations (even so called US allies) will nationalise what they can (ie model weights already deployed within their jurisdictions). This is the only way to respond to a rogue US administration.
I've actually not thought about deployments in remote jurisdictions that much. I also don't think the models are dangerous enough to warrant it, but do you reckon the big labs have plans thought out for deleting remote model copies, such that they couldn't be scrubbed off cold NVMEs?
Thousands of Anthropic employees believing they just finished putting out fires related to Fable this week and finally won't be on call for this weekend:
(1) personally very annoying. I have been using fable to try to collect cutting edge math in one area and work on a hopefully new result with lean verification.
(2) I am really tired of the AI community trying to threaten everyone with grey goo and finding out the hype doesn't land comfy with others. It's a freaking text generator, not god in a pocket.
it is text generator. just like an interactive library or smaet search engine. if we dont ban books on cryptography putting this under ITAR is rather absurd. Anthying these models train on is already public or accessible information. They just collect and link it together dynamically. Whats next wikipedia is ITAR. However thisnreuskt is expected when you got rationalist kooks (cf Dario Amodei) marketing the "singularity" religion.
This heralds the end of frontier model development in the US since the same national security argument can and will be made against any model stronger than Fable/Mythos. Squashing the ability of Anthropic and OpenAI to deploy newer stronger models will destroy their valuation so no trillion dollar IPOs either. Low cost Chinese models will soon catch up to Opus and GPT-5.5 eroding Anthropic and OpenAI's ability to charge more. The knock on effects of this are just beginning.
These guys are working with the feds. This is a giant psyop from the start. Make Anthropic look like they're harnessing dangerous powers, portray them as counter to government.
They aren't counter to the government, this is all kayfabe to introduce precedence for the US government to be justified in putting controls on AI, expect that by the end of the month there are discussions to regulate Deepseek.
It could be the case that Anthropic created this whole situation on their own, I figured they'd release a "dangerous" model at some point then piggy back off of bad outcomes to dig their regulatory moat
It could also be the case that Altman has close ties to the white house and is using regulatory levers on his competion.
I stand by that its all Kayfabe to make AI look more dangerous than it is (it cant even center a div reliably) to justify controls on Open Source.
Fable is very impressive but not exports restriction impressive. Very tinfoil hat on my part but doesn't this seem very false flag adjacent?
You bribe someone in the admin to restrict access after a couple of days of media blitz and user approval, locking in the honeymoon period that new model releases get (remember when GPT-4 was new?). The spooky factor gives it even more marketing, and just before the IPO the Trump admin frees Mythos and they make nice after the DoD debacle.
just on the basis of narrow jailbreak window?
At this point it may be all for marketing, an opus 4.8 would be more powerful for specialized task than vanilla fable5
I do agree with the skepticism in this thread. But, if we assume Fable/Mythos really are that good (=easy to misuse) and thep keep getting better, what similar responses (signals) would you expect to see going forwards?
Anthropic rents the entire Colossus 1 data center and other compute capacity from SpaceX, which acquired xAI. Under the agreement, Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month, totaling roughly $45 billion for a multi-year lease
Sadly, I suspect this will be the best piece of marketing they could ever hope for. "It's so advanced the government made us add extra security* to stop hackers!"
Surprisingly, I've found this works shockingly well (along with any plausible-sounding reason why it was wrong of the model to refuse) to "jailbreak" many models I've played with thus far. They're all just so eager to please...
Wow this is wild...but I guess it makes sense now why they had such an overly sensitive on Fable usage before. Perhaps they were already in a back-and-forth with the Trump admin about the Fable/Mythos release and what safeguards are needed.
Well, it was great while it lasted - I had fable build me a bunch of stuff this week that opus was just screwing up too much and could never finish. Good thing there are plenty of choices now even if US gov fucks up US AI.
I like to think that the long arc of history bends towards greater access to knowledge and intelligence. I mean, isn't that what we all want? To be collectively less ignorant and more aware of how the world works? But I guess that's not what the US gov wants. Crazy times, truly. The mask is really coming off lately.
Big deal! Can't wait for the Chinese models to catch up - cheap, no marketing gimmicks, no politics, humble, hardworking, and they are only getting better. America is no longer a trustworthy technology partner! No wonder Europe is trying to detach itself from the present and future Trumps, Pete Hegseths, and other deranged narcissists. But I wonder why Anthropic is cutting my access, too, as I'm a US citizen residing in America? They could've vibe-coded a self-improving ID verification in no time, right? Should US models in the future require biometric verification to make small CSS tweaks to a vibe-coded website?!
EU Commission’s mass surveillance agenda makes it impossible for me to trust EU-based companies. Mandatory age checks, long-term metadata storage, chat control, forced backdoors in devices, the list goes on. Hell, legally operating secure phone companies are being hacked and shut down on a regular basis. I’d put money on the fact that funneling all LLM requests through EU Commission–approved filters will become a reality.
Yes, the US is pretty fucking corrupted right now, but I prefer its erratic, inept form to a silent, more competent authority that quietly consolidates power and control and implements surveillance without public debate.
So the US government was able to shut down that upgraded version of that slot machine in Anthropic's casino because of how powerful it is?
There is something called the Streisand effect and they are about to unintentionally get a bunch of more token gamblers into their casino.
We'll see if this backfires hard, but then again constant doomsaying will get yourself under scrutiny and self exclusion (due to the 30+ day retention clause) and this is exactly what Anthropic wants for free marketing.
If I read that right, the "jailbreak" is to ask the model to fix the codebase and then it exposes the flaws? That sounds like a gap that is nearly impossible to fix while retaining high capability. Like you want it to be able to fix your codebase...
I think it's interesting they think it's about jailbreaking when it could be about the guardrails or even other stuff being reported like it deleting people's projects depending on what they were working on.
When I was a young child, Nixon's corrupt insecurity led him to order the Watergate hotel break-in. The investigation was broadcast on multiple television channels simultaneously and pre-empted my cartoons repeatedly. I never forgot that Nixon stole my cartoons. Today, I was restoring an iOS synthesizer with Claude Fable. I will never forget that Trump stole my AI.
this is just the US government bullying everyone wherever they can because they "are the bestest government that has ever goverend" ugh puke. the US govt and its leader is a typical schoolyard bully and I wish someone could stop that bully. i hate that the govts have so much power.
So scare tactics on losing jobs and ending all white collar ones is fine and ok and advertised everywhere, but scare tactics about software vulnerabilities is not and forbidden, got it!
While I'm always skeptical of the claims of AI companies and have been skeptical of Anthropics claims about the dangers of their Mythos model, the fact that the US government is taking this seriously enough to send this type of order is strong evidence in their favor.
> We suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider. Every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non-universal jailbreaks (which can elicit some cyber information in specific circumstances), and it is likely that universal jailbreaks will eventually be found in the future.
Laying the groundwork to limit access to high capability models
>As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
Dario, yesterday: "I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action."
Trump, today: Further action
Dario, today: "Waaaah! This petard I asked President Trump for hoisted my ass halfway to the Moon! Nobody warned me he'd do something like this! No fairrrr!"
This administration is spectacularly corrupt (take a look at what is happening with the Gordie Howe bridge -- the entire government is beholden to billionaires if they just pad some pockets), so odds favour that OpenAI called some of their employees in government, looking to kneecap a competitor. They didn't make all of those massive donations for nothing.
The US has long been catastrophically corrupt, with a pay-to-play government, but this army of grifters and thieves have turned every dial to 11.
I already gave up on Fable 5 because it sometimes was just not worth the editional price compared to Opus 4.8 and other times it flat out downgraded to Opus anyways for no good reason because it thought I'm looking for security vulnerability while working on the auth part of my app. In our company Fable 5 is not enabled because of the change in data retention being required.
And now this. How would they even enforce this restriction when they can't know what nationality the end user behind some API query belonging to a company account has? It seems like nobody is thinking things through anymore and the end result is total unreliability from every angle. What a huge mess all of it, sigh.
Is it fine though? We’re definitely seeing some huge negative impacts from AI use. Of course some positive ones as well, but the point is that they were right to be concerned.
Seems like we're starting to get reliant on the intelligence of these models to keep our outputs less "sloppy". Effectively an IaaS (Intelligence-as-a-Service). With the U.S. putting the suspension on Fable 5, we might be stuck with slop.
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.
Now they finally found the right fools in audience to believe it.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/op...
Marketing or actual fear? We’ve got 5 and 5.5 out now… he compared 5 to the Manhattan project. AI may one day be an economic Manhattan project but GPT 5 wasn’t it.
It’s a meme because they overdo it.
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.?
It all sounds pretty accurate and reasonable to me if you watch it.
So it doesn't really matter what he thinks
Ironic then, that both companies are in an out-of-control race to create a superintelligence.
this means nothing
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
If you want to be taken seriously, provide data, proof, so that any outside observer can independently come to the same conclusion instead of taking your word for it. Asking people to trust you for [reasons?] and that you somehow for some reason are right and the other is wrong regardless of if they agree or not. This is the imposition of a viewpoint instead of winning your case, which is not a sensible point of view, and definitely not how you influence opinions.
They don't. LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence and everyone working on LLMs knows this (with a few eccentric exceptions).
LLMs didn't emerge by chance, they are the culmination of decades of research intersecting with brute force engineering rigor in a perfect storm of innovation. You're not just going to stumble into an alternative approach by dumping loads of cash into research.
GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.
We can argue about sincerity, but I don't think we can argue about utter historical incompetence in assessing the risks. It's one or the other.
Either way the evidence seems to indicate we should not listen to AI companies about the risks of AI. Which is not to say that there aren't risks, just that the dealer is the least credible review.
No, it was "let's set a precident while these things are not too dangerous, c'mon guys we know y'all can reproduce this easily".
The amount of self-confidence and belief it takes to get a company through the funding rounds and burn through borrowed money to rise to the top requires an absurd amount of self-delusion.
Another fun little gem of information, government has something called Mayhem
> the autonomous Robo-Hacker AI called Mayhem that’s now in charge of protecting the Pentagon’s most critical systems
Guess Mythos and Mayhem had a chat
Oh please. Do people really believe this or shit like "Don't do evil". Companies get founded by all kind of people and ideals. They all go out the window quickly.
Why are they both rushing to IPO now then?
"Our product is so good the US had to make it illegal for foreigners" is a hell of a marketing slogan.
Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.
Not really. There aren't any other choices, and the PRC also heavily utilizes export controls [0].
This is why sovereign AI has become important, as can be seen with EU NatSec uses cases tending to use Mistral [1] and Indian governments starting to use Sarvam [2].
That said, for most commercial usecases, older generations of Opus as well as enterprise grade GPT and Gemini are fairly good.
The distilled OSS models are alright for hobbyists but if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini (most hobbyists don't get access to these) you see how far behind the open weight models are.
Even in China, traditionally open minded models teams like Alibaba's Qwen are looking to become more restricted given the org changes [3].
Also, Corporate RFCs now demand final say on model used and depending on the geo, this can be a dealbreaker (eg. An American financial institution will absolutely blacklist a vendor if they use a Chinese model and same in reverse and European defense vendors mandate sovereign EU models depending on the opportunity).
[0] - https://www.allbrightlaw.com/EN/10475/f9d4055e47e81afb.aspx
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/mistral-defen...
[2] - https://www.sarvam.ai/blogs/partnerships-with-indian-states
[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/b39da303-3188-447b-8b65-3dd8dad8b...
This might be the trigger for creating other choices. Not within a month, but things can change quickly.
But this has left a sour taste in my mouth. What if I relied on it for mission critical business processes?
This is potentially far worse than say a gmail account going down. It's the stuff of nightmare fuel.
Not having an alternative is a massive risk for any business.
Edit: Can't reply
> Time to build fabs back in the states
We are and did. The Intel and TSMC fabs have already started 2nm fabrication.
Source: https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/nv...
ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ekndZwyOzo
Also, the EU, Japan, SK, ASEAN, and India are not supportive of using Chinese tech after China export controlled rare earth exports last years [0].
Software supply chain regulations also make utilizing Chinese software risky for ExChina players and make using ExChina tech risky for Chinese players.
Expect to see RFCs now demanding visibility into what models are used and right of refusal - this is already the norm in F1000s. Similar ones are likely to arise in the EU as well with some of the upcoming industrial policy changes being proposed.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-is-making-it-harde...
Matters not for open weight models, no?
> if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini you see how far behind the open weight models are.
I really do feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is often better than current Sonnet is, in the general case.
Opus 4.7 is a solid step above Sonnet, and Fable was a solid step above Opus 4.7. I've only had Fable for a few days, obviously, but I was decently impressed after Opus 4.8 being a downright disappointment for me (it's just too buggy; I had it go out of control 3 separate times on things Opus 4.7 never had any trouble with.) I still ran into limitations. It's not world-endingly great.
So, based on that, I think DeepSeek V4 Pro is, ignoring multi-modal capabilities, about a couple solid steps behind. Assuming model iteration will continue to decelerate, especially as Anthropic heads into IPO, I'm guessing that DeepSeek will probably be able to strike back with something further along. Of course we'll see how able and willing they are to stay open weight, but they've done well so far so, no reason to doubt them at the moment.
(There are some models that claim to be ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro. I've tried some of them and really not been that impressed. Maybe it's a me issue.)
Now I reckon that most people just simply don't really need Mythos/Fable for most of what they do and using Mythos/Fable tokens in place of Sonnet-tier models would not make any sense. At my job we already mostly just use Sonnet as it is. I'm sure there is some cutting-edge research where you want the absolute best model available and sure, in that case, you're stuck with Anthropic for the moment.
But is that really everyone? After all, while Mythos was dominating the hype cycles, quite a lot of impressive LLM-assisted CVEs dropped that were not linked to Mythos.
Their IPO is well and truly fucked now. This also means no other frontier lab in the US is allowed to exceed Opus 4.8 capabilities.
If you're a luddite or a decel you should literally be dancing in the streets right now. And, if you're a tankie you'll be dancing right next to them. And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
Is it really? It was limited release anyway (like hypebeast merch!). Everything people are gonna talk about for a week is gonna about how Fable was so cool that it got banned by the feds. If it's just the Trump admin being the Trump admin, Amodei is just gonna have to pay up as a racket / marketing expense. Or it is like I'm suspecting and this was pre-bribed and the ban is kabuki theater.
>And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
The funny thing is that solar and batteries advancements are actually this, not LLMs, but your framing kinda fits anyways.
And so if this policy holds, Anthropic has functionally had Fable killed by government intervention, and in a logically consistent world, this would imply all other US-based AI labs may also never exceed existing (read: Opus) capabilities.
What interesting times we live in, indeed.
This is quite clearly corporate capture of the white house by a competitor influencing policy, but it's hard to imagine something that plays more into anthropic's hand. They now own the model that was so good the US government made them shut it off.
As someone not using the technology, I'm fine with that :) Intellectual property laundering was never a good thing. Glad we can begone with it.
It just means the government decides who gets to profit off of laundered IP, which is arguably even worse.
The reality of Republican free markets were about compounding and growing big business and resource extraction at the expense of everyone else.
The rest is all about convincing suckers that getting kicked in the balls is good for them. The most obvious example being farmers. Most aspects of agriculture have been consolidated into oblivion and the markets are not super functional. 80% of the dairy operations in my state are out of business. 60 companies dominate eggs in the US - there used to be 3 in my city.
It’s not such a terrible tension to live with. We can have, say, equal rights to life while also allowing unequal rights to gold nuggets. You might have more gold nuggets than I do but we both have the right to live in peace.
The far ends of the spectrum though involve, respectively, redistribution of gold nuggets to all, and at the other end a commitment to survival of the fittest that extends to viewing any kind of market regulation as commie bullshit.
Republican != Conservative… and in reality Trump is neither, but at the same time, the type of Democrat he was no longer exists. It’s also a mistake to confuse Republican for Establishment GOP.
You're using terms incorrectly. Conservatism has nothing to do with free market.
The people who care most about free markets are liberals (called libertarians in the US).
Presumably you mean to say "Republicans". And your answer is "under Trump". But it's important to note that Trump merely took the Republican party back to its roots. Traditionally, Republicans were more protectionists than the Democrats. Regan changed that, and Trump reverted.
But what annoys me about people who criticize this change, is that it often comes from people who don't believe in free markets.
---
As a side note, I think the reason Americans use these terms so wrongly is because of the 2 party system. It forces all ideologies into two camps and for Americans "conservatism", "libertarianism", "nationalism", "fascism" are all the same.
Everyone? There's worlds outside of the United States government overreach.
Serves them right
Unfortunately though, they're not smart enough to realize the long term damage to the industry that they're doing without any hint of remorse will negatively affect them and will have the opposite effect: Highlighting how imperative it is we all switch to open-source and remove our reliance entirely from them.
So not only are they going to take the whole industry down out of their own greed and stupidity and ruin it for everyone in the short term, but they're going to put themselves and the other labs out of business in the long term. Well done Anthropic. Well done Dario. You played yourself. 5d chess.
> To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Step 1: "OMG, the AI hacked a researcher eating a sandwhich in the park!"
Step 2: Journalists use that great clickbait to generate profit, which generates publicity for Anthropic
Step 3: Rinse repeat
If the threat of LLMs was treated relative to the actual capabilities of them, and we weren't all being lied to by Anthropic and their army of millions of social media bots and backing media companies and mouthpieces, we'd be going in a much healthier direction. Working out the kinks/supply chain risks and developing sound, long-term countermeasures to the ACTUAL risks.
The only threat to the world is if progress is not open-sourced, democratized and in lockstep with capability. The moment it becomes a scenario of: Only a small group get access to frontier intelligence, is when it gives that small group power over everyone else in the world, and wildly increases the risk of a nuclear level event that WILL be exploited eventually - as the divide between the haves and the have nots accelerates in an exponential fashion. Bad AI is countered with an abundance of good AI that has been used to stay ahead of bad AI. The moment your bad AI outpowers the army of good AI it is game over for humanity. The strength of open-source and open-access AI is the difference between humanities permanent enslavement or extinction versus a prosperous future.
Is this Dario leveraging it into a ban on open models?
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5742548/anthropic-penta...
OpenAI's models are very good, they have refusals + a government ID verification story for cyber access (I don't think they prevent non-US nationals, but I don't know this). What they don't have is Project Glasswing and all the hand wringing about how they're going to end the world in public.
I hope Anthropic pulls their head out of their ass and just starts acting like a normal company.
https://youtu.be/Pn-W41hC764
Issues I'd been kinda circling around for weeks, long standing errors in some long-running sync operations for a project I'm working on, all solved the same day the model dropped. Just incredible. And it's effectively a lot more token efficient I find as well (less so with sub-agents). Just areas where Opus 4.8 would occassionally get confused or venture down the wrong direction, just doesn't happen nearly as much as with Fable 5.
Like what is everyone who is dissing on this model / Anthropic using day to day? For me it's just an incredible jump in intelligence. So much so and so quickly after the modest bump from 4.8, that I really can understand why they are starting to shout warnings.
It's way more _proactive_ than the old models, sometimes in ways it shouldn't really be proactive. But it produces _more_ slop than 4.8, and I have not seen any real breakthroughs from it.
Edit: to give an example, I'm working on integrating a self-hosting auth provider into our app. So I gave it a prompt to create a "bootstrap" script that would create pre-configured settings for the local installation.
Fable did it. And then proceeded (unprompted) to test it by killing the running server, removing the database, re-initializing and (trying) to verify that the bootstrap produced identical results.
Well, yeah. Great. I can see how this "bias for action" works for security research and one-shot projects, not so sure about regular development.
I just tried that with Opus, and it produced a similar bootstrap script but did not start the test by itself.
It'll be "resolved" within a few days.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
They ultimately got what they wanted.
No, it's not what they wanted. As it says in your quote, they wanted "a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles."
* Free marketing before the IPO, demonstrating how already powerful their frontier models are.
* Governments to intervene in the rollout of these frontier models and blocking their access to whoever they want.
* A strong reason to apply these further restrictions onto releasing powerful open weight models to the public. (which is entirely a business threat to them.)
Given that they accepted funding from the Gulf states [0] despite it conflicting with their own "principles", I think we are well beyond the point of what they write / say vs to what they are actually doing.
This drama just tells us that the government declared them as the winner that has the most powerful model.
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-to-seek...
This sort of attention is exactly what they would to showcase the powerful capabilities of their latest models.
Now we are getting reactive, arbitrary and capricious enforcement; rules rushed out the door; classified evals. The worst of both worlds.
They got what they claim they wanted for PR purposes. Like when a billionaire says they should be taxed more, or when Sam Altman says the public should get some of that AI wealth.
But they never thought it would actually happen.
Oops.
I wouldn’t the surprised if all this were actually orchestrated, it all seems too convenient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAuG7_acmdA
What is a “foreign national” is more what I’m wondering. Like is it a “Non-US Citizen”? Do US citizens abroad count?
The following quoted text is from the Definitions section of 8 USC § 1101, which is reproduced at [0]. (Though, you will probably have to scroll up a bit to be able to read subsection (a)(21), which is the thing I'm linking to.)
From this, it's fairly clear that a "foreign national" is someone owing permanent allegiance to a foreign (that is, non-US) state. What's not immediately clear to me is whether a US citizen can also be a "foreign national", [1] and how that would affect access to things from which foreign nationals are barred. [2]EDIT: For a more official source of this information, you might be able to check out [3] and/or [4]. After examining and interacting with those pages, one might see why one might go to an unofficial source for casual inspection of this information.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101#a_21
[1] I think they can be.
[2] I'm very uncertain.
[3] <https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...>
[4] <https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title8/chapter12/subc...>
"The United States Department of State defines a “foreign national” as anyone who is not a “U.S. person.” A “U.S. person” is any one of the following: U.S. citizen; Lawful permanent resident (green card holder); and “Protected Person” i.e. political asylum holder." [0]
A foreign national is a person or organization who is not a citizen of the United States, and who is a citizen of a foreign country. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses the term "alien" to refer to a person who is not a United States citizen, and does not use the term "foreign national."[1]
[0] https://www.orc.msstate.edu/faq/what-department-states-defin...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/foreign_national
It's kind of a weird definition. I would guess most people's nationality is more an accident of birth than anything else.
Unfortunately there also a possibility this what they intentionally wanted to try regulatory capture to get rid of competitors.
You see the state of the country and you think it’s a nefarious master plan instead of a bunch of opportunistic people taking advantage of an overworked, overstimulated populace who forget to vote or believe stupid slogans on TV.
Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out????
Anthropic is calling for regulation. For example they endorsed CA SB-53 that even OpenAI and Google thought was too much: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-is-endorsing-sb-53
They have spoken publicly about how they want open models banned (they call them Chinese models).
They might not want this specific action, but they do want regulation on their own terms. That really is regulatory capture.
> Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out
They don't think is is "idiot stuff" - they are doing it openly and shouting to everyone who will listen! Read Dario's latest essay[1]:
> Many policymakers are showing increased openness to taking action, and it's been encouraging to see our peers come around to the same positions we've been advocating for over the past few years.
[snip]
> Thus, in 2025, Anthropic supported transparency legislation, helping to pass SB 53 in California, RAISE in NY, SB 315 in Illinois (in early 2026), and advocating for a transparency standard at the federal level.
[snip]
> It is time to go beyond transparency to more serious and binding regulation of AI.
> I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action.
> The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks.
I'm not sure why you think they don't want to be "found out"!
Whenever I hear some octogenarian senator babble about the evils of distillation I assume Amodei (or maybe Altman) fed them the script, word for word.
Over worked and over stimulated is the intentional method and means these people well aware of the neurological consequences rely on
Do you really not think that people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei angle for regulatory capture? It happens in every other industry, from automobiles to tax preparation software. Why do you think that AI is any different?
Hint: it can be both.
Thats incredibly infuriating to hear someone say.
Obviously no one is absolute control of everything but physics is essentially shows nothing other than information determinism. There has to have been a thought of intention in the minds of these people as they play in the largest arena publicly.
"No one is doing it intentionally because I think theyre dumber then I think other people think they are"
"They're taking advantage of people intentionally"
"People dont have political power to do anything about their victory laps"
I mean, better safe than sorry, right Dario?
You simply cannot apply any sort of actual logic to the reasoning of the current U.S. government's actions... They just "do stuff" because they feel like it, with no clear thought whatsoever of any potential consequences that may occur.
Yes, there is a gap between "taking a stake" and nationalizing one, but..
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-says-his-team-will-lo...
This is how the UK government got the banks through the 2008 financial crisis.
Time to fire up the printers I guess.
AI is a national security issue. Best accept that as fact, or you won't see it coming.
I think David Sacks is right, if you are saying you are building nuclear bombs, then prepared to be regulated like one.
There is no eating it while having it
But it changes little.
They are NOT "em-proof" --- what they are is electronic warfare immune.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou... Published this year, but talking about a trial 2 years ago.
Blocking any leading edge AI model changes nothing. We (humans) have a long history of determined attackers finding creative and unexpected solutions.
What the AI we have, the stuff that is already PUBLICLY AVAILABLE, is good enough to shrink the time for developing one of those creative solutions into a working tool/weapon.
There is /so/ much stuff on the internet that just needed someone to spend enough time on it.
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.
Just more corrupt behavior from the contemptible kakistocracy that's busy running things into the ground and enriching themselves while they're at it.
Not only that, but also a golden opportunity to flex the muscle of anti-immigration.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510010
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.
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.
More stuff done per dollar or more stuff done for more dollars? Seems to be an important distinction
GPT-5.5 isn't awful.
Or they were getting silently rerouted and couldn't realise they weren't using Fable
Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788385
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.
Enjoy.
Don't get me wrong, I use it, it's fast-smart-and affordable. But not suitable for all tasks.
A House committee also recently probed Cursor and Airbnb for using Chinese models, rather than more expensive American alternatives. A sexagenarian Congressman gave a nonsense quote that he certainly did not come up with himself,[1] which sounds very similar to language Anthropic uses in its marketing materials.[2][3]
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/04/29/2026/house-committee-p...
[2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/updating-restrictions-of-sale...
[3] https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
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.
> 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.
It's definitely not as good. But it's also definitely good enough.
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?
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
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"
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.
Have people forgot about evidence?
ChatGPT 2 was once too powerful to release.
AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.
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.
95% odds this gets reversed by Monday morning is why
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.
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.
Then they won't survive the termination boundary.
Too bad. Should have had more cash.
You don’t _have_ to buy into the technocracy, there’s a whole outside going on.
Same as the new bridge between Windsor and Detroit can't open until some palms are greased.
Chaos is a ladder, gotta keep climbing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic%E2%80%93United_State...
What an unbelievable claim. Especially since the vast majority of publicly available benchmarks disagree.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5
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.
Fable was designed for _really_ hard software engineering problems. Possibly large, but especially hard. For those tasks, you feel the difference immediately.
The base intelligence does not feel much greater to me.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
beautiful good bye, for now
Edit: I take it back. Just a 200 in a trenchcoat.
goodbye.
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.
On the All in Pod, Chamath Palihapitiya has also been pushing to require ID checks to use AI models. Free thinking and free speech are under attack.
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.
US vocabulary is confusing.
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.
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
I'm running a 248B model on a paltry amount of hardware and getting plenty of good use out of it.
Sure, the most demanding tasks will demand the best models (and always will). There's still less demanding tasks for other models.
I think some people are fooling themselves that coding of all tasks is always going to requires the biggest models ever. Again, maybe some coding tasks will, but the majority of business CRUD apps probably don't. Same goes for virtually any other type of task. The biggest models are really only useful for the most complex tasks.
Now this might not be the most cost effective (and may require a bit extra power), but you only need a datacenter for training or cost optimization.
If a government entity bans a LLM provider due to a jailbreak concern, they can also ban an on-prem solution under the same guise. The jailbreak risk exists regardless of where it's hosted. You could defensibly argue the on-prem risk is higher since frontier model companies can justify safety spend due to their size, it's more difficult to combat bad actors if you're company is the only one using the model and you don't have economies of scale.
I'd agree except that Big AI has made sure that most of us can't afford the hardware (RAM, NVMe, etc) to run it.
Private models in a low trust society means the government will come and seize the models. Competitive business will only be allowed through cronyism.
The better option is to opt for high trust. Yes the Gman can rip your servers apart, but they know they'll face consequences, legal and political. Laws and regulations are the answer, not locking down into smaller fiefdoms.
Some will take greater risks and win (or lose); others will play it safer and slowly accumulate wins (or be obsoleted).
Never mind the threat of letting these models write code that runs your business, or operate it agentically. Models trained by actors (corporate or nationstate) diametrically opposed to your interests.
Lots to take into account now, interesting time to be in business.
And infrastructure dominance is really the big picture here. Chinese models are going to become the standard setters because they're going to be what people are using. That means more research, more tooling, and a whole ecosystem developing around them.
And that was already starting to happen even before this fiasco with Chinese models now being the most used ones globally. https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/technology/features/story/clau...
The tricky part with banning Chinese models is that they're open. It'll be easy to ban access to service providers, but preventing people from running these models on prem is going to be really tough. Like are they going to go after Cursor for example given that their model is based on Kimi?
I very much agree it's going to be a futile endeavour in the end. It kind of reminds me of the time Microsoft tried to get Linux and open source banned when Linux started encroaching on Windows server market. This is going to end the same way.
https://turbulence.substack.com/p/the-gated-age
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3...
That said, Mythos doesn't seem to be exceptionally good but closer to "following the established trend in improvements"
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos...
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/how-fast-is-autonomous-ai-cyber...
Not to mention intelligence agencies look for any information advantage they can get to influence policy.
1/ Jailbreak => Rapid catchup of the industry leading to commoditization
2/ Jailbreak => 99% of internet infrastructure gets exposed to cyberattacks at a scale the world is simply not ready. Maybe <1% of internet users are using Fable, out of which <1% will use it for beyond intended use. Put yourself in the shoes of someone maintaining critical infrastructure, or millions of people working 7 days a week to run a small business. The world needs some time to adapt.
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.
I wonder if they pulled Fable because it had too high of a “dangerous session” count. If so, I wonder if they’ve considered that their “dangerous session” detector has lost its damn mind this week.
(BTW, that screenshot is 100% real. I was walking to work this morning and a random song played. I had a thought about it and wondered what a model would have to say on the matter. I ran that prompt and got that response, said something profane out loud, and screenshotted it to share with friends. That’s not a mockup, but something I personally experienced and recorded myself.)
After that details don't matter, they've shown their "enemy" colours, once is enough. This is just punishment and it will continue, until they bend the knee.
It's been interesting seeing how OpenAI pops up to counter the threat of AGI being controlled by Google, and then OpenAI and every spinoff company from its employees has become a far larger threat to the public, for different reasons.
As much as it seems like Anthropic's self righteous leadership truly believes in what they're preaching, they've shown themselves to be tied for the worst stewards of this technology. Google actually seems like the best option to me, by far. Anthropic is also the only major lab with no open weights releases.
They'll have burned a lot of goodwill with the community by the time another lab takes the tech lead, which I guarantee will happen.
What I can't understand, is that they act like the _knowledge_ is dangerous.
I don't know if I'm biased from my BSci (chem/maths), but: knowledge isn't dangerous, the reagents needed are incredibly easy to control. Thats what we already do!
Try...since GPT 2.
https://naokishibuya.github.io/blog/2022-12-30-gpt-2-2019/
So much for all of the rhetoric about Mythos supposedly far surpassing GPT 5.5 (edit: in cybersecurity, in particular). Of course, the AISI benchmarks also showed this, but it is amusing that Anthropic is saying it now that it is to their advantage.
It's difficult to predict this administrations actions, but given it included employees that has to be a huge risk for Google, where Deepmind is based in London.
Cohere (Canada) and Mistral (France) are going to get a lot of interest.
I predict they will all be mostly the same in 5+ yrs but coding is serious work and companies aren’t going to pay for almost good.
See also https://www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to-kill-burner-phones-by-f...
Digital yellow star by exclusion from digital life for foreigners.
Remember when tech companies would go to court to vigorously defend against infringement of their and their customers rights? Turns out that’s just a feature of democracy, once you have autocrats it’s all compliance.
Anthropic just baited themselves with their scaremongering to be the attack vector here.
It a stellar move by the way - since every tech company in an exceptionally fast growing field will comply or miss out sales, you effectively force KYC without legislative process onto much of digital because that’s the only way to comply.
UPDATE: I lost access at 6:59pm pacific.
GPT-5.4 is currently the strongest model (this changes hourly)
Methodology: https://aistupidlevel.info/faq#methodology
False positives and poorly defined tasks/acceptance criteria have let some models have insanely inflated scores on bad benchmarks.
And sure, you can say they're not disclosed to prevent gaming, but if you're the only one who can review them then the might as well be a random number generator display with an unreadable UI.
I'd also think that they would transparently degrade, just to prevent production outages for clients that are requesting Fable explicitly.
It did just use a small harness to run docker compose with different envs and other settings to validate a very small change, so... Feels like Fable
Opus 4.8 spams a lot more text. It'd be obvious.
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it.
Edit: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
And now we're done. Oh well.
(I have never had an agent do enough to burn up the 5 hour quota on Max)
(edit: just switched my CC model to 4.8 and my 5-hr cycle reset back to 0%, even though it previously had 2 more hours to go)
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
edit: And... it's gone
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
It's disheartening how many people think the use of government power is justified or not based on the WWE smackdown drama they concoct in their own brain instead of, you know, the laws of our nation.
It is very dangerous for the government to be able to shut off services, regardless of whether their owners wrote some blog posts that rubbed you the wrong way.
Last I checked I can’t buy a tactical nuke at Walmart. Clearly the government and all states have some power to control private enterprise for the betterment of their citizenry.
For the record I don’t support this ban, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…
And yes, the administration is hobbled (by design) by our institutions. But, as fascists do, they're doing their best to degrade those controls.
We’re gonna apply it to so many things it’ll have lost its meaning soon.
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
Which 'F' word do you think is appropriate to describe all this? Or has meaning already been lost?
Everyone who has touched currency is a capitalist, everyone who has paid taxes is a commie, everyone who has regulated a technology is a fascist
Or perhaps... one must look at the full fact pattern of a person's behavior to approximate (and always imperfectly!) their political philosophy.
Hilarious
> Restricts model to large corporations
> Release information about how Fable / Mythos 5 is stronger than Mythos Preview, give access to every user for a limited time via subscriptions
> Users jailbreak model
> U.S. suspends Fable / Mythos use
Who didn't see this coming?
I wonder what this means for the future of AI models. Either we'll see worse guardrails than what was there for Fable 5 (for me, it was a unusable at times), or the models just stop getting better from here.
I think it's that the guardrails will be more strict, which is unfortunately not good news.
I'm glad I don't own stock in a public Anthropic.
1. Release fable, highly nerfed and limited 2. See the compute capacity limiter pegged day after day 3. Lobby to the government, claiming ai is super unsafe and not aligned and they must do something 4. Government "forces" anth to turn off 5. Anth takes the pressure off of compute capacity, and gets to blame it on the govt
Like you're telling me fable is somehow an order of magnitude better than GPT 5.5 to the point where it compromises national security, despite evals and anecdotes saying otherwise? Nah.
Was their ongoing designation as a "supply chain risk", which they are suing to overturn in court, also a marketing stunt?
Seems like a really strange thing to use that sort of power for - why not just get all your competition declared persona non-grata and seize monopoly power?
“OK, Dario. Let’s start with you.”
“No! I meant regulations for other people!”
How will this be implemented/verified? Also, does this mean that American citizens abroad will still be able to access it?
We can cancel all those data center plans, won't need them anymore.
What’s not clear?
> 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
That is absolutely NOT what is being said there.
They are referring to a very specific thing that you must have clearly seen and chosen to ignore—a jailbreak for LLMs that is used on other models and to some effect with Fable 5.
If Fable 5/Mythos 5 are considered dangerous enough to invoke export controls on then future models are almost guaranteed to trigger the same process. Locking them down to US citizens is _very_ interesting. I don't think any tech company so far tracks licenses attached to citizenship.
The page showed June 11, 2026 and has now been updated to June 12, 2026 in the last 10m.
https://imgur.com/a/lx7HCW9
Edit:
Google mislabels crawl dates clearly my bad
https://imgur.com/a/EOWWUbD
That's the release blog post. Google is likely pulling the snippet from the Related Content section at the bottom, which includes the post about the US government directive.
Where'd you get this info? The imgur is the weakest thing one could've screenshotted. At least use archive.today or screenshot the evidence that Google crawled it.
This sounds exactly like the opening line from an apocalyptic sci-fi film.
All those $Billions of investments in AI Datacenters? Up in smoke if the models that are capable of replacing humans can't actually be used.
I wonder if 2008 style bailouts will be needed, soon.
That trillion-$SpaceX valuation based on $14B+$10B infusion from Anthropic and Google? Heard they have short-notice cancellation clauses.
Either this rule is rescinded quickly or the bubble bursts. Which shall it be? I know which one I'm betting on; do you?
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is an ai-model, if it can't speak?
https://youtu.be/l2ThMmgQdpE
Another interpretation, of course, is that this is just US putting a thumb on the scale for US competitors around IPO time. It will be interesting to see if there are any fingerprints.
There's no way they have the authority to actually order this and not just request this right? If crypto is speech... LLMs definitely are...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
AI is different though because these models are private, so they cannot really be considered to be "speech". Although if it were an open model it would likely be protected speech to release it.
Haven't they/we already, or am I just not interpreting the last decade or so of growing widespread insanity correctly?
https://xunroll.com/thread/2064776322979676227
Using combinations of jailbreaking-techniques including: writing cyrillic helped a lot to disarm the filter.
It's vitally important open source models are supported.
Additional theory: Altman is behind it.
So you spend billions of dollars training the model, only for it to be used in the US.
Then interesting to see where most of anthropic revenue comes from. If it's the US then they're fine but if it's global then they'll see a drop in revenue?
Then add to this decision, companies are going to significantly reduce their token spend.
So what does all of this mean for their IPO?
The most ethical goal of an AI lab or government should be to bring the maximum amount of intelligence for as cheap as possible to the people equally.
It would be hard to classify AI (or tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft) as “arms” that can be “borne” in that sense.
And? Computers are dual-use. Cars are dual-use. Telephones are dual-use. Freeze-dried chicken is dual-use.
Single-use, i.e. military only technology is actually pretty rare.
> This kind of posture is simply not tenable as frontier intelligence increases.
I reject the corpo speak that tries to brand these things as being "intelligent." They can be useful. But a language model cannot conjure a weapons platform from the ether no matter how "intelligent" it is.
But your statement could be rephrased as
> The most ethical goal of a weapons manufacturer or government should be to bring the maximum number of nuclear weapons for as cheap as possible to the people equally.
Making sure everyone is a strapped as possible only makes sense to the type of libertarians who salivate at the idea of shooting someone who steps on their property to deliver a letter
If it’s the latter then I missed the joke. If it’s the former I think you’re incorrect.
The Trump administration should focus on things like the UFC fight etc.
This also looks like the perfect China shaped gap in the market if there ever was one.
But a model that can provide general information, research, or source code for most modern technology?
It is really unusual that this is the first notice of this
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
Those who bribe Trump and do exactly his bidding (including helping out with war crimes and surveillance of US citizens) will be left alone, or even protected from competition and international law, as long as they keep giving Trump a taste. Those who balk, even a little, will be punished for it.
Republicans never wanted a free market, they just wanted a market that served their interests.
Russia and China could not dream of accomplishing the damage being done to US leadership in tech by our own government as we speak. If they have a wishlist, I'm sure it includes things like stopping immigration of scientists to the US, punishing innovators and elevating hucksters (make them trillionaires, for example), drive a wedge between the US and European allies, insure no one trusts hosting their data in the US or with US companies, erode democracy, and increase inequality especially at the margins (make the poor desperate and the wealthy beyond the reach of consequences).
It may be safer to just move the company to Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Down the rabbit-hole with me now to discover who said it first... LOL!
(Edit: Proving to be a fruitless quest thus far. Nobody seems to know.)
Sounds like they only want Americans to access SOTA AI.
On the one hand someone will subscribe $4.99 a month for TODO.app or calendar.com because they are paying for a solo dev or a small team to work on constant development and improvement of products filling a particular niche.
On the other hand, Linux, Django, PyTorch, React, Zed, Helix, Postgres, Arch, Chromium, Firefox, Rust, Python etc. ship continually improving, solid pieces of enormous infrastructure for free, to be used freely by all, off the back of hundreds if not thousands of active core developers. These projects and large and complicated. They are also commodities.
Then, ahem*, on the final hand there are of course Windows, Office, Adobe, macOS and iOS, et al which span both categories: monster projects that are also commercial and also commodities and yet they have hooked themselves into the world in such a way that most folks gotta pay for ‘em.
LLMs feel like they want to be in the same category as the OSs of yesteryear, with all the fanfare of major release versions named like 95, 98, 2000, XP… or like Leopard, Tiger, Yosemite, Sequoia. The training and evaluation pipelines might feel like they fall into those categories, but the models themselves — after all, distillations of someone else’s public or private IP — do not.
”In 1991, the United States Supreme Court in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co ended a seventy year struggle among federal circuits concerning copyright protection of factual compilations. Prior to this decision, courts allowed copyright protection for works if the compiler labored over his project, whether or not the work involved originality or creativity.” **
It might seem like a trivialization, but aren’t LLMs just telephone directories? Except instead of phone numbers of a public phone system they contain weights of a mind that’s read a public library? Such works might or might not be proprietary based on “sweat of the brow” copyright laws.
* after Niven/Pournelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand …
** https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
... Isn't that basically what Anthropic asked for, literally a week ago?
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...
> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.
Am I missing something?
>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.
What's obvious is that none of these models are dangerous in the least. The government knows this, so the motive behind their actions is something else. It's pretty obvious that they are trying to force Anthropic to implement some kind of ID verification system as this is the only way they can tell if a customer is a "foreign national" or not. Anthropic is being used as a pawn by the authoritarians, and they can't say they didn't ask for it.
[0] https://europe2031.ai
There we go. This should make nations consider whether they're letting their workforces become dependent on foreign tools, but of course they won't.
The people who are the smartest people full stop aren’t the leaders of these companies - they’re the people you never meet, who are working in the research department, begging not to be promoted into management.
“Wait what do you mean you’re banning it?”
They had better give me a refund!
E: I emailed them and got an AI email that said
"Hi Joe,
Thank you for reaching out about your Claude Max subscription refund request.
I attempted to evaluate the refund eligibility for your JG Games account, but unfortunately an error occurred during the process. I'm unable to complete your refund request at this time.
I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."
What the hell kind of support is that?
"How dare you release this model to poor people? This belongs only with the ultra-rich!"
They can say whatever they want... but I just have this gut feeling that this is part of it.
The only other relevant players are France and China.
Edit: Fable 5 was just disabled.
(2) I am really tired of the AI community trying to threaten everyone with grey goo and finding out the hype doesn't land comfy with others. It's a freaking text generator, not god in a pocket.
They aren't counter to the government, this is all kayfabe to introduce precedence for the US government to be justified in putting controls on AI, expect that by the end of the month there are discussions to regulate Deepseek.
It could be the case that Anthropic created this whole situation on their own, I figured they'd release a "dangerous" model at some point then piggy back off of bad outcomes to dig their regulatory moat
It could also be the case that Altman has close ties to the white house and is using regulatory levers on his competion.
I stand by that its all Kayfabe to make AI look more dangerous than it is (it cant even center a div reliably) to justify controls on Open Source.
Either deliver on your fuckass promise to end the world and replace everyone and make everything shitty forever or fuck off.
Shit or get off the pot already, clowns.
You bribe someone in the admin to restrict access after a couple of days of media blitz and user approval, locking in the honeymoon period that new model releases get (remember when GPT-4 was new?). The spooky factor gives it even more marketing, and just before the IPO the Trump admin frees Mythos and they make nice after the DoD debacle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498573
SpaceX IPO + https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership
*(ask it in a more stern voice)
Surprisingly, I've found this works shockingly well (along with any plausible-sounding reason why it was wrong of the model to refuse) to "jailbreak" many models I've played with thus far. They're all just so eager to please...
But what about the pelicans ?
(Ok gotta spend my upvote points somewhere)
pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered
Any company that uses Magaland LLMs should be aware of the very real Trump related risk.
What happens if the LLM your firm runs on is disabled tomorrow, because Trump wakes up feeling slightly annoyed...
"I think they are lying to you"
https://youtu.be/zfYsSFY4l18
Europe really needs to get some useful sovereign capability and right quick.
Yes, the US is pretty fucking corrupted right now, but I prefer its erratic, inept form to a silent, more competent authority that quietly consolidates power and control and implements surveillance without public debate.
Well you said it yourself they are erratic, so maybe?
There is something called the Streisand effect and they are about to unintentionally get a bunch of more token gamblers into their casino.
We'll see if this backfires hard, but then again constant doomsaying will get yourself under scrutiny and self exclusion (due to the 30+ day retention clause) and this is exactly what Anthropic wants for free marketing.
By thinking for ourselves and writing the code with the keyboard.
Laying the groundwork to limit access to high capability models
Wonder how many US-based early-stage startups are using Opus to research incorporating and moving overseas at this very moment.
EU isn’t tenable, UK is iffy. Australia? Thailand? Who wants to be innovation-friendly?
Although it's gonna be more difficult to come up with a Fable competitor than a m365 one
When you ask for regulation, you get regulated. Welcome to the real world
2. Get treated like you actually did what you claimed, and face consequences
3. ???
4. Profit
Dario, yesterday: "I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action."
Trump, today: Further action
Dario, today: "Waaaah! This petard I asked President Trump for hoisted my ass halfway to the Moon! Nobody warned me he'd do something like this! No fairrrr!"
The US has long been catastrophically corrupt, with a pay-to-play government, but this army of grifters and thieves have turned every dial to 11.
And now this. How would they even enforce this restriction when they can't know what nationality the end user behind some API query belonging to a company account has? It seems like nobody is thinking things through anymore and the end result is total unreliability from every angle. What a huge mess all of it, sigh.
> In fact, our safeguards are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad.