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The way I see it, a government led by an adult toddler and his sycophants has decided to punish a firm that refused to cooperate with it's military when it was embarrassed by a militarily weak adversary. The model strength spin strikes me as motivated reasoning.

The rubicon being crossed here is Republicans/the red tribe losing their comparative advantage of being opposed to overregulating a rapidly advancing technology.

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

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

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

> Anthropic got what they deserved

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

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

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

Anthropic will probably go for $2T IPO now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> Fable was the strongest model on the market

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree.

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

> but in practice, even if you are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They can't control what I run on my GPU. Exactly why local inference is so important.

This reads pretty one-sided.

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

To the EU.

The whole thing is theatre.

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

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

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

I can only say well played Anthropic.

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

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

What's the difference ?

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

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

You can't use it if you're American either.

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

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

100%. Isn't the US supposed to be all about Freedom? It's become a laughing stock.

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

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

There's no such thing as a "strong LLM".

The whole idea is a lie and a marketing stunt to prop up the US stock market.

I think it's too early to understand the ramifications but I agree this is a huge deal.

It's pathetic - this is all sleepy Trump getting back at them for saying no. That's all. Millions of people are affected by the mood of this shit-for-brains.

At first people said this was tin-foil hat territory. But ANYONE who publicly pisses this guy off, mysteriously get a government takedown weeks later. They're not even pretending anymore.

When Trump attacked them before because he wanted anthropic to decide who lives and dies, they said no. (That's probably a lie, I'm sure it has to do with money - but I digress).

So exec ban happened. Problem is - everyone uses claude. Microsoft is going through the same thing now. They find a way to use it anyway.

So they reverted it. What better way to go around circumvention than to just outright ban it.

Funniest thing - his own law makers are the ones who run on freedom and a nanny state. They are literally preventing us from using a tech "for our own safety" - can't get more nanny than that.

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

don't worry, these idiots can try, but it is too late for them :)

I lean libertarian but I can recognize the danger in having access to a machine that can craft pathogens to spec.

A pathogen with a very long incubation time and a high fatality rate would be about as bad as nuclear war. Maybe we need to figure out how to possibly defend against one person doing this before making it easy for anyone to do it.

No different from encryption

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

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

I mean, maybe in principle, but if the object is just hobbling Anthropic you might still get OpenAI's latest model without that much trouble.

It will just delay SOTA models to us by say 1 year. I’m actually ok with it given that’s it was entirely predictable any govt would do that to even strongish AI

“Fable was the strongest model on the market” - explain why anyone should believe that claim.

I’ve been trying to track LLM code generation adoption in the critical infrastructure world - as far as I can tell, it’s nill. Zero. Nada. Nobody is relying on these models to write secure code for anything where failure is catastrophic. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear reactors going into meltdown. Electrical grids loosing synchronicity. Lots of these BS claims from the marketing and investment crowd, but - it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.

The whole reason China open sourced its models in the first place was because nobody generally speaking really trusts China and Chinese deployed models (if they were proprietary)

and OSS models gave way to running it with freedom and security.

So OSS models have always tried to catch up to the frontier and lag behind 3-6 months. For my use cases, I am happy with current OSS models especially so if you let frontier-ish models design the plan with your input

If I were to suppose that China created a frontier model so good and far ahead, then I can understand if they don't open-source it. Qwen does it already with their Max models being closed-source.

but if you are suggesting that China in whole will remove itself from AI race, then 3 (or 4) possibilities can occur.

1. Some chinese companies might stop the production of OSS models if their names are known (z.ai etc.) but there are multiple other companies who are fighting with their research labs as well. They might create a decent model and OSS it to get known within world and China.

2. The whole Chinese economy (well similar to America, but to an even more extreme level from my understanding) depends on AI and is a bet on AI. They are funneling state and all bank money into these companies. From point 1, they wouldn't wish to be silent with frontier models and then lag behind and wait for other countries to catch up (point 3)

3. Europe(MistralAI)/India(SarvanAI? Kinda recent) will jump on the opportunity. (My point is that these two regions are trying to create their own models. How much they lack from the frontier is another thing but if China were to remove itself from the race, then they will have much more time to figure out how to make better models)

My point is that america and china are in arms race of closed source vs open source models. If china were to close source its models, they might simply lag behind and other countries will catch up.

4. Either that or you are right and we will have the current frontier OSS models and some more. IMO they are reasonably good as well and I used to wonder what would happen if say it would have been net good if AI was stuck at a similar level to sonnet 4.5 (IMO it was sweet spot), so I don't think that I am reasonably worried about it all. If absolutely need be, you can have an frontier model direct a plan and have OSS models do the grunt work.

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

That sounds so great.

> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer?

We will be not just safer but richer. These LLMs are like drugs that should absolutely not be cast freely into the highways and byways. My main worry is that this action will be a haphazard one-off and not part of a coherent plan of curtailing LLM propagation.

This is a very interesting perspective. However we always thought that the diffusion of ever stronger AIs was practically guaranteed by its competitive value- you might restrict what AIs are available in your country, but the impact on your economy can be dramatic if other countries have access to better models. In the end, it's hard to imagine governments blocking access to any AI that is just a bit better than what other countries have.

Pepperidge farm remembers when they banned G4 Macs for export as well

The LLM Euphorics—the types who might report about being poor for a few months because they “splurged” on a multi-tens of thousands of dollars LLM server—are now concerned about LLMs for the people. Yeah okay.

Those of us who are negative about AI for political reasons have been saying from the start that the biggest problem with AI is power. People can’t now all of a sudden be thinking that huh nation states have power (along with Big Tech and the rest of the power brokers).

But this is in fact quite a tortured fear, all wrapped up in the usual hyping—though this part is expected of LLM Euphorics. The usual story of simply making human labor less valuable and concentrating hardware for compute is just, you know, this rotten economic system working as it is intended. No need for weapons, subterfuge, three-letter agencies, much more straightforward, and just a natural evolution of X-CLASS CAPABILITIES.

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

It would be too naive to suppose that the strongest LLMs are available to plebs now.

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

I would be surprised if the public ever had anything close to the strongest LLM. It’s not like nuclear bombs were created by the private sector, then the government started the Manhattan Project and seized them all for itself.

They probably had Fable-quality models in 2016.

If there was ever a time to sell all your stocks and buy gold, this is it. NVIDIA to zero. This will make COVID look like a market hiccup.

Repeating from the duplicated thread:

First I want to see them play video games at a high skill level, preferably without any access to game state beyond the same visual output that humans have access to, like a raster frame X number of times per second. One LLM model played Factorio, albeit at a very, very poor level, which can be seen if you slow the video to 0.25 playback speed and pause frequently.

https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1u1blr6/claude_fa...

There have been streams of other games, where LLMs and AIs have likewise performed very poorly.

I recognize that LLMs might be better at language processing than these sorts of tasks. But being able to play video games is part of general capability. And this kind of hardcore video game playing, with no access to game state, is also a general task where feigning skill can be harder. If LLMs excel at pretending to be competent without actually being competent, like this AI training approach is arguably about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

Then some AIs might be trained and designed for deceiving humans instead of actually being competent and capable. And thus, one response is that they should be met with more difficult tests.

Basically, make tests that AIs or LLMs will not have an easy time cheating. Hopefully, that will engender research in greater LLM/AI competence, not in greater ability to cheat or deceive, neither for LLM/AI researchers and companies, nor for LLMs/AIs themselves.

Bigger picture is AI seems to advance at exponential rate

The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence. This is part of a clear historical record that is available for anyone to Google. Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.

Arbitrary imposition of export controls is also part of the history of frontier tech. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

This is good PR for them. They get to tweet about how scary and powerful their models are in the lead up to their IPO.

This affects more than just Anthropic. It's a game of thrones and everyone using this technology loses. I wouldn't cheer for that.

It's ironic isn't it? All the marketing of how dangerous and powerful Mythos is and the government went "bet".

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".

Serves them right

This is OpenAI and Meta using their leverage over the White House to screw over their competitor.

They obviously want heavy regulation to make sure they do not have to compete long term. This is all just part of the base strategy.

The administration should not be able to arbitrarily punish companies they don’t like. Full stop.

We need a neutral regulatory body for AI with objective, predictable standards. Not random bans based on whether the president likes you. Unless GPT 5.6 also gets a ban, this will look extremely bad for the administration.

Our economy depends on fair application of rule of law. Not anti-growth cronyism based on who is friends Trump.

The precedent set here would be broad and scary. Treating any API like an export makes it very easy for the administration to bully companies they disagree with.

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.

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.

Probably a marketing ploy. Inflate the value even more before an IPO, and Daddy Trump and his friends make a few $$$.

It'll be "resolved" within a few days.

I can only imagine how many engineers got fired when fable came out

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.

They ultimately got what they wanted.

And now is this going to be a one-off, or routine with every new generation of models?

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.

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.

They never claimed to be “so much ahead”, they just claimed to be honest.

Pay? This is the best marketing they could have hoped for.

Would be funny if they got themselves nationalized.

I mean, better safe than sorry, right Dario?

You call it scare-mongering. Others, serious thinkers and leaders in the AI and national security space, believe, maybe not scare-mongering enough.

AI is a national security issue. Best accept that as fact, or you won't see it coming.

> First, Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety and signs point to that still being the case

"omg these things are so so so dangerous, no one should ever build them, but anyways give me $7 trillion so we can build them and see for ourselves, it's OK because we're The Good Guys"

There are a lot of dangerous things in the world and surprisingly a lot of people can avoid the constant stream of chicken little nonsense.

If everyone expended the same amount of marketing effort trying to scare the ** out of everyone that Anthropic does, it'd be a very miserable world to live in.

We are unfortunately a captured audience and the autistic people at Anthropic are abusing this.

HN is mostly bitter cynics that think they understand AI safety better than the people that actually work on it.

I don't see any reason we should put weight behind their supposed fears today though. It's completely irrational to build the very thing you think could seriously harm or kill us all.

Yes they may have had those fears before, but even then it didn't stop them from building companies and running full speed towards the end goal with little to no effort spent on meaningful safety efforts.

The idea that the government introduced export controls on it because they "fell for the marketing" is stupid. It's much more likely they're being vindictive. There's plenty of evidence that that's how the current government acts.

  Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety

Anthropic is just another company of, in my opinion, money-hungry sociopaths; they are not that different from the OpenAI bros.

So yeah, play stupid games - win stupid prizes.

> 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".

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

> punitive

Not only that, but also a golden opportunity to flex the muscle of anti-immigration.

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

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

> 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.

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

"They were asking for it"

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

Nothing is funny about LLMs being restricted like air travel.

My first thought is that this government-Anthropic feud is good publicity for both of them.

  - Anthropic is seen as a victim/hero
  - They get Government-endorsed model hype
  - Monday will be a bad publicity day with the new Agent SDK limits, this overrides/dominates the headlines

  - The government gets to appear like they're ahead of the curve
  - The government gets to appear forcible and weapons-conscious (and maybe earn some right-wing points)

People always exaggerate the thing they don’t understand.

I wonder if there even is a real vendetta. How many people in the administration / friendly with the administration would benefit financially from the IPO? Maneuvers like this still pump more air into the hype balloon. I suspect that Anthropic and its backers did not enjoy the many "meh" reviews that Fable has received for its modest bump in output quality.

That or an excuse to put controls on all AI and massage the message for why we have to ban Deepseek.

Where's the people who complain about the government picking winners? Strange that they suddenly travel somewhere without internet or lose their vocal cords.

I find it funny that AI keeps getting bigger, and the mental gymnastics needed to trivalize the progress get bigger as well - ie the government shutdown an AI model twisted into now even the government is being tricked.

Everyone is tricked except me. Only I know AI isn't as smart as everyone thinks it is.

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

I wouldn't say so. Once upon a time, a PlayStation 2 was too powerful to export: https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...

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.

> 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 predict in future the best frontier models will be gatekept solely to the wealthy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any other scenarios?

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

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

Chaos is a ladder, gotta keep climbing

There's an obvious rug pull coming on AI.

>> Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?

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

Simple solution (for now): don't do it under US jurisdiction.

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

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

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

We definitely reached the available capability plateau. You are 100% correct IMHO.

Eh, not any different than the performative encryption restrictions from decades past.

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.

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.

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510010

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

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

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

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?

Aren't biggest Qwen 3.7 closed? I don't suspect China's policy here would be anything but ruthless.

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

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

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

Wait until it is illegal to download or use Chinese models (only half-joking).

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

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

Not really, they are not even as good as opus 4.7

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

No one serious is using the open models. Using them is like traveling back 2-2.5 years in time and using ChatGPT.

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!

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.

Likely models by Anthopic can no longer be reliably trusted as it'll subtly sabotage your codebase you're working on.

Gov just need some national security orders for Anthopic not disclose it to the public and to implement whatever they've done to Fable 5 to existing models.

No no, you never ever build ON the models. You build WITH the models.

Never let a 3rd party LLM be the core of your product or it can be changed or taken away at any moment.

What you do is use the frontier models to build a deterministic set of tools that does what you want and MAYBE put in a small core of LLM for the ambiguous stuff you can't make deterministic (yet).

And make sure you can swap that LLM core to any other provider (even local) and have a playbook ready for that.

I mean, lots of Americans would risk building something important with it in that case.

The can’t comply even if they wanted to because employees: Most frontier staff is foreign origin.

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54695598

And they just had their TAM killed days ahead of IPO.

Based on all I know about Deemed Exports wrt software and current US controls on software Deemed Exports, your read is spot on.

The phrasing of the foreign nationals implies a Deemed Export control, which is already in place for software for stuff like drones or space satcomms.

If it's a Deemed Export control, it's a strategic position and not a knee jerk reaction about cybersecurity threats.

It's a coherent read too; if Fable can solve coding and build biological weapons (X to doubt) - well then terminal guidance and autonomous drone controls should be a piece of cake for it and that software is already under Deemed Export restrictions.

> I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen.

They literally say this is why.

I find it most likely that this export ban means only USG has access to Mythos/Fable rn. Given the reports of NSA and DoD using Mythos it's now being given a near weapons-grade status by the government.

Even if they could practically restrict access to US citizens only, I would expect them not to - it would be hard to regain that once lost and they need a global market for growth.

Your defending the US Administration wanting ID verification built into our devices like going through airport security because you think they think it is 'pro-US'?

Such a shame this super intelligent, super dangerous AI can't make a website that doesn't look like an 11 year old's MySpace page, or make their "Game engine TUI" not flicker.

Horrific color contrast juxtaposed next to being banned due to national security threat.

I laughed, asking it to write it's eulogy was a good use of tokens

This page could act as effective counterpoint to the claim that the model is dangerously smart.

Damn, that beam of light was a flashbang. I wouldn't call this tasteful UI design, but maybe I just need to go to sleep.

I am just glad we know that was the result of a prompt written by an American. USA! USA!

First time seeing an HTTP 451 in the wild for me.

Edit: I take it back. Just a 200 in a trenchcoat.

this is absolute slop, terrible, and beautiful in the way that all Fable work is beautiful, terrible, and slop.

goodbye.

I'm annoyed at how short the eulogy is, impressively annoying beam of light shining through the text, making it hard to read. hats off to Fable!

Ah right the super-smart model which had to be banned created this terrible looking website. Hmm...

In my experience, US citizens are completely blind to how much stuff like this makes citizens of other countries hate their government (which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens; not that I condone hating any group of people based on the actions of their state)

The US has spent the last 12ish years betting that they're the only country that matters, but the end of result of that is that somehow when I talk to Australians in my age group the average person has a more positive opinion towards China even than the US.

So you're going to use DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi and Mistral now? I tried them, and they really fall short of GPT and Claude.

Without access to US models, I'd be limited to asking simple questions in chat interfaces and maybe some grunt work in coding CLIs, but even that the weak models will mess up.

Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience, which also aligns with what the labs themselves admit ("near-frontier").

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?

Absolutely - there's already a bill in congress for this - the GUARD Act: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5858006-senate-panel-a...

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.

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.

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.

ID checks are possible for first-party harnesses...but they would also mean no more API access. Your wrapper could easily become a way for a foreign national to query Fable. Maybe a few large customers like Cursor would work with Anthropic to prove they had implemented ID checks themselves as well in their own products, but being able to just get an API key and have your product call frontier models may be over.

Yeah, I'm expecting that Opus 4.8/5.5 tier will be the best models we have access to without having to provide more ID than just credit card info. If that happens, it'll end my brief stint of paying for these models instead of working within the bounds of local ones.

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.

They would have to verify every user is a US citizen, which would not go down well to say the least. Maybe we'll get insane KYC regulations for AI models!

This honestly just reads as harassment to me. Trump has publicly declared that he wants the federal government to own a piece of big AI companies. And not for any particular civic interest, just because he wants money and power. This feels like a first test balloon of extorting some equity stake.

Yep. This is more about the Trump administration’s vehement anti-immigrant stance than anything.

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...

> I predict the pressures for on-prem, offline access ... will be overwhelming and one the players will fill the need.

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.

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.

Likely many points along the pareto frontier.

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.

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 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.

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...

Why? None of the various cloud provider outages ever have.

Kicking Russia out of SWIFT was 100% the right move. And they need to be kicked way harder so they knock the fuck off.

>Now they are betting that Mythos will provide them with some edge. Personally, I don't believe that Mythos is such a game changer They're just buying their own hype.

They just ran the entire Iran campaign on Opus. They know what that can do, they know what this can do.

this is the take.

> Just to give some random examples: the weaponization of the banking system (kicking Russia out of swift

I do wonder why that happened. Hmm.

It's almost like Russia invaded Europe...

So the Imperium from 40k?

The scope of who is allowed to continue using it sounds like it is aligned with other US export controls (like ITAR and EAR).

Yes, because this government is known for its subtlety…

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.

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"

This administration is not known for their well calculated decisions

No, it’s about Amodei refusing sucking Hegseth's dick a few months ago.

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.

It’s also punitive - Anthropic can’t comply, it locks their research staff which is, like any frontier lab, mostly international out.

The objective isn’t national security because we already know how that goes https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54695598

There’s no path to compliance and the decision is arbitrary - the model capabilities are not officially assessed by any visible criteria and it prevents export of models based on these non criteria forward.

All days before IPO.

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.

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.

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.

If this gets 5.5 banned I am going to be hopping mad.

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.

Reading comprehension failure on display here from maxall4.

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.

The issue is that it’s fundamentally a religious organization. All religious orgs do things that seem irrational / harmful to unusual groups / off-kilter from capitalist orgs.

It would be nice if they slid on over to a more typical presentation in the market — but I think they’ll need to experience a fair amount more pain to really change behavior - it’s embedded in their minds as proper, safe and ethical, and they’re currently sitting on tons of cash.

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.

I love the UI in the screenshot. Which interface is it?

It would be very funny if the UK were to put export controls on Gemini 3.5 Pro.

We’re all just going to use Opus, GPT or Gemini let’s be honest

There is also Poolside (France/America) and Aleph Alpha (Germany).

If the US gov does try to limit all frontier models from being used outside the US, I wonder how that would go with Google and Deepmind?

I asked it to tweak the fonts/colors of a very very simple static page and it blew through $35 (which is a lot for me lol; it's 10 days of my monthly codex plan).

If I used a racecar to go 25mph in a residential neighborhood, I’d make a similar conclusion.

But in the end it's all just a deceptive theater.

While Anthropic publicly claims to refuse to help the MIC with warfare and surveillance, behind closed doors, Anthropic actively deploys its engineers and models to assist the NSA with espionage and offensive cyber warfare. Just look at the many contradictions:

* Anthropic secretly sent its own engineers directly to the NSA to deploy its (at that time unreleased) model "Mythos"[2,7]

* While the Pentagon has publicly labeled Anthropic a "supply-chain risk", the Trump administration has simultaneously been working hand-in-hand with Anthropic behind the scenes to secure its upcoming initial public offering (IPO)[1]

* If the U.S. government truly believed Anthropic was a national security threat, it would completely isolate the company. Instead, the Trump administration has actively encouraged major American banks and financial institutions to use Anthropic's models[1]

* Anthropic is heavily embedded within Palantir, the foundational data platform of the Military-Industrial Complex[3][4]

* Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense operates hand-in-hand with Palantir. Ukraine uses a specialized Palantir AI platform called PRISMA to fight Russian forces. Anthropic's language models power the text and data analysis within this system[4]

* Ukraine uses Anthropic-backed Palantir software in secretive command centers to coordinate its aggressive long-range drone campaign inside Russian territory[8]

* Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has stated that the company will not allow its AI to power fully autonomous weapons that take humans out of the loop. However, in Ukraine, the AI functions as a decision-support tool. Because a human commander makes the final choice to press the button or launch the drone, Anthropic's terms of service are not technically violated. This allows Anthropic to protect its "ethical AI" brand while still letting its technology serve as a vital asset for Western-backed military operations[5]

Remember the Minab school attack, where the U.S. Military killed 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren[6]? Given all the evidence it's highly likely that Palantir and Anthropic played and still play a major role in perpetrating the war of aggression and all the crimes involved.

Personally, I find it morally unacceptable to use U.S. AI tools, because I do not want to support them financially and thus support the crimes they are involved in.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/blacklist...

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-dod-blacklist-cour...

[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/12/karp-palantir-anthropic-clau...

[4]: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/what-is-palantirs-prisma-the...

[5]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

[7]: https://archive.is/DyuAv

[8]: https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/palantirs-prisma-how-an...

> 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!

What is this comment? If they occurred we would face a huge disaster; isn't it better to err on the side of caution to make that risks as low as possible???

My smoke detector has gone off three times now, where is the fire?

>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.

Try...since GPT 2.

https://naokishibuya.github.io/blog/2022-12-30-gpt-2-2019/

This is not legislation.

You'd need to relocate all employees and close all offices in the US. I don't know any Anthropic employees, but I guess their moral has limits and they would never do that. They would also lose valutable time and fall behind openai during that time.

The US would nationalize Anthropic before they allowed that

I laughed out loud. Do you understand in the EU Anthropic wouldn’t even be possible? Why do you think Mistral is so far behind?

Also, as a US citizen Dario is subject to US law regardless of where he lives.

The US loves throwing its weight around via the US treasury and threatening countries with banning their ability to transact in U.S. Dollars, hence how the Obama administration turned every global bank into a dragnet for enforcing its draconian global taxation scheme on non-residents via FATCA.

The US has too much power, period. Doesn’t matter who’s in power, both parties abuse it. China rising to be a real counterbalance is a good thing imo.

Look at what the EU have done with Apple intelligence. Knowing the EU it wouldn't be long before Anthropic are on the wrong end of some regulation to force open model weights or some such madness.

Yeah pretty sure this will be reversed as soon as certain someone acquires a hefty amount of pre IPO shares

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.

> I don't think any tech company so far tracks licenses attached to citizenship.

Access to certain software being gated on one's citizenship is not at all new.

§ 734.13 Export.

(b) Any release in the United States of “technology” or source code to a foreign person is a deemed export to the foreign person's most recent country of citizenship or permanent residency.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII...

The rule in this form seems to go back to at least mid-1990s.

I held jobs at multiple U.S. companies, not personally working on anything remotely sensitive. My experience has been that it's completely standard practice to be asked to sign some U.S. export control papers.

No, this is about the fragile ego of the President taking petty revenge on a company the didn't go along with every whim of his administration.

He asked for an independent body.

This is explicitly not what Dario asked for in his blog. Care to quote his post for me where you feel that he asked for this?

Please tell me how this is what he “asked for.”

It appears to be working for me, but... Maybe it's silently degrading? It's hard to say.

It is gone for me now.

> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it.

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

And now we're done. Oh well.

ssshhhh don't tell anybody it's still working, i have some stuff to do :-)

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)

I still also have access, so either they silently reroute Fable 5 to Opus 4.8 or hasn't actually pulled the switch yet.

This is just Anthropic being nice enough to wean us off before the 22nd.

Edit: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

It identifies as Fable 5 for me, but it could just be Opus with the Fable system prompt.

> 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.

No, still cracking on with a bug fix. Definitely feels like it's still Fable.

Just turned off for me on Claude Code. Good while it lasted.

Still works for me but I don't know if it's gaslighting me or not... fool me once situation here...

Working fine for me.

I lost it just now. Had a workflow running. :(

shush, lol

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.

Not working for me.

DELETE THIS

I found it tripped in most laughable situations by mere were words that could be related in some way to hacking but are in common use in programming. I would have to go back, examine my prompt for word that could be use in another context and replace it with a synonym.

Yea I managed to cure cancer and build a global utopia with it! It wasn’t just 14% better at coding...

/s

Thinking of it unfortunately there is good chance it exactly what they want for regulatory capture.

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.

> 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.

Their hubris just became lethal for their business. Whoops, I guess.

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.

> As we have stated publicly, we want the government to ban the other guys, not us

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.

It can’t be; that’s why they shut it off for everybody.

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

> we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers

What’s not clear?

Once a spec becomes sufficiently large and detailed and complicated, it becomes very difficult to ensure it is internally consistent. That's why I start every project with a METASPEC.md so that Claude can break up the task of writing SPEC.md into manageable steps.

How do you avoid interruptions for permission? dangerously skip permissions, or is there something less nuclear than that? For me I guess the only less nuclear thing I can think of is running on a sacrificial machine. Is there any better way?

Unless there is major administration change, how do things not get worse and worse from here? LLM's will only get more intelligent and be seen more of a national security risk. This brings the surveillance state deeper into every web connected device.

The real reason behind this is that Fable was not well received due to costs and unpredictable quality so they are shifting blame to the government.

Yeah, and how are you preparing?

> "Lets hope our vibe government and vibe society and vibe president don’t get prompt injected"

Haven't they/we already, or am I just not interpreting the last decade or so of growing widespread insanity correctly?

It shows the same for this thread.

https://imgur.com/a/EOWWUbD

> 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.

You are so desperate to prove some sort of conspiracy that you’re throwing all critical thinking out the window.

Agreed 100%. I don't understand why we have to fear access to knowledge.

This is precisely the issue. It took a fair amount of idealism, conviction, and commitment in order to create the open source movement and bring it to where it is today. In contrast, most skilled data science practitioners are just chasing IPO exits these days.

AI is dual use technology. This kind of posture is simply not tenable as frontier intelligence increases.

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

China already won when 空降美国人 were created 20, 30 years ago.

I think we’ve already seen that export controls help your competitor in the long term. First europe would turn to Chinese models, then if china was daft enough to stop that (why would they? It would bring the end of American hegemony) then europe will just develop their own.

The difference between America and europe isn’t technical ability. It’s access to funding and ambition. Export controls would fix that. In fact, I think the trump administration is already driving a boom in London.

unless they managed to hire enough smart Chinese CS PhDs living in Europe.

you do understand that the whole thing is Chinese in China vs Chinese in America?

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

I would bet they can't afford to operate them at the advertised price and this gives them a way to save face.

I'm not. The political alignment of this site is very evident.

Different taste? The main advertising line for mythos was that it was too dangerous to let people use it?

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.

US has banned export of cryptography. They are extending such claims for national security reason to AI model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

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.

In one hand I think we should react quickly, one another hand maybe we should let people talk a bit more and wait for a bubble crash and better LLM inference hardware.

Yes plus Opus-class models will deteriorate with ads and user manipulation injected into them, until they lose their usefulness.

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.

It's a pretty big difference in quality, definitely no. I'll miss Fable a lot, it was the first time when the model was able to catch up with my abandoned compiler project, and it did it extremely well, I have seen nothing like this so far.

So is Fable 5 so "good" that I barely noticed any difference when switching back to Opus 4.8, or is it because it's actually Fable 5 now?

That's a huge grasp. Anthropic have been making this bed for years now. Altman did not need to do a single thing for this outcome to materialize.

I'm from Europe, but I think this move can actually achieve America First, at least as a first-order effect. The model is incredibly strong; I've used it for a few days. It gives anybody with access a serious boost. If they also take Opus and GPT5.5 away from me it's going to really be a drop in productivity.

Anthropic is one of the main deals for SpaceX.

Yeah LOL ... "It should've been OpenAI not us!"

lol

I am certain this is hype. Tomorrow, they can release Opus 4.9 and claim it is 99.99% close to Fable.

The problem with the EU is that they havent yet figured out that datacentres dont run on virtue signaling

It’ll be sorted out after OpenAI releases their next model.

There goes my plan for the weekend though

I mean yes? It's the American government, and that's how us export controls work?

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

Ugh.

Well said though. Anthropic's actions aren't inspiring confidence in me as a subscriber. Looks like we're moving towards a world where companies can simply change the terms of the subscription after the fact, consumer rights be damned.

I'm just a small fish (subscribe to the Max 5x plan), but I'm sure I'm not alone in my inclination to consider canceling my subscription with Claude and stop giving $$$ to Anthropic.

Also what if you subscribed in reaction to the release of Fable? Now you're holding the bag and good luck getting reimbursed!

Great time to remind people that this is meant to be a curse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...

it already blocks users from Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Russia etc

I would be worried if I was banking on that deal.

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?

Yes, it's marketing straight out of the Big Tobacco playbook. Convince everyone your product is dangerous, get government to ban it, and then... uh... pivot into adjacent market segments?

Hi dang, sorry to reply here, I've emailed [email protected] twice about my account umjunsik132 being shadowbanned but haven't heard back in 18 days. It was flagged after I accidentally submitted a link with /#. Would really appreciate if you could take a look. Thanks.

Yes, I had to start using more fable to not waste all that usage by Sunday and figured I broke it myself.

Yep I had 100% weekly usage and it was cleared. Hooray I guess

I've been using the model for a few days and it really is incredibly strong. It gives anybody with access significant power. You can't deny that. I've used all large models (~1T) to get a feel for the difference, and it's real.

US employers absolutely do know that, they are required to have proof you can work in the US.

To make the problem worse, everyone outside of the USA now has to decide the risk of this further escalating. Is this the first of many similar decisions to come?

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.

Ooh Mythos - I am so scared. Nobody gives two shits about one model or the other. They are hoist by their own petard.

Not really, the impacts on education seem to be severe. People are actively getting dumber.

I think even Anthropic is very happy about it. It makes them look very advanced. But we all can see this is fake drama.

As someone who's also worried about delegating too much thinking to LLMs, I wonder if letting your own citizens use the good models is detrimental.

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.

Ah, so US citizens are so pure of heart that they can have access it's just the smelly ferigners that must be locked out?

> other nations will nationalise what they can

The only other relevant players are France and China.

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?

I'm confused? Do they need this? They have our credit cards, that's fully KYCable

Am I missing something?

That's in the article:

>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.

I'm glad that Android developers will continue to have a job for the foreseeable future and that RSI is forestalled. Those are more important to me than you getting a cheap slopapp

Is there any evidence, anything whatsoever, that would convince you the models actually are so powerful?

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.

As a European, we obviously want to, but are systemetically incompetent on every level. It permeates everything. Even if tides were to change rapidly, it would require decades of growth. The US has been consistently marinating themselves in their odd but productive culture for decades and it has paid off.

It arguably started after WW2 when the transistor was invented; appearantly it was also simultaneously invented in France, but just never got the kind of serious development that it got in the US.

Domestic AI means spinning up new fabs I think, and maybe power. Maybe an entirely new foundry could work. Or market dynamics and/or architectures change and it becomes 10x cheaper to run a 1T-class model.

Would you think so? The marketing gain seems to be on ... Mistral side! And IPO of a company that just got their user base cut off their product ...

I think it's being silently downgraded. Can't tell for sure.

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.

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!"

*(ask it in a more stern voice)

That's actually a good point. I had Fable available almost immediately under my Copilot subscription and never bothered to use it even to say hello.

But from what I hear, Fable looks like an incremental update, with improved behavior imprinted by training.

Something that you could theoretically approximate by using a good set of instructions and model orchestration (tweaking the session life cycle, using a second model to understand user intentions, using a third model to prevent drift, ...).

If the above is true, the only discriminator would be user effort.

If Fable is dangerous, then we are still in danger right now, and have been for the last few months at the very least.

And the US gov could pull the rug out from under our business at any time? That's confidence inspiring?

How is this good for their long term revenue?

What's the alternative to the us and silicon Valley? Companies were trying to make Austin happen and that was a failure. Now one talks about that anymore.

Where does the quote in your profile come form?

"It is unfortunate that a large number of users here are not hackers, not even in an idealistic philosophical sense, and will betray the public good for their own short-term gain. You either unite the world or you divide it."

The people there genuinely thinking that AI could end up being more dangerous than nuclear bombs or COVID or anything else as well as a decisive national security tool. There is theoretical backing for that as well as lately practical results. I don't really understand the hand waiving about drama even if you don't personally share those concerns.

To hell with mythos, I want the marketing bot.

Surely they can and will but it's Friday and immediately complying generates headlines.

Probably silently rerouting?

Feudals doing backroom deals.

SpaceX IPO + https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership

  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