As much as it’s tempting to read some kind of ulterior motive into this, I think the most reasonable explanation is that AWS, as perhaps the single biggest point of failure in the backbone of US IT infrastructure, has legitimate concerns about its ability to fend off attacks from bad actors armed with the most advanced models.
Everyone is assuming this isn't a positive outcome for Anthropic. Think about the optics: everyone was shitting on Anthropic for silently downgrading Fable. Now that is forgotten, they have a chance to spend a week or two revising their approach, then will come out with a "Gov't approved" version and life goes on.
Most importantly, Anthropic has been too "uppity" and needed to be put in their place by the powers that be. Power hates disruption. Restrictions, control (and investment) are defenses against transformative tech. Amazon needs Anthropic to bend the knee for their investment to have long term value - the sooner the better.
> Everyone is assuming this isn't a positive outcome for Anthropic
It’s not. Shitting on or not, Fable was being used and clearly folks were running up bills. This is political retribution against Anthropic, pure and simple. The fact that Anthropic may be able to spin that doesn’t change what it fundamentally is.
Sure, and at the end, there will be one of Trump's kids or friends on the board at Anthropic, and probably with access to pre-IPO stock at a nice friendly strike price.
Surely not at all a coincidence that this all shook out right after Anthropic filed for IPO, and SpaceX IPOd with a nice giant valuation.
Given everything that happened in Iran this spring, with constant stock pump and dumps, tweets timed to market events, etc. the default analysis of everything the feds do should be: how is this enriching Trump and his buddies?
If the end goal is that only regulated US companies can use Fable, that is a pretty good outcome for Amazon, and also for Jeff Bezos's new startup which aims to use AI to monopolize large industries that depend on advanced engineering in the physical world.
>If the end goal is that only regulated US companies can use Fable, that is a pretty good outcome for Amazon
It's a terrible outcome for Amazon because it destroys Anthropic's revenue. Roughly half of Anthropic's customers are foreigners, and they wouldn't use Anthropic if its next generation model was banned while other providers' next generation models aren't. And if the US follows through and bans all Mythos-level models for foreigners, then in 6-12 months the entire global market will be overtaken by China when its models catch up, and Amazon will lose money on its investment in OpenAI too.
Immediate revenue impact is basically 0 - nobody cancels their Claude sub because Fable isn’t why they got it in the first place (by nobody I mean like 1% of total users and they’re likely net neutral tokenmaxxers for revenue).
Signal to OpenAI and Google is clear: can’t release too smart models or they get controlled. It follows there is no danger to revenue since other providers are forced to plateau at the same level.
…which puts the whole train the next model business idea a risky proposition since the training can’t ever pay for itself - but USG really wants you to keep training, so guess what happens?
Oh and re China - if you think they’ll release an open Mythos-class model, I have a bridge to sell.
Seems like estimates are that 70-85% of their revenue comes from API usage/pricing, so some users switching from Opus to Fable for that would've had a big impact
Then there's people switching from GPT 5.5 or upgrading their subscriptions, and Fable being scheduled for removal from subscriptions on the 23rd
I think it's just to hype Anthropic. Check it out, we have products so dangerous the government banned them, we must be so advanced. (Their competitors cannot make such a claim.)
You think Dario called up Andy Jassy and told him "Hey, we're trying to get Fable banned, so can you please go talk to the government and tell them that they need to ban it"?
He's always talking about how dangerous AI is, how the models he's building could be used for cyber attacks, and how if his company is successful then at least 50% of the white-collar workforce will lose their jobs.
Doesn't seem that unlikely he might say something like that.. Unless he's super-villain evil it sounds like he believes the government needs to do something?
> But Amazon has a fairly large equity position in Anthropic. Why mess with that?
Read the fine prints. None of these hyperscaler deals are $ for equity. It's some provide hosting, rentals etc. With how things are going they can just find another customer.
I would speculate that they were concerned, as many people familiar with frontier AI models are, that they are dangerous and could be misused to do bad things.
Everyone assumes that it is business motivated. Perhaps, but perhaps that business motivation is the fact that this group at Amazon had reportedly many past interaction with the Administration about AI safety, and this being just the latest interaction.
If Amazon's stake in Anthropic goes up 10x, but American national security is fatally compromised in the process, I kinda doubt that's net profitable for Amazon. They're not going to be able to deliver in 2 days or hit AWS sales targets if everyone's drowning in cyberattacks.
Isn't that what the entire billionaire class has been doing for decades though? Making profit go up and up while destroying national security? They don't seem to feel it's a net negative.
No? I'm really not sure what you could be referring to. Tech billionaires are if anything too willing to follow the government's lead on national security; they don't seem to have particularly minded the whole PRISM saga, even knowing that it would fatally compromise their relationships with privacy organizations.