[zmmmmm]

I think it's a near universal phenomenon that people with extraordinary amounts of power become victims of their own hubris. Once you get sufficiently decoupled from the consequences of your own actions, it is near impossible to tether yourself to a calibrated sense of reality.

So I genuinely think that Amodei thought here that he was building a moat - set a very high bar for safety at exactly the line Anthropic but nobody else meets, and then declare anything less to be too unsafe to be allowed. That would put a permanent halt to open models, Chinese models and throw a significant barrier in front of competitors - if OpenAI is about to release something competitive with Mythos, they would have to immediately double back and implement at least equivalent safeguards. It might cost them months at the most critical juncture in Anthropic's history, when they are filing for IPO.

Having said this, I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their own model being restricted. They probably still see it as a win because it acts as a strong endorsement of them as the market leader and the model as the most powerful available model. So I think both things are true, but we are in the "plan B" scenario now rather than "plan A".

[matheusmoreira]

> I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their own model being restricted.

Doubt. Had they foreseen this, they would have started verifying the identity of their customers. That would have allowed them to keep their US customers when the US government banned foreign persons from accessing Fable. Since they were forced to turn off Fable for everyone, it follows that they were not prepared for that possibility at all.

[CamperBob2]

The big problem Anthropic faces isn't implementing a KYC workflow, but the fact that many if not most of their own employees are no longer allowed to work on Fable/Mythos.

[dannyw]

Also their API customers and downstream customers (e.g. Cursor users) would also need similar infra, and probably a decent amount of users would just choose another model that doesn't require ID & an immigration status check.

And API is much more profitable (relatively) than subscribers for them.

[i67vw3]

I think it will atleast take one month to set up correct flow for user authentication for both their subscribers and for API's (Cursor etc).

Others are thinking such a export control ban is good for them as it shows entire world Anthropic models are best, I disagree. It will wreck the company, IPO considerations etc, when the models may be best but their are no users to use them.

If such an export control ban stays in place for this particular model or future models of Anthropic, revenue will be affected. My guesss is around 50% of subscribers are non-US citizens, meaning direct 50% revenue loss.

Altman/Musk used to also do moral superiority, "Dangers of AI", lobbying to ban "non-safe" models etc. But they largely stopped doing it after 2025. While Anthropic/Dario increased the intensity of moral authority, and got hit back with exactly they were asking for.

[matheusmoreira]

What a hilarious situation. Clearly, they never even imagined their precious government regulation would be turned against them.

[zmmmmm]

> they would have started verifying the identity of their customers.

Very good point. Yes i think this part goes to hubris. Amodei probably didn't think the ban would cut along those lines if it happened. And in fact it wouldn't surprise me if the government specifically made it that way (singling out foreign nationals) as a way of punishing Anthropic for putting them in this position. It's clear they absolutely hate being dictated to by anybody, but especially Amodei and they probably thought through what would hurt them a lot to implement and deliberately made it that way.

[d1sxeyes]

Unless, conspiracy hat on, they wanted to be prevented from serving Fable because it's too expensive for them to run, and they want some external authority to blame for shutting down access.