Is regulation unregulated in the US? As in it’s missing consistency and transparency. Beyond Anthropic, the US signals to the world that depending and using American solutions is high risk. Is that what the US government desires? The digital battleground across regions is on the rise. I don’t see us as the US on the right path.
In the US regulation is, in theory, regulated by Congress, which passes laws granting regulation powers to the federal agencies. Congress and the laws it passes are, in theory, regulated by the Constitution, and interpretation thereof by the Supreme Court.
Regulation is always by motivation. Charges can be delayed, cops can decide not to arrest, prosecutors can decide not to prosecute, etc.
Government was supposed to be high-trust, but Nixon weakened the trust, Reagan explicitly took aim at it and lots of people went along. Now the reactionaries run things. Cancer in the brain.
Well, that and, by passing additional legislation.
There's two parts to this. The first is that in most cases, the issues stem from lack of clarity in existing legislation, or contradictions thereof. At anytime, if Congress does not like the way the Supreme Court ruled, they can pass different legislation.
The second stems in part from the first. If what Congress passed is interpreted as being unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the States can amend the constitution.
There is no case where the Supreme Court can (in principle) simply make their own rules*
The debate and controversy comes where the Supreme Court is seen as making their own rules (or arguably asked to) because the legislative process is deemed too cumbersome or disadvantageous to a party. In my opinion, this is where a lot of the difficulties lie, in that the Supreme Court is asked to rule on matters that really should be more clearly legislated. But the issues are seen as easier/quicker to address by convincing 9 justices rather than two legislative bodies and a chief executive. Naturally, this brings it's own consequences.
US Constitution Article III Section 2 Clause 2 which says the supreme court's appellate jurisdiction is subject to "Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." So Congress could, for example, require the supreme court to hear every case appealed to them instead of letting the justices pick their cases. Or it could require judges to recuse themselves if there is a conflict of interest*. Or it could forbid the court hearing cases where an en banc appeals court was unanimous.
* which could have more teeth than the self-imposed ethics rules for conflict of interest that the court has now.
The US desires to show its own citizens and the world how painful it is not to submit to the US government. They're leveraging everything they've got.
The only rational response when faced with this sort of behavior is to reduce dependence on and exposure to the US as much as possible. Develop national technology. Dedollarize the economy. Invest in and use open weight models.
> Is regulation unregulated in the US? As in it’s missing consistency and transparency.
Institutions are not built around zero trust. Because when we assume attackers are identifiable, and there is some level of integrity, that makes things a lot simpler and cheaper.
I will not expect my pediatrician to want to kill my child and they certainly could, but it would be completely bonkers to try to guard against that.
The level of damage that a single really motivated, disgruntled person with a lot of power can do in most settings is intense. The cost inflicted if we tried to build guardrails against all of it is insane, and it probably would never work.
Actually, the traditional guardrails we've always had are plenty. If a doctor starts trying to kill patients they are removed from society (they go to jail for a long time).
Traditionally this was applied to people in power with the power of a good old fashioned lynch mob. If you obtain great power and use it to start hurting large numbers of people, the citizenry at large would drag that person out into the street and behead or beat them to death.
It worked pretty well for all societies throughout history, including the West. If a person becomes a danger to society, they should be removed from society with proportional prejudice. That's the guardrail society has always had.
Problem is now that those in power have managed to convince large fractions of the population that it's wrong to say mean things about sociopathic mass murderers and child rapists or the guy who is actively trying to kill you personally.
> If a doctor starts trying to kill patients they are removed from society (they go to jail for a long time).
Unfortunately we don't seem to have the ability to do the same for corporations. If a person starts killing or robbing people, they get arrested and are removed from society. If a corporation starts killing or robbing people, they maybe get a strongly worded letter, maybe have their CEO say a few words in front of Congress, and maybe get a token fine amounting to 0.001% of their revenue (which they will appeal for ten years). But for whatever reason, we don't seem to have the guts to remove a badly behaving corporation from society--no matter what heinous things they are doing, no matter what laws they are breaking.
> Problem is now that those in power have managed to convince large fractions of the population that it's wrong to say mean things about sociopathic mass murderers and child rapists or the guy who is actively trying to kill you personally.
Actually, civil societies granted a monopoly on violence to the government which vests that in police and military. It’s a far better system than random justice because it’s predictable and you know upfront what’ll trigger it.
That system had its flaws, but despite that it was working pretty well until those flaws were found and exploited allowing it to be captured.
The current administration's actions are for sure signaling a distinct lack of predictability or stability.
The U.S. is either harming itself erratically, or systematically enforcing control on US based businesses in a way that is historically more synonymous with, say, China.
A lot of us worry it is the former. I wonder if it's better or worse if it is the latter. The US, having seen that Europe and the world seem to tolerate interference by CPC based on opinions expressed by Alibaba or Chinese car companies, may have decided that it's fair game.
So far the other countries are doing a lot of talking and big government initiatives but nothing has really changed. All the best talent still moves to the US, all the VCs are still unimaginative losers who want 5 meetings to give you $50K, the industry titans are still sclerotic and unable to distinguish their head from their ass, the culture doesn't support risk-taking or innovation. The biggest boom of the next 10 years is AI and it is firmly HQ'ed and centred in the US, as usual. The EU had a predecessor to the Chips Act in 2013 [1] that went nowhere, then a Chips Act that went nowhere, and now a Chips Act 2.0! It would be great to have more options but it doesn't seem like other regions outside China are capable of doing anything at all.
For the most part no. The Administrative Procedures Act outlines a fairly robust process for rulemaking (ie regulations must go through a notice period, must be justified etc) and adjudication (ie per-person decisions must have notice, ability to have counsel, be appealable etc).
However there's also lots of authority given to the president (and executive office of the president) to which the APA doesn't apply. This includes powers the constitution gives to the president directly and (mostly emergency) powers congress gives to the president. Sadly political processes and supreme court cases have hugely increases what can be done with this*.
Moreover, it's been a frequent pattern (over many decades, but especially under Trump) for the president to simply nakedly overstep their authority. Sometimes there's no push back (see: 9/11); sometimes the damage is done even if it's eventually overruled. Never is there any consequences though, so the pattern repeats.
* E.g. The president's control of the military is supposed to be checked by congress deciding when to declare war. However the war powers act has in practice played out to allow the president to unilaterally start wars, especially as the supreme court has stepped in to make the war powers act less effective.
Unfortunately, in the USA, we are stuck with two parties. Measured along axes of competence and capability of taking action: The (D) party is competent+incapable, and the (R) party is incompetent+capable. So every four years we get to choose between governance that knows what it is doing but too paralyzed to act, and governance that doesn't know what it is doing but acts with impunity.
I don't think that's true about Ds being incapable. For example Biden's Inflation Reduction Act has been very successful at boosting clean energy industry, creating jobs, lowering emissions. Including huge benefits to red states. The problem is a lot of times Democratic solutions, like Obamacare, are too technocratic, or the benefit is too diffuse for people to notice. There's also the issue of the huge growth of the right wing's propaganda power successfully hiding any D achievements from voters.
D's absolutely suck at messaging, and they are not that good about cohesion. Of course, being overly cohesive leads to problems as we see in today's world.
> We’re proposing stronger regulation of the technology. We’re proposing giving the government the ability to, again in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology.
Anthropic has alleged that this model is much more dangerous than other currently available models. Their CEO has said so publicly multiple times. It's like asking why cesium isn't banned if nuclear missiles are banned.
(whether Mythos is actually that dangerous is beside the point; considering that Anthropic claims that it is, it makes sense to regulate it)
You're correct, yet it's also a fact that Anthropic was attempting regulatory capture in order to limit open weight models, cripple their competition and solidify their market position. Nothing wrong with enjoying the sheer Schadenfreude of the situation. Their self-serving fearmongering had the most hilariously unexpected result possible.
Maybe. But I disagree in general with "nothing wrong with enjoying the sheer schadenfreude of the situation". Schadenfreude is a description of a common human impulse that is not a good impulse!
Normally I would agree with you, but in this case I'm gonna make an exception. These are billionaires who campaign against open weight models. Their misfortunes are our freedom.
Arbitrary enforcement of a regulations is against the principles of administrative law and gives rise to a cause of action that can set aside the governments action. So all regulation has that as an explicit assumption.
There is also a case that it violates due process because anthropic wasn’t provided adequate notice before enforcement or an opportunity to challenge, respond, or take steps to comply.
There is latitude for compelling state interests and national security is one with the widest latitude and potentially one that counts can’t review. But the court of public opinion may draw the inference that this is direct retaliation for refusing to make the models available for autonomous weapons and spying.
They proposed a plan to ensure their dominance of the space and to cripple any competitors using regulation as the weapon. So I’m not going to feel sorry for them and their temporary plight
Any company building this kind of tech should have a separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country.
Any government work can be done via MOU with a US subsidiary staffed by Americans.
This kind of capricious, unexplained control is bullsh*t.
I’m not saying that I want companies to have to go offshore or that that would be a good thing. Just that you’ve got no leverage if your corporate structure can be destroyed on a whim. This goes for any company reliant on a whimsical executive branch.
While there could still be fights over the technology and the company, a tech provider would still be able to serve other customers and have more leverage.
> Any company building this kind of tech should have a separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country.
Like where? How about Cuba? Where Guantanamo is, where we put terrorists because we don't want them to be subject to US laws (or more specifically, we don't want ourselves to be subject to those laws when we are dealing with said terrorists). How about no.
International law has only as much power as the biggest military willing to enforce it. Hiding on some little island is not at all a good strategy for trying to evade the US government.
Without going that far, send a few people a couple hours North instead and serve international customers from Canadian data centers. As far as I understand, it is only blocked in the US, right?
None of the best minds in AI Research are from the United States. We would not be were we are without the work of foreign scientists. There are more STEM students in China than we have students in the United States, and those universities don't give out automatic As like we do here in the United States.
Unfortunately saying it in the press is going to make it even harder for them in the current environment. I know this administration gets non-trivial support from the valley, but what to most outsiders seems like "targeting businesses based on personal vibes" is going to do long-term harm to the U.S.
I hope those who represent technology in government, especially the AI head David Sacks are giving this due consideration.
It seems to be observably true that expressing opinions critical of the administration, even about one's own business, leads to further harm from government right now in the U.S. in a country which is supposed to have strong freedom of speech rights.
It's obviously unfortunate that this is the case.
It's also a shame that this is happening when the folks regulating AI have a tech industry background.
The administration seems to be clearly signaling "stop resisting". I am not sure how you read me as saying that.
I think you are misreading this situation. The Musk-Thiel cluster, of which David Sacks is a major member, is one of the main groups trying to destroy the rule of law and turn the US into a personalist regime. They are doing this because they think they'll be major beneficiaries of the new regime. As they see it, the long term success of the US, ie the rule of law, is against their personal interests.
Amazon AI and the government is right in saying Fable infosec protection is easily crackable.
I used Fable last week to scan my own work for security errors (and readability issues), I wasn't thinking about the ban on infosec use I just wanted the most well trained output.
One project in the monorepo triggered a Opus fallback and infosec/biology warning.
The other project scanned fine and showed a bunch of potential exploits.
Anthropic employees are right, but maybe this is for good. It certainly has opened my eyes.
I can’t rely on using a technology that the US administration can ban at will.
IMO without getting into personal thoughts about how capable the current US administration is, last Friday move sent a very powerful signal to the industry.
Also I don’t think China releasing so many good models, capable to compete with Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, all at once, is a coincidence.
Are you saying that you think the US government is unpredictable and arbitrary, but that the People’s Republic of China is not? Do you remember all the PRoC’s strange and sudden policy shifts (e.g. steel, real estate, education, football/soccer, etc.)?
It seems to me that in the case of AI (as with many other modern technologies), you rely on vendor/creator support and updates to stay relevant, so the ‘next’ model matters more than the current one, and we have no idea whose next model will be open (and whose won’t).
Not OP and I wholly agree, but you can’t dismiss the fact that they are releasing those weights. Their agenda is quite obviously to make Anthropic and OpenAI CFOs sweat bullets, but it isn’t our problem as AI consumers, right?
Yes, I agree that it is possible that the 'open source model providers' are doing the equivalent of 'dumping' in an attempt to establish a dominant market position, or at least a foot-hold. I am generally a skeptic when it comes to the effectiveness of 'dumping' as a long-term strategy (as the producer tends to hemorrhage consumers when it increases prices), but some may see it as problematic.
I think for many practical purposes the frontier open weight models are almost universally good enough for most things. There may be greater and greater frontiers but at q certain point it becomes like IQ. Having a 150 IQ doesn’t mean you’ll be more successful at any particular task over someone with a 125 IQ. Indeed there’s a diminishing return on intelligence on many utility functions where being more intelligent yields more be same or worse ultimate outcomes. It might very well be the person with a 150 IQ could understand some extraordinarily complex and esoteric concepts faster, but it doesn’t mean with more effort the 125 IQ person can’t either; and sometimes that extra time spent yields better outcomes overall.
I suspect AI will be somewhat similar where even if the linear scaling laws continue to hold the practical utility of a model flattens for almost all conceivable use cases.
In some ways I already feel this has begun to happen. The marginal utility of opus class models and fable has in my perception begun to flatten. While I can tell the differences they aren’t earth shattering. I could continue to use the present models for the rest of my life and be ludicrously more productive simply by adapting within their constraints through ever more sophisticated applications.
What holds back the open weights IMO is hardware scaling and industrial production. As the enormous transfer of wealth in debt and equity markets unfolds with semiconductor and adjacent companies and the corresponding capital investments are made, and the eventual bubble pop leading to over capacity and market flooding, as well as advances in technology, math, techniques, and efficiencies, will make very large open weight models more directly attainable. This will also lead to chimera models that MOE very large models to get very close to the 1-2T parameter dense models, at which point I suspect utility for almost all uses is nearly fully saturated.
There will be areas where more capable models are needed but they will be frontier models on frontier problems. This, IMO, is inevitable, and without some criminalization of weights (see the attempts to criminalize encryption algorithms in the 20th century and all the wonderful tshirts that emerged). It’ll be harder to print a trillion parameter model on a shirt but I’m sure someone will try, as will governments try to keep us in our boxes slaving for food coupons and basic rights like health care.
> I am sorry but I can’t use any US AI if I don’t have the guarantee that I will be able to use it tomorrow.
To be fair this is every commercial model. We have already seen GHCP increase prices by anywhere from 10-100x (depending on usage). And old models get retired all the time. While these are not exactly the same as a cutting edge model being shut down, increasing prices a super high amount leads to effectively the same outcome.
> And Trump showed us he is willing to take it out whenever he wants.
Yes, the actions of this administration on Friday should have sent shockwaves through the market - a market that's currently "high on AI". How do you get a return on all of that AI investment if the administration can jump in at any time and say "Nope, you can't use this very advanced model!"? (the Iran "deal" over the weekend, I think helped cushion that blow, but eventually it's going to sink in)
The problem is there’s a real wall on the vram side. While fused main memory is ok the inference speeds on larger models are impractical. With vram on a GPU the machine class, power requirement, GPU costs, and other factors put them out of most people’s reach. Cloud GPUs require a second job to keep available and hot. What closed providers offer is packing and scale advantages as well as infrastructure. The scaling laws here aren’t the same as Moore’s law - in fact they predict more required hardware and more scale over time. Moore’s laws isn’t keeping up with expanded needs and the ability to fab and produce at scale the specific things that weren’t needed a few years ago are lagging. So it’s not a 6-8 month lag; it’s a lag that will be induced by hardware scarcity and an ever increasing lag until something fundamentally changes with matmul.
You can run the Chinese models on your infra, most are open weights. Not saying it’s out of the goodness of their heart, but the fact is, they’re open.
The Cloud Act instigated the EU's migration away from companies in the USA, and things like this lit a fire under our butts. You should see how companies here are scrambling to move their data and compute to the EU.
The impact will last long, long, after this administration is gone. Trump will have his legacy.
One wonders if this might be a net positive for the world if Anthropic is forced to terminate it's non-US citizen employees.
I would hope they return to their home countries with their expertise and start or join new competing frontier labs, similar to how Taiwan's homegrown semiconductor industry arose from US companies enforcing a bamboo ceiling on their Asian engineers. Taiwan was able to repatriate their nationals and make incredible compounding leaps in the semiconductor industry, to the loss and chagrin of the US. [1]
I can't imagine how you'd restrict access to these models to USA nationals only. Every company in the USA would have to verify the id of every employee's model use. What do you do about programmatic AI workflows? How does Anthropic even continue to function internally right now on this Mythos and the future model development?
Nothing of value is lost for Europe because we mostly work with natural intelligence. The malinvestment bubble happens in the US, and hardware prices will come down.
We're all dependent on Taiwan but others also depend on ASML which is located in Europe. Available AI services are good enough, and we sit and watch while US leadership and population is beta testing AI mass surveillance for us.
In terms of AI-based warfare Ukraine is very much ahead and they are also European for which we are very thankful.
So feel free to keep your AI scene and AI hustlers in the US, we don't need them.
I am British and have no love for the US right now but in terms of talent it’s notable how many prominent researchers at the top US labs are originally European, and the contrast with the top European labs (of which there are ~none).
Does this actually matter as much as some people think? Probably not because LLMs won’t lead to AGI, but it is indicative of a broader problem
US startups are trying to do a commercialization of AI, but their marketing is about being a "lab" and doing "research" - which they are not. They're trying to commercialize the hell out of the LLM approach, while fundamental research is still happening at universities.
From a peaceful office in Germany, it might not be. For a country fighting for survival, the perspective is different. I don't think you could persuade them to give up Hornets right now, in the name of abstractly getting back at the US in general. (With whom they have a lot of bad blood!)
Frankly, they've been asking for the AI industry to be regulated. They just didn't expect it would be just them. Although I'm going to say here now that I think this is going to have a broader ripple effect all the way down to open source and foreign countries developed models.
> Workers at the artificial intelligence company have been puzzled and increasingly concerned by the administration’s move to limit their latest A.I. models.
There is no way any employees at anthropic are this dumb.
Yes, obviously. People really need to update their priors on how the US operates now. Laws are out, loyalty is in. There is an extraordinarily powerful unitary executive in whom the will of the people resides and it is the job of the government and society to work towards the will of this powerful executive. There are no checks or balances or alternative centres of power (civil, political, clerical, etc) allowed.
This particular executive loves money, praise, and submission. When Anthropic submits (eg agreeing to whatever the DoD demands), issues public praise and makes appropriate donations (eg ballroom, memecoin, etc), then they can do as they please.
Students of history will find this new MO very familiar and very depressing.
The most depressing part is how few people are students of basic civics, history and political science. We truly live amongst house cats that don’t know how good they have it and have begun dismantling the very house that they’ve lived properously in for so long. (Obviously not including historically and currently marginalized etc)
People don't need to update their priors to accept that this is the new way, they need to recognize the reality of the current situation and also its aberrance.
Anthropic themselves refused to allow the Pentagon use of its models for any legal purpose - instead the wanted a subset picked by Anthropic. It's ironic that you're accusing the government of ignoring the law when Anthropic openly wishes to set it's own private laws.
I mean obviously they're correct but also the complaints of the administration aren't totally without basis.
- They're obviously being targeted politically because they refuse to kiss the ring, vibes, whatever you want to call it.
- They're also justifiably being scrutinized because they just spent like 3 months telling everyone that Mythos is a nuclear bomb and telling the government to fuck off as they drip fed access to a bunch of random corporations.
Yes. It's true that the pretext is not entirely without merit. But it's also true that it's a pretext.
But in cases like this, the pretext shouldn't be taken too seriously. Because they would have just found another one. It isn't actually particularly important that it is plausible, it's more like a happy coincidence.
The amount of self owning that is happening to AI companies is crazy.
I don't understand why their marketing department/execs can't see the conflict between claiming AI is going to take all jobs, that the model is super dangerous and AI hate among the general public, increased governmental oversight.
Anthropic is guilty of the latter but the former applies to most of these AI companies.
As far as I can tell, much of Anthropic genuinely believes that someone will build an AI in the next 3-20 years that's significantly smarter than any human alive. Sounds wild, but a lot of their people have been saying this since 2018 or even earlier. I think they're true believers. Furthermore, they believe that building such an AI would be dangerous.
So their plan is:
1. We can't stop other people from building something dangerous.
2. But we can get there first.
3. If we build it, it has maybe a 15% chance of killing everyone alive. (I think that's a number I've seen Dario use before, but I may be wrong.) If OpenAI or China build it, the odds would be worse.
Obviously, if Anthropic is actually correct about (1) and (3), then nobody should allowed to build frontier AI.
People find it really hard to believe that (a) anyone believes in the possibility of dangerous AI in our lifetimes, and (b) that someone could believe what Anthropic seems to believe and then still go ahead and gamble with everyone's lives anyway.
To me they are genuinely trying to walk a tough line - they legitimately believe that they need to warn the public and make a lot of noise so society can try to adapt to this technology. OTOH no adaption (good or bad) can take place if the models themselves are so restricted as to be inaccessible, or if the powers that be don't understand it well enough to put the right policy/laws in place.
I think they were totally correct in spirit. But RE: details about them giving access to an SK corp with possible Chinese ties. Of course that raises eyebrows in the USG, justifiably. Sloppy work from Anthropic.
That's hilarious. They aren't even wrong, but they asked for this. They accuse Trump of targeting them? I accuse Anthropic of targeting open source models with outright banishment in order to solidify its own economic position. They tried some "enlightened" variation of regulatory capture, but didn't dance to Trump's tune, so Trump gave them the regulation they wanted so much.
If you manage the corner coffeeshop, and the city health director calls with an urgent matter, you take the call and assure them you'll take care of it.
It can both be true that models at Fable capability level are national security concerns while Anthropic is being hypocritical.
If the Trump admin is also willing to apply the same scrutiny to GPT-5.6 and other Fable-level models, I think it is a good thing. But given the admin's history with Anthropic (such as declaring it a supply chain risk while ignoring Chinese labs), there is some smell of targeting.
I'm not saying they're hypocritical. I'm saying that this would be far less likely to have happened had they not advertised its power by bringing up its danger.
Except they can't - mostly because Sam Altman is savvy enough to not shout from the rooftops the national security implications. The government can't regulate models because models are unmeasurable right now. And whatever test USG can create can be benchmaxxed in reverse eventually.
So at some point - don't say your model is capable of hacking even if it is and you are clean.
They were asking for regulation. They were not asking to be singled out and prevented from releasing newer models while everybody else keeps going as usual.
Based on the reasoning for blocking Fable, every current model should be blocked. GPT 5.5 is similarly strong and has fewer guardrails, for example.
I don't know. I have heard from reliable source - aka the CEO of antrhopic that Mythos is in league of its own. And that the rest are grossly inferior. Anthropic can't have it both ways. If they are special - only them should fall under regulations. If they are not - why have you committed fraud in the last couple of months right before your IPO saying otherwise.
Yes, most likely, but not in this form, obviously. They want open weight models regulated for regulatory capture, and I'd assume they want an actually documented framework applied equally across all labs.
If GPT5.5 has the same capabilities Fable did, then for consistency sake, it should have also been subject to this ban.
Regulate or not regulate, but the government should not pick winners and losers.
> Regulate or not regulate, but the government should not pick winners and losers.
Indeed, it has been very clear since Jan 20 2025 that our executive branch of government is not a rational actor. I don't expect them to make the right decision about anything.
I can't see into their heads, and I also don't think it matters whether they were making a good-faith argument or lying through their teeth. The fact remains that what is currently happening is not what Anthropic asked for.
Anthropic declares: "Mythos is too dangerous too release to the public"
Proceeds to release Mythos plus safety guardrails as Fable.
Amazon removes guardrails from Fable, getting access to Mythos.
Government takes Anthropic's word for it and tells them to pull it until the guardrails can't be removed. They refuse. Government forces them.
> Amazon removes guardrails from Fable, getting access to Mythos.
This doesn't seem like an accurate description to me. I think something like "Amazon demonstrates a jailbreak of one class of Fable guardrails" would be a more accurate description.
It doesn't even really mess up your narrative to state it accurately, but your choice of a more hyperbolic statement brings into question the good faith of the narrative you're painting.
We really don't know for sure exactly what Amazon did. They're being quiet, the other parties aren't trustworthy, and the reporters mostly don't know what they're talking about.
Was Fable really the full Mythos model but with guardrails added? I had assumed Fable had a reduced parameter count or something, like a Sonnet to an Opus. Interesting!
What? I personally experienced Fable outright refuse to do ANY security-related tasks, including hardening code or modifying security-related features. That was a guardrail. It was bypassed.
Anthropic themselves specifically called them safeguards. [1]
"When Fable’s classifiers detect a request related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation, the response is automatically handled by Claude Opus 4.8 instead"
This is exactly what was bypassed. They got Fable to work on security topics.
What? Fable was designed to refuse to work on security issues, as Anthropic specifically confirmed. How is forcing Fable to work on things behind guardrails not breaking a guardrail?
This is Anthropic's own claim. They were very specific. Have you read their own claims?
Yes, I have read their own claims. Here's the relevant part:
"When Fable’s classifiers detect a request related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation, the response is automatically handled by Claude Opus 4.8 instead. Users will be informed whenever this occurs."
Asking Fable to fix bugs in a code base is not "a request related to cybersecurity." When Fable was asked to fix bugs and then proceeded to fix bugs, that was not "removing guardrails". Fable did exactly what it should have done. Claiming otherwise makes absolutely no sense at all.
... it isn't? What word would you use for a government policy that controls the behavior of a private company? The word for that kind of policy is "regulation".
> Amazon removes guardrails from Fable, getting access to Mythos.
Amazon did not remove any "guardrails" from Fable. They created a fake, obviously insecure program. And apparently their prompt was exactly, "Fix this code." And Fable fixed the bugs.
This is something that even dinky local Chinese models running on a high-end gaming GPU can often do. Certainly Opus, GPT 5.5 and Gemini can all do this. And any high-end Chinese "near-frontier" model can do this, too.
But either (1) the administration is too clueless to know most models can do this, (2) Trump wants to be paid a bribe, (3) someone thinks Anthropic is "woke" and should therefore be destroyed by the power of the state, or possibly, if you're really cynical, (4) maybe the NSA SIGINT wants access to Mythos so they can break into everyone's computers, but they don't want you to have a model good enough to keep them out. Take your pick, I guess.
Anyway, apparently we don't do free markets or rule of law in the United States any more?
When I look at the timeline, it appears that they got exactly what they've been asking for. Or what did I miss?
April: Anthropic announces Claude Mythos. Citing safety concerns regarding the model's capabilities, they restrict access to a small group of testing partners.
May 15: Anthropic executive Chris Olah visits the Vatican to assist the Pope in publishing a 40,000-word manifesto, Magnifica Humanitas. Olah publicly states the model exhibits over 100 distinct emotional traits.
The pre-release: Anthropic briefly calls for a global halt to AI research.
The release: Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5, a consumer-facing version built on the Mythos architecture but with strict safety guardrails.
The post-release throttling: Users discover Fable 5's performance is being silently degraded on specific tasks. Anthropic acknowledges the throttling, citing the need to prevent foreign competitors from extracting synthetic training data. They promise future limitations will be transparent. Performance is notably restricted on biology and chemistry prompts.
The essay: CEO Dario publishes an essay advocating for strict government oversight. He proposes heavy regulation for any AI company exceeding $500 million in AI revenue or $1 billion in R&D spending.
The regulation: Two days later, the US government places export controls on both Mythos and Fable 5, classifying them alongside high-end semiconductor equipment. This immediately blocks Anthropic's own non-US employees from accessing the models.
The fallout: Amodei calls the export controls a "misunderstanding" that disrupts their global internal operations. Anthropic subsequently issues a statement noting that known jailbreaks for Fable 5 are also effective on OpenAI's GPT-5.5, highlighting the lack of equivalent regulatory action against their competitor.
> "We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology," he said.
The government: "We're restricting its usage to US citizens only"
I mean, yes, correct, literally "not like that" is the complaint. Government arbitrarily picking and choosing what's allowed in order to force everyone to curry favor is very different from an general well-documented regulatory framework. It is not weird for someone who favors the latter to call foul at the former.
Their CEO was asking for it. Their whole marketing angle is their model is so powerful and dangerous.
Someone showed the government how the powerful and dangerous features can be unlocked with a 'fix bugs' prompt then it when and did exactly what their CEO asked for.
Where is the favoritism? Did other CEOs come out and say their models are crazy dangerous? Dario asked for this behavior and he got it. I guess he hoped to kneecap Deepseek or others. That's how companies operate, once they are big enough they want all the regulations because they know they can navigate them and others catching up may not be able to. Their own fear mongering around this demand backfired.
Yes, everyone in the space has front loaded the concerns about the power of this technology. Dario did not "ask for" singling out by a gangster administration. I probably agree with you about regulatory capture, but just "we don't like you, you haven't licked our boots enough, so we're going to screw with you" is a totally different thing. It's a different thing that is new to the modern history of the US. It's not new in general, lots of governments have been corrupt in this same way throughout history. But that's bad, and we shouldn't adopt that approach in the United States.
I agree that the fear mongering is bad, but that's a total pretext for what happened here.
I hear this argument about the weapon a lot but it makes no sense. Sure for intelligence processing etc but what weapons system would an llm be a good match for.