[data-ottawa]

The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.

Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.

So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.

I installed Mistral Vibe last week and I've been experimenting with offloading work to it. I won't pretend that Mistral-medium is close to state of the art. It isn't. It still writes incorrect tool calls.

From the last week about 50% of my LLM tasks actually reduced to "take this work and write about it" and Mistral excels there -- it definitely beats Opus at writing. Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate.

There's another say 30% of tasks that's writing queries against a data warehouse. I updated my semantic layer MCPs and Vibe uses them, but it struggles with ambiguity here. It's not a replacement, it's maybe where Opus was a year ago.

The rest of my work involves writing code. That's going to be harder to replace for now. My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models. I can't decide if I was ever actually happy with Opus's work on this front though -- the understanding tradeoffs when you trust LLMs with decisions stack non-linearly and negatively. I did like Fable on these tasks, I won't lie, I will miss it, but not by any choice of my own.

[Aurornis]

Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April. Wayback Machine if you don’t believe me: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old. LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls. These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.

[ozozozd]

This is a strange plea for optimism.

Sincerely or not, judgement is yours, Dario has been begging for regulation. He has been talking about how Claude models are distilled by foreign adversaries. And now the regulation is here.

What makes you think this situation that the CEO of Anthropic is asking for it temporary? Do you not believe Dario was sincere?

[xinayder]

How ironic it is that multibillion AI companies are complaining that their models are being distilled (read: used without permission) while the current top players trained their models on stolen data...

[spwa4]

We still have to see what will happen when people "uncopyright" Disney movies, Microsoft software, ...

[brookst]

There are three issues here:

1. Identity verification as a way to validate real-personness and mitigate distillation by e.g. North Korea

2. Identity veriiication as a way to limit model usage to US residents / citizens

3. The level of model which will be subject to identity verification, today and as time goes on

It’s a mistake to conflate the three and form a rock solid opinion of exactly what will happen from here to the heat death of the universe. Everything about AI is moving quickly. I doubt Dario would claim to have a perfect roadmap not subject to change.

My personal guess is that just like export controls on CPUs, this will apply differently to different regions, and will change over time. Especially with US political instability and increasing anti-science policy, I cannot imagine Dario or anyone else would want to surrender the EU and other markets to become a US-only company.

But whether I’m right or wrong, one thing I’m not is certain. I can’t imagine how anyone could be in the current situation.

[pegasus]

Do you sincerely believe Dario wants Fable to be restricted to US citizens only?

[airhangerf15]

No, he wants regulatory capture. I think if the mask ever came off, he'd want the government to come in and crush Hugging Face, Civitai and any other distribution of open weight models, forcing everyone to go through an authorized provider like Antrhopic, under some bullshit about everything else being "too dangerous." He's no better than Sam Alternative-Man and any media disagreement is likely just smoke and mirrors to make it seem like they're two players in the field when in reality, it's getting incredibly cramped.

[shevy-java]

Why else would they demand age sniffing?

I do not want to give my private data to any company, yet alone those hostiles US companies that obey the orange king. Insanity has to be contained, not allowed to spread outside of the USA. So, no to age sniffing.

The UK is also suspect here. I don't understand why they are even worse than the USA here. Someone needs to fix the UK legislation - it is by far the worst. On audits they regularly detain people and pat them down. See Auditing Britain or DJ Audits; the US Audits on the other hand almost never reach that level of escalation. Something is fundamentally flawed in the UK.

[pc86]

The UK has been worse than the US on privacy and basically any privacy-adjacent right for like 50 years, if not longer.

[hoytschermerhrn]

I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models. This effectively kills my usage of anthropic for anything beyond their 4.8 models.

[ElProlactin]

> I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models.

I can't speak to your specific use of Anthropic's models, but I find it interesting that people will identify themselves (to set up and pay for an account) and provide all sorts of personal (and often sensitive if not confidential) information to these models on a daily basis, but balk at a 5-minute identity verification.

[-Fu]

It’s not the five minutes that I balk at, it’s entrusting a third party with all they need to steal my identity. But of course, they’ll never get hacked…

[ElProlactin]

It's not like Anthropic is the only company in the world that would have the basic details contained on a driver's license or passport. Odds are all of the PII required for someone to steal your identity is already in criminal hands.

The National Public Data breach alone exposed the social security numbers of potentially upwards of 100 million Americans. Numerous companies have literally "all" of your personal data and you never did business with them/gave it to them directly.

It's not right but the identity theft cat is out of the bag, which is why precautions like credit freezes, are recommended for all Americans.

[lobocinza]

But they have all other data as well and this concentration is dangerous.

[mcv]

And to me, it's specifically that that third party is Peter Thiel. Not the guy I want to trust with my data.

[asdfsa32]

It is because you think the contention is about being identifiable, while that is hardly the case.

Most people understand or at least accept that in order to facilitate payments and a company to follow various laws that are generally understood as "good for all" (like AML and tax avoidance), but require ID to access is not the same.

It is identical to accepting to paying for National Parks car pass or camp ground fees but protesting access fees. Not the same thing.

[teliosix]

It is just the standard performative outrage over and over. The same person will be uploading their ID a few days after it is introduced.

So many people have internalized an anonymous audience that they are performing to in terms of what they think the anonymous audience wants to hear that they can't tell what is their own actual thoughts and motivations.

That is why the motivation changes two weeks later and the ID gets uploaded.

[mapt]

Some of us hold grudges on account of performative outrage. Ubisoft made invasive DRM the norm in gaming ~20 years ago. While other companies now do the same thing, I'm still boycotting. Fuck'em.

[skocznymroczny]

I'd say before Ubisoft, Valve was the one to really spearhead DRM by introducing online verification to play Half-Life 2. Before HL2, it was almost unthinkable for a game to require Internet access to be played and most copy protection relied on serial numbers and/or presence of the original game CD. HL2 was high profile enough to make people accept the restriction.

[pbgcp2026]

+1. You are not alone and please keep boycotting them. I personally do this and never use any websites or services requiring "ID check". If Gov agency wants my face and prints - Ok, I will give them on the border crossing and immigration services to get a passport. Everyone else goes to hell.

[joe_the_user]

Well, if all the data people uploaded to these models provided ironclad personal identification, would Anthropic need to have these identity verification processes? They could have directed Claude to disconnect all non-citizens when the order came, for example. Perhaps they don't to frighten people with that ability. But most likely all the inputs together only add to a rough identity hash.

[ElProlactin]

> Well, if all the data people uploaded to these models provided ironclad personal identification, would Anthropic need to have these identity verification processes?

> But most likely all the inputs together only add to a rough identity hash.

You literally provide your name, email address, address and credit card number when you create an account and subscribe.

The identity verification they're doing is for legal purposes. Even if they have a way to take your name and IP address and figure out who you are with near-absolute certainty (including through the use of third-party databases), they're doing this so they have a legally-defensible process by which identities were established.

[rglullis]

> You literally provide your name...

Not if you are using through your employer.

> they're doing for legal purposes

The USA is becoming a Banana Repulic. Having grown up in one, you end up learning that "the law" is never meant to be used for the benefit of the people but only to give the veneer of legitimacy for the authoritarian abuse by those in power.

“To my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law”: https://www.undp.org/latin-america/blog/graph-for-thought/%E...

[BeetleB]

> You literally provide your name, email address, address and credit card number when you create an account and subscribe.

I don't recall Anthropic's payment systems, but I use Paypal wherever supported. I don't think Paypal sends my address, but am not sure. I'm pretty sure they don't send the CC information.

And often, not even the name (e.g. have often had people use my CC to buy stuff (with my permission)).

Also, I still routinely buy stuff from one service that thinks I'm in a state I haven't lived in for over 20 years, because that's the address I provided back then.

So no, generally, sending your payment info doesn't equate to sending them my address.

[epolanski]

> These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.

The big problem American policy makers (and business leaders) don't understand is that they tend to minimize or ridicule extremely serious events.

There's a pre-Greenland and post-Greenland annexation threats for European Nato allies, and it is non reversible. EU allies do not forget that the US (the only country to ever call article 5 or to gather NATO allies for operations) has both mistreated the alliance, and has been the only power to threaten militarily EU countries.

Same happens here. Business-level wise, you seem to be talking with a very American-centric point-of-view, like these events are minor and temporary issues and we're all here waiting to throw money at an abusive relationship.

But this is not how we operate in EU. None of us can afford to build their operations based on uncertainty of US export controls. The damage is here and many of us are replacing Claude/GPT subscriptions with shared opencode servers using GLM and DS4.

Might be slightly worse? Probably. But we can work on it, harness it, get experience, and even update back to American models at some point. But we're no longer going to be building assuming US models availability.

[nutjob2]

You're way off the mark, and probably viewing this as an American.

If it happens once that means it can happen which means it can happen at any time.

When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.

[matheusmoreira]

> When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.

Completely agree.

[pfisch]

You're acting like you can't just switch which llm you are using in around an hour.

I mean...use opus/fable when you can, if down the road your access gets cut then just switch to kimi or whatever.

Yeah, this sucks, but you're being really dramatic and acting like you can't switch llms with basically no lock in. Getting something like your email cut off would be a real thing to be concerned about, but this isn't that.

[baka367]

This decision has, effectively, turned LMMs into a supply chain risk.

Before this incident I’d gladly use any anthropic LLM in production features. Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.

[simoncion]

> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.

If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".

If the software your business depends on can't run indefinitely without getting permission to operate from someone else's systems, then you're perpetually at risk of someone else tanking your business because they decided that you can no longer use that software.

[redserk]

Anyone doing product integrations should recognize it’s a perpetual risk but why stick to the platform that will require US citizenship demands for future models especially when there are other labs with reasonably comparable performance that don’t require this?

Anthropic didn’t have to beg for the government to deem their models a security crisis.

[simoncion]

> ...especially when there are other labs with reasonably comparable performance that don’t require this?

This access restriction could be

1) A legitimate concern about capabilities.

2) A hype-generation scheme entered into by both the Federal Government and Anthropic.

3) Pettiness.

If we're in situation #1 or #3, then there are no other LLM providers that provide comparable services that are safe from this.

If we're in situation #2... well, I guess how safe you are from this is a factor of how desperately the company needs "wau, look how scary our software is!1!1" hype.

[sofixa]

> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight. If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".

I'm pretty sure that a US government export restriction / ban / etc. would count as a force majeure invalidating all the fancy wording you could wish for on a piece of paper.

The only way to actually control is to self manage in an environment you control.

[intended]

The long term goal of LLMs is to automate most white collar work, so wasn’t that a risk you faced anyway? Like Amazon basics, which took all the easy to replicate goods they saw on their marketplace.

[sofixa]

> We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past.

But not on a SaaS whose continued availability you'd rely on.

In any case, your optimism is bordering on naivety. The world has seen how the US can easily disregard anything and act arbitrarily - sanctions, tariffs, shutting down access to SaaSes - and this will not be forgotten. As you say, administrations change. Even if next time around there are competent adults in the White House (which really isn't a given), do you really want to bet your business on that not changing 4 years later?

There's a reason why all the big cloud providers are constantly shouting about their "sovereign" solutions. The US has broken everyone's trust and there is no going back on that.

[ignoramous]

> This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old...

I think, this is all a culmination of rapidly eroding trust and soft power between US & its allies for the past 3y.

[deanishe]

What allies?

You threatened to invade Canada and Greenland.

You surely don't think you're coming back from that?

[N_Lens]

They will obviously come back from that no questions about it. It’s like an abusive relationship that CA/EU can’t fully eject from, there will always be hope of conciliation because the benefits both ways are so massive and the relationships are so entrenched, it will take much more than DJT and Republicans/dark enlightenment technocrats to completely fracture these alliances.

[sneezychl]

Agreed. Things are really bad right now. But they've been bad before. We helped rebuild Germany after they started world wars.

[Applejinx]

What, all of us? I would suggest that Russia's proxy leaders threatened to invade both those places specifically to weaken US alliances and hurt NATO.

So when did we become Russia? Better you should ask, should we become Russia, would we like it? We've only begun to experience the damage of it and I figure part of the plan is that once we notice and object to what's been done to us, it'll be too late.

You are mad if you think we are not the target here. This is not about hurting Greenland, it's about hurting US and people elsewhere should take note because you are subject to the same tactics and the same influences.

[palmotea]

> What allies?

> You threatened to invade Canada and Greenland.

> You surely don't think you're coming back from that?

Trump threatened. Those were unserious remarks by an unserious person who's 80 years old. If that was all it takes to permanently demolish those alliances, they were never actually there.

[sofixa]

No no, the remarks were pretty damn fucking serious.

And the fact that the US could elect such an unserious and demented criminal, twice is proof enough that there is a lot to worry about. Who's to say who will be next? Or after that?

[palmotea]

> No no, the remarks were pretty damn fucking serious.

Trump says a lot of things. It's foolish to take every outrage seriously. It's pretty clear it's just a tactic of his (albeit a dumb one).

> And the fact that the US could elect such an unserious and demented criminal, twice is proof enough that there is a lot to worry about. Who's to say who will be next? Or after that?

Ok, then. If you're serious: kick the US out of NATO. Increase military spending, go it alone. Really treat the US as a non-ally.

Or, you know. Wait for him to leave office or die (he's 80!), and write the Democrats and tell them to get their fucking house in order. Trump didn't win so much as the Democrats were utterly incompetent.

[dboreham]

It's the fact that he wasn't immediately removed from office that's the underlying problem.

[deanishe]

This sort of casual dismissal is precisely why the relationship won't be repaired.

We deployed troops to Greenland after his comments. Does that sound unserious to you?

[wvh]

That's not how democracy works. You have responsibility and accountability. These people can and do real harm.

[victorbjorklund]

That’s like claiming Iran didn’t ever threaten North Korea, USA etc but only their leaders. Trump is the guy Americans had choosen to decide their foreign policy. Just like Russians can’t claim they are innocent just because of what their leaders do Americans have even less excuse.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Over-reliance on a single LLM is probably not a good idea, no matter who owns it.

[marcus_holmes]

> past 3y

since January 2025

[rootusrootus]

it’s been a loooooooong year and a half

[jampekka]

Crypto export ban lasted only about 45 years. :)

[Citizen_Lame]

These are obvious lies. But whatever man, they just updated privacy policy to say they may ask you to verify age or identity.

[moomin]

US controls on cryptography software lasted _20 years_. If there's something I'm absolutely certain of, and I'm certain of very little in the fields of AI and of politics, it's that Fable will be utterly irrelevant in 20 years time.

[shevy-java]

> Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April.

Well, irrespective over as to whether this is the case, the blog entry from claude came yesterday, aka June:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-ver...

So, why the two months delay here? If they felt all was already said, they would not have had a need to repeat what they wrote two months ago already that mandatory age sniffing is required for all claude users.

[justaj]

What makes you believe this is about export controls rather than harvesting data?

[kgutscode1]

Mass surveillance and all the other that gets associated with mass surveillance

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

What makes you believe he belives that?

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

The sentence does not state he believes the ID check is for export control purposes

In fact, earlier in the comment, he argues the ID check dates back to April

[justaj]

Because of this sentence?

> LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls.

[asdfsa32]

> We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.

Yeah, in the long everything will happen, from 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 being the winning Powerball numbers to heat death of the universe, but as the colloquial goes "ain't nobody got time for that!"

Once an institution or person has proven that they will take adverse action against you, it is foolish to bank on them again.

[RobertDeNiro]

Export controls have typically been for physical goods. Don’t remember the last time it was used for an API

[input_sh]

You should look up the words "crypto wars". There were absolutely very annoying attempts by the US government to limit encryption, forcing every software maker to maintain two editions of their software: one targeting the domestic audience with no restrictions, and one "international edition" which had to intentionally weakened encryption (as in ship with shorter key lengths).

[bigiain]

Have we all forgotten PGP already? (Not an API, but certainly not a "physical good")

[InsideOutSanta]

I also think this makes OpenAI and Anthropic even less viable. They're tens of billions in debt, losing money every month, have data center commitments in the hundreds of billions, and now they're reducing their market to the US? The only way this can work is with substantial government subsidies.

[dgellow]

Definitely damaging for their IPOs

[Den_VR]

Tragic.

[somenameforme]

And a fraction of the US market at that. Requiring ID scans and all of this nonsense to use a chatbot just added a whole layer of friction that many are going to just nope on out of and use one of the endless other services. I suppose the next step will be for the government to try to ban those other services once they mature and start booming.

[beezlewax]

subsidies what like space x or tesla?

[marcus_holmes]

shhh, the investors might hear you. If they do then the bubble pops, all those data centre projects grind to a halt, 5% of US GDP disappears, and the USA goes into a deep recession.

Of course, as you say, this would require govt funds to fix. Congress gets asked for funding to save the US economy, and various members of the Trump dynasty pop up in unexpected non-exec directorships for companies receiving those funds.

[lukewarm707]

easy IPO cashout

[Animats]

> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.

Note the big cut in token prices from China.

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml

[ignoramous]

> Note the big cut in token prices from China.

After the recent 75%+ price cuts by DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo (and now, MiniMax), I pretty much packed my Claude bag up and moved over. I see no discernable difference (other than chattiness of its thinking modes) in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.

[1over137]

and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.

[ElProlactin]

> and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.

They don't need to. They can undermine the West economically and politically.

The US has been a much more violent imperial power but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.

[js8]

You don't know what you're talking about. Russians occupied my country, killed almost no one, and yet it was far worse than all the economic damage caused by Western neoliberalism.

US imperialism has been a blight to the world, outright killing millions. Modern China did nothing on that scale.

[ElProlactin]

I think you misread my comment.

> ...but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.

"What IT has done overseas" refers to the US.

But as for China, the Great Leap Forward is considered the largest man-made famine in history, causing somewhere between 15 and 55 million deaths. The Cultural Revolution resulted in the destruction of irreplicable artifacts and historical sites.

Like the US, China has been involved in sowing discord and destruction in other countries. What the US did in Cambodia was an absolute travesty. But China was Pol Pot's primary backer, having provided around $1 billion in economic and military aid to the Khmer Rouge. So it's not like China was an idle witness to what happened in Indochina last century.

We can argue all day about the greater and lesser of two evils but my point remains: powerful countries can cause significant harm to the world without invading other countries.

[71bw]

And yet it is China who has, for the last 40+ years, successfully used the "start cheap, destroy competition, rise prices" tactic.

[ethbr1]

Taiwan? South China Sea?

[N_Lens]

Comparatively tiny issues compared to US actions in the past several decades.

[ethbr1]

See how this comment plays out in the next 5 years.

[lmsh77777]

Republic of China is not China, lol

[earthnail]

On that front I think you’re badly mistaken. China’s government publicly states that it doesn’t see our idea of society and government as a good idea. They are a rivalling system, with very different values.

The US is many things, but it’s still way more aligned with European, Canadian, Australian etc goals than China ever will be.

[trollbridge]

I just got finished setting up an environment with MiMo-Pro-2.5-UltraSpeed, Qwen-3.7-Max (basically used this to sub in for Opus), and of course DeepSeek.

Then GLM came out and that just means everything got even better.

[digitaltrees]

You need to look up loss leader strategy and dumping in international trade because that is what china is doing. And your use of their models over api is giving them training data.

They will flip to being just as bad or worse if they beat America.

But America isn’t deserving trust at this point.

The only viable option now is local AI. Our industry needs to figure out how to decentralize training data, infrastructure, inference and analysis.

[trollbridge]

Most the Chinese models are open source. You can buy some hardware and go run them yourself, if you really are concerned about "dumping" and "loss leaders".

[digitaltrees]

But you do see that supports my argument right? For every one of Us that stops paying monthly subscription or api costs to OpenAI/anthropic/google the smaller their market gets. Taken to enough scale and they won’t reach profitability.

So while I am running local models I am aware of the geopolitical implications

[js8]

Why do you care about geopolitical implications? (I don't see how it supports your argument, sorry.)

[chorizo]

I made the same switch. Impressed with the sheer value of Deepseek v4 Pro and Minimax M3 so far. I mostly work on an open source academic simulation tool, so I’m happy to be a source of training data.

[matheusmoreira]

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.

> Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.

Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really hard to justify giving Anthropic any more money. I'm very tempted to switch to GLM 5.2.

[nozzlegear]

> banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free

It should go without saying, but "the free" in "the land of the free" refers to Americans, not everyone else. Not sure if you were trying to make it sound like a great irony that "the land of the free" would exclude or ban people, but if so it doesn't quite hit the mark. A more cutting criticism would be that the land of the free isn't letting one of its own companies freely compete.

[matheusmoreira]

Fair point. The fact that even americans got cut off from Fable is definitely ironic though. I suppose that's going to be fixed now that they're implementing identity verification. And even that runs smack into the concept of freedom since freedom under surveillance isn't real.

[inlined]

But given the hoopla about how a driver’s license isn’t valid in the SAVE act because it doesn’t prove you’re a US citizen, how is drivers license verification going to satisfy the US national requirement here?

[cryptonector]

It probably won't. It will probably have to be a U.S. passport.

[yurishimo]

Many states have extra markings on the card for citizens vs legal residents. A valid birth certificate would also be enough since the US is one of the only nations to recognize birthright citizenship.

Also worth pointing out that most Americans don't have passports and getting one can take anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months.

Also, you'd have to be smoking something to assume that the three letter agencies are not going to be combing through Anthropic's customer list and assessing for fraud and foreign bad-actors. If you lie, they'll probably catch you eventually and most people are not stupid enough to lie about their identity to the US government and think they'll get away with it forever.

[mcv]

It doesn't even refer to all Americans. Just the wealthy ones. And even that is increasingly reduced to just the wealthy ones who support Donald Trump.

[tommit]

It's always been a catchy propaganda slogan. Nothing more.

[3stacks]

What is stopping you from switching to GLM 5.2 now? Have you tried it out yet?

I'm playing with Deepseek a lot more via OpenRouter recently and the only major downside I can see is the usage billing over the monthly plan

[matheusmoreira]

Existing setup. I'm already used to Claude Code I guess. I actually spent time and tokens customizing and fixing it. Have a patcher utility that modifies the binary in order to disable telemetry and remove performance reducing language in the system prompts. Every update I spend some Claude tokens dissecting the newest executable and integrating it with my patcher.

The monthly subscription is also a major hurdle for me. The "high end frontier models for low prices" aspect is a major reason. I think I'm getting a lot of value from my subscription, given that the API prices are like a hundred times higher.

However, there's also a psychological factor here. These subscriptions are like the gachas of the software world. I got "addicted" to them. I developed workflows around achieving 100% weekly usage. Sometimes Anthropic randomly resets weekly usage and I scramble to get the most out of it. I'll point Claude at things and then just have it run hundreds of code review agents. I ran out of projects to do this on and started doing it to my favorite open source projects instead, looking for things to contribute.

I think with usage-based pricing I wouldn't use LLMs quite so freely. It'd probably cure my "addiction" too, but the problem is I'm not sure whether that's a good thing, since this "addiction" has been a somewhat positive force in my life. It's driven me to start new projects and also make major progress on existing ones. It brought me out of a slump. I'm a little afraid of moving away from Claude and not being as driven as I was before.

[eturkes1]

Are you me? Anyway I wonder if you've played with the following, they've been what I've been using to patch CC:

https://github.com/skrabe/tweakcc-fixed https://github.com/skrabe/lobotomized-claude-code

[matheusmoreira]

Yeah I know about tweakcc, even had some custom prompts committed to my dotfiles repository for a while. For some reason it wasn't working for me, don't remember why.

At first I used this shell script here:

https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...

Someone posted it on HN on the Opus degradation thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925

I just kept using it to fix the prompts for a long time. Eventually I asked Claude to port it to Python to make it easier to maintain. Now every month or so Claude dissects the Claude Code binary and integrates the script with the newest version.

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/%7E/.lo...

[eturkes1]

Thanks for the info. Yeah tweakcc is finicky, in fact it broke again for me with the latest CC update. Maybe I'll end up with my own solution as well in the end.

[Scoundreller]

Meanwhile, as an irregular user of heavy AI, I like the usage-based billing of deepseek. Made a bunch of optimizations to my vibe-coded codebase, created some extra modules, using the chat... has costed me 33 cents so far in a couple weeks.

[djeastm]

Yeah for a side project I just switched over to DS4 and between Pro and Flash a few days ago I've spent $1.96 both for code work and some large LLM text processing tasks.

It feels to me as good as the last version of Opus I was using (I think 4.6 or 7?). I'm going direct through the DeepSeek API, not Openrouter.

[matheusmoreira]

33 cents? That's insane... I set up an API cost meter on my Claude Code status line and it frequently runs into the hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

[Scoundreller]

My build/work is probably a lot simpler than yours, but still, a huge value for me for just 33 cents.

Minimum spend/fill is US$2 plus Chinese vat (dunno why but not gonna complain about 6%)

[patates]

For the 100$ I'm paying for Claude, I'm pretty sure I can use Deepseek way more than I can use Opus via the plan.

[3stacks]

Fair. If you trust the stats on Codeburn I've used $6k USD of tokens in the last month with Claude as a very heavy user, so our situations may differ

[zubairov]

The downside are opportunity costs - not using other models to make better decision, I guess, right?

[Amekedl]

usage billing over the monthly plan when deepseek is over x25 cheaper?

[3stacks]

Maybe I'll try out a month on the usage plan and see how it compares dollar for dollar. I think I'm squeezing about as much as I can out of Anthropic under the plan

[digitaltrees]

As an American founder I am sorry for this. I think the world needs to band together to take geopolitical risk out of AI.

[miki123211]

They clearly specify that they accept IDs from most countries. This likely means that they've reached a deal (or hope that they'll reach one) with the US government that lets them share Fable with foreigners, but only as long as they know exactly who it is being shared with.

This is off-putting to the HN demographic, but won't change anything in practice. 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.

[dgellow]

Persona already had scandals earlier this year:

- https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-su...

- https://hothardware.com/news/discord-drops-persona-after-use...

It’s off putting outside of HN

[andybak]

The Peter Thiel connection is especially toxic for a lot of people outside the US. Whether it's substantive or just optics doesn't make a huge difference.

[cloverich]

Its optics. Personas series D is from his fund. Rich guy tries to get richer is the primary take away.

[crote]

> 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on

Why? Is Claude really so much better that the additional hassle and privacy invasion is worth it? What's stopping people from switching to one of the dozen or so other AI tools?

Heck, considering the volatility of the LLM industry, shouldn't everyone already be using OpenRouter & friends to avoid getting screwed over by the model-of-the-week - making a switch absolutely trivial?

[0x3f]

Fable seemed pretty good, but the thing is, even having access to test the next model _and see if it's worth switching to it_ is worth the marginal hassle/risk of doing the ID flow. A lot of things now do KYC, so we're not really talking about a categorical shift in me sharing ID info with any company vs not. It's just one more app.

[cheonic52749]

> What's stopping people from switching to one of the dozen or so other AI tools?

I’m lazy.

I will simply upload my drivers license to Claude, and continue paying $200/month.

[matheusmoreira]

Subscription prices. Anthropic subscription can't be used with third party harnesses. OpenRouter would require me to pay API prices.

[chickensong]

This is the reason.

[calgoo]

Sure if you want to share your ID and information with Persona.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632

[rockskon]

That remains to be seen. Assuming the worst from the start discourages people from taking any action and is an imprudent way to approach political topics.

[deepvibrations]

Completely disagree that 99% of people will just do it.

A lot of people are already skeptical of the frontier labs - I moved over to Claude from OpenAI when they bent over for the US government. And I'll certainly move on again if Claude start asking for photo ID.

[slashdave]

It's pretty obvious this has nothing to do with Fable

[vachina]

> 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.

In a vacuum yes. But this space isn't vacuum, I'm going with path of least resistance.

[danpalmer]

> Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate

I'm starting to see more and more of this: speed matters more than model, skills matter more than model, cost matters more, harness matters more than model. It seems like until we have a step change in models (and Fable isn't it), there's a lot of room to optimise with what we already have.

This is a stark change to the "best model at all costs" mentality from a year ago.

[WhyNotHugo]

The government mandate forcing them to restrict access of new models to American has really cut their legs under them.

This identity verification is a best effort to kinda stay afloat: they can now offer bleeding edge models to US nationals, but not to the other 95% of the world. Their influence is gonna tank quite seriously if the previous mandate is not reversed.

Realistically, their choices are to either implement this, or restrict access to new models entirely, which is a sure way to fall into complete irrelevance.

[mapontosevenths]

The worst part is that the entire ban is zero step thinking. The US is showing the world that even when it has the best tech it's too politically unstable to rely on as a serious partner.

Worse, doing this forces other nations to catch up to compete. Once they have, what happens next? An AI arms race that the US may not win? Someone else opens their Fable class model first and takes the multi-trillion dollar market that could have been run by a US company?

There is no n-step positive outcome for the USA. The only winning move was not to play.

[cortesoft]

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.

Your overall argument makes some sense, but I would bet any money this simply is not true. Even if the US maintains some of the restrictions on export (which is in no way a given with how fickle this administration is, let alone the next administration), as LLMs advance, Fable will eventually be considered a lower tier model, and is likely to have restrictions lifted.

[pizzly]

That makes it better, paying money to always having access to the second rate models from US AI providers. The problem remains.

[cheonic52749]

> paying money to always having access to the second rate models from US AI providers. The problem remains.

Your alternative:

Pay a Chinese or EU company for a third rate model.

The choice is yours.

[FpUser]

>"The choice is yours."

I think (probably except cases with regulatory restrictions) most will very much prefer to pay for "second rate" models from other suppliers, including China and help them to become premium choice.

[byzantinegene]

not if they run out of investments to train their cutting edge models. Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are going to be a massive flop if they aren't able to sell their best models to the world.

[suddenlybananas]

They do catch up.

[cortesoft]

Which is why I said the overall argument makes sense.

[furyofantares]

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true.

I don't really disagree with the rest of your post but I very strongly doubt that Opus 4.8 will be the best American LLM you'll have access to this year.

[dalemhurley]

Why, is there any evidence to support your claim?

[Aurornis]

There is a long history of US export restrictions on technologies. They have all been temporary.

It would be extraordinary if this was the beginning of the first ever permanent technology export restriction.

[input_sh]

Temporary as in it lasted for quite some years, not temporary as in it was dropped within months. That's a very long timescale for this sort of field.

[bigiain]

From outside the US, there has been so much "extraordinary" stuff happening in US politics recently that it's almost expected now.

[sofixa]

It doesn't matter, because people are adopting AI now, and even if the restrictions are lifted tomorrow, it has been proven that relying on an American SaaS is risky, because you can just lose access.

So why would you get that instead of self-hosting Mistral Studio and fine tuning for your needs? Or going fully DIY with e.g. OpenShift AI and open source Chinese models?

That way you fully control availability, costs and quality.

[furyofantares]

Polymarket gives 32% chance the ban on Fable is lifted this month.

Even if it's never lifted, probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.

Open models will catch up to Opus 4.8 and state of the art will, most likely, continue to get better. It won't be long before "better than Opus 4.8" is not a big deal.

[root_axis]

> Polymarket gives 32% chance the ban on Fable is lifted this month.

Totally meaningless.

[furyofantares]

It's June 30 and the ban has been lifted, I'm gonna say Polymarket's 32% chance of the ban being lifted in June was far and away a better guess than bemoaning that non-Americans will never access an American model better than Opus 4.8.

[root_axis]

Polymarket's 32% wasn't "a guess", it's just noise with zero connection to the actual likelihood of the event.

[cyphar]

"This particular band of gambling addicts have bet money on a particular outcome at a ratio of 68:32, so there is a 32% chance of it happening."

Wow, how informative. Maybe I should go check my horoscope for if the Iran war will end next week...

[ethbr1]

> probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.

If you buy the story that Anthropic's marketing hype drove US regulation, then I have a bridge to sell you.

The best case real reason is Anthropic pissed off the administration.

Which will leave OpenAI, Google, Meta, and X far more vulnerable to government data sharing requests... and KYC identity is incredibly valuable to mandate for those.

[furyofantares]

That is my best guess too, which is an even better case for better-than-Opus-4.8 models being available from OpenAI without drawing the attention of the administration.

I do think their marketing hype was a factor though even in this narrative. Andrew Jassy tells a vengeful admin that there's this jailbreak for a model Anthropic said was dangerous, and vengeful admin seizes the opportunity to take vengeance.

[ethbr1]

I think any optimism about future OpenAI models is discounting the avarice of the current US administration.

Having succeeded with Anthropic, it's reasonable to expect their next attempt will be:

"Nice new model, OpenAI, would be a shame if national security concerns tangled up a public release. Now let's talk about equity stakes..."

[kgutscode1]

GLM 5.2 is better than opus 4.8 bro what are you talking about

[pyeri]

Have you tried one of the Kimi K2 models or the latest GLM models by z.ai? The general consensus is that they're at least at par with Claude's class.

[stavros]

If K2 or GLM 5.2 are on par with Opus 4.8 I'll eat my hat. They're good, but they're not that good. Deepseek V4 Pro has been better than Sonnet for me, but the only model that comes close to or surpasses Opus 4.8 is GPT-5.5.

[Aeolun]

GLM 5.2 is far better than deepseek V4. Seriously feels like I’m talking to a Claude model. Also burns tokens like one, so there is that. Deepseek is unbeatable on price/quality.

[fjsoxjdnwk]

Honestly just give it time. This stuff moves so fast next month the conversation will be different. For folks who don’t like the ID privacy issues, use Deepseek et al and it should be able to get the job done even if the experience takes a bit more wrangling.

The problem with the ID verification is that they can pair introspective conversations with ID. Either that bothers people or it doesn’t.

Main point: we can’t fret about current state models because the ID verification has future implications. Models will change and competition will catch up. Do what feels right in the long run not whether TODAYS model is better at Anthropic.

[stavros]

I agree with this, my disagreement was strictly with saying that the current open models are as good as Opus.

[chrsw]

They're not. And by the time they are Open AI and Anthropic will probably be onto the next thing.

Not sure what happened to Google in all this. They're falling out of the frontier race.

[HDBaseT]

Both Anthropic and OpenAI don't want to continue training models indefinitely.

Anthropic CEO has expressed potentially slowing down on model training. There is little return for billions of dollars burnt for 1-2% increase on various benchmarks. These companies profit via inference.

Not to mention, the whole Fable being banned by the US Gov is a scary prospect for future models. What is the point of spending billions if its going to get blocked?

[pimeys]

They are but from our evals for example GLM 5.2 (unquantized) performs as well as Opus but uses more tokens and takes more time.

I really wish this would change soon but they are not there yet.

[klardotsh]

Using even double the total tokens and taking, what, 2-3x the time?, still seems worth it if prices are 5x+ cheaper (which OpenRouter [1] claims is the case).

On NeuralWatt for my personal projects at home (not affiliated, just a happy customer), I get so much more mileage out of GLM than I get out of Claude at work, specifically because it's priced as a hammer I can pound any nail-shaped-object with, not a delicacy I need to carefully budget-analyze to try to figure out if it's worth burning my monthly spend limits on this task.

https://openrouter.ai/compare/z-ai/glm-5.2/anthropic/claude-...

[Den_VR]

I thought true token use was being hidden by anthropic and openai both

[vanviegen]

No, they do specify token counts, as they let you pay for them. They just don't tell you what these thinking tokens actually are.

[girvo]

Though because they don't show you, they could be lying about it. Very unlikely, I think, would be too dangerous IMO. But technically possible

[mcherm]

> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

Not exactly. The close buddy with the owners of several other AI companies who has a known dispute with Anthropic and who has seized near-absolute power in the US is doing something that damages Anthropic. The fact that it also destroys long term prospects for the US overall is irrelevant because the individual can't think ahead and also doesn't care about the future of the US.

It's nearly the same thing in the end, but helpful to understand the cause.

[zsoltkacsandi]

> I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access

That is very well put.

[cheesecakegood]

If they have a year sub, then yes I agree (even if it’s implicitly always part of the risk of buying so far in advance) but if they are month to month this position is absolutely nonsensical.

[0x3f]

You seem to be saying that it's not a problem because you can just cancel your subscription if you don't like it. The fact remains that it's true. It's bad for goodwill in the same way Apple flipping $ -> £/€ is.

[windexh8er]

Hopefully Persona is a non-starter for many. At this point I'm done with Anthropic, I'll be a non-paying subscriber to any of the US based "Frontier" providers. I've been finding far more value in how the models are used vs leaning only on the brute force of a SotA model. Between the Fable / Mythos FUD and scare mongering that Anthropic continues to prance around with I can't take them even remotely seriously anymore. Just like with early iterations of ChatGPT these founders have acted like they're sitting on AGI. But just like with those earlier versions of ChatGPT we'll look at frontier models a year from now and laugh at how off base Dario has been, again as he's been very off base for the last couple of years. I'm still waiting for half of white collar jobs to be replaced next week...

[Phelinofist]

> As a non-US citizen

...

> My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models

May I suggest using Cortecs.ai then? OpenRouter is US-based as well and since you have been bitten by this already perhaps it's really time to change course? :)

[data-ottawa]

Thanks for the suggestion, I am looking into it, it looks promising and I like that the pricing model is very upfront

[lmohseni]

I’ve been using GLM-5.2 on openrouter with pi and, while I’ve only been playing with it for a couple days, seems stronger than Opus 4.8, nearly on the level of Fable for coding/architecture tasks.

[port11]

There’s no way I’m giving a random foreign company my ID.

I’m really enjoying the phone-controlled sessions with Claude, and the models do good work; but if I’m asked to validate my ID, we’re done.

I already have Aivo and Pi somewhat similarly configured. Just give me a reason and I’m giving my money to someone else. In Europe, if you have my ID it’s not that hard to get me into trouble. And there’s no safeguard that Persona won’t be hacked, it’s not like they encrypt the ID with my own keys or something.

[drnick1]

> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market

The issue is that there is no "international LLM market." America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge. I routinely use Qwen and GPT-OSS (locally) for things I don't want to share with Anthropic, but they are clearly inferior to SOTA cloud models.

[1over137]

How does it follow that there’s no “international LLM market” just because one party is ahead of another? There’s an international car market even though some cars are better/worse than others.

[toofy]

> America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge.

this sentiment is far too commonplace in my opinion.

just because the BMW x5 exists doesn’t mean rav4 isn’t used by far far far more people.

the rav4 is close enough for most people to the x5 and way cheaper.

if deepseek is close enough and significantly cheaper, which direction do we think the market will go once the hype trash moves on and people realize how much of the hype trash is just botted algorithms?

[laacz]

Kings come and go. These types of decisions can actually kill a king. Not instantly, of course. But still.

[chaitanyya]

I don't believe US government wanted to restrict the model use to US citizens only. The bad actors will and can find their ways around it.

They do however want strict measures in place to avoid abuse, and the export control was the only tool they had to stop Anthropic from releasing the model.

Though I also wonder if it's even possible to patch things without severely crippling the abilities of the model.

[hailwren]

This strikes me as bluster. You use Anthropic because they offer the best model, if China offered a better model you would use them. You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model but the truth is as long as Anthropic continue to serve a better model than China, you will use it.

Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.

[matheusmoreira]

> You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model

You think some people aren't "deserving" of the best models?

[hailwren]

Not an argument I made. A summary of the argument OP was making.

[metalspot]

The entire internet will be real id verified soon. You won't even be able to send packets without a hardware digital signature linked to a real id. Might as well get used to it.

[aucisson_masque]

I bet that if you don't use companies that enforce these verifications, and they start to lose money, things will shift very fast.

[metalspot]

No. Google and Apple are already rolling out the infrastructure. FCC is requiring IDs for phones. It will be opt-in for a while but the acceleration of AI risks will inevitably lead to an infrastructure level lock down of the entire internet. 99% of the population will accept it without hesitation because it is no different than what they do already. Everything you do online is already logged and tracked. The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.

[3y350n1y]

"The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity." what an absolute crock.

[girvo]

> The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.

What utter nonsense.

[matheusmoreira]

> The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.

As defined by the politicians bought and paid for by the corporations via their lobbyists.

You actually think this is a good thing?

[jen20]

> FCC is requiring IDs for phones.

Sources?

[hurfdurf]

https://www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to-kill-burner-phones-by-f...

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-421309A1.pdf

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/35134-new-fcc-rule-requirin...

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/if-the-fcc-bans-burner-pho...

[jen20]

All of these appear to be proposals only.

[lobocinza]

Worse than that. You're funding models and an ecossystem that discriminates you.

[varispeed]

I don't know what was the hype about Fable. It was crap. This more looks like PR stunt by the US government to prop up the failing product.

Now everyone talks about Fable and wants Fable.

Having used it for limited time when it was available, I don't miss it at all.

[matheusmoreira]

I wanted Fable in order to harden my C project against exploits and vulnerabilities. Anthropic downgraded me to Opus 4.8 every single time I tried to do it.

So I don't even know if I miss it. I suppose that's equivalent to never having used Fable at all.

[calvinmorrison]

Claude has been doing this to me even without Fable, trying to write a Xaw frontend for the moc music player.

[throw__away7391]

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to

No, we are all just waiting for Dario to get scheduled for an Oval Office press conference where he can present a gold trophy to Liberace Hitler and extoll his praises for all the amazing winning he is doing like no one has ever seen before.

[trollbridge]

Please do yourself a favour and check out GLM-5.2, Qwen-3.7-Max, MiMo-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro.

And then for stuff that you already said you were able to use Mistral for... Qwen-3.6 (option to run locally), MiMo-2.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, or... many, many other models to choose from too.

[nextaccountic]

right now the best contender is GLM 5.2, right?

either this or stick with Codex until the US government cripples it too

[lyime]

You underestimate how large the US market is.

[ecocentrik]

AI was always going to be geo-politically fragmentary. As soon as we started talking about it like a utility it was clear that every country was going to be strongly limited to the resources it could develop and the infrastructure it could build out. The US and China will still be selling hardware, managing infrastructure and licensing models and yes the domestic market is massive.

[byzantinegene]

you understimate how large the international market is, for example, half of google's revenue is generated from international markets.

[lyime]

Only *half of Google's revenue is generated outside of the US.

[lyime]

You just proved my point.

[fragmede]

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.

Codex-5.5 > Opus 4.8, so that's not true.

[sourthyme]

Where does 5.5 beat Opus 4.8?

[anonuser123]

Reviews for one. It's reviews are phenomenal.

[pimeys]

Yes and no. The hot moment I tried Fable that thing gave reviews so good I was already considering automation to cut a review for every PR in the company. Its coding abilities though were not that good.

GPT 5.5 is by far the best coding model.

[OccamsMirror]

This is just not true. Especially for frontend development. But I've compared them very recently one to one and Opus wins every time.

Some people have been saying that 5.5 is on par with Fable and it's just nonsense.

[hulahoof]

If you haven’t already, check out omnigent for building workflows across multiple harnesses: https://omnigent.ai/

(Disclaimer: I work for Databricks, but do not work on omnigent - though I have submitted some QOL PRs as a community member)

[azinman2]

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

That’s totally unclear. Things are changing fast. No statement from god or potus has come down about the future of LLMs and who can access what. And for what it’s worth, I’m not able to access fable and I’m a US citizen.

[jeromegv]

> That’s totally unclear.

Lol, welcome to US foreign policy. Or US trade policy. Totally unclear, and it's a feature.

Yes, lack of stability and clarity is entirely why people are steering away from the US. Yes things can change again next week, it's not a good thing.

[coldtea]

>That’s totally unclear.

Being unclear is enough for people to steer clear of it...

[OtomotO]

As is everything coming out of the US these days.

If you have a person as president that changes his opinions faster and more often than their underwear, you're simply not reliable.

[chillfox]

I can't build workflows on something that can randomly be unavailable for over a week.

At this point the future availability of Anthropic models outside the US is very unclear.

[Barbing]

Right, if we saw an open-source Mythos release today, I’d expect it to move the government’s idea of security goalposts.

[wouldbecouldbe]

That's the implied suggestion from the verification that they can prove to only share it with US citizens

[fluidcruft]

My understanding was that until they can make sure it cannot be weaponized against the US, only US citizens will be allowed to use it.

(Read: the US lacks authority to ban use by citizens and doesn't want to risk their hand in court, particularly since lawyers who know anything have all left US government and what remains are complete incompetent jokes who can't even win slam-dunk cases due to repeated procedural errors. The nice thing about blocking non-citizens is they are easy to bounce out of court on standing)

[misnome]

Please don’t be dumb enough to take whatever they say in good faith.

[johnsmith1840]

Or its to stop industrialized distilation efforts?

I would suprised if admin doesn't want american companies and their employees to not be over competitive with outside companies.

But I do see them wanting a lever to prevent international rivals from having it.