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by bushido 27 days ago
The loss of trust in using US based model's is unlikely to come back though.

Anthropic with it's hyped doomsday messaging, and the administration falling for it (at best), has eroded a lot of trust and has triggered an arms race of sorts.

5 comments

OTOH: “our product is so good it was banned for being too good” is the best advertising possible. OpenAI would kill to get that.

I’m not falling over myself to test out Sonnet 5, but I am very interested in Fable.

I really don't think this is effective advertising, reactions have been negative virtually everywhere.

The security bugs were real (see the Open Source projects struggling to keep up) so I think gradual rollout was sensible originally before the ban. But people have always resented safety steps.

Their valuation and revenue don't reflect that.

For the purposes of technical excellence, you are absolutely correct that this has been bad. For the purposes of money-getting, this has very much been a case of "there's no such thing as bad publicity".

Anthropic is very much in the money-getting business right now.

> OpenAI would kill to get that.

I have news for you, from 5 days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48690101

"U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

First mover got all the power of the narrative.
It didn't feel the same
that's an obsequious Altman, not their model being banned for being too good
"W have to go through a regulatory approval process like everyone else" is so much less sexy than "Our model was so powerful that it got banned by the government after a few hours and now all our competitors have to go through a regulatory process invented because of us"
There's nothing sexy about it. From the get go they were accused of FUD drama and that it backfired as predicted. Now what I see in reality is that Anthropic mostly reaped more resentment from their poor marketing attempt. And their model is basically useless or unreliable from being lobotomized by guardrails.

Subscription folks barely have access to the model. Some report a single prompt before hitting weekly limit. And that's when it works instead of downgrading.

If that is a first movers play, it's a disastrous one.

How sexy do you think this guy finds Anthropic now?

> Today I told Sonnet (!) to use a browser MCP to enter a username and password for the project it is working on, it told me that it can't do that because it violates its security protocol.

> This worked fine before. I love Claude, I have stuck with it even through people saying Codex is better but this is definitely getting to be the last straw.

Meanwhile I can tell GLM 5.2 to decompile and crack anything I want with tools like IDA MCP and packet sniffing and it just works. Let alone code.

Here's to OpenAI and a chinese firms bringing some much needed competition.
Amusing to see OpenAI being the "good guy" in the end
They didn't become the good guy, Anthropic became the bad guy instead. The good guys are the chinese firms releasing open weight models.
There's no good guys, just entities you might be able to get marginal value from, who in turn want to get marginal value from you
No. The "good guys" are the ones who provide permanent value: open weight models, hardware we can afford, purchase and own. The good guys offer sovereignty.

The "you'll buy intelligence from us on a meter" rent seekers are technofeudalists. Just a bunch of "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" oligarchs who must be resisted at all costs. Anthropic had a reputation for ethics at first but it quickly became clear it was just like OpenAI but with a patronizing attitude.

The fact China is releasing open weight models will never not be amusing. I expected better from the USA.

So... it IS China, not just companies in China. And why would the CCP want to give out open weights, hmm? Because they are all kindness and love? No. It is just their approach to counter dominance in the space by Western frontier labs. No need to make moral attributions..it is everything, and I mean everything, about Great Power Competition.
The purpose is the destabilization and discrediting of democracy. The Beijing state, in concert with Putin and ex-Khamenei, has no other purpose but to prove there is no democratic alternative. Sure, it turns out you get free things as e.g. one got free RT America.
> The good guys are the chinese firms

Eh... I'd say DeepSeek and maybe one more of the small labs. Chinese Big Tech is even worse than US Big Tech.

Whichever firm is distilling the frontier models and releasing the weights is doing god's work. I'll forever thank them for that.
They're great but in fact it is state financed economic war against the democratic world.
Yeah this is wild stuff. Seeing Anthropic free fall after building up such good will is shocking.
Personally, I think it is manufactured outrage by those with an agenda.
Free fall? None of this recent Mythos / Fable drama is going to even slow Anthropic down.

The HN bubble strikes again.

It's certainly not going to affect their valuation, but their reputation as the "ethical" AI company is gone.
They are slowing down. Sonnet 5 is nothingburger.
If you've built a product based on AI, then diversify or make an abstraction layer so your product is model agnostic and you can plug and play any model. If you're an end user like a software engineer, just use another model or like Gemini or ChatGPT. That is more productive than complaining about a trust which wasn't there in the first place to begin with.

Anthropic provides a service and they can stop offering it regardless of export ban or not, same goes for any other AI company in any country. If you really wants a trusted LLM, then run your own open weight model.

you cannot plug and play random models. they are all different trained on different data and rl for different capabilities.
They didn't say "random models". The mentioned other models that are trained for the same purpose with close to the same capabilities.

Anthropic's best models are very good, maybe the best in their category. But, they have direct competition. You can, in fact, just switch to Codex or Gemini or GLM. It mostly is plug and play. I have a preference but I also have options.

> The mentioned other models that are trained for the same purpose with close to the same capabilities.

well they dont tell you that do they? there is no way to tell what model can and cannot do unless you extensivevly test it yourself and pray for the best.

If you don’t have a proper testing mechanism for your product, regardless of the model, you shouldn’t be shipping it. Praying for the best is not a strategy and don’t blame your lack of testing strategy on the LLM capability mismatch
even anthropic uses 'user reports' in alignment system card.

Do they lack "testing strategy" to test their own alignment?

Can you share the you testing strategies that are letting you plug and play models.

OpenRouter would like a word. Also my in progress SaaS would like a word. Models are incredibly interchangable, just find best performance per cost and optimize harness and prompts, easy to have multiple configs for each model.
On the other side. What would happen if Anthropic did not communicate like they did and Fable was used to hack Pentagon? Dario would swing from a tree.
The vast mojority of its users were probably clueless about all this happening at all. We forget we live in a bubble here on HN. They'll spin it as their success and carry on.