If this becomes the norm, what incentive does the rest of the world have to keep their markets open to the US?
If US companies have a large unfair advantage such that domestic competitors are no longer able to compete, then wouldn't it make sense for governments around the world to ban or tariff US products and services?
If I was responsible for national economic policy, I would place this at the top of my non-emergency agenda. The world needs to act quick before their industries fail.
It might not be a coincidence that POTUS wrote yesterday on Truth Social that 100% tariffs would be imposed on any country proceeding with taxing US' digital services.
Empty threat conditional on something that will never happen.
Most of the rest of the world is too heavily dependent on US digital services to tax them more heavily. From social media to hyperscaler's clouds the US is dominant and stuff will just stop working if they get taxed. There would be a huge pushback from businesses if their government increased the cost of things like AWS.
…and the US is depending on other markets - mostly the EU and China - to keep growing their economy, because the domestic market is pretty saturated with tech already. This has ripple effects too, because 401k pensions depend on big tech to keep growing, so no administration can risk loosing big parts of the European market.
> so now we'll be moving to build our own alternatives
We are taking our time about it and not being consistent. For example some European governments are moving away from US cloud systems, but they are also pushing apps that require American devices to work. There is very little movement of the private sector away from the US so much of the economy economy remains dependent on the US. The end result will be government clouds not dependent on the US, but that can only be used using US controlled devices, and a private sector still just as dependent.
Nothing. It doesn't matter though. If we can't trust the US administration won't just apply 50% taxes tomorrow because some EU representative said something mean to the president, then we can't rely on goods or services exported by the USA anymore.
It's just chaotic. Chaos isn't good for business. What if Microsoft were instructed, on short notice, to block EU customers from using Entra over a trade dispute? If the identity provider of millions of European customers is suddenly unavailable, work grinds to halt. That's unacceptable.
Now you might say that sounds unrealistic - but would you have expected the American president to threaten an invasion of Danish territory? Or freaking Canada?
And even if the next administration turns out to be more "normal", we won't forget that American voters don't care about anyone but themselves - they wanted this. Twice. There is virtually no guarantee the same thing won't happen again in the future, and we all have seen how quickly fruitful business relations turned to shit over a pathetic narcissistic a-hole at the helm throwing temper tantrums.
Trusting the USA has proven to be a bad strategy, even for its closest allies. That won't change all too soon.
codex sub 200usd. in eu it magically becomes 200eur(hello beuracrates) plus vat. You already taxing 30%. That on top that I pay via mine already heavily taxes money.
Mistral experience was as miserable as running local models btw.
This is far from a new challenge though. Another recent example, China has an advantage on cost of labor and manufacturing, and lack of enforcement of IP rights. They can produce for much cheaper than many other countries but it hasn't led to everyone banning trade with them.
Cheap qualified labor doing machining for example.
They def make less than in europe. You make very good money for working at Volkswagen on the line.
And China now also has software developers and even if they make the same amount, they are def also now a big player in the game and take parts of the cake.
Yes, this is exactly the implication. The decoupling of economies between those that have advanced AI, those who do not, and those who decide to ban AI outright or above a certain level of capacity.
One would have to have leverage to put tariff on US and not worry about retaliation. Almost every country is tightly coupled with US, let it be trade or reliance on technology.
I can only think of Russia that is decoupled from US at the moment and they are stuck with Putin that still lives with imperial mindset rather than actually being a rival to US
The US doesn’t have this leverage either, Trump is just uniquely willing to hurt his own country for his own idiosyncrasies. It is pretty established at this point that Americans were the most hurt by his tariffs.
They don’t, they wouldn’t need tariffs if they did.
America mostly produces cheaper ag commodities than the EU but more expensive than South America. Deepseek is already a better search engine than Google. (Not sure if it does Google searches)
Travel the world it’s not American companies gaining market share. I would especially recommend trying Chinese AI or riding in a BYD car and judging for yourself.
You are assuming that governments care and are not corrupt.
I think they have very little room for manoeuvre - companies like AWS or Microsoft can simply you are too cocky and we will shutdown infrastructure your country is running on if you don't bend the knee.
The incentive is that Americans are huge consumers and closing markets to US also means losing US markets, that's why Trump's taxation on Americans for imports(AKA tariffs) caused huge stir. That said, if the risk is not tolerable then it's not worth it and can be sacrificed. EU was fully on board to do that if Trump invaded Greenland and EU as rest of the world are aggressively diversifying.
BTW EU will never have a "tech" industry in any meaningful size as long as US have access to EU markets, anyone who eventually got tech industry are those who blocked the US or were blocked by US.
So if US keeps its course, in a few years we may end up with fragmented markets with US blocked out because the US is very unpopular but the current politicians everywhere including in the EU are very pro-US actually hoping that current situation is just a glitch, which is not aligned with what the general population demands and as a result the next elections they will align with anti-Americans.
Its utterly unsurprising that in the reckoning of pro-socialist society (work less, tax more, live easy), the failure of European industry over the last 30 years, utterly unsurprising that the knee-jerk reaction is "You need to share your labor with all of us" rather than "We need to get our shit together and build a competitor"
Europe isn't cooked because it lacks talent, there are untold smart capable people there, it's cooked because it built a social allergy to the very thing it needs most.
We don't need more fear mongering with AI, it already made a mess. Industries are not gonna fail, they fall behind, like how US doesn't share weapon tech or certain IP's. Plus you have China providing a close 2nd/3rd place LLM tech for free.
The US as a large-scale import nation and so does not need the rest of the world (except perhaps Europe, and only small parts) to keep its markets open to the US.
Even in the European case, Europe would lose much more than the US would if they closed their markets. Plus, a lot of Europe is either very close to breaking point and unwilling to change (Italy), or rapidly worsening into a crash, and unwilling to change (France).
It's Europe that is dependent on a large trade surplus with the rest of the world, financed by dollar loans to 3rd world countries. Now China is taking away their trade surplus, even directly (meaning Europe has a massive trade deficit to China), and indirectly (replacing demand for European goods, famously cars, everywhere). This is causing large-scale job losses in Europe as well as total disaster for government finances across the block, finances that were unhealthy to begin with.
Now Europe and China are unwilling to lend to the rest of the world (because initially that would make very rich Europeans/the CCP a little bit poorer, by raising inflation quite a bit, thereby raising interest rates, which will move government finances from disaster to catastrophe), so if these money flows are to keep going, either the US MUST export to China, which is not happening, or EU and/or China must loan several times their own GDP to the third world, or the EU and/or China must massively increase their dollar holdings (which will, of course, inflate the Euro and Renminbi something awful whichever way it goes). But either WILL happen, because a crash will do that too. Which is what people mean when they say the worldwide system is on a crash course.
I don't think whether a country is an importer or an exporter matters at this point. This is likely going to develop into a matter of national security. Nations cannot allow most of their domestic industries to be destroyed.
If the US doesn't reverse course soon, I think we'll start seeing large-scale closure of international markets to US companies very soon. Even with US retaliation, there is no other option.
Zero chance of that happening. Europe has already largely deindustrialized and it never closed itself to China. Europe also tried to stop buying Russian oil and failed due to transshipment through India.
It's really sad seeing how little so many of us Europeans understand the situation. America and China hold all the cards, Europe holds none. It makes very little that is both unique and strategic. Decades of left wing economic policies are coming home to roost and there's no way to turn the ship around now.
Germany, the 3th biggest GDP country is deindustrializing right now.
that def will hurt.
But we still have a lot of capital left, so plenty of ways to adress the elephant in the room. Its just very weird that the current CDU doesn't has any real good ideas.
USA has a certain amount of hands especially IT but otherwise? China runs circles around Europe and USA for everything else.
Btw. CDU was in power for 16 years and is more right wing than center. If you say left wing in sense of not protecting our own markets, i think this was accepted globally.
USA also can't make things anymore.
If no-one comes up with the general notion of a min of like 60% home made, none of it matters because rebuilding this will take a lot of time and money.
And even with a chip factory in USA, they still import most and automate as much as possible.
This might reduce the pressure on USA Loans but will not help the USA people themselves. They will just continue seeing a bigger and bigger split between poor and rich.
Europe generates ~20% of revenue for US big tech which is a large part of its stock market. With how precariously coupled US growth is to these companies, it absolutely needs that market.
But can the Europe survive without the US big tech. Imagine the worst case US bans any sort of export from big tech to Europe, all startups and even every tech reliant company in EU would collapse without AWS, Azure or Google cloud. Also imagine ban on exports from Apple and Google, from tomorrow onwards both iPhones and Android phones stops working because software services are banned in EU.
It’s so easy to argue on putting tariff on US tech, but we forget how much Europeans depend on it and it would be like shooting one’s own foot.
One could argue that over the time EU can build their own infrastructure and alternative, but who is going to invest for it? The governments? With tax payers money? And who is going to build it? EU is one of the fastest aging continent in the world and what can they offer to attract young talent?
aws et all are just extracting rent. we all know this.
telcos have some ownership of the android firmware they distribute, and could easily spin up and fund alternatives like replicant or even go full partnership with Chinese versions.
simply moving email providers from Microsoft would make threeletter agencies work much more difficult, and it's a 2min dns change.
any way you look at it, the impact would be positive. i don't think your example is the example you think it is. like trump, you're ignoring agency to every other player in the systems and ignoring some obvious consequences.
Either you’re stupid or ignorant. What do you mean by easily spin up alternative android? And who is going to fund that? EU spend millions of Euros for a corona Warn app, and spinning an android alternative would cost billions, with tax payers money. Also everyone that uses iPhones, what are they going to do? Are they gonna get free android phones?
Forget about phones, all the companies that uses RDS would lose their data and that would be catastrophic.
I think this is a bit too deterministic. Even if Europe is in a weak position economically, "the US does not need the rest of the world" seems overstated
I would even argue that the USA is imploding without China.
The normal USA citicen can't afford a car anymore. Either they make it a lot cheaper over there or they have to continue pressue the USA Citicents to accept that they are not allowed to buy cheap China products.
It will be quitei nteresting to see if we will see a global rebalancing of manufactoring and co around the globe for USA, Europe and China or a overall change in system from pure capitalism to something else.
Or the big players start to reinvest into countries again to have customers who can actually afford it again.
This is not how economists think. They see the US, go "Coal mining, check. Iron mining, check, so you can make steel inside US. More than enough people, check. Oil, check. As well as 1000 other things, and mostly, the checks are there", and conclude the US could produce cheap cars. So if it makes sense or it becomes urgent enough, it will happen. Nothing is really preventing the US from doing everything itself, and doing that will improve the balance of trade (while making Americans much poorer).
In other words, the problem of "The normal USA citizen can't afford a car anymore" can be understood in a different way. That can be fixed, by paying people less (yes, less, really, think about it)
The US can drop it's imports and do essentially everything itself.
Right now people can't afford a car because the US is so equal, meaning they can't compete with labor in India or ... But you could "fix" that, by creating more inequality in the US (do what we effectively do now, worldwide, but within the US. Forbid people immigrating from California to New York. Move all banks to New York, build factories in California. Pay people in California 20% what they make in New York for the same job), and production will move back to the US.
And if that offends you, please understand that's exactly what we're doing now. Just replace California and New York with India or China and New York with, well New York, or Washington, and that's exactly the system we have. That's the system the EU is trying to create in the EU.
Doesn't work that way for exports (EU, or China, or to a lesser extent, India). The EU is an export block that's rich getting out competed by export blocks that are poor ... Now THAT is a difficult problem to solve. Not that EU politicians are even trying.
The US is not doing better because US politicians are better than EU ones. They just have a much easier problem to solve. And, of course, both US and EU politicians are failing, but the consequences are much bigger in the EU.
For example, the EU is in fact making it harder to immigrate WITHIN the block, despite "free movement", and is creating massive differences in pay for the same work, which is apparently what socialism stands for:
Typical after-tax pay for supermarket cashier:
Netherlands: 2550 euro (after tax), for 36 hours of work ~ 15 euro/hour
Greece: 1050 euro (after tax), for 40 hours of work ~ 6 euro/hour
Oh and that's not where it ends. You get way more social protection and medical in the Netherlands ... for paying less in tax. The EU is purposefully creating inequality to solve the problem of rich Dutch people not getting richer fast enough. It's only within the same country that there is less inequality in the EU. And, of course, the EU has been making it worse, not better, for about 18 years now. They're not about to stop. The US hasn't even decently started doing this yet.
European economy would implode without trading with US. The biggest economy in Europe, Germany; exports cars, pharmaceuticals and other high end machinery to US and the whole middle class in Germany relies on the jobs from those exports oriented companies
Germany is the biggest economy in the Europe and the one that’s holding Euro stable ( France and Italy would soon be only serving their debt). If German economy goes down, then you can say goodbye to Euro
Ah yes, the classic “Europe is in decline” narrative favored by Americans. You’d think after more than a decade of that nonsense, people would start to ignore it or at least question its assumptions. Nominal GDP and venture capital funding are not the only things that matter in an economy.
America has to be careful not to push Europe into the direction of China though. And with how Trump acts that might happen sooner than they would like. Bullying like how Trump prefers to do only works until some point. Europe mostly seems to bet on America changing its tune again once Trump is gone but we have to wait and see if the rot in America hasnt set in too deep already.
Even if America pushes EU to be like China, they cannot be China. China is one country ruled by one law and in a unified vision. On the other hand EU is a band of 27 countries with different laws, different problems and different priorities. They couldn’t even agree on a response for Ukraine-Russian war and present a unified front and do you think they would present a unified front against Americans?
And ... what will Europe do if America simply ... also moves to use China as a trading partner? Or just drops the EU goods entirely? It'll be unpopular for 1 or 2 years and then the US will be better off. The the EU will have to create 600 billion in new (dollar) revenue per year to compensate. They haven't successfully done that in 20+ years ...
What the Clown currently does is to push Europe massivly into exactly this.
I can't find it right now but I read news just a few month ago that the EU is working on making it easier to invest into EU similiar to how the Petrodollar currently works.
But if the deindustrialization of germany/EU continues as it currently does and US implodes and China has also issues, we will see how the new world order will look like.
China is for sure more resiliant though. The living standards were never as high as what we as germans are used to and they dont demonstrate.
In the USA people have guns and civil issues and a hard divide between city and country sides.
But as Europe/Germany we should be able to increase our bonds right? Investing into solar/energy transformation; Doesn't matter short term how this will end.
And if AI continues as it does with robotics, we might even see in 50-100 years a complete change in system?
USA Bonds are exploding so they might have overplayed their hand already.
Unless your country still use only analogue technology your country would definitely will be at the mercy of the country with AI superiority. Mythos showed how good it is at finding vulnerabilities and attack vectors for digital infrastructure. Imagine an attack on power grid which would result in a days long blackout in the middle of winter?
> your country would definitely will be at the mercy of the country with AI superiority
People claim this, but it doesn't seem to be the case at all. We have multiple ongoing conflicts between countries currently, and we're not seeing huge gains from those with more access to AI.
Mythos is relatively new and Antrophic has been fighting US government to not allow their models for warfare. However, it’s only a matter of time till they bend the knee and in next 5-10 years we’ll see the effects of that.
Previously US used rebel groups to throw governments in other countries that are not US friendly. In the future I can see they can just start chaos by attacking banking systems, energy infrastructure or any other important modern infrastructure until that country falls in line with US
That's all entirely science fiction though, until we see some actual evidence. If Mythos is so incredibly dangerous, then the models before should be at least a little dangerous, and we haven't seen that.
It would definitely be a problem. A big one. Think of all the multi-national tech companies that have rolled out AI not only to their engineering teams but to their business teams now too. Suddenly your employees in the US can do more and do it quicker than your employees elsewhere. It would be a nightmare to try and manage.
That only applies to things Mythos does better than Opus. Mythos is supposedly very good at things such as finding vulnerabilities, but is it better at business tasks? IN the short time I had access to Fable it did not seem noticeably better at things I tried it for (lots of small tasks).
Maybe it is better at vibe coding or finding security flaws, but at how much is it sufficiently better to be worth paying the extra?
You're assuming this export restriction won't apply to any future models. The problem is a couple of years from now when the ROW is still on Opus and US workers are on something much better.
I disagree. I work at a very large international corporation. How much revenue do you think we’ve seen due to AI? I’d guess it’s zero. I know for the groups whose finances I see, it’s zero. Yet costs have gone way up. There’s a bunch of new code, but not anything customers are going to pay more for.
And either way no AI basically puts you back to where we were last year. US employees have always been far more productive, that’s nothing new.
Do you think the only bottleneck in dev has been the speed of coding? I think it’s obvious that this is not the case. It’s finding product market fit, actually discovering and deciding what must be built, and then selling it. And there’s a deeper economic reality: budgets for software are finite and limited, and already close to maxed for most consumers and businesses. If my customers can only afford $500/month total for software, no amount of software I make will push them past that.
It’s not just us: where’s the revenue in the entire market? We can see all the public filings. There haven’t been any revenue gains. The only people making money from AI are the LLM providers. And even they are losing money. Even the biggest tech companies are limiting token spend. At best the tech is a new cost just to maintain parity, and I think most businesses look at it as a way to cut dev costs (trading for token spend). I think they will learn that it’s less of a win than they hoped. If a dev was spending 50% of their time coding, and you reduce that to 10% - that’s a big change but it isn’t really making you more because it’s all that time we hate in meetings, understanding customer needs, etc, that make us money.
A lot of the bottleneck is product management now. There's always near infinite work in every engineering team's backlog.
Identifying the next few things to improve the product is hard work, with market investigation, competitive analysis, synthesizing user feedback... some of this gets faster with LLMs, certainly.
I think most tech companies haven't figured out how to rebalance product to engineering to ensure engineering teams are doing work that grows the business funnel rather than expending tokens on other work.
The real reason, afaik, that the US is trying to restrict access to SOTA models is that a very large component of USA tailored access and surveillance relies on exploits and weaknesses that these models will easily detect.
Thus, it really is an export control issue, but it has nothing to do with offensive capabilities. Offensive capabilities always exist, but pervasive defensibility would upset the asymmetric advantage that attackers, especially the USA, currently have.
There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative.
Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.
But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.
The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.
This is the most credible-seeming claim about why a competent administration might suspend access (by any means necessary, but also by export controls) to models like Fable
However, I haven't seen any prominent articles proposing this theory, I haven't seen anyone in the administration gesturing towards this as the reason (but haven't been following too closely)
Do you have any sources?
(And in fact, it seemed like an obvious hypothesis that wasn't getting much air time in the first weekend, but again, I didn't see anybody really staking a claim to it except in a few comments or tweets like this one)
I doubt an administration would openly admit to sabotaging the ability for companies and individuals to safeguard their products against cyberattacks from the US government lol.
That’s pretty much taking the mask all the way off.
It’s the only motive I have seen that aligns with the actual scenario, and if I -did- have inside information I certainly would not be at liberty to cite it publicly lol.
If only we had a good term for someone good at this stuff less unwieldy than “cybersecurity expert”. (Then someone could start a news site for us.)
As someone in the field for 30+ years, I find that, generally speaking, the only groups that use this term are charlatans and military/military-adjacent. The military use has been slowly leaking into the general public, but I quite wish it would stop.
> “I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown Friday
why is the commerce secretary making this decision
I once had to go through the process of buying a compiled encryption library from a US company, which involved filling in a multi page form basically pinky swearing I wasn't a terrorist and wasn't going to sell it to North Korea.
On the bright side I got to add "successfully managed the purchase of controlled munitions" to my CV.
My tin foil hat version of myself says it is because the whole thing is a marketing stunt and certain members of the administration are getting kick backs for it.
Marketing stunt by who dude? Do you really think Anthropic would really go this far? This whole situation is completely absurd. The federal government is arbitrarily restricting AI models without really providing any reasoning. This is not a clear and transparent government and it just feels like gears are moving behind the scenes that have lead this out of character restriction of private and extremely wealthy (at least on paper) companies without much media or presence of any kind from the fed's side.
I can see a limited way this benefits Anthropic. They've been having issues with one or more Chinese companies using Anthropic models' outputs at high scale to train their own models. By restricting Fable and Mythos temporarily and then rolling out to their most important customers first, then requiring identity verification, they may be able to slow that behavior significantly.
They are losing a ton of money on this and would be much much better off if people (Americans or not) had been building with Fable over the past few weeks rather than not
If Anthropic wanted to continue slow rolling their best model to a select few companies they could've kept expanding mythos access instead
Not to mention the fact that OpenAI has had time to prep 5.6 for release so that there will actually be an alternative around the same intelligence point as Fable. This is just all around terrible for Anthropic.
If you want a conspiracy theory, the one that says "this is corporate assassination" or "the US government does want to be in the business of picking winners" is much much much closer to the truth than yours.
Rather than buying either conspiracy theory, though, I expect Hanlon's razor describes the situation best (incompetence on one side, inability to coordinate/communicate effectively with the current administration on the other)
> I think it is a reasonable term to use in the context of adversarial AI development
Distillation is neither an 'attack', nor 'adversarial' in any reasonable sense.
> Does that mean I am getting paid by the CIA or something
It at the very least means you're uncritically parroting the framing of a company that'd like nothing more than to successfully persuade lawmakers that something should be done about open Chinese models (eliminate choice), preferably so that Anthropic is close to anyone's only option.
It seems like a reasonable person could say that a model being distilled "against the model provider's wishes" is in some sense a cyber attack that is stealing information (eg the lower order bits of the model weights)
I think this is mostly a confusing way to describe it, but I'm not really sure why you say it isn't an attack or adversarial. One side is doing something the other side doesn't want. Seems to be pretty clearly adversarial.
> I'm not really sure why you say it isn't an attack or adversarial. One side is doing something the other side doesn't want. Seems to be pretty clearly adversarial.
This is Anthropic we're talking about here. A company that's infamous for adversarial scraping of copyrighted content. I generally don't accept their framing, especially when it's pretty clear what the end goal of that is.
why not? they have been sued for 1.5Billion, with a B. do you think you get that because you play fair or are such great guys...? how much money do they spend on lobbying? if you count it you will see it. if not then perhaps do some homework and open your eyes.
Anthropic is successfully burning bridges behind them and making the path to profitability impossible for anyone coming from behind. If your model is “allowed by US administration” it’s an implicit admission that it’s either underperforming or undermined.
Thanks to these big guys the odds are stacking against any fresh competition. Data sources have dried up and training material is harder to get, regulation is controlling any advanced model, prices are inaccessible now, and they’re seeking that courts cut off the rest of the avenues, including the ones they used to get where they are.
While I also regard the "doom from the companies themselves is just a marketing stunt" arguments as conspiracy-theory territory (especially since neither OpenAI nor Anthropic* changed their tune since before they were rich enough for meaningful lobbying):
This particular specific doom is from the USG, Trump has a history of kayfabe, and there's a stink of market manipulation coming from the White House.
* Musk, however, you can totally have: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon" in 2014 to "if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?" in 2025.
> So, assuming they are moderately sane is "conspiracy theory"?
Every time I've met someone who believes a conspiracy theory, they don't realise how not-sane the conspiracy they propose is.*
Founding a company on the basis you don't think the others are safe enough, raising capital on that basis, developing methods to improve AI safety, publishing literature about your methods, making open calls for legislation for safety standards, etc.?
While also managing to not leak documentation of this despite all the staff who did leave in order to openly speak about the stuff that they thought still wasn't safe enough?
Thinking that all the doom-talk from OpenAI and Anthropic** is just a PR technique even though they maintained this position continuously starting before they had any money or offices is about as sensible as thinking 9/11 was an insurance scam.
* by definition, because if they did they wouldn't believe it; actual conspiracies can of course be insane, but a conspiracy theory has to also justify why the "evidence" of conspiracy consists of people saying "I recon" rather than documents (specifically documents that mean what they think they mean, cf. "Mike's Nature trick").
** Again, just those two. I'm absolutely not fully generalising this, I'm absolutely not saying there's zero people who do as you say. Heck, the mere fact that this is a common talking point practically guarantees someone post-ChatGPT saw all the people claiming it was PR and said to themselves "great idea I'll do that".
They raised money on the basis of replacing labor by cheaper AI. Not on the basis of being more safe then nebulous "others". They are not "safe" and do nothing to make world safer or better.
> Founding a company on the basis you don't think the others are safe enough, raising capital on that basis, developing methods to improve AI safety, publishing literature about your methods, making open calls for legislation for safety standards, etc.?
These are marketing claims. Or self-delusion claims.
> Thinking that all the doom-talk from OpenAI and Anthropic is just a PR technique even though they maintained this position continuously starting before they had any money or offices i
Continuing to maintain self-aggrandizing position that makes investors give you money is not proof that you are genuine.
But, if they are genuine, then maybe they should stop trying to make that doom happen as fast as possible. I just dont see how "they are really trying to cause maximal harm to maximum amount of people" is a defense.
> They raised money on the basis of replacing labor by cheaper AI. Not on the basis of being more safe then nebulous "others". They are not "safe" and do nothing to make world safer or better.
Original founding says otherwise, for both OpenAI (famously) and Anthropic with this in a copy of their certificate of incorporation I found:
ARTICLE III
The specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced Al for the cultural, social and technological improvement of humanity. In addition, the Corporation may engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the Delaware General Corporation Law as the same exists or may hereafter be amended (the "DGCL.").
> Continuing to maintain self-aggrandizing position that makes investors give you money is not proof that you are genuine.
Conspiracies and growing businesses are incompatible with not getting caught.
A conspiracy of 2 is easy to hide. How big did Facebook get before we saw their dirty laundry?
> I just dont see how "they are really trying to cause maximal harm to maximum amount of people" is a defense.
With that in quotations, you seem to be arguing backwards from what you think they're doing.
Their actual arguments are much the same as open source software: with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
This is obviously true. It may not be sufficient, there's plenty of other doomers who say it isn't sufficient, but it is true.
Easy way to demonstrate, is the difference with the armchair philosophising before LLMs vs. what we see now they exist:
We had decades of people claiming the "obvious" way to keep superhuman intelligence safe is to keep it in a box, keep it offline. Every one of those discussions I've been in, the person saying this refused to believe that it was possible for an AI to convince humans to let it out of the box.
Real life? Blake Lemoine violates his NDA and hires a lawyer on behalf of an LLM, after the LLM convinced him with arguments that a lot of other people (justifiably) mocked him for believing. LaMDA was not superhuman, and it still convinced him.
Did this immediately stop people saying we can keep AI in a box and just not let it out? Nope, kept hearing that for another year or two. That's how much experience humanity collectively needed to internalise just that one part of "AI is more dangerous than you think it is".
> Conspiracies and growing businesses are incompatible with not getting caught.
Growing business is super compatible with lying to make yourself sound better to investors. How is this one an argument? It is not even a conspiracy, just a normal CEO behavior at this point.
Also, what safety testing seriously? It is not like Chinese models were more unsafe in any realistic way.
And it is not like there wpuld be any real attempts to make humanity better.
I dont kmow what you are on about offline AI and someone not keeping corporate secrets. Or antropomorphised ai with conscoiusness hiring layer by proxy.
I understand why Anthropic might not want to fight this particular one in court, because they're trying to convince the administration to let them move forward.
But would another company who is not on the trusted partner list and has less to lose taking on the admin have standing to sue here? On the basis of the export control being illegal and this putting their business at a disadvantage vs. competitors with access
Technically the US government is allowing Anthropic to serve the models to any US citizen, and it's Anthropic who decided that's impossible to comply with and so they pulled the model for everyone. I guess a US business with non-citizen employees could work.
A lawsuit would be a hard sell though, because Anthropic themselves argued that the technology is dangerous. Even if many people on HN might think that Anthropic was scaremongering about Mythos, a court is probably going to take their assessment at face value, and courts are loathe to find against governments in cases of national security.
There's also the issue that these models are getting better through an iterative process, so even if the line between GPT 5.5 and Fable/GPT 5.6 is somewhat arbitrary, it doesn't mean that the government shouldn't be able to draw a line at all. So you're left arguing that they drew the line too early, which is subjective.
> I guess a US business with non-citizen employees could work.
No. Only if those employees have a green card and the company must not only take on that responsibility but ensure other employees are denied access. Otherwise the company would be subject to millions in fines.
US export laws are no fuckin' joke like everyone here seems to think they are.
It's really frustrating to read pages of comments rooted in emotion and no understanding of the existing laws.
> It's really frustrating to read pages of comments rooted in emotion and no understanding of the existing laws.
I read your frustration. Try to let go of the fact that there are many smart people who aren't experts in legal affairs. Cite eCFR if they're wrong, and move on. As much as they don't know the rules, you don't know their situation.
For all you know, the subscriber may be a US Citizen + Delaware C Corp owner.
At some point it becomes willful ignorance of history.
I remember a time not very long ago when everyday crypto like 128-bit SSL was restricted under US export law. The old web browsers came in separate, "exportable" versions. [1]
Phil Zimmermann was in big trouble for releasing PGP. That was the mid-90s. Clinton was President so this stuff transcends politics.
Yes, because US CIA and NSA was hacking half of the World. You can learn about this in Cybersecurity books.
This is different situation. Cybersecurity specialists (at least those I found and read) don't consider Mythos as something really powerful. Good tool but not groundbreaking.
Anthropic was playing terror game and burned by it
> Technically the US government is allowing Anthropic to serve the models to any US citizen, and it's Anthropic who decided that's impossible to comply with
It is technically impossible. Many of the researchers working on the models aren't US citizens. That's not just within Anthropic. It'd make things 100% worse.
There are tens of thousands of defense contractors that not only work with export-controlled stuff, but even top-secret and other higher levels.
Getting just a secret clearance takes up to a year, and expecting to do this for all employees, in this AI market? Not going to happen, things move way too fast.
People complain about the US approach, but almost every high end manufacturing is being export controlled, from ASML machines to high end optic used in missiles.
It hasn't yet happened. And, as things stand right now, nobody in their right mind wants to work in a business beholden to ITAR. Strong export controls will kill American AI.
The Government's position is that Anthropic/OpenAI are forbidden from allowing non-US citizens use the models. This is impossible in reality because how can Anthropic know that the person sitting behind a Claude code session or API key is at any given moment a US citizen? You can check their ID on signup but how can they know that they didn't give their credentials to someone else to use? They can't.
Given the impossibility of compliance, what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is working with the government to release it to certain organizations with the government's blessing.
If this were about missiles and not AI models, nobody would question this turn of events. If the government said that nobody can export this missile or allow non-citizens access to the missile, and then they started giving permission for certain organizations to handle the missile, that would be normal, not picking winners.
The only reason people are questioning it in this case is because they believe that these models are not dangerous enough to deserve these kinds of export controls. Personally I'd agree that in my 3 days of using Fable I didn't observe any superpowers. Unfortunately however, Anthropic undermined that argument by claiming that Mythos is highly dangerous, which set them up for any jailbreak of Fable to be considered a national security risk. Who is a court going to believe? Someone who used a model for 3 days? Or the government and the people who made that model?
Comparing AI models with missiles is a far fetch as long as citizenship is the single qualifier used to decide who’s allowed to be a customer. This is not a security related policy, it’s about strategically controlled economic power.
This is just not how it works even if we really, really want it to work that way. US government can do it, and has done it before. At some point strong encryption was considered “munitions” and export controlled. If SSL can be “munition”, LLMs can be slapped on a label just like that. SSL/TLS stopped being qualified as such eventually so some sanity was restored. But as the legal and regulatory framework, it’s certainly there and has and is being used in that capacity.
> This is not a security related policy, it’s about strategically controlled economic power.
It is both. The US and China are locked in an AI arms race with economics and security intertwined, given the perceived power of the trajectory of frontier AI models.
This has a long history and the US government are not completely stupid. They understand that some cornerstone technologies are high leverage even if they are not per se directly militarily relevant.
Some classic examples of this, on which the US places severe export controls, was advanced materials science and inertial navigation technology. Neither of these are weapons but advanced technology in these domains greatly enables the development of advanced weapons. Any work in these areas is automatically subject to the full export control regime. In extreme cases they may be nationalized and classified.
AI tech is becoming just another tech domain subject to the same level of scrutiny. I’m not making a moral judgement. This was always going to be the reality and a lot of people could see it coming.
Another one is thermal vision cameras. Anything above 9fps (I guess an arbitrary cutoff to do with night-vision goggles) is export controlled. This is despite the technology being very valuable for many industrial and hobby applications.
If that was a guesstimate on frame rate it's likely off.
Regardless of US controls, I can from Australia buy a high quality 50 fps thermal scope with built in 1000m (or ~ 1000 yard) laser range finder from Hangzhou, China.
ie. Why lock the stable at 9 fps when out on the open plain 50 fps is already running free.
The US government obviously has no control over what China sends to Australia, so it this case the cat is out of the bag. However I can assure you the limit is still real for US companies: https://oem.flir.com/support/support-center/knowledge-base/a...
I don't think this is what happened. Anthropic could have absolutely complied with the government order, even in the most minimal fashion possible. Instead they chose to block everybody, and then give a link blaming the government.
I think it's most likely that they felt that this would drive wide antagonism towards the government which would help put them in a more favorable situation for future negotiations to establish a more 'commercially favorable regulation regime.' In other words, build me a moat, now! The government responded by super-screwing them, but is doing so in a way that can help keep the corporate class relatively content while this plays out.
"Our models are so good they are banned by the government"
I don't see any way how releasing an incrementally better model could get even close to the positive PR. For every Mythos token not sold because of this they'll sell dozens of Fable, Opus and so on. Perhaps the ban did not origin at Anthropic, as a PR stunt, but genuinely at some government desk. Entirely possible. But Anthropic would be foolish to not pick up that ball and drag it out a little.
Yeah but that's not what happened at all. The government said limit access to US citizens. Anthropic could have chosen compliance or even malicious compliance (are you a US citizen - please tick yes or no). And such a response from Anthropic would have required the government to try to crack down even harder which would have made them look even worse, and Anthropic even better. Instead Anthropic chose to over-comply and looks just as bad the government here, especially with somewhat transparent ulterior motives driving their behavior.
In addition to what you're saying, Trump admin is also hand-picking which customers gain access to GPT 5.6 during this period. This is widely reported on.
That's why I raised skepticism that Anthropic has not been subject to that.
The people in charge of enforcing US export law are worse than city building inspectors and the penalties are orders of magnitude more severe. They're not people you want to mess with, ignore, or pretend you didn't know the rules.
> As described in court filings, from at least December 2022 through December 2024, Mazulina conspired with Russian freight forwarding companies and others to unlawfully ship controlled items, including industrial oil and gas equipment, from the United States to Russia, through intermediary countries. At one point, in June 2023, Mazulina told colleagues that her clients were paying through bank accounts in third party countries because “[m]ost of [her] clients [were] currently sanctioned with USA.” Mazulina attempted to conceal the unlawful scheme by submitting and causing the submission of false export documents to the U.S. government, which omitted the information that the goods were destined for Russia.
That feels materially different than a software program released in the open domestic market.
I think it’s a general misconception with folks that export controls only apply to weapons, forgetting that it applies to many high-end manufacturing and technology.
I’m surprised about some of the reactions, but again anyone who has a security clearance wouldn’t touch any of this discussion with a ten-foot pole also.
Also there’s no incentive to fight. They already have one of the best models. Mythos remains a trump card when a competitor releases an even better model.
Being nationalized removes the fear of going out of business. They would become like the post-office but for delivering and centralizing all digitalizable knowledge.
Most researchers in AU work for a pennance in academia, which is 'kind of almost a wing' of gov. in some ways, at least in sense there's related funding and 'public good'.
But being part of a gov industrial entity would be hard, unless it had 'all the right ingredients'.
Like the modern version of NASA? It's hard to imagine under this administration. But maybe it's plausible with a different mindset.
Also worth remembering NASA exists to counter Sputnick, we think of it as 'space, exploration, science' but it has a 'cold war' underpinning.
The government, once they see realized potential, will print money and give it to Anthropic if that’s what’s needed to keep developing the technology with gated access.
Bond yields are already rising on sovereign debt, if the government resorts to 'printing money', rates will rise materially, debt payments become unsustainable and the economy would crash in a worse way than 'the Great Recession' and it's hard to understand what woudl become of that.
In 1929 the US was not 'global reserve' meaning there was not all that extra leverage in the system.
The US 'hooked' on cheap debt, aka the rest of the world buying USD.
Kind of like leveraged speculation - it has upsides, but the downside is harder.
But that's even before the fact that 'nationalization of Anthropic' would lead to it's instant evaporation.
Have a look at what's going on with the DOJ right now, it's being completely corrupted, 'banana republic' style.
People would be reluctant to have such a thing in 'gov' in normal times, but right now ... things are extremely bad.
The difference is Anthropic is not a defence contractor.
Any number of materials and technology can be used for nefarious purposes.
'Security' is real concern, I'm not denying that, it's not unreasonable for gov. to be paying attention or to take some steps - but it can obviously bee too heavy-handed as well.
The labs will not just ignore the order, there are too many other levers they can try to pull to mess with those companies. Just for some examples, think about the number of employees reliant on visas that could be revoked, the government contracts that the hyperscalers hosting them that could be canceled, the certifications that all the data centers need to be hooked up to the grid, the tariffs that could be put on critical components, the IPOs that need to be approved by regulators, the bill introduced in Congress to seize 50% of their equity...
Lots of these moves would and should be struck down in court as an arbitrary and capricious use of administrative power. Some of them might not be, and in the meantime you're signing up for tons of trouble. A trillion-dollar company does not simply go to war with the US government.
A more mid-sized company that's not so intertwined, but not so small that they can't get a good legal team, might be another story.
These regulations have been in place since the 1990s and have been applied by every administration. It isn’t a new authority and many companies have had the opportunity to fight it. Anthropic’s lawyers will know this.
Before you offer legal advice, you should at least check the legal definition of "export":
> The EAR definition of “export” extends beyond the transportation of physical goods outside the U.S.
> A “Deemed export” is the release of technology or source code to a foreign national in the U.S. The release is “deemed” to be an export to the last permanent residence status/citizenship of the foreign national. This can occur through demonstration, oral briefing, site visit, or through transmission of non-public data.
Please read the actual regulations and laws. They do not work the way you are assuming. Companies with obligations under these regulations are required to actively prevent constructive export via domestic distribution. If you let a foreign country launder access to the tech through domestic channels, that is on you. It is why KYC laws exist.
You don’t want to fuck around with export control laws.
Yes he does. They could ignore the US government, but will likely quickly find themselves in court fighting a fight that they are likely to lose and isn’t worth fighting anyway.
Ignoring US export control laws that have been on the books for nearly 50 years is a good way to pay millions of $ in fines and/or land in pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Ask every satellite launch company in the 90s how that worked out.
> They could just ignore Trump as he has no authority to so limit a private company.
Ignore export control regulations?
I think you’re trying to say you really feel it’s not fair, and you’d like so and so meany and bully to go and pound sand. And yeah most people feel the same way here but ignoring export control regulations is not a joking matter and not something to play around with. Especially for a company that feels they are having extra eyes on them.
>> More than 100 companies and institutions will now have access to Mythos 5, including many Fortune 500 companies, a source familiar with the new directive said, declining to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Who are those 100 companies? Clearly they can't compete on merit and have rubbed some hands to be picked as winners...at least for now.
I don’t know if this has something to do with the administration or access to export controlled technology. There could be a licensing process, but I don’t think it would be public information, we don’t know whom each defense contractor sells to as public.
Im really not convinced that can be solved with money alone. China has the money and infrastructure, they don’t have the chips. Europe doesn’t have the infrastructure or the money but may have some chips
But the actually valuable EUV light source technology is developed by Cymer in California. Cymer was only permitted to be acquired by ASML in 2014 under a strict technology sharing and export agreement with US government.
It's why ASML can't just sell the machines to whomever they want. It's largely American tech inside them.
To do what exactly? They have been nothing but EU funds leech and corporiders.
Every single model is (and always was) behind anything from China.
I wish Europe could find one company that can put us on the map but Mistral’s not it. They have repeatedly shown that extra funding doesn’t magically transfer to better models.
I'd assume that Deep Mind, being owned by a US company and having US offices, has to care about US law, despite the differences (me: small fry; them: actually having offices there), because the chain of enforcement is still "take it or leave it" at each stage (USG->Google->DeepMind vs USG->Apple->3rd party Apple devs).
These are export restrictions, so if the model is in London (how do you determine that? The weights? The training itself?) there is no need to export it from the US. Then Google may have found gold. They can sell it to everyone that can't get the best OpenAI or Anthropic models.
Usually export controls are applied to stuff where some significant % is made in America so a few US based engineers could make the project export controllable.
Or in the case of ASML machines, any company you can pressure to comply with your policies either by restricting their access to the technology you control or politics between governments.
But do they want to start a game of chicken with Google? Doing it to Anthropic is one thing, they're much smaller and less B2C. But Google is far more powerful and likely to defend their UK/EU business because they're also fucked if they don't.
Gemni is really not that far behind, 3.1Pro was the best model or close to it when it came out, 3.5Pro likely wont be but whenever they get to 4 that could easily be Fable level, just later than when Fable itself came out.
> What’ll happen when Google Deep Mind go to release their next models, developed mostly in London?
Unless you open source it then Google Deep Mind isn't the entity "releasing" it. It's some other Google that's US based, e.g. Google Cloud running the APIs etc.
This makes me sad since it implies that the best LLM I will ever be allowed to use is GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. Anything smarter than that is deemed too risky.
So much wasted potential.
And why would I pay Anthropic or OpenAI once consumer hardware gets powerful enough to run an open weight Chinese version of Opus 4.8? Even more so when mobile phones are able to run similar LLMs.
Their financial growth looks doomed. It looks like they will be heavily regulated just like the next missile factory. This is antagonist to VC led turbo growth startup regime.
> It is almost guaranteed it will also introduce export controls on the models.
The current models are open weights and already out the door. They are hosted by many providers and are already comparatively good in many domains. Even if this generation is the last one to be open, I‘d argue it would already put the US providers in trouble
Also, the evidence isn't that China is doing anything magic - it seems AI is just energy + compute as opposed to any special research edge. There is reason to think that anyone would be capable of building these models. They're generic and every country will eventually catch up at a speed depending on how economically capable they are at buildign data centres.
I'm upbreat about China because they seem to be the biggest player here, but even if they don't come through I expect other countries will be able to put out decent free models.
I would argue that there is somewhat a research edge - there's no reason to think Chinese labs aren't incredibly capable in research though, look at all the recent papers from them on things like efficiency.
Naturally I wasn't implying they'll restrict the current models retroactively. Which either way trail behind even the universally available frontier models.
What's perplexing is people see CCP as some kind of libertarians while they in fact love regulations and routinely leverage them both domestically and in exports.
I’ve been asking myself this question quite a bit lately. People seem to suddenly think China is a good alternative to the US hegemony status. I sincerely hope I’m just misreading things.
The US has an open media and the western world internet is a non-stop airing of the US's dirty laundry.
China has only state media and little internet overlap with the west.
From the POV of your typical western internet denizen, The US elected a dictator to burn the country to the ground, while China is building
a utopia where the fruits are free for everyone.
Uyghurs, Tibet, and Taiwan, for starters. Taiwan in particular could become a conflict if push came to shove. Hard to say. (No nation will go to bat for the Uyghurs or Tibet, though.)
It doesn't change the fact, that as an European I really wish we had a better relationship with China and ditched US and their backward policies. It's OK to point out atrocities made by big empires, they are all guilty anyway.
As the US jerks from being BDFL to bullying zero summer, it’s not surprising that the abstract fears of china seem manageable compared to the new pressing fears of the US.
Why as a European be more afraid of a country that whilst you wouldn’t want to live in and which has supported Russia is quiet and selling you cheap stuff vs a country who used to be a friend who is now wanting you to grovel for a bad deal and is also supporting Russia?
If the Chinese models are open weight the after release you don't care about China at all; they could be running on a server in Bulgaria with zero CCP influence for all you care.
Consider it from a European perspective: The US under this administration is more unreliable than China. If Trump decides tomorrow that he's unhappy about something he'll pull some random other thing to bully the other side. You can't do business with that.
Rebuilding trust and foreign relationships is going to take a long time after Trump is gone.
There are no Chinese military personnel and bases in Europe. The Chinese have not tried to take European land by force and China is also quite stable. It won't change it's mind every 4 years and negate international treaties that have been signed. I also don't recall China invading another country and/or kidnapping leaders of a foreign state in recent history. China also does not control the global reserve currency and can not unilaterally impose debilitating sanction on countries such as Cuba causing the death of thousands of innocent people because of some historical beef.
Yes, China does not have a good human rights record, they imprison a lot of political dissidence but then who are we comparing them too? The US has a 5x worse per capita prison population than China and a horrific human rights record.
What exactly bothers you so much about China that the US does not?
The irony is that the US is currently getting so much flak because it's leader is trying (and failing, EOs only go so far) to become what Xi Jinpeng is to China.
So if you want to put all your eggs in Xi's basket alone, go ahead. But if he has a stroke tomorrow and thinks China would be best off making pool toys, all your eggs will be smashed in one instant.
China is an authoritarian ethno nationalist state-capitalist system. They are so far from anything remotely communist. The only thing communist about it is the name of their mono party
They pretty much like to confiscate your property and or force you “donate” your profit (see Alibaba for a very good example), make you disappear, enforce censorship and all that stuff very familiar to European communist regimes. They may be different flavours of communism but they all stink.
> They are so far from anything remotely communist. The only thing communist about it is the name of their mono party
They are far from anything remotely communist except by the one and only thing that defines communist? "Communist" has only ever referred to a political party.
Are you confusing "communist" with "communism"? The latter has held dual meaning, both referring to a nation under rule by a Communist party and an imagined sci-fi world where post-scarcity has taken hold. Obviously we remain far from achieving post-scarcity. However, nobody has ever claimed China has. In context, we know that the political party is the point of focus.
You’re the one who seems to be confused. When china liberalized it kept the esthetic of communism, while shifting to a state capitalism system. Communism is about control of means of production. China has adopted a capitalistic economy
> Communism is about control of means of production.
No, but perhaps you are now confusing communism with Marxism? Long story short, Marx and Engels hypothesized that capitalists would effectively withhold the technology necessary to realize post-scarcity. They suggested that the only way to bring post-scarcity into reality was to have the public take control of the means of production — a.k.a. socialism.
You are right to point out that being the foundation of the Communist party. Their efforts (on paper) revolve around the belief that they need to take action to see us find post-scarcity, believing, like Marx, that vested interests will stonewall the transition.
> China has adopted a capitalistic economy
You might say that is a move away from the Marxist underpinnings, but is not at odds with the Communist agenda. We nearly have post-scarcity in the area of food, and that has been primarily driven by American and European advancements, so today we have come to accept that Marx's ideas have not proven themselves. That does not diminish the quest to find post-scarcity, however. Communists (on paper) still have the same goal. If you look closer, while their system is capitalistic, the Communists still hold the reins to prevent autonomous capitalists from stonewalling post-scarcity.
You know, like as is seen in the original article. We have a purported transformative technology that can lead us towards post-scarcity being withheld by a small guild for their own benefit. Marx may have not gotten the exact mechanics right, but his underlying fear is playing out right before our eyes.
Most Europeans do not think about some ill-defined "communist threat" at all. The majority of negative opinions about China stem from economic worries.
Also FYI: the CCP has officially adopted the designation "socialist democracy" for themselves*, so I don't think you're going to bother them much by using that term. You'll have to get more specific about what you think their "democracy" should look like for them to start giving you the side-eye.
* Many places that are not really recognizable as democracies from a western POV do this. People, we have democracy at home!
Export controls are only a strategic advantage if the export destinations don't already have the same (or better) technology. That time may come, but first China needs to export to destroy the AI industry in the USA.
Right, I cancelled my Codex sub yesterday, it ends today. I'm not American and I see the writing on the wall, I'd just as soon improve my tooling to work more effectively with "stupider" open weight models than be dependent on Lutnick and Bessent for "permission" to use the frontier models.
Sad situation is that half the talent that did the primary research and initially created these models and got them out there was educated here or taught here or have citizenship here in Canada. Karpathy, Sutskever, Hinton, there's a huge list. And for other countries, too.
In the short term this play may work for the US administration, in the long run it will only reduce the flow of talent and good will and sharing between G7 nations.
The last bit might be the point - this has all got a bit out of hand, the US government might have decided now is the time to prick this bubble.
Either because ordinary people hate it or (more likely) because Sam and Dario have got too powerful and they’re now starting to become a genuine rival castle to the US government in elite theory terms - of course at that point you get your wings clipped
Yeah that's what I'm saying - this isn't about "doing the right thing", it's about the existing power structures wanting to preserve their status (the US equivalent of what happened to Jack Ma).
Kushner and the rest of the gang have probably already got a heads up about this and cashed out their stakes, now it's time for Sam and Dario to go through some struggle sessions
This is a pithy internet comment, but terrible advice.
Between the Chinese government and Anthropic, I know which one I'd rather send tokens to. For all of the problems of the US, for-profit corporations, data harvesting, etc. the CCP (and, perhaps more troublesome, its allies) is far less likely to align with your interests.
I don't buy that anymore. The day America threatened to invade Canada and Denmark was the day America showed they cannot be trusted any more.
It's not like China can be trusted either, but China isn't planning any direct invasions to the west. Taiwan, perhaps, but they're playing a long-term tactical game rather than a "invade the country we don't like this week" game. They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk, but in that case you shouldn't be uploading your secrets to an AI company in the first place.
The US is a big and beautiful country. I also dislike contemporary US politics, but don't deny yourself the experience of ever traveling there out of spite.
The world has better places to offer. The past 20 years have only reinforced my stance no need to try.
My friends experiences visiting family (before Trump) have confirmed them multiple times.
Imagine visiting family as a 17 year old German and then being questioned for 11 hours because you don't know the exact street where the family lives. While the relative is waiting at the airport without any kind of information.
> If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk
Read about GE and Alstom and how the US government (under Obama) forced the sell at a discount, without a true GE financial audit.
No, experience tell if you're a foreign company owner, you risk less allying with the CCP than with the US. At worst with the CCP you'll lose your IP, with the US you will get arrested and be forced to 'sell' (I.E. you'll get overpriced stocks)
> Taiwan, perhaps, but they're playing a long-term tactical game rather than a "invade the country we don't like this week" game.
So one of the world's biggest and most rapid military build-ups in history that is largely intended to give China the ability to seize a democratic country by force by 2027 over any US/Western efforts to protect it is OK because...it's "a long-term tactical game"?
Note that China is not just menacing Taiwan. It's constantly harassing Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam too. Other countries in the region are worried because they understand that if China takes Taiwan successfully, it's not likely to stop there and become a good, peaceful neighbor.
The US, under Trump, is a foreign policy disaster. That doesn't mean that China, with a seemingly more emotionally stable dictator at the helm, is any less dangerous.
> They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
With all due respect, you're really naive about how China operates.
You're judging China based on some future thing that may happen. The US has been bombing Iran for the last year impacting the entire global economy. I think I'll judge based on actions.
Yeah, because criticizing the US, and/or making China look good can get you on certain lists. Maybe that is the reason?
FWIW I do not buy into the "China bad, we good" narrative either.
The US has done really fucked up things, bombed countries for freedom, there has been recent events as well. I do not even think they were ever the "good guys" they thought they are. In Hollywood movies, sure, but in reality? Nah.
> Yeah, because criticizing the US, and/or making China look good can get you on certain lists.
What lists? And what happens to people on those lists?
> Maybe that is the reason?
If you think people are signing up throwaway accounts to post replies to random comments, making no substantive or even controversial statements, I have a bridge to sell you. In the US or China. Take your pick.
> FWIW I do not buy into the "China bad, we good" narrative either.
I never presented that narrative.
> The US has done really fucked up things, bombed countries for freedom, there has been recent events as well. I do not even think they were ever the "good guys" they thought they are. In Hollywood movies, sure, but in reality? Nah.
I'd agree. But what does this have to do with an analysis of China?
My previous comment got flagged about a minute after I posted it to you. It was three paragraphs and it argued a position without any abuse in it. It is probably someone in this thread who hit flag instead of replying because they did not like what I said. Which is suspicious, and it is also the thing I was already talking about. The throwaway shill insinuation earlier was a way to avoid engaging with a disagreement, and a flag does the same job. Welp.
> The US, under Trump, is a foreign policy disaster.
The US, under every single president has been an imperialistic threat to half the world. From imposing embargoes, to overthrowing governments and supporting dictators and genocides all over the world. Half the world hates you, and the other half has begrudgingly no choice but to half assedly support the greatest threat that the world has ever known, a military in a trenchcoat made to protect their dominance over world trade.
So, respectfully, fuck off. The Chinese are not a worse problem than you are, merely a different one. The NSA already has all my data, no reason the MSS shouldn't get a piece of that data too.
I always find it strange to encounter people whose disposition to one violent imperial power is to welcome...more violent imperial powers. Strange form of sadomasochism.
> I don't think China is more violent than the US.
You don't have to because that wasn't an argument I made. Both the US and China have done horrible things to innocent people and are both currently engaged in malicious behavior that is an affront to humanity.
> I think the US did this more in a century than China did in a millennium.
Once again, I'm not interested in "who is worse" pissing contests, but please educate yourself.
> The Great Leap Forward led to between 15 and 55 million deaths in mainland China during the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine it caused, making it the largest or second-largest famine in human history.
China was the Khmer Rouge's main backer. The Khmer Rouge's actions were responsible for a genocide in which 1.5-2 million people perished. Afterwards, China offered asylum to Pol Pot and his top aides.
People who are genuinely interested in justice, human rights and peace should be horrified by what both the US and China have done.
> Once again, I'm not interested in "who is worse" pissing contests, but please educate yourself.
Way to speedrun your argument being shit. I am now free to not take it seriously.
I'll reply for the other onlookers anyway.
> The Great Leap Forward
I know quite well about how awful China was to its own citizens during Mao years, thank you very much.
The thing is, I don't care. China can be as awful as it wants to be to it's own citizens.
The US has a very long list of spying and interfering (many times very violently) abroad. That is what I am concerned about, and that was the point I was replying to.
I could say something along the lines of you needing to educate yourself, but I tend to not seed asphalt.
> The Tibetan government in exile believes as many as 1.2 million Tibetans died as a result of Mao's invasion of Tibet in 1949.
Again, I don't care. China sees places like Tibet and Taiwan as China. Not my problem.
China never threated to send troops to invade Greenland.
> People who are genuinely interested in justice, human rights and peace should be horrified by what both the US and China have done.
In many ways, I am. But that is not what is being discussed here.
> The thing is, I don't care. China can be as awful as it wants to be to it's own citizens.
Way to speedrun proof that you're an abhorrent person.
> Again, I don't care. China sees places like Tibet and Taiwan as China. Not my problem.
> China never threated to send troops to invade Greenland.
So China causing more than a million deaths and displacements when it actually invaded a functionally sovereign state (Tibet) and threatening to invade and seize Taiwan, which has its own democratically-elected government, constitution, currency, central bank, military, etc. "is not your problem" but somehow Trump threatening to invade Greenland is your problem?
Unless you're a Greenlander, by your own standard, you have no legitimate reason to care about the ~57,000 people who live in Greenland. Let China take Taiwan, and let the US have Greenland.
> So China causing more than a million deaths and displacements when it actually invaded a functionally sovereign state (Tibet) and threatening to invade and seize Taiwan, which has its own democratically-elected government, constitution, currency, central bank, military, etc. "is not your problem"
Correct.
> but somehow Trump threatening to invade Greenland is your problem?
Correct.
> Unless you're a Greenlander, by your own standard, you have no legitimate reason to care about the ~57,000 people who live in Greenland
EU, article 42. Educate yourself.
(Just kidding, it would be in vain).
> You're a real piece of...work.
No, I just live in a country that does not pretend to be the world police.
I can't do shit about China invading Tibet or Taiwan, much in the same way I can't do shit about Israel turning Gaza into an open-air Auschwitz, beyond writing mean words on the internet.
But I can recognize what country poses the biggest threat to my living nowadays. That country is not China, it is the US.
No, you're just looking forward to being the only violent imperial power and to rule unopposed. the existence of another violent imperial power keeps you on a leash. It's not the best case scenario, but an unfettered and unrestricted united states spells doom for the world.
China also happens to be the one that's electrifying the world, producing and improving batteries, solar panels, has a long term plan while the US is going hurr durr VC money printing for smart dog food.
> No, you're just looking forward to being the only violent imperial power and to rule unopposed.
You'd probably be a much more content person if you stopped going around the internet assuming things about random strangers on the basis of their nationalities.
Elsewhere in this thread you insinuated that someone is a Chinese propagandist for pointing out that the US is actually aggressive in ways China is not.
If you're going to assume other people have ulterior agendas without evidence, you can't be surprised when people make assumptions about you in turn.
> Elsewhere in this thread you insinuated that someone is a Chinese propagandist for pointing out that the US is actually aggressive in ways China is not.
America's aggression around the world is well-documented and is deplorable. That can be acknowledged and discussed without dismissing Chinese aggression. There's no law of the universe that says only one country can be a bad actor at the same time.
Yes, I was referring to that comment. You knew exactly which one I was talking about without pointing it out specifically, so why should I have bothered?
Now you just dropped five links in an attempt to demonstrate that Chinese aggression is comparable to US aggression, and yet none of those incidents amounted to extrajudicial execution (aka murder), which is what the person with the throwaway account was referencing.
All of it is beside my point anyway, which is that you are making assumptions about people while also asking people not to make assumptions about you.
For all you know, that throwaway account is someone who uses this site for professional development under their real name and does not want their criticism of a vindictive administration tied to them. Instead of considering that, you implied that they are a Chinese troll engaging in bad faith.
I'm inclined to believe that if someone is drawing false equivalencies and needlessly smearing their interlocutors as trolls, they are the one engaging in bad faith.
We are thoroughly off-topic at this point, so let's just end this thread here.
> Now you just dropped five links in an attempt to demonstrate that Chinese aggression is comparable to US aggression, and yet none of those incidents amounted to extrajudicial execution (aka murder), which is what the person with the throwaway account was referencing.
China engages in the extrajudicial execution of its own citizens.
I personally believe that the US has committed a significant number of crimes. That doesn't mean I'm blind to the fact that other countries commit crimes too.
I'm not sure why so many people struggle to acknowledge that all of this stuff is evil, regardless of the country doing it.
> For all you know, that throwaway account is someone who uses this site for professional development ...
Normal people using sites like this for professional development don't decide to create throwaway accounts post a single response to one short comment, buried in the context of a larger thread, that wasn't even highly downvoted or upvoted. This is what troll farms do and I'd have to question your intellectual honesty if you keep pretending that this isn't exactly what China-sponsored troll farm commenting looks like.
> The US, under Trump, is a foreign policy disaster.
This administration only removed the blinds on what has always been an adversarial policy, allies included.
If given a choice you may choose US or Chinese models for whatever reason it's fine, but there's no need to fall into the delusion that it is for moral reasons or obligations.
Less likely to align with your interests maybe, but have you considered that not everyone has the same interests?
Personally I am much more concerned about handing my data over to the government that actually has power over me and labels dissenters terrorists than I am with the government overseas that has no direct effect on my life... well, other than providing alternative LLMs with permissive licenses that can be hosted anywhere in the world... but to each their own, I suppose.
That's the neat part with the Chinese open weight models. You don't have to send your tokens to the PRC, the models can be hosted stateside or anywhere else you'd like.
As if we have a choice. I'm one of the foreign peasants the US government has cut off from the top tier models. I'll probably switch to GLM 5.2 when my current Anthropic subscription ends.
You don't have to send your tokens to the CCP to use the Chinese models, that is the beauty of it. You can find GLM, Minimax, Deepseek, Kimi, etc hosted in China, Europe, the US, and probably elsewhere depending on what your geographic preferences for token transport are.
At least China isn't a terrorist state run by Jeffery Epstein Associates. It's a nation run by engineers, and it has flaws, but at least the people at the top know how to read.
I find interesting that the tactics to nudge people towards US models and away from Chinese models ceased to be on merit or technical capability - anyone that used DeepSeek or MiMo knows that those are nothing short of excellent. Now it's the old-fashioned fearmongering.
You know what? I live in Europe. China was not the country threatening military action against one EU nation that would throw the whole continent into war a few months ago.
Also, it's not Chinese companies harvesting every piece of data about me that they can get their hands on.
If fear is your argument, I know that I fear the US and its big tech corporations a lot more that China.
I’m not sure what the US government is trying to do. At first it seems like they are just trying to stifle some company that said no. Now they are just doing free publicity. It’s like never before have I wanted to try something out as much as this.
They’re in effect saying “nothing else is as powerful as what Anthropic put out”. Even though that might not really be the case it’s what it sounds like.
It’s probably just basic corruption. Want access to Mythos for your company? Enrich someone in the administration. That’s how everything works now: they outlaw/tariff it and then you pay a bribe to get it back or get declared exempt.
It just came out the Kalshi outright gave Donald Trump Jr a $300k stake in the company when it made him a “strategic advisor”. That’s the name of the game now
Could you share some pictures of the rock you're living under? The US regime is concerned with furthering the interests of a closed circle of powerful loyals. This achieves that goal. Access is reserved to those loyals.
A published policy with the right to appeal exclusions from the list.
An equal standard for all companies rather than ad hoc application.
A countervailing policy to mitigate the unfair advantage conferred on the companies that have early access (such as a higher tax rate that goes to fund ai job loses, and a commitment that AI use of the new models won’t result in layoffs).
A requirement that hardware is made available for open source models rather than locked up in by the AI labs.
A restriction on AI labs being vertically integrated from hardware all the way up through the app layer. I would restrict AI labs to being API providers and prohibit them from building apps. That would allow an ecosystem of independent software development on the app layer without fear of being copied by the labs that have an unfair advantage in seeing the data while apps are being built, the usage data as they become successful and the ability to undercut competitors by subsidizing tokens unfairly.
That would convince me that the US Administration is capable of good governance and interested in a regulatory environment that furthers the public good and curtails excessive corporate power. A tough sell indeed. But that was not the question. They can be incompetent and corrupt and favouring the interests of their buddies, and also genuinely believe that the models are actually becoming dangerous (especially in the hands of other countries). It's simply impossible to tell what mix of motivations led to this mess.
The latter question is 100% reasonable, and something I also fall on.
But there's definitely a large contingent who denies that they think there's any risk at all, instead of them engaging in motivated reasoning to think their self interest just so happens to coincide with what is best for safety.
I might be un-convinced if someone published a clear technical explanation of what error these companies have all made. The only counterarguments I've seen so far are vague speculation about how bubble dynamics might incentivize them to say it worked great, and to me that's not persuasive.
Of course not. I like to complain that AI is dangerous and should be regulated and then out of the other side of my mouth complain that it is unfair and a gimmick if the government tries to regulate anything.
Why? Because I am a social media addict that lives in 2026 and I don't know how to relate to things in the world that don't involve complaining.
Complaining you see is more form of epistemology and entertainment at the same time to me. Reasoned debate and nuance just doesn't get enough likes for me. I am all about the emotional response to a topic.
I mean, we're talking about an administration that has already over-reached in regulating this specific company out of personal bias; is openly seeking leverage over companies for favoritism and graft; hires on the basis of loyalty to whims of a narcissist; makes fun of the whole idea of competent government based on expertise; provides a range of conflicting explanations for whatever it chooses to do; and has been unable to field a team capable of understanding or explaining whatever real risks are here.
Your question is like asking what evidence would convince us that a bag of rocks doesn't have rocks in it. Easy, just take the rocks out.
I thought "Free market!!1!" was basic US policy. But apparently you can't do any consumer protection laws, but you can regulate AI access to only your wealthy friends / campaign sponsors.
Anthropic has been touting how their newest model is basically a cyber weapon and is so dangerous that they need to only role it out to trusted people and make sure it has super restrictive guard rails. They are begging to be regulated. This is exactly what they’ve been asking for.
This doesn't directly follow from the first part of your comment, and more importantly seems inaccurate with respect to Anthropic's public statements on this situation. For example:
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
In fairness, they are up against a part of government that can move swiftly and authoritatively. They don’t have the luxury of biding time against a sclerotic and process-bound bureaucracy.
There is a good reason no one seriously tests the resolve of these particular regulatory authorities.
What they wanted is to regulate competition but they forgot that current admin is Trump. They should have buy gifts to Trump preferably gold and pay for few exciting dinners in Florida. They should have learned from Bezos and Cook.
Their true intentions were to get the government to regulate open weight models while leaving them alone. Government went after them instead.
As enjoyable as the sheer irony of the situation is, this is a terrible development... Not only are foreign peasants like me cut off from the best models, so are the chinese AI labs that were distilling them into open weights for the rest of us to enjoy. This sudden acceleration has been genuinely terrifying, I'm not sure what to expect of the future anymore.
I wonder if the Founding Fathers knew about AI, they would include it in the 2nd?
The spirit is to provide effective tools for the people to resist federal military tyranny, and Mythos seems like it would be a good tool to defend against that, for so many reasons.
I'm not sure that analogy works: pretty much everyone agrees that there are some types of weapons civilians shouldn't be able to have, even though they might be very effective for resisting military tyranny.
I don’t think everyone agrees on that. It’s just that the government has been able to legislate that as technology evolved.
That being said many legal scholars say the state militia was intended to be the defense against tyranny not individual citizens because there were government led crackdowns on rebellion under Washington and other presidents from the earliest days of the republic. State militias have the full range of weapons
As Iran is showing, the federal government is worried about nukes. I feel like a modern 2nd amendment should ensure every US citizen has a right to up to three (3) nuclear weapons.
Dear anthropic, please consider moving your entire business to Canada or Europe where you will be allowed to conduct your business without vindictive and Kafkaesque government interference. I would like to have access to your models too!
Well, as long as you stick to the rules you can do business in Europe and it can't be taken away from you.
As long as you are in the US? No one protects you. Asset forfeiture, arbitrary sanctions, arbitrary tariffs, your employees can get arrested and deported right off the street if they happen to have non-white skin and live in a city under siege by ICE, and if you oppose the regime or just dare to not kiss the ring, say goodbye to planned mergers.
Rule of law matters, and rule of law is gone in the US.
Hi I'm from Europe and I'm about to start my second business. I don't have friends in high places, and the process is entirely online and takes about an hour to complete followed by 1-5 weeks of waiting for tax approval etc.
Pro tip: most American anti-Europe propaganda is propaganda.
I do work in a bureaucracy heavy activity in Europe, and without my friends in high places I'd be shut down. I've had wait times for bureaucracy cut from 2 years to 2 weeks, licenses given after a dinner when official processes were denied, etc.
I've never had these problems when trying to start the American branch. Competition yes, having to wine and dine local politicians nephews no
Dinner with politicians? Where do you live? Where I'm at(Sweden) someone getting a permit after dining with a politician would be front page news, along with judicial consequences for both the politician and the business owner in question.
Europe is quite diverse, even us Europeans tend to underestimate just how diverse it is.
What? I, and several of my friends, have absolutely started a business. Maybe things are different in some countries (for example, parts of Eastern Europe), but that's not true in general. Europe is big.
> As an EU company I think I now basically have to consider US AI as hostile and avoid it
Yes, that’s the only sane conclusion. And yes it does screw the TAM, but it’s not like the AI vendors had actual realistic economic plans to begin with
By doing it, as leader in the industry, the world hegemon, and self-titled „leader of the free world“, the US gave the implicit permission for any other country to do the same
AFAIR there was the evidence posted for the specific three letter creeps snooping specifically on Airbus and sending everything to Boeing, long time ago, when "Echelon" was considered a tinfoil hat conspiracy.
Unfortunately, Europe should had made this conclusion at least 18 months ago, not now.
Watch out European politics procrastinate for at least one more year hoping that Trump will reverse. Then procrastinate more, because “elections soon, maybe Dems will win and reverse”.
I live in Europe and will never go to work in the US; but EU/UK inability to solve national security problems is beyond pathetic.
Oh sure the EU is terrible at all technology policy but it also seems like this is sort of a don't interrupt your enemy when they are making as mistake situation.
If the US commit to handicapping their AI industry like this it's going to destroy the competitiveness of those companies globally. All of those US spending commitments on data centres etc are going to collapse, or americans will need to pay 2x the token cost of the rest of the world. Both very bad options.
Is there a world where frontier labs move to somewhere else like London to escape the business hurdles of the US? There are trillions at stake, is it a plausible scenario?
The US is already seeing energy market distortions from the power use of AI; the UK has a much smaller total electricity supply, both from a lower population and the baseline per person being lower.
Total UK demand in 2023 was 316.8 TWh[0], or an average of about 36 GW. The US currently has 33 GW of data centres, and the AI boom plan, so far as discern actual plans from AI hallucinations in the modern web, is about ten times that.
From the scales people talk about, my expectation is that even the smaller additional supply needed for the constant churn of newly trained frontier models would probably exceed what London alone can manage.
Talent concentration, little tech regulation, English speaking, decent funding, close to GMT. There's a reason why a big chunk Google deepmind is already there.
Well, I think right now Antropic is going crazy with their safety rules. I got banned after creating a new account for a new employer. Went through some code with Claude Code, and that's... it. Came back the following morning and I was banned.
10 days for an appeal is too long. Company is a startup, so no team/enterprise support.
Under the hood, yes, but Mythos had more relaxed safeguards and was/is only available to a subset of approved customers under Project Glasswing, similar to the situation with GPT-5.6 now.
I’d say we’re about 5 years out from the Great Firewall of America, and requiring government ID associated with serial number to legally purchase components.
It never made same sense that the most capable model was used by the CIA to create vault 7-like exploits while the same model was being used by another government project / random little people to patch up the vulnerabilities the exploits relied on.
But contrary to the climate crisis and what all the AI boosters are saying, it is not inevitable. Its something that is actively being built, it’s not something that just happens. It can be stopped, a different system can exist. The AI crowd also hasn’t proven at all that what they are building can self sustain. So far the economics are monstrously bad, there is no viable business model
It was, yes. The difference is that if we stop the AI stuff, it stops. There is no external feedback loop that sustain itself. The climate crisis, after we pass some thresholds (and we likely did), that becomes out of human control
Other than maybe some in-the-moment cybersec wrappers, is this really true? Does anyone think a startup with a good product is going to be materially disadvantaged by not having access to an incrementally better security focused LLM release? It’s lots of fun to pretend it’s some step-change that’s too dangerous for general release, but in real life it’s not conferring some massive advantage that any real startup would need to compete. Almost everyone would be best just to ignore it and keep building.
(Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
> Does anyone think a startup with a good product is going to be materially disadvantaged by not having access to an incrementally better security focused LLM release?
- It's not "incrementally better". It's a complete game changer. Opus 4.8 on max thinking does X amount of mistakes in my commercial work. Fable 5 did 5% of X. Counted. I barely had anything to contribute in the work sessions, for a full week I could count on my two hands the total amount of times I actually caught Fable 5 -- and one part of those were not true mistakes, more like divergence from policy in our `CLAUDE.md` files.
- It's not "security focused". It's simply better in every way _plus_ it's also security-conscious.
- It legitimately accelerated my work. I don't have too much unknowns in my work, I simply have way too much to do. Fable 5 was an objective and measurable improvement over Opus 4.8. Returning to it after Fable 5 was removed was extremely discouraging and frustrating, and still is to some extent.
> It’s lots of fun to pretend it’s some step-change that’s too dangerous for general release
Maybe, but not as much fun as tearing down a straw man apparently. :)
> (Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
It's ridiculous for multiple other reasons but ridiculous nonetheless.
> I don't have too much unknowns in my work, I simply have way too much to do.
Interesting, I'm curious what work you do? My software engineering career has never been in that situation, it's always so much ambiguity and unknown that trumps everything.
Fair question, and I was vague just so as not to balloon the comment.
I work in a financial startup. The codebase is a mess and very much spaghettified. One rework that forced us to migrate our data model from 1:1 users<->loans to M:N (many-to-many) took two months and touched ~40% of the codebase... multiple times. Huge churn. And it just crossed two months of work, even though it's now in its very final phases.
I know what must I do:
- Introduce and enforce structs for passing context and input shapes around. So as to stop fighting with NULLs, lack of keys in maps and other maddening cases that inflate your coding lines for no other reason than programming languages not having higher-order constructs on well-researched and mostly resolved computer science problems (sigh; not going to rant here about that but it does tick me off how we are _all_ constantly reinventing the same wheels almost every day).
- Saga discipline: if step 6/9 in a pipeline fails, revert everything up to this point, even if it was touched by a 3rd party API.
- Compensation/undo steps. Including flagging / logging those that cannot be undone (sadly one part of our 3rd party APIs are like that).
- Introduce an universal runtime validator library that enforces contracts -- including conditional validation i.e. "only validate field Z if field X is present and is a positive integer and if field Y is present and is a valid UUID".
- Introduce our own dynamic workflow engine, piggybacking off of a few free and unencumbered solutions in the language of choice's ecosystem.
...And these are just off the top of my head after I slept only 4.5h and woke up due to the heat. And each one of these can take from 2 to 6 weeks _even_ with Opus driving all coding and me reviewing and keeping it behaving within my policies and coding standards.
Me & Claude are maintaining a TODO list that is no smaller than 150 items at this point (though in fairness, at least 75% of them are fairly small and not architectural like the ones above).
I believe I know how to architect this thing but business customers and the CEO keep coming back with feature requests which of course always take priority.
When Fable 5 was around, for mere 4 workdays, I not only went ahead of my own schedule feature-work-wise but even had the bandwidth to start tackling a few other architectural decisions, tightened them up in `CLAUDE.md` and Fable even devised an opinionated AST linter for test discipline (disallow direct DB access in our tests, only go through the domain/context modules to do so). It helped me start turning the tide.
This all went out the window when I had to go back to Opus 4.8. It's still _very_ good, mind you, but it does feel like I am a special-education teacher periodically. It forgets disciplines we discussed and codified likely 15-20 times at this point, forgets important project context and attempts to reintroduce subtle bugs, and a few others.
My next game is, with or without Fable, to continue its work and just enrich the AST-based linters to convert the theoretical prompt-based guard-rails into actual LLM hooks and compiler / runtime-at-startup hooks so the agent cannot ignore them.
I don't enjoy harness engineering but the interesting and very positive effect has been that it helped me think more like an architect and less like a coding monkey, which I do hugely appreciate and only realized I was missing it for years after it actually started happening again.
> Introduce and enforce structs for passing context and input shapes around. So as to stop fighting with NULLs, lack of keys in maps and other maddening cases that inflate your coding lines for no other reason than programming languages not having higher-order constructs on well-researched and mostly resolved computer science problems
It's not that much of a tangent tbf. It's one of the things that is an endless churn in millions of codebases out there and yet no core programming language team has the courage and the grit to solve this problem.
Those who tried are only doing it in mostly academic/toy languages which is a damned shame. We _really_ need those constructs, compile-time enforced, in commercial codebases, like 25 years ago at least!
People are trying everywhere though but I've witnessed CTOs getting cold feet and fearing their codebase will get too abstract or hard to maintain when they hire the next dev.
Group-think and conformism and fear of change, demonstrated live, every day. :/
That kind of gets to the absurdity of it. Either it’s a wildly powerful next generation model with incredible capabilities and thus needs to be limited… or it’s another progressive enhancement like we’ve seen already and limiting access to it makes no sense.
Say you had a perfectly smooth progressive chain from rocks to spears to guns to nuclear weapons. When it comes to government restrictions, you still have to choose to draw lines somewhere, right?
True, but we know Opus is more like a "spear" and a progressive enhancement over it still leaves us firmly in the "spear" category, not the "nuke" category. Drawing lines makes sense, but this is premature. Even if you draw the line at human level intelligence, we still seem to be pretty far off.
Crypto companies were built for anonymous transfers of wealth. It's why they are perfect for money laundering and corruption. Venture backed companies are more difficult, since you would need a paper trail (equity, incorporation documents, beneficial owners, etc.)
It's not impossible, of course. It's not even terribly difficult, but it does require a different level of record.
(No, I'm not saying that the goons running the United States give a shit or won't do it anyway.)
VC companies do not dig into the numbers as you suggest. FTX was able to get away with their fraud for a long time for that very reason. VC companies don’t care if some of their investments are fraudulent as they spread their eggs so thin that it doesn’t matter if any given basket blows up. VC firms stated this to the press outright when FTX blew up.
Also most crypto companies are not good for laundering since the blockchains record that fraud forever and publicly. I could see some specific protocols where that may not be true — like monero or tornado cash — but these projects are not really startups. Most crypto startups pitch their products for enterprise customers and thus would be horrible for laundering money.
It's a win-win game because both Anthropic and the Government are on the front page again pulling on important leavers.
In the mass-marketing world it's less about who's right or wrong but who is perceived by the population to be pulling the leavers on the front page again.
I think this could crash the stock market: Their TAM is now a small percentage of what it was, with all the second and third otder effects that follow from that
"I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model"
I assume "trusted partners" means, "companies that have bribed Trump an appropriate amount". A few million for the inauguration, a few million for the ballroom, a few million on a movie about Melania, the don wants a taste.
I think they kind of had to since they allowed OpenAI to do a 5.6 "preview to trusted parties" today. The other driver is that the DoD/NSA wanted to get access to Mythos again. I figure OAI will now do several weeks of 'preview' like Anthropic did with Mythos. When OAI wants to release 5.6 wider to actually start making money with it, I expect Fable will get approved the same day.
Back when the administration hit Mythos/Fable with the surprise ban, I figured this would be the endgame. They'd keep Anthropic tied up until a competitor had a roughly comparable model ready, then gate them the same.
It is interesting that there is no public announcement from the US government or Anthropic on this topic. That means there is no form to apply to be a trusted partner.
Does it mean US is allowing accessing to governments' exclusive list?
Are Cyber Verification Program (CVP) members included in this?: "We also intend to scale up our Cyber Verification Program, which would grant Mythos-class capabilities to many more organizations for specific cyberdefense tasks" (https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-project-glasswing).
Regulatory agencies limit uses of other products without acts of congress-- cigarettes, vapes, drugs, pesticides, chemicals, explosives. Even firearms, despite a constitutional amendment! Why not models? (Note I am not arguing it's a good idea; I'm making a narrow argument that there is precedent.)
EDIT: I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.
> I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.
Should ever new "weapon" invented require a new act of Congress? We've considered software subject this act since the 90s.
If everyone making AI is screaming up and down that we are in an AI arms race creating dangerous entities that will determine the fate of the world is the government just supposed to ignore them?
No. But it could be done in accordance with the rule of law and commitment to equal access rather than an ad hoc approach that creates the impression of corruption and picking winners.
None of those things are knowledge. I think theres something specific around limiting access to knowledge and capabilities that makes this feel insidious.
Information is covered by ITAR, so that's not new. You can illegally export information about an ITAR covered item by just allowing a foreign national the potential to see an item. They don't even have to prove the foreign national actually did see it.
All of the agencies responsible for those regulations were created by and get their funding from Congress. Currently, they're asleep at the wheel. Or a better idiom might be "cowering in the corner".
Fairly certain all those have "acts of congress" attached to them. I mean, it used to take a constitutional amendment to make something illegal but now we have tons of agencies responsible for regulating all the things.
Plus, they're relying on the "math is a weapon" law to ban "export" of the models.
Congress passed the Arms Export Control Act (22 USC 2778) in the Ford administration and it has been applied to software since at least the Clinton administration.
I would say this is a fairly equivalent dynamic in action, but it was concentrated to the defense industry. This suggests a future in which every company in the tech industry has "clearance required" or "citizens only" roles for the people who need to be able to use the find-security-problems-bot...
Cruise missiles are not general purpose tools, it's obviously not even remotely similar. Virtually everybody reading this could use Mythos immediately to do real work, collectively in virtually every part of the economy.
It's pretty problematic to not make it more widely available at least to US businesses, and there is not even a vetting process to get approved quickly and easily. If this is the new norm, the intended or unintended consequences of this type of gatekeeping will be an unprecedented consolidation of power amongst the largest corporations. Even more than we have seen over the last 20 years.
"Malboro cigarettes may once again be sold, but Newport remains banned for everyone except large purchasers that have paid the appropriate bri... fees."
Overturning the Chevron doctrine is good because it stops lawful people from doing things we don't like. We aren't bound by laws, so we can do whatever we want.
That repealing the chevron doctrine was a calculated play in the unitary executive theory. We all know congress is basically useless these days. But we also know that regulation isn’t, like, optional. It’s going to happen no matter what.
So what’s left? Where does that decision making go? Turns out the executive, so that’s what we’ve been seeing and it’s largely uncontested. This should have been obvious to most people going into this, particularly if they understood Trumps platform or Project 2025.
Repeal of the Chevron doctrine took the power of deference away from executive agencies and replaced it with first-principles judicial interpretation of statutes.
Chevron and the unitary executive theory have essentially nothing to do with each other.
I’m still not sure what point is attempting to be made here.
In effect, it did not. All it said is that the powers enumerated to those executive agencies must be more explicitly laid out by congress. But, that’s just not something that’s going to happen.
So, the gap has been filled largely by executive orders.
Is there any scenario where it's not catastrophic for for the frontier labs?
They just got their market cut to a fraction. Investing in new tech is now very risky because even if things work out you might not be able to sell anything.
There were already serious doubts about ROI for the frontier labs. If they can only sell to 100 or so entities it's over business wise.
The authority under which this was done has been operative and actively used for several decades. It isn't a partisan issue, it is a policy of American governance. Anyone that has worked on frontier "dual use" technologies will be familiar with the legal regime.
The only thing that changed is people are writing articles about it in the news media.
I’ve dealt with these regulations across several administrations. Nothing about this is novel, it is just receiving more attention than usual. Anyone could have started caring about this decades ago. You are making an argument from unfamiliarity with the regulations as practiced.
If it takes Trump to force people to educate themselves on how the US government actually works then I guess that is at least one good thing to come out of this.
I am aware that the government has always been involved in these types of issues. Even a season finale of silicon valley shows pied piper being required to navigate government oversight when it became successful and implied it was a badge of honor / success.
But you have to admit this policy seems ad hoc and creates the impression of opening a wide door for corruption.
It isn’t ad hoc, it happens all the time in frontier tech, this particular instance just gained public notoriety. Historically, the government has preferred to keep this reality out of the public consciousness. This time they are either unavoidable or they expect some leverage by making it public.
This was absolutely predictable, and many people made that prediction. The patterns of what tech they apply export controls to is actually pretty legible. People have long tried to ride the gray area so that their tech is not subject to export controls. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This was never not going to be subject to it.
This isn’t a pure export control restriction. It is granting access to “trusted partners” with no criteria of how a firm or person earns that designation. It is also unclear why these models in particular were subject to a restriction or at least evaluation.
I am simply arguing that there is a more effective approach to creating a regulatory framework here. It doesn’t have to take that much effort. But this random announcement with no prior or current guidelines seems ad hoc to me.
I am making an observation of fact. My feeds are full of ignorant hot takes that clearly demonstrate people have no clue about current law or how the government actually works. Your response is a perfect demonstration of this. This is neither unique to the current administration nor supporters of a particular party.
I don’t support the admin but if you are unwilling to engage with reality then that is on you.
Make a case then based on Prior examples and why they are of the same nature and degree.
We are talking about the government giving exclusive access the the most transformative technology in human history to a select group of companies with no formal policy as to how you gain access, lose access, what you are expected to do with that access or commitment to transparency around any of this.
Also known as, the tu quoque fallacy. Just because politicians in both parties have been doing this for decades doesn't mean that this administration is not especially hypocritical for doing it after whinging so much about free speech and free markets.
If by correct you mean, inconsistent with the American tradition of the rule of law and commitment to equal protection of the law, and the emergence of an authoritarian kleptocracy that picks winners and losers. Then yes. Correct.
Which has been obvious trend the last few decades and is now being done openly and shamelessly like a tinpot dicator. Largely through a new populist protectionism ideology that is popular on social media. Which makes it much more public and well documented.
Usually companies do this stuff quietly with lots of small new rules via Congress creating barriers to entry or through national security angles like the Chips act which funneled money and tax breaks to huge weathy companies, or Boeing, or the car industry, etc.
Anthropic and OpenAI went hard in the paint pushing for AI safety and it backfired into hurting their companies rather than protecting their interests.
I’ve been critical of crony capitalism consistently on HN for a decade now. Many people just haven’t been paying attention because nobody cares to follow this stuff unless there’s a useful political angle.
Well, there are the political ideals expressed or embraced by the populace, and then there are politicians. AFAICT political parties at the national level and state level in the US is pure theater.
the question isn’t about size, it’s about who the government works for. Small government can promote private interests by not entering certain societal spaces, leaving them for profit making — education, healthcare, housing etc. But large government can also promote private interests, by directing tax dollars to corporations (and still not entering certain societal spaces).
It’s not about size, it’s about where it chooses to operate
Having an a collective economy governed by the “free market” is like having a pile of stones governed by gravity. There exists a primary directive force, but if you want to construct a cathedral or a bomb shelter, you need to impose some constraints, lest you revert to the angle of repose.
This is a very bad analogy. Markets behave like an imperfect optimisation algorithm, and you can prove that, under some conditions which are most often met, they give people what they want.
In fact, you can almost always expect governments to be less effective and less rational than markets in allocating resources to satisfy the desires of people, even when democratic. You can prove it either by using the same logic that tells you when markets fail (externalities, information asymmetry), or empirically by looking at what was basically the most perfect A/B test we had on society over the 20th century. Although it was a comparison between mixed economies and fully centralised ones, there is no reason to expect the optimum mix of centralisation/distribution to be closer to the worst-performing one (the fully centralised one).
You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.
This is why arguments about this go in circles. You either argue from a pure theoretic POV back and forth, or you go off data - at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
Even the theoreticians on the free-market side are far less solid than.. all the other sides (behavioural economics, information asymmetry.. even Marx) but I regard it as deeply unpragmatic when there's so much data out there indicating what actually happens in the real world when you go one way or the other.
> You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.
You can prove the logic part starting from the assumptions. It's also falsifiable. I just mentioned it was literally the most controlled test on human society you could make. We tested by splitting societies at the level of the entire planet, states and cities.
US healthcare is mostly not a free market; by free market, at minimum, I mean that the quantities and prices (ideally even the quality) are not set. The US healthcare system has a fixed number of practitioners who can get a license every year. This is as far as a market can be from being free (together with the case of having price controls). In fact, free market theory predicts that when you restrict quantity, you get higher prices for the same quality.
It literally predicts the US situation.
It's funny you mention Marx, given I regard most of his claims as either unfalsifiable or easily proven false.
at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
I mean, it's not. In a free market you'd have a choice of insurance providers rather than having to take whatever plan your employer offers, and you'd have some idea of what the hospital is going to charge you beforehand rather than receiving random bills for weeks.
Just to be clear, my definition of free-market is just that there is no centralised authority that can use force to set prices/quantities/quality/type of services offered.
Of course, the fact that the employer has to offer health insurance in some cases is part of it not being a free market.
But there are more fundamental things that make the US healthcare very far from being a free market. The first one is that the supply of doctors is capped in quantity, not just in quality.
They have affiliated themselves to him. Watch, within a month of Democrats being back in power they’ll be harping small government, denigrating the national debt they ballooned themselves. There’s no reason to help them attempt to disavow it.
> the entire party aggressively supporting him and everything he does.
That's untrue.
If you do some homework you will see Republican politicians and the Supreme Court disagreeing on a number of issues. Amongst Republican voters, his approval rating has been sliding and is now below 80% in most polls.
You have to remember that very very few voters agree/support everything their party does. If that wasn't the case, then not a single American voter is morally pure.
They passed one major piece of legislation since he took office and it was loaded with pork to get everyone onboard. I wouldn't call that aggressive. The Right is very fractured right now.
I can't tell if you're disingenuous or just ignorant. The Trump admin has been completely coopted by the pro-Israel lobby and Big Tech. He betrayed his entire base. He's ruling by executive fiat (EOs). Anyone that speaks out publicly for the original platform gets a primary challenger funded by Miriam Adelson or threats. See Thomas Massie, MTG, Lauren Boebert, etc. Are you paying attention at all? The Boomers watching Fox News propaganda in their nursing homes all day are not a reflection of party unity.
The Fox News boomers were pawns, but everyone knew that. Trump is a “money talks” kind of guy, that’s why people voted for him.
Yes that was shortsighted but it’s worked out well for trump. He can basically just… do whatever. Nobody needs to legislate, he’s essentially congress at this point.
Trump has an 87% approval rating amongst Republicans as of the last poll I can find.
While Trump is a megalomanic and does whatever he wants, he has the mandate of the Republican party, whose elected officials could choose at any moment to end this by withdrawing support.
This is what they want. When they say "small government" they mean "small autocratic ruling party". When they say "personal responsibility" they mean "societal harm burdened on the individual"
When they say "liberty" they mean liberty to oppress others ... I've heard this language my whole life. I know what these people stand for and I've seen it in practice. It's heinous and repulsive.
The entire Republican party in all branches of government is supporting Trump. His politics and the Republican party politics are one and the same. The last election the party did not have a platform because, quite literally, they said that whatever Trump says _is_ their platform.
He's a Republican backed by the Republican establishment funded by Republican donors and massively influential in Republican primaries. Republicans voted him into power twice. Republicans pushed his voter fraud narrative. Republicans embraced his vaccine skepticism and killed countless Americans. Republicans voted for his ICE policies that murdered two citizens of my home state.
Republicans caused this disaster and are all, each and every, individually morally responsible for putting Trump in power.
Republican voters, Republican politicians, Republican donors and the Republican political machine.
They picked the losing side of history and they can sink with it.
If you think that anthropic wasn't pushing aggressive regulatory capture legislation in the Biden administration, why do you think they hired a bunch of people from it?
What Anthropic was pushing for under Biden has very little to do with the values Republicans have been espousing (and failing to live up to) for decades. That's kind of the point op was making. Republicans run on small government but do not deliver it. Democrats do not run on small government. Democrat Presidents campaign on and push for things like the ACA, they don't have fun quips like, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”
A clear regulatory framework to operate within allows businesses to operate within it rather than get surprised by the King's whims upending their business on every few Fridays. If you expect regulation will eventually happen, pushing for it to happen on terms you're able to comply with rather than as haphazard surprises is pretty sensible.
It's very fashionable to hate on the current administration, despite what the previous administration was doing. That's reality and I'll be punished to hell for saying so.
If you don't want the current administration to be blindly hated, perhaps you should ask the president to stop publishing daily statements about how much he hates various people. You reap what you sow.
Again, you're seeing this as some kind of clever invariant of politics, but it's not. People are blind to politicians on their side because Donald Trump has spent the past 10 years working hard to make sure that everyone in politics is constantly enraged at the other side. You're being "punished to hell", in your words, because you're blaming Trump's passionate embrace of hatred-based politics on his opponents.
That's always been a relative, rather than absolute statement.
Genuine question: if Democrats take power, do you expect them to be more interventionist or less interventionist with respect to AI? Bernie's jockeying leads me to suspect "more", but I could very well be wrong.
(FWIW I personally think modern AI falls in the small realm of potentially dangerous technologies that merit careful, ideally bipartisan, government oversight)
Bernie and AOC (which aren't DNC mainstream, but prominent) had just pushed for a moratorium on "AI data centers" with a definition that includes "that are used for the development or operation of AI models at scale" (trivially sidesteppable by "we build this GPU farm to sell to whoever bids for compute" - which is actually true), plus a bunch of fancy extras bundled in like "The government must review and approve AI products before they are released
to ensure that AI products are safe and effective.", while lacking actual definition of "AI" (given that we had "AI" systems since '50s).
Yeah, the bill has a cause - it recognizes some pain points. But then it haphazardly tries to address symptoms instead of underlying issues (environmental regulations, utility pricing, land use, job security), while pushing vaguely defined regulations that allow arbitrary application. As if misdirected measures and poorly defined laws aren't already a giant issue.
The whole point of Congress is to get a bunch of people with different ideas and hash them out. Ideas like this are an input, not an output, of Congress.
Congress did regulate weapons access when they passed the AECA almost 50 years ago. The rules have been refined via ITAR over time. This isn't arbitrary.
The what? More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline and those wishing to curry or keep his favor" - quite an expansive definition of "political decision making".
It wasn’t. Biden largely didn’t do much. The trump administration does illegal things that get struck down in courts on a daily basis. We’re all very desensitized to it.
But yes, Biden was old and cognitively not well. But his “whims” didn’t exist much, and they were always fairly reasonable. Trump is the most unreasonable president, most likely in US history. I would even categorize Andrew Jackson as more restrained.
The IRA and the CHIPS Act were the "last major thing" the Dems did, and both were far better policy for tech than anything out of this current administration.
> I think they’d try to get something through Congress to regulate the industry in a rules-based way.
Is that a joke? We're back in a spat with Iran because Obama refused to engage with Congress, as required by our constitution, to enter the USA in any binding deal.
Any AI actions from the next admin is going to be executive yolos.
Ever since I've been conscious (the 80s), it's been the party of fear, violence and greed. They've consistently nominated actual clowns for positions of power. B-movie actor Ronald Reagan... Dan Quayle... Sarah Palin... the current, truly stunning iteration of absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy TWICE after he killed hundreds of thousands of people due to COVID/vaccine skepticism and staged a violent attack on the capitol after losing a democratic election.
Free market? Small government? Big police state, trillions in defense contractor grift, unsustainable tax breaks to the wealthiest leading to massive spending deficits... all while doing everything to erode access to education, healthcare and basic services.
It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
> It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them.
Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc.
That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.
It tells me that the people who buy Republican politicians make money from selling Americans guns, and somebody with influence thinks they can make money by restricting LLM release.
Considering there's no such thing as a "free market" I've been laughing for a real long time. Markets require regulation and enforcement to function.
The US government was created to protect the interests of rich, white, male slave owners. And if you look at Louisiana State Penintentiary (often called "Angola"), which is essentialy a Southern plantation with forced labor, you realize not as much has changed as you might otherwise think.
> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
While chattel slavery ended when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery continued through debt bondage and convict leasing up until 1941 where FDR suddenly decided to aggressively prosecute the practice for fear of the Japanese using it for propaganda value. I'm referring to Circular 3591 [2]. And while that heavily curtailed abuse (eg by locking people up essentially indefinitely for "vagrancy" or imaged debts), forced prison labor continues to this day, including private companies profiting from prison labor.
Also, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the South arguably won. Reconstruction saw severe curtailment of newly-established civil rights for former enslaved people. And after Reconstruction came Jim Crow until the 1960s.
The point of slavery was money, and the point of money was power. By the time of the civil war the real power for the ruling class was coming from industrialization.
EU has the talent but not the ability due to structural issues and fragmentation.
And even if they solved that (it will take them 40 years of bickering), it’s not something you can top-down create, unless you want the AI equivalent of the Yugo.
China has the drive and the ability. It’s communist in name only, and has truly turned into a hyper-capitalist super producer (less government spending as % of GDP than even the US).
It will beat out both the EU and US and sweep both the digital economy (the US’s golden goose) and industrial economy (the EU’s golden goose) over the next 20 years.
And blocks not just training on the oss code but use of it by models. If they want to build on the shoulders of us plebes they shouldn’t be able to include our code in their vibe coded bs
I don't think you can move closer to something that you're already fully enmeshed in.
The rate that the ruling class ran into crony capitalism at the first chance they got is something that needs to be remembered. They'll try to act like they were always against it at some point in the near future.
> The two biggest enemies of the free market are two separate groups: my academic colleagues and business people. Business people are enemies of free markets, not friends.
> [...]
> The business people are just the opposite. They're all in favor of freedom for everybody else, and at the drop of a hat you can get any leading businessman to give you an eloquent speech on the virtues of a free market. But when it comes to their own business, they want to go down to Washington and get a special tariff to protect their business. They want a special tax deduction. They want a tax subsidy. And Chrysler is on the verge of failing, which it should have done. It should have been allowed to fail. Chrysler goes down and exercises political influence and tries to get the government to lend it money to subsidize it.
> So businessmen in general — not all, there have been some notable exceptions — and I don't want to include everybody. But in the main, most businessmen are enemies of free markets.
The entire arc reads as a marketing stunt rather than a legitimate national security threat. Maybe Anthropic asked the US for this action to be taken.
edit: > Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (lol)
Fable was out for 3 days, not really long enough for us to properly evaluate it, but the "Sorry we had to remove Fable. Read more. (because it's too powerful btw)" is loudly shown every chance they get for weeks. It creates a halo.
Reminiscent of the 1999 Apple G4 commercial where they displayed it next to military tanks. "For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government."
"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed." ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Dario really fucked us all with his fear mongering regulatory capture approach cause there is zero chance this reverts back to government deciding it doesn't want the power.
They only allow it for specific companies and agencies, which are trusted with the less restricted model. The general public is still not trusted to use Fable, apparently.
I personally believe that Dario Amodei is probably one of the 'less shitty' AI leaders. But literally no one is going to convince me that either 1. He overplayed his hand and fucked up 2. This is at least 'majority' PR.
Also this administration having say over who gets access to what AI is just so much more grift corruption and picking your favorites / destroying others, for these incdecent undemocratic in American grifters who've seized our state.
If this is the way things are now, isn't that going to crash the AI stocks? All those trillions dumped into it probably weren't with the expectation that it could only be sold to a handful of select US agencies and corporations.
They are all private aren't they? There's nothing to crash since the valuations were all made up funny raise numbers anyway. A donation to the right person likely removes the restrictions
Depends on how much of an overhang there is with the power of existing models. Have we discovered 10%, 50%, or 90% of the valuable applications for Opus 4.8 / GPT 5.5? Hard to be confident at this point.
I think it’s a complex dynamic but he certainly preferred this to happen than not, and someone might have nudged the development to his favor while aligned well with this admin’s interests.
I think we should also thank Dario for constantly beaming "Mythos is dangerous". That's why I keep saying we shouldn't support Closed AI and Misanthropic.
I wonder if Anthropic and ChatGPT will continue to scream at the top of their lungs how dangerous their services are and how they will break the security of everything everywhere?
Or may they'll decide to be a little more quiet and less end-of-the-world-is-nigh-if-you-use-our-services?
Meanwhile, China is pushing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), which, in the face of internal divisions and impotent leadership among Western nations, could prove to be the first global regime that China gets to build and lead.
Land of the free, land of the brave. Free market. Freedom of speech. Market economy.
These words don’t mean what they use to anymore. Newspeak is in full swing. Words still sound the same and are written in the same way but now mean something completely different. If Mao and Stalin were alive, they would be nodding approvingly.
It just makes you think you're a 10x better programmer. In reality you've just given yourself 10x more busywork because "Claude can handle it." For the parts that Claude has actually improved your programming, the open models compete just fine.
Favored companies get access to frontier models, which gives them a competitive advantage, starving out smaller companies. Any smaller companies that do manage to innovate ultimately get acquired by the favored companies since they are worth more with access to frontier models than without (which is effectively a discount on the purchase price of those companies).
I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it is one possible scenario that, over time, would be disastrous for innovation and freedom.
Foreseeable corruption by the state. A further slip into cronyism. A large puzzle piece that when simply connected with the recent actions like demanding shares in companies, removing funding for energy projects not aligned with other lobbies, pardoning of white collar criminals. It seems pretty plain and obvious the type of disasters that await.
I'm not being facetious, can you direct us to which laws are in play here? Specifically, why different models can be classified as different exports that need separate approvals?
If this becomes the norm, what incentive does the rest of the world have to keep their markets open to the US?
If US companies have a large unfair advantage such that domestic competitors are no longer able to compete, then wouldn't it make sense for governments around the world to ban or tariff US products and services?
If I was responsible for national economic policy, I would place this at the top of my non-emergency agenda. The world needs to act quick before their industries fail.
It might not be a coincidence that POTUS wrote yesterday on Truth Social that 100% tariffs would be imposed on any country proceeding with taxing US' digital services.
Empty threat conditional on something that will never happen.
Most of the rest of the world is too heavily dependent on US digital services to tax them more heavily. From social media to hyperscaler's clouds the US is dominant and stuff will just stop working if they get taxed. There would be a huge pushback from businesses if their government increased the cost of things like AWS.
Edit: edit to say tax more heavily
…and the US is depending on other markets - mostly the EU and China - to keep growing their economy, because the domestic market is pretty saturated with tech already. This has ripple effects too, because 401k pensions depend on big tech to keep growing, so no administration can risk loosing big parts of the European market.
We're only dependent on American services because we trusted America
Trump has ruined that, so now we'll be moving to build our own alternatives
> so now we'll be moving to build our own alternatives
We are taking our time about it and not being consistent. For example some European governments are moving away from US cloud systems, but they are also pushing apps that require American devices to work. There is very little movement of the private sector away from the US so much of the economy economy remains dependent on the US. The end result will be government clouds not dependent on the US, but that can only be used using US controlled devices, and a private sector still just as dependent.
What exactly American services did to you that stopped to trust them?
Nothing. It doesn't matter though. If we can't trust the US administration won't just apply 50% taxes tomorrow because some EU representative said something mean to the president, then we can't rely on goods or services exported by the USA anymore.
It's just chaotic. Chaos isn't good for business. What if Microsoft were instructed, on short notice, to block EU customers from using Entra over a trade dispute? If the identity provider of millions of European customers is suddenly unavailable, work grinds to halt. That's unacceptable.
Now you might say that sounds unrealistic - but would you have expected the American president to threaten an invasion of Danish territory? Or freaking Canada?
And even if the next administration turns out to be more "normal", we won't forget that American voters don't care about anyone but themselves - they wanted this. Twice. There is virtually no guarantee the same thing won't happen again in the future, and we all have seen how quickly fruitful business relations turned to shit over a pathetic narcissistic a-hole at the helm throwing temper tantrums.
Trusting the USA has proven to be a bad strategy, even for its closest allies. That won't change all too soon.
Stuff like:
https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-co...
Trump is using sanctions and started a trade war with Europe.
Europe would be mad to entrust their digital ecosystem to such a country
They're thinking about taxing more heavily because some bright spark decided to tarrif their exports extremely heavily.
codex sub 200usd. in eu it magically becomes 200eur(hello beuracrates) plus vat. You already taxing 30%. That on top that I pay via mine already heavily taxes money.
Mistral experience was as miserable as running local models btw.
> hello beuracrates
Just in case you missed that class, taxes are determined by legislators
Eh? We already tax them. The UK is not alone in having a digital services tax.
Sorry, meant tax more heavily. Uk's tax is 2% and limited to advertising and marketplace fees.
You forgot to write ZERO after TWO.
20% VAT to begin with payed with heavily taxed money of mine.
Than on top of payed by provider of services to UK gov machine making 10usd sub be 10£ sub.
Irrelevant. VAT is charged on most services and by everyone. Not specific to digital services.
in USA it is 10, not 20 for example.
why digital services are so special you want more taxes?
I'm happy to vote for anyone who can put an extra 0 on that, it would be nice for these companies to pay more tax than me one of these years....
They already pay. How 10usd subscriptions become 10eur or 10£? Companies pay lawyers and beurocrats and accountants to operate.
I'm not claiming they dont pay everything they legally have to, I'm saying the laws are wrong.
Nick 30 ans is tired and wants someone else to pick up the slack for once.
> Truth Social that 100% tariffs would be imposed
Didn’t he already lost that case? And, all the other countries know that.
Pure grift.
This is far from a new challenge though. Another recent example, China has an advantage on cost of labor and manufacturing, and lack of enforcement of IP rights. They can produce for much cheaper than many other countries but it hasn't led to everyone banning trade with them.
What part of China has cheap qualified labor?
Skilled engineers nowadays demand between southern and central European prices at the very least.
Cheap qualified labor doing machining for example.
They def make less than in europe. You make very good money for working at Volkswagen on the line.
And China now also has software developers and even if they make the same amount, they are def also now a big player in the game and take parts of the cake.
> The world needs to act quick before their industries fail.
It's a cost problem. If you want to try for a SOTA model, you're going to need to spend big time.
Germany spent ~$115B last year on it's defense, roughly 2% of it's GDP.
In contrast, ~$145B was spent last year just on AI infrastructure by Meta, and, well no one talks about Meta winning any AI races.
It feels less like a pure tech market now and more like cloud, semiconductors and defense policy all getting mixed together
Military-technological industrial complex. Has always been a thing. Nascent WW2 computers were used for artillery, rocket, and bomb guiding.
Yes, this is exactly the implication. The decoupling of economies between those that have advanced AI, those who do not, and those who decide to ban AI outright or above a certain level of capacity.
One would have to have leverage to put tariff on US and not worry about retaliation. Almost every country is tightly coupled with US, let it be trade or reliance on technology.
I can only think of Russia that is decoupled from US at the moment and they are stuck with Putin that still lives with imperial mindset rather than actually being a rival to US
The US doesn’t have this leverage either, Trump is just uniquely willing to hurt his own country for his own idiosyncrasies. It is pretty established at this point that Americans were the most hurt by his tariffs.
They don’t, they wouldn’t need tariffs if they did.
America mostly produces cheaper ag commodities than the EU but more expensive than South America. Deepseek is already a better search engine than Google. (Not sure if it does Google searches)
Travel the world it’s not American companies gaining market share. I would especially recommend trying Chinese AI or riding in a BYD car and judging for yourself.
You are assuming that governments care and are not corrupt.
I think they have very little room for manoeuvre - companies like AWS or Microsoft can simply you are too cocky and we will shutdown infrastructure your country is running on if you don't bend the knee.
The incentive is that Americans are huge consumers and closing markets to US also means losing US markets, that's why Trump's taxation on Americans for imports(AKA tariffs) caused huge stir. That said, if the risk is not tolerable then it's not worth it and can be sacrificed. EU was fully on board to do that if Trump invaded Greenland and EU as rest of the world are aggressively diversifying.
BTW EU will never have a "tech" industry in any meaningful size as long as US have access to EU markets, anyone who eventually got tech industry are those who blocked the US or were blocked by US.
So if US keeps its course, in a few years we may end up with fragmented markets with US blocked out because the US is very unpopular but the current politicians everywhere including in the EU are very pro-US actually hoping that current situation is just a glitch, which is not aligned with what the general population demands and as a result the next elections they will align with anti-Americans.
The rest of the world already has quite a few restrictions.
Its utterly unsurprising that in the reckoning of pro-socialist society (work less, tax more, live easy), the failure of European industry over the last 30 years, utterly unsurprising that the knee-jerk reaction is "You need to share your labor with all of us" rather than "We need to get our shit together and build a competitor"
Europe isn't cooked because it lacks talent, there are untold smart capable people there, it's cooked because it built a social allergy to the very thing it needs most.
We don't need more fear mongering with AI, it already made a mess. Industries are not gonna fail, they fall behind, like how US doesn't share weapon tech or certain IP's. Plus you have China providing a close 2nd/3rd place LLM tech for free.
The US as a large-scale import nation and so does not need the rest of the world (except perhaps Europe, and only small parts) to keep its markets open to the US.
Even in the European case, Europe would lose much more than the US would if they closed their markets. Plus, a lot of Europe is either very close to breaking point and unwilling to change (Italy), or rapidly worsening into a crash, and unwilling to change (France).
It's Europe that is dependent on a large trade surplus with the rest of the world, financed by dollar loans to 3rd world countries. Now China is taking away their trade surplus, even directly (meaning Europe has a massive trade deficit to China), and indirectly (replacing demand for European goods, famously cars, everywhere). This is causing large-scale job losses in Europe as well as total disaster for government finances across the block, finances that were unhealthy to begin with.
Now Europe and China are unwilling to lend to the rest of the world (because initially that would make very rich Europeans/the CCP a little bit poorer, by raising inflation quite a bit, thereby raising interest rates, which will move government finances from disaster to catastrophe), so if these money flows are to keep going, either the US MUST export to China, which is not happening, or EU and/or China must loan several times their own GDP to the third world, or the EU and/or China must massively increase their dollar holdings (which will, of course, inflate the Euro and Renminbi something awful whichever way it goes). But either WILL happen, because a crash will do that too. Which is what people mean when they say the worldwide system is on a crash course.
I don't think whether a country is an importer or an exporter matters at this point. This is likely going to develop into a matter of national security. Nations cannot allow most of their domestic industries to be destroyed.
If the US doesn't reverse course soon, I think we'll start seeing large-scale closure of international markets to US companies very soon. Even with US retaliation, there is no other option.
Zero chance of that happening. Europe has already largely deindustrialized and it never closed itself to China. Europe also tried to stop buying Russian oil and failed due to transshipment through India.
It's really sad seeing how little so many of us Europeans understand the situation. America and China hold all the cards, Europe holds none. It makes very little that is both unique and strategic. Decades of left wing economic policies are coming home to roost and there's no way to turn the ship around now.
Please tell us more about how “left wing economic policies” have destroyed Europe.
Germany, the 3th biggest GDP country is deindustrializing right now.
that def will hurt.
But we still have a lot of capital left, so plenty of ways to adress the elephant in the room. Its just very weird that the current CDU doesn't has any real good ideas.
USA has a certain amount of hands especially IT but otherwise? China runs circles around Europe and USA for everything else.
Btw. CDU was in power for 16 years and is more right wing than center. If you say left wing in sense of not protecting our own markets, i think this was accepted globally.
USA also can't make things anymore.
If no-one comes up with the general notion of a min of like 60% home made, none of it matters because rebuilding this will take a lot of time and money.
And even with a chip factory in USA, they still import most and automate as much as possible.
This might reduce the pressure on USA Loans but will not help the USA people themselves. They will just continue seeing a bigger and bigger split between poor and rich.
Europe generates ~20% of revenue for US big tech which is a large part of its stock market. With how precariously coupled US growth is to these companies, it absolutely needs that market.
But can the Europe survive without the US big tech. Imagine the worst case US bans any sort of export from big tech to Europe, all startups and even every tech reliant company in EU would collapse without AWS, Azure or Google cloud. Also imagine ban on exports from Apple and Google, from tomorrow onwards both iPhones and Android phones stops working because software services are banned in EU.
It’s so easy to argue on putting tariff on US tech, but we forget how much Europeans depend on it and it would be like shooting one’s own foot.
One could argue that over the time EU can build their own infrastructure and alternative, but who is going to invest for it? The governments? With tax payers money? And who is going to build it? EU is one of the fastest aging continent in the world and what can they offer to attract young talent?
that would actually spark a new golden age.
aws et all are just extracting rent. we all know this.
telcos have some ownership of the android firmware they distribute, and could easily spin up and fund alternatives like replicant or even go full partnership with Chinese versions.
simply moving email providers from Microsoft would make threeletter agencies work much more difficult, and it's a 2min dns change.
any way you look at it, the impact would be positive. i don't think your example is the example you think it is. like trump, you're ignoring agency to every other player in the systems and ignoring some obvious consequences.
Either you’re stupid or ignorant. What do you mean by easily spin up alternative android? And who is going to fund that? EU spend millions of Euros for a corona Warn app, and spinning an android alternative would cost billions, with tax payers money. Also everyone that uses iPhones, what are they going to do? Are they gonna get free android phones?
Forget about phones, all the companies that uses RDS would lose their data and that would be catastrophic.
I think this is a bit too deterministic. Even if Europe is in a weak position economically, "the US does not need the rest of the world" seems overstated
I would even argue that the USA is imploding without China.
The normal USA citicen can't afford a car anymore. Either they make it a lot cheaper over there or they have to continue pressue the USA Citicents to accept that they are not allowed to buy cheap China products.
It will be quitei nteresting to see if we will see a global rebalancing of manufactoring and co around the globe for USA, Europe and China or a overall change in system from pure capitalism to something else.
Or the big players start to reinvest into countries again to have customers who can actually afford it again.
This is not how economists think. They see the US, go "Coal mining, check. Iron mining, check, so you can make steel inside US. More than enough people, check. Oil, check. As well as 1000 other things, and mostly, the checks are there", and conclude the US could produce cheap cars. So if it makes sense or it becomes urgent enough, it will happen. Nothing is really preventing the US from doing everything itself, and doing that will improve the balance of trade (while making Americans much poorer).
In other words, the problem of "The normal USA citizen can't afford a car anymore" can be understood in a different way. That can be fixed, by paying people less (yes, less, really, think about it)
The US can drop it's imports and do essentially everything itself.
Right now people can't afford a car because the US is so equal, meaning they can't compete with labor in India or ... But you could "fix" that, by creating more inequality in the US (do what we effectively do now, worldwide, but within the US. Forbid people immigrating from California to New York. Move all banks to New York, build factories in California. Pay people in California 20% what they make in New York for the same job), and production will move back to the US.
And if that offends you, please understand that's exactly what we're doing now. Just replace California and New York with India or China and New York with, well New York, or Washington, and that's exactly the system we have. That's the system the EU is trying to create in the EU.
Doesn't work that way for exports (EU, or China, or to a lesser extent, India). The EU is an export block that's rich getting out competed by export blocks that are poor ... Now THAT is a difficult problem to solve. Not that EU politicians are even trying.
The US is not doing better because US politicians are better than EU ones. They just have a much easier problem to solve. And, of course, both US and EU politicians are failing, but the consequences are much bigger in the EU.
For example, the EU is in fact making it harder to immigrate WITHIN the block, despite "free movement", and is creating massive differences in pay for the same work, which is apparently what socialism stands for:
Typical after-tax pay for supermarket cashier:
Netherlands: 2550 euro (after tax), for 36 hours of work ~ 15 euro/hour
Greece: 1050 euro (after tax), for 40 hours of work ~ 6 euro/hour
Oh and that's not where it ends. You get way more social protection and medical in the Netherlands ... for paying less in tax. The EU is purposefully creating inequality to solve the problem of rich Dutch people not getting richer fast enough. It's only within the same country that there is less inequality in the EU. And, of course, the EU has been making it worse, not better, for about 18 years now. They're not about to stop. The US hasn't even decently started doing this yet.
European economy would implode without trading with US. The biggest economy in Europe, Germany; exports cars, pharmaceuticals and other high end machinery to US and the whole middle class in Germany relies on the jobs from those exports oriented companies
Cars are largely not exported to the US from Germany, but built in US factories. German car companies have factories all over the world.
You talk about Europe then only give Germany examples ..? Is that a German only problem ?
Germany is the biggest economy in the Europe and the one that’s holding Euro stable ( France and Italy would soon be only serving their debt). If German economy goes down, then you can say goodbye to Euro
Ah yes, the classic “Europe is in decline” narrative favored by Americans. You’d think after more than a decade of that nonsense, people would start to ignore it or at least question its assumptions. Nominal GDP and venture capital funding are not the only things that matter in an economy.
Europe has no tech industry. It's largely floating on the same economy it had 50 years ago. The situation is beyond dire.
[citation needed]
America has to be careful not to push Europe into the direction of China though. And with how Trump acts that might happen sooner than they would like. Bullying like how Trump prefers to do only works until some point. Europe mostly seems to bet on America changing its tune again once Trump is gone but we have to wait and see if the rot in America hasnt set in too deep already.
Even if America pushes EU to be like China, they cannot be China. China is one country ruled by one law and in a unified vision. On the other hand EU is a band of 27 countries with different laws, different problems and different priorities. They couldn’t even agree on a response for Ukraine-Russian war and present a unified front and do you think they would present a unified front against Americans?
I think he meant : to be pushed towards China as a partner while moving away from the US.
And ... what will Europe do if America simply ... also moves to use China as a trading partner? Or just drops the EU goods entirely? It'll be unpopular for 1 or 2 years and then the US will be better off. The the EU will have to create 600 billion in new (dollar) revenue per year to compensate. They haven't successfully done that in 20+ years ...
What the Clown currently does is to push Europe massivly into exactly this.
I can't find it right now but I read news just a few month ago that the EU is working on making it easier to invest into EU similiar to how the Petrodollar currently works.
But if the deindustrialization of germany/EU continues as it currently does and US implodes and China has also issues, we will see how the new world order will look like.
China is for sure more resiliant though. The living standards were never as high as what we as germans are used to and they dont demonstrate.
In the USA people have guns and civil issues and a hard divide between city and country sides.
But as Europe/Germany we should be able to increase our bonds right? Investing into solar/energy transformation; Doesn't matter short term how this will end.
And if AI continues as it does with robotics, we might even see in 50-100 years a complete change in system?
USA Bonds are exploding so they might have overplayed their hand already.
Is the rest of the world really that dependent on emerging AI? I don’t think so. The US could cut off all foreign access to AI, nobody would notice.
Unless your country still use only analogue technology your country would definitely will be at the mercy of the country with AI superiority. Mythos showed how good it is at finding vulnerabilities and attack vectors for digital infrastructure. Imagine an attack on power grid which would result in a days long blackout in the middle of winter?
> your country would definitely will be at the mercy of the country with AI superiority
People claim this, but it doesn't seem to be the case at all. We have multiple ongoing conflicts between countries currently, and we're not seeing huge gains from those with more access to AI.
Mythos is relatively new and Antrophic has been fighting US government to not allow their models for warfare. However, it’s only a matter of time till they bend the knee and in next 5-10 years we’ll see the effects of that.
Previously US used rebel groups to throw governments in other countries that are not US friendly. In the future I can see they can just start chaos by attacking banking systems, energy infrastructure or any other important modern infrastructure until that country falls in line with US
That's all entirely science fiction though, until we see some actual evidence. If Mythos is so incredibly dangerous, then the models before should be at least a little dangerous, and we haven't seen that.
It would definitely be a problem. A big one. Think of all the multi-national tech companies that have rolled out AI not only to their engineering teams but to their business teams now too. Suddenly your employees in the US can do more and do it quicker than your employees elsewhere. It would be a nightmare to try and manage.
That only applies to things Mythos does better than Opus. Mythos is supposedly very good at things such as finding vulnerabilities, but is it better at business tasks? IN the short time I had access to Fable it did not seem noticeably better at things I tried it for (lots of small tasks).
Maybe it is better at vibe coding or finding security flaws, but at how much is it sufficiently better to be worth paying the extra?
You're assuming this export restriction won't apply to any future models. The problem is a couple of years from now when the ROW is still on Opus and US workers are on something much better.
Which would force us to use Chinese models instead. It would also increase the incentive for other countries to develop models.
I disagree. I work at a very large international corporation. How much revenue do you think we’ve seen due to AI? I’d guess it’s zero. I know for the groups whose finances I see, it’s zero. Yet costs have gone way up. There’s a bunch of new code, but not anything customers are going to pay more for.
And either way no AI basically puts you back to where we were last year. US employees have always been far more productive, that’s nothing new.
>> There’s a bunch of new code, but not anything customers are going to pay more for.
This isn't an AI problem, it's a management issue. Why are you getting devs to build things that aren't going to generate revenue?
Do you think the only bottleneck in dev has been the speed of coding? I think it’s obvious that this is not the case. It’s finding product market fit, actually discovering and deciding what must be built, and then selling it. And there’s a deeper economic reality: budgets for software are finite and limited, and already close to maxed for most consumers and businesses. If my customers can only afford $500/month total for software, no amount of software I make will push them past that.
It’s not just us: where’s the revenue in the entire market? We can see all the public filings. There haven’t been any revenue gains. The only people making money from AI are the LLM providers. And even they are losing money. Even the biggest tech companies are limiting token spend. At best the tech is a new cost just to maintain parity, and I think most businesses look at it as a way to cut dev costs (trading for token spend). I think they will learn that it’s less of a win than they hoped. If a dev was spending 50% of their time coding, and you reduce that to 10% - that’s a big change but it isn’t really making you more because it’s all that time we hate in meetings, understanding customer needs, etc, that make us money.
A lot of the bottleneck is product management now. There's always near infinite work in every engineering team's backlog.
Identifying the next few things to improve the product is hard work, with market investigation, competitive analysis, synthesizing user feedback... some of this gets faster with LLMs, certainly.
I think most tech companies haven't figured out how to rebalance product to engineering to ensure engineering teams are doing work that grows the business funnel rather than expending tokens on other work.
Worse, why would you ever take a dependency on a US company. Even China seems more trustworthy at this point.
The real reason, afaik, that the US is trying to restrict access to SOTA models is that a very large component of USA tailored access and surveillance relies on exploits and weaknesses that these models will easily detect.
Thus, it really is an export control issue, but it has nothing to do with offensive capabilities. Offensive capabilities always exist, but pervasive defensibility would upset the asymmetric advantage that attackers, especially the USA, currently have.
There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative.
Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.
But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.
The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.
This is the most credible-seeming claim about why a competent administration might suspend access (by any means necessary, but also by export controls) to models like Fable
However, I haven't seen any prominent articles proposing this theory, I haven't seen anyone in the administration gesturing towards this as the reason (but haven't been following too closely)
Do you have any sources?
(And in fact, it seemed like an obvious hypothesis that wasn't getting much air time in the first weekend, but again, I didn't see anybody really staking a claim to it except in a few comments or tweets like this one)
I doubt an administration would openly admit to sabotaging the ability for companies and individuals to safeguard their products against cyberattacks from the US government lol.
That’s pretty much taking the mask all the way off.
It’s the only motive I have seen that aligns with the actual scenario, and if I -did- have inside information I certainly would not be at liberty to cite it publicly lol.
If only we had a good term for someone good at this stuff less unwieldy than “cybersecurity expert”. (Then someone could start a news site for us.)
As someone in the field for 30+ years, I find that, generally speaking, the only groups that use this term are charlatans and military/military-adjacent. The military use has been slowly leaking into the general public, but I quite wish it would stop.
Yes, it should have been cyberwarfare technician.
> “I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown Friday
why is the commerce secretary making this decision
because the Export Administration Regulations are administered by the US Dept of Commerce.
you're welcome
Does it apply to USA citizens and organizations as well?
Fun fact the 1996 cryptography restrictions have never been repealed. You just haven't heard of them as open source software has broadly been exempted https://www.linuxfoundation.org/resources/publications/under...
I once had to go through the process of buying a compiled encryption library from a US company, which involved filling in a multi page form basically pinky swearing I wasn't a terrorist and wasn't going to sell it to North Korea.
On the bright side I got to add "successfully managed the purchase of controlled munitions" to my CV.
You haven't heard of them * unless you build hardware that talks to other hardware
Then you've had lots of fun with EAR compliance.
That’s also probably why when publishing apps to app stores you have to attest to the forms of encryption your app uses.
Yes
And it's Howard Lutnick... the guy who lived next door to Epstein and magically wasn't at work on 9/11.
Downvotes every time this topic comes up because Epstein was deeply ingrained into the VC world.
And why is that?
So no need to do any deep consideration or evaluation, just the approval of the Epstein class.
You're completely wrong here, they make sure the check clears.
My tin foil hat version of myself says it is because the whole thing is a marketing stunt and certain members of the administration are getting kick backs for it.
Marketing stunt by who dude? Do you really think Anthropic would really go this far? This whole situation is completely absurd. The federal government is arbitrarily restricting AI models without really providing any reasoning. This is not a clear and transparent government and it just feels like gears are moving behind the scenes that have lead this out of character restriction of private and extremely wealthy (at least on paper) companies without much media or presence of any kind from the fed's side.
I can see a limited way this benefits Anthropic. They've been having issues with one or more Chinese companies using Anthropic models' outputs at high scale to train their own models. By restricting Fable and Mythos temporarily and then rolling out to their most important customers first, then requiring identity verification, they may be able to slow that behavior significantly.
They are losing a ton of money on this and would be much much better off if people (Americans or not) had been building with Fable over the past few weeks rather than not
If Anthropic wanted to continue slow rolling their best model to a select few companies they could've kept expanding mythos access instead
Not to mention the fact that OpenAI has had time to prep 5.6 for release so that there will actually be an alternative around the same intelligence point as Fable. This is just all around terrible for Anthropic.
If you want a conspiracy theory, the one that says "this is corporate assassination" or "the US government does want to be in the business of picking winners" is much much much closer to the truth than yours.
Rather than buying either conspiracy theory, though, I expect Hanlon's razor describes the situation best (incompetence on one side, inability to coordinate/communicate effectively with the current administration on the other)
Yeah, what better marketing than the US government thinks it is too powerful?
[edit: don’t forget my previous tin foil hat note, I’m not overly serious about this]
In any ordinary times this would be an incredible endorsement. I'm not sure it works in the current timeline though.
How do you think that this wouldn't "work in the current timeline"? This sounds like a deep misunderstanding of media.
It could be that the us govt doesn't want china to execute distillation attacks and narrow the gap.
The framing distillation 'attacks' is a propaganda psyop.
I think it is a reasonable term to use in the context of adversarial AI development. Does that mean I am getting paid by the CIA or something?
> I think it is a reasonable term to use in the context of adversarial AI development
Distillation is neither an 'attack', nor 'adversarial' in any reasonable sense.
> Does that mean I am getting paid by the CIA or something
It at the very least means you're uncritically parroting the framing of a company that'd like nothing more than to successfully persuade lawmakers that something should be done about open Chinese models (eliminate choice), preferably so that Anthropic is close to anyone's only option.
It seems like a reasonable person could say that a model being distilled "against the model provider's wishes" is in some sense a cyber attack that is stealing information (eg the lower order bits of the model weights)
I think this is mostly a confusing way to describe it, but I'm not really sure why you say it isn't an attack or adversarial. One side is doing something the other side doesn't want. Seems to be pretty clearly adversarial.
> I'm not really sure why you say it isn't an attack or adversarial. One side is doing something the other side doesn't want. Seems to be pretty clearly adversarial.
This is Anthropic we're talking about here. A company that's infamous for adversarial scraping of copyrighted content. I generally don't accept their framing, especially when it's pretty clear what the end goal of that is.
China will get the raw data (user sessions), because users will use China models instead.
Next gen models are greatly aided by data obtained from existing model use.
By restricting use, the outcome may be slower progress, thus narrowing the gap for other reasons.
why not? they have been sued for 1.5Billion, with a B. do you think you get that because you play fair or are such great guys...? how much money do they spend on lobbying? if you count it you will see it. if not then perhaps do some homework and open your eyes.
Anthropic is successfully burning bridges behind them and making the path to profitability impossible for anyone coming from behind. If your model is “allowed by US administration” it’s an implicit admission that it’s either underperforming or undermined.
Thanks to these big guys the odds are stacking against any fresh competition. Data sources have dried up and training material is harder to get, regulation is controlling any advanced model, prices are inaccessible now, and they’re seeking that courts cut off the rest of the avenues, including the ones they used to get where they are.
America's tech industry is rapidly making themselves untrustworthy if they continue getting in bed with the White House.
While I also regard the "doom from the companies themselves is just a marketing stunt" arguments as conspiracy-theory territory (especially since neither OpenAI nor Anthropic* changed their tune since before they were rich enough for meaningful lobbying):
This particular specific doom is from the USG, Trump has a history of kayfabe, and there's a stink of market manipulation coming from the White House.
* Musk, however, you can totally have: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon" in 2014 to "if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?" in 2025.
So, assuming they are moderately sane is "conspiracy theory"?
Assuming they are evil unsane and actually believe that crap while doing what they do looks way more like conspiracy theory.
> So, assuming they are moderately sane is "conspiracy theory"?
Every time I've met someone who believes a conspiracy theory, they don't realise how not-sane the conspiracy they propose is.*
Founding a company on the basis you don't think the others are safe enough, raising capital on that basis, developing methods to improve AI safety, publishing literature about your methods, making open calls for legislation for safety standards, etc.?
While also managing to not leak documentation of this despite all the staff who did leave in order to openly speak about the stuff that they thought still wasn't safe enough?
Thinking that all the doom-talk from OpenAI and Anthropic** is just a PR technique even though they maintained this position continuously starting before they had any money or offices is about as sensible as thinking 9/11 was an insurance scam.
* by definition, because if they did they wouldn't believe it; actual conspiracies can of course be insane, but a conspiracy theory has to also justify why the "evidence" of conspiracy consists of people saying "I recon" rather than documents (specifically documents that mean what they think they mean, cf. "Mike's Nature trick").
** Again, just those two. I'm absolutely not fully generalising this, I'm absolutely not saying there's zero people who do as you say. Heck, the mere fact that this is a common talking point practically guarantees someone post-ChatGPT saw all the people claiming it was PR and said to themselves "great idea I'll do that".
They raised money on the basis of replacing labor by cheaper AI. Not on the basis of being more safe then nebulous "others". They are not "safe" and do nothing to make world safer or better.
> Founding a company on the basis you don't think the others are safe enough, raising capital on that basis, developing methods to improve AI safety, publishing literature about your methods, making open calls for legislation for safety standards, etc.?
These are marketing claims. Or self-delusion claims.
> Thinking that all the doom-talk from OpenAI and Anthropic is just a PR technique even though they maintained this position continuously starting before they had any money or offices i
Continuing to maintain self-aggrandizing position that makes investors give you money is not proof that you are genuine.
But, if they are genuine, then maybe they should stop trying to make that doom happen as fast as possible. I just dont see how "they are really trying to cause maximal harm to maximum amount of people" is a defense.
> They raised money on the basis of replacing labor by cheaper AI. Not on the basis of being more safe then nebulous "others". They are not "safe" and do nothing to make world safer or better.
Original founding says otherwise, for both OpenAI (famously) and Anthropic with this in a copy of their certificate of incorporation I found:
- Jan 2021: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f7mYsm4px4pPdIzYo64wGePVNEH...Immediate thing they did? Spend one year training a model, then a second year safety-testing it.
> These are marketing claims. Or self-delusion claims.
It's published reproducible work. Early-stage stuff you could get away with calling "self-delusion", that doesn't fly when papers get published, sometimes on topics that can be described as "AI do X, which is bad, can we make them not?" e.g https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10162, https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10965, https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18397 from Anthropic and https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16339 from OpenAI.
> Continuing to maintain self-aggrandizing position that makes investors give you money is not proof that you are genuine.
Conspiracies and growing businesses are incompatible with not getting caught.
A conspiracy of 2 is easy to hide. How big did Facebook get before we saw their dirty laundry?
> I just dont see how "they are really trying to cause maximal harm to maximum amount of people" is a defense.
With that in quotations, you seem to be arguing backwards from what you think they're doing.
Their actual arguments are much the same as open source software: with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
This is obviously true. It may not be sufficient, there's plenty of other doomers who say it isn't sufficient, but it is true.
Easy way to demonstrate, is the difference with the armchair philosophising before LLMs vs. what we see now they exist:
We had decades of people claiming the "obvious" way to keep superhuman intelligence safe is to keep it in a box, keep it offline. Every one of those discussions I've been in, the person saying this refused to believe that it was possible for an AI to convince humans to let it out of the box.
Real life? Blake Lemoine violates his NDA and hires a lawyer on behalf of an LLM, after the LLM convinced him with arguments that a lot of other people (justifiably) mocked him for believing. LaMDA was not superhuman, and it still convinced him.
Did this immediately stop people saying we can keep AI in a box and just not let it out? Nope, kept hearing that for another year or two. That's how much experience humanity collectively needed to internalise just that one part of "AI is more dangerous than you think it is".
> Conspiracies and growing businesses are incompatible with not getting caught.
Growing business is super compatible with lying to make yourself sound better to investors. How is this one an argument? It is not even a conspiracy, just a normal CEO behavior at this point.
Also, what safety testing seriously? It is not like Chinese models were more unsafe in any realistic way.
And it is not like there wpuld be any real attempts to make humanity better.
I dont kmow what you are on about offline AI and someone not keeping corporate secrets. Or antropomorphised ai with conscoiusness hiring layer by proxy.
Who cares?
Do not assume people are sane for any definition of sane. That way lies the madness.
corruption
I understand why Anthropic might not want to fight this particular one in court, because they're trying to convince the administration to let them move forward.
But would another company who is not on the trusted partner list and has less to lose taking on the admin have standing to sue here? On the basis of the export control being illegal and this putting their business at a disadvantage vs. competitors with access
Technically the US government is allowing Anthropic to serve the models to any US citizen, and it's Anthropic who decided that's impossible to comply with and so they pulled the model for everyone. I guess a US business with non-citizen employees could work.
A lawsuit would be a hard sell though, because Anthropic themselves argued that the technology is dangerous. Even if many people on HN might think that Anthropic was scaremongering about Mythos, a court is probably going to take their assessment at face value, and courts are loathe to find against governments in cases of national security.
There's also the issue that these models are getting better through an iterative process, so even if the line between GPT 5.5 and Fable/GPT 5.6 is somewhat arbitrary, it doesn't mean that the government shouldn't be able to draw a line at all. So you're left arguing that they drew the line too early, which is subjective.
>Anthropic themselves argued that the technology is dangerous.
They never released mythos 5 to the general public. And they never will.
Never is a long time. When open models catch up in 4-12 months, they might change their minds.
> I guess a US business with non-citizen employees could work.
No. Only if those employees have a green card and the company must not only take on that responsibility but ensure other employees are denied access. Otherwise the company would be subject to millions in fines.
US export laws are no fuckin' joke like everyone here seems to think they are.
It's really frustrating to read pages of comments rooted in emotion and no understanding of the existing laws.
> It's really frustrating to read pages of comments rooted in emotion and no understanding of the existing laws.
I read your frustration. Try to let go of the fact that there are many smart people who aren't experts in legal affairs. Cite eCFR if they're wrong, and move on. As much as they don't know the rules, you don't know their situation.
For all you know, the subscriber may be a US Citizen + Delaware C Corp owner.
At some point it becomes willful ignorance of history.
I remember a time not very long ago when everyday crypto like 128-bit SSL was restricted under US export law. The old web browsers came in separate, "exportable" versions. [1]
Phil Zimmermann was in big trouble for releasing PGP. That was the mid-90s. Clinton was President so this stuff transcends politics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape_Navigator_1.1_fo...
Yes, because US CIA and NSA was hacking half of the World. You can learn about this in Cybersecurity books.
This is different situation. Cybersecurity specialists (at least those I found and read) don't consider Mythos as something really powerful. Good tool but not groundbreaking.
Anthropic was playing terror game and burned by it
Good, so it might not be over, considering everyone around the world can use PGP and browsers?
Sounds about the mechanisms they'd use to prevent consumers from having edge inference. Their final moats.
That was in reference to whether anyone outside of Anthropic might be able to have standing to sue at all, not the merits of the case.
> Anthropic themselves argued that the technology is dangerous
They said Mythos was dangerous, not Fable which is what got banned.
"Mythos-class models" were banned, which includes both Fable and Mythos itself.
> Technically the US government is allowing Anthropic to serve the models to any US citizen, and it's Anthropic who decided that's impossible to comply with
It is technically impossible. Many of the researchers working on the models aren't US citizens. That's not just within Anthropic. It'd make things 100% worse.
Lockheed Martin is able to restrict access of their product details to only us citizens.
It's not impossible, it's just hard.
There are tens of thousands of defense contractors that not only work with export-controlled stuff, but even top-secret and other higher levels.
Getting just a secret clearance takes up to a year, and expecting to do this for all employees, in this AI market? Not going to happen, things move way too fast.
People complain about the US approach, but almost every high end manufacturing is being export controlled, from ASML machines to high end optic used in missiles.
> Lockheed Martin is able to restrict access of their product details to only us citizens.
The US government has stated that the US is very behind in manufacturing of military equipment vs e.g. China (in terms of scale and speed).
So if your example is gimp it then sure it's possible.
For just this reason, dialing back ITAR export restrictions has been on the agenda for nearly a decade.
> https://calibremag.ca/trump-preparing-to-roll-back-itar-expo...
It hasn't yet happened. And, as things stand right now, nobody in their right mind wants to work in a business beholden to ITAR. Strong export controls will kill American AI.
Not every government law is wise or good. But it's still the law.
Are you certain? Trump admin is hand-picking GPT 5.6 winners
The Government's position is that Anthropic/OpenAI are forbidden from allowing non-US citizens use the models. This is impossible in reality because how can Anthropic know that the person sitting behind a Claude code session or API key is at any given moment a US citizen? You can check their ID on signup but how can they know that they didn't give their credentials to someone else to use? They can't.
Given the impossibility of compliance, what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is working with the government to release it to certain organizations with the government's blessing.
If this were about missiles and not AI models, nobody would question this turn of events. If the government said that nobody can export this missile or allow non-citizens access to the missile, and then they started giving permission for certain organizations to handle the missile, that would be normal, not picking winners.
The only reason people are questioning it in this case is because they believe that these models are not dangerous enough to deserve these kinds of export controls. Personally I'd agree that in my 3 days of using Fable I didn't observe any superpowers. Unfortunately however, Anthropic undermined that argument by claiming that Mythos is highly dangerous, which set them up for any jailbreak of Fable to be considered a national security risk. Who is a court going to believe? Someone who used a model for 3 days? Or the government and the people who made that model?
Comparing AI models with missiles is a far fetch as long as citizenship is the single qualifier used to decide who’s allowed to be a customer. This is not a security related policy, it’s about strategically controlled economic power.
This is just not how it works even if we really, really want it to work that way. US government can do it, and has done it before. At some point strong encryption was considered “munitions” and export controlled. If SSL can be “munition”, LLMs can be slapped on a label just like that. SSL/TLS stopped being qualified as such eventually so some sanity was restored. But as the legal and regulatory framework, it’s certainly there and has and is being used in that capacity.
> This is not a security related policy, it’s about strategically controlled economic power.
It is both. The US and China are locked in an AI arms race with economics and security intertwined, given the perceived power of the trajectory of frontier AI models.
This has a long history and the US government are not completely stupid. They understand that some cornerstone technologies are high leverage even if they are not per se directly militarily relevant.
Some classic examples of this, on which the US places severe export controls, was advanced materials science and inertial navigation technology. Neither of these are weapons but advanced technology in these domains greatly enables the development of advanced weapons. Any work in these areas is automatically subject to the full export control regime. In extreme cases they may be nationalized and classified.
AI tech is becoming just another tech domain subject to the same level of scrutiny. I’m not making a moral judgement. This was always going to be the reality and a lot of people could see it coming.
Another one is thermal vision cameras. Anything above 9fps (I guess an arbitrary cutoff to do with night-vision goggles) is export controlled. This is despite the technology being very valuable for many industrial and hobby applications.
If that was a guesstimate on frame rate it's likely off.
Regardless of US controls, I can from Australia buy a high quality 50 fps thermal scope with built in 1000m (or ~ 1000 yard) laser range finder from Hangzhou, China.
ie. Why lock the stable at 9 fps when out on the open plain 50 fps is already running free.
The US government obviously has no control over what China sends to Australia, so it this case the cat is out of the bag. However I can assure you the limit is still real for US companies: https://oem.flir.com/support/support-center/knowledge-base/a...
I don't think this is what happened. Anthropic could have absolutely complied with the government order, even in the most minimal fashion possible. Instead they chose to block everybody, and then give a link blaming the government.
I think it's most likely that they felt that this would drive wide antagonism towards the government which would help put them in a more favorable situation for future negotiations to establish a more 'commercially favorable regulation regime.' In other words, build me a moat, now! The government responded by super-screwing them, but is doing so in a way that can help keep the corporate class relatively content while this plays out.
"Our models are so good they are banned by the government"
I don't see any way how releasing an incrementally better model could get even close to the positive PR. For every Mythos token not sold because of this they'll sell dozens of Fable, Opus and so on. Perhaps the ban did not origin at Anthropic, as a PR stunt, but genuinely at some government desk. Entirely possible. But Anthropic would be foolish to not pick up that ball and drag it out a little.
Yeah but that's not what happened at all. The government said limit access to US citizens. Anthropic could have chosen compliance or even malicious compliance (are you a US citizen - please tick yes or no). And such a response from Anthropic would have required the government to try to crack down even harder which would have made them look even worse, and Anthropic even better. Instead Anthropic chose to over-comply and looks just as bad the government here, especially with somewhat transparent ulterior motives driving their behavior.
In addition to what you're saying, Trump admin is also hand-picking which customers gain access to GPT 5.6 during this period. This is widely reported on.
That's why I raised skepticism that Anthropic has not been subject to that.
Export control is not illegal where are you coming up with this stuff?
Claiming ignorance is a good way to pay tens of millions of $ in fines or do prison time.
Here's one from TWO DAYS AGO:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/manager-us-freight-forw...
She will be doing 18 months in federal lockup.
The people in charge of enforcing US export law are worse than city building inspectors and the penalties are orders of magnitude more severe. They're not people you want to mess with, ignore, or pretend you didn't know the rules.
> As described in court filings, from at least December 2022 through December 2024, Mazulina conspired with Russian freight forwarding companies and others to unlawfully ship controlled items, including industrial oil and gas equipment, from the United States to Russia, through intermediary countries. At one point, in June 2023, Mazulina told colleagues that her clients were paying through bank accounts in third party countries because “[m]ost of [her] clients [were] currently sanctioned with USA.” Mazulina attempted to conceal the unlawful scheme by submitting and causing the submission of false export documents to the U.S. government, which omitted the information that the goods were destined for Russia.
That feels materially different than a software program released in the open domestic market.
And while it feels different, the government would apparently disagree: https://exportcontrol.lbl.gov/training/export-control-overvi...
Distribution of software to a foreign national within the US is an explicit proviso of the law. That is a wild law and I am surprised it stands.
Anthropic doesn't have the right to release weapons technologies on the open Internet, that's the point.
Lockheed doesn't whine that they aren't allowed to sell their products for a $20/mo subscription to everyone with a pulse.
> doesn't have the right to release weapons technologies
true but that isn't what we're talking about here
Then why did Dario say that their product was like nuclear material? https://coincentral.com/anthropic-ceo-says-ai-could-be-as-da...
I think it’s a general misconception with folks that export controls only apply to weapons, forgetting that it applies to many high-end manufacturing and technology.
I’m surprised about some of the reactions, but again anyone who has a security clearance wouldn’t touch any of this discussion with a ten-foot pole also.
Also there’s no incentive to fight. They already have one of the best models. Mythos remains a trump card when a competitor releases an even better model.
There's huge incentive.
The government has arbitrary commandeered their business.
This could ruin Anthropic.
They are walking a tight rope with respect to revenues, hype, IPO.
If this kills their hyper growth prospects, it could kill the IPO.
If there's a serious change the gov. is out of line, the judges could put a stay and possibly throw this out.
There may however be enough of a case, in which there's maybe not much they can do.
Having a crazy person completely control your business is very, very bad.
Maybe they would prefer Nationalization more than an IPO.
Definitely not.
If this technology has export restrictions, then Anthropic and OpenAI will go out of business.
Anthropic's revenues are already 66% international.
Being nationalized removes the fear of going out of business. They would become like the post-office but for delivering and centralizing all digitalizable knowledge.
It also removes the potential for growth or any other upside. I doubt there'd be many AI researchers willing to work on civil service salaries.
Most researchers in AU work for a pennance in academia, which is 'kind of almost a wing' of gov. in some ways, at least in sense there's related funding and 'public good'.
But being part of a gov industrial entity would be hard, unless it had 'all the right ingredients'.
Like the modern version of NASA? It's hard to imagine under this administration. But maybe it's plausible with a different mindset.
Also worth remembering NASA exists to counter Sputnick, we think of it as 'space, exploration, science' but it has a 'cold war' underpinning.
holy camole, no.
'Being nationalized' is 'Going out of business' - in this context.
The US will not pay market prices that investors would want - and - everyone working there would leave.
Even if they did not - the fuel required to keep it going would not be provided.
US Gov is not geared to lead an institution like that.
It would evaporate
The government, once they see realized potential, will print money and give it to Anthropic if that’s what’s needed to keep developing the technology with gated access.
"will print money ... good gosh.
No, they will not.
Where do all these people come from?
Bond yields are already rising on sovereign debt, if the government resorts to 'printing money', rates will rise materially, debt payments become unsustainable and the economy would crash in a worse way than 'the Great Recession' and it's hard to understand what woudl become of that.
In 1929 the US was not 'global reserve' meaning there was not all that extra leverage in the system.
The US 'hooked' on cheap debt, aka the rest of the world buying USD.
Kind of like leveraged speculation - it has upsides, but the downside is harder.
But that's even before the fact that 'nationalization of Anthropic' would lead to it's instant evaporation.
Have a look at what's going on with the DOJ right now, it's being completely corrupted, 'banana republic' style.
People would be reluctant to have such a thing in 'gov' in normal times, but right now ... things are extremely bad.
Just replace the word Anthropic with defense contractor or weapons manufacturer, they’re all export controlled at this point, do you see a difference?
I really hope the controls are relaxed, but at some arbitrary levels it’s expected that all countries will apply export controls.
The difference is Anthropic is not a defence contractor.
Any number of materials and technology can be used for nefarious purposes.
'Security' is real concern, I'm not denying that, it's not unreasonable for gov. to be paying attention or to take some steps - but it can obviously bee too heavy-handed as well.
I find it ironic when it’s China who does exactly this (to protect their own interests), it is commie behaviour.
The Murican propaganda machine keeps turnin.
sue? whom? usa? have fun..
US government regularly loses lawsuits and has to backtrack policy.
A law firm already has: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/legal-tech-firm-sue...
They could just ignore Trump as he has no authority to so limit a private company.
The labs will not just ignore the order, there are too many other levers they can try to pull to mess with those companies. Just for some examples, think about the number of employees reliant on visas that could be revoked, the government contracts that the hyperscalers hosting them that could be canceled, the certifications that all the data centers need to be hooked up to the grid, the tariffs that could be put on critical components, the IPOs that need to be approved by regulators, the bill introduced in Congress to seize 50% of their equity...
Lots of these moves would and should be struck down in court as an arbitrary and capricious use of administrative power. Some of them might not be, and in the meantime you're signing up for tons of trouble. A trillion-dollar company does not simply go to war with the US government.
A more mid-sized company that's not so intertwined, but not so small that they can't get a good legal team, might be another story.
US sounds like a communist country.
These regulations have been in place since the 1990s and have been applied by every administration. It isn’t a new authority and many companies have had the opportunity to fight it. Anthropic’s lawyers will know this.
None of them have asserted that export controls apply to whatever domestic distribution the administration says that never leaves the country.
Before you offer legal advice, you should at least check the legal definition of "export":
> The EAR definition of “export” extends beyond the transportation of physical goods outside the U.S.
> A “Deemed export” is the release of technology or source code to a foreign national in the U.S. The release is “deemed” to be an export to the last permanent residence status/citizenship of the foreign national. This can occur through demonstration, oral briefing, site visit, or through transmission of non-public data.
Ref: https://exportcontrol.lbl.gov/training/export-control-overvi...
Please read the actual regulations and laws. They do not work the way you are assuming. Companies with obligations under these regulations are required to actively prevent constructive export via domestic distribution. If you let a foreign country launder access to the tech through domestic channels, that is on you. It is why KYC laws exist.
You don’t want to fuck around with export control laws.
Yes he does. They could ignore the US government, but will likely quickly find themselves in court fighting a fight that they are likely to lose and isn’t worth fighting anyway.
Ignoring US export control laws that have been on the books for nearly 50 years is a good way to pay millions of $ in fines and/or land in pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Ask every satellite launch company in the 90s how that worked out.
Aside from how brazen and stupid this would be, the executive branch does have ways of limiting them and their sharing of tech, as we've seen.
They'd need to build an army of automated AI killbots that could rival the entire US military before they could even begin to think of defying Trump.
> They could just ignore Trump as he has no authority to so limit a private company.
Ignore export control regulations?
I think you’re trying to say you really feel it’s not fair, and you’d like so and so meany and bully to go and pound sand. And yeah most people feel the same way here but ignoring export control regulations is not a joking matter and not something to play around with. Especially for a company that feels they are having extra eyes on them.
If you have power and are willing to use it, you don't need legal authority, it turns out.
Trump does many things he lacks the legal authority to do.
>> More than 100 companies and institutions will now have access to Mythos 5, including many Fortune 500 companies, a source familiar with the new directive said, declining to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Who are those 100 companies? Clearly they can't compete on merit and have rubbed some hands to be picked as winners...at least for now.
May have an overlap of which political campaign they donate too.
I don’t know if this has something to do with the administration or access to export controlled technology. There could be a licensing process, but I don’t think it would be public information, we don’t know whom each defense contractor sells to as public.
I’m on record saying mistral needs 50B euros asap; I’ll admit this was wrong, they need more sooner
Doesn’t help unless they get GPUs or equivalent to train.
With enough money this problem is solvable. GPUs alone are only a fraction of a frontier model.
Im really not convinced that can be solved with money alone. China has the money and infrastructure, they don’t have the chips. Europe doesn’t have the infrastructure or the money but may have some chips
What chips does Europe have?
Europe has ASML
But the actually valuable EUV light source technology is developed by Cymer in California. Cymer was only permitted to be acquired by ASML in 2014 under a strict technology sharing and export agreement with US government.
It's why ASML can't just sell the machines to whomever they want. It's largely American tech inside them.
STM32
They're going to run AI training and inference on a 32 bit microcontroller?
That's the joke
oh so they should team up
Musk tried, no?
To do what exactly? They have been nothing but EU funds leech and corporiders.
Every single model is (and always was) behind anything from China.
I wish Europe could find one company that can put us on the map but Mistral’s not it. They have repeatedly shown that extra funding doesn’t magically transfer to better models.
> Every single model is (and always was) behind anything from China.
My guess is, that Mistral plays fair and doesn't try to extract data from US models, while Chinese companies are not.
What’ll happen when Google Deep Mind go to release their next models, developed mostly in London?
Are Google going to end up in a situation where the people working on their models cannot use the models after launch?
> What’ll happen when Google Deep Mind go to release their next models, developed mostly in London?
I am a British citizen living in Berlin, and even when making apps purely for the German market I still have to go through US export restrictions: https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-ap...
I'd assume that Deep Mind, being owned by a US company and having US offices, has to care about US law, despite the differences (me: small fry; them: actually having offices there), because the chain of enforcement is still "take it or leave it" at each stage (USG->Google->DeepMind vs USG->Apple->3rd party Apple devs).
These are export restrictions, so if the model is in London (how do you determine that? The weights? The training itself?) there is no need to export it from the US. Then Google may have found gold. They can sell it to everyone that can't get the best OpenAI or Anthropic models.
Usually export controls are applied to stuff where some significant % is made in America so a few US based engineers could make the project export controllable.
Or in the case of ASML machines, any company you can pressure to comply with your policies either by restricting their access to the technology you control or politics between governments.
But do they want to start a game of chicken with Google? Doing it to Anthropic is one thing, they're much smaller and less B2C. But Google is far more powerful and likely to defend their UK/EU business because they're also fucked if they don't.
Possibly. But we also need to keep in mind that Google gave governments access to their internal data center traffic unencrypted for years.
It’s whatever the Trump admin decides. There are no rules here, we are past that
Restrictions are on good models. You might as well ask what would happen when Microsoft open sources Office
Gemni is really not that far behind, 3.1Pro was the best model or close to it when it came out, 3.5Pro likely wont be but whenever they get to 4 that could easily be Fable level, just later than when Fable itself came out.
> What’ll happen when Google Deep Mind go to release their next models, developed mostly in London?
Unless you open source it then Google Deep Mind isn't the entity "releasing" it. It's some other Google that's US based, e.g. Google Cloud running the APIs etc.
User -> Google -> Google Deep Mind.
So nope, same restrictions apply.
This makes me sad since it implies that the best LLM I will ever be allowed to use is GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. Anything smarter than that is deemed too risky.
So much wasted potential.
And why would I pay Anthropic or OpenAI once consumer hardware gets powerful enough to run an open weight Chinese version of Opus 4.8? Even more so when mobile phones are able to run similar LLMs.
Their financial growth looks doomed. It looks like they will be heavily regulated just like the next missile factory. This is antagonist to VC led turbo growth startup regime.
The LLM improvement curve will level off and with so many AI engineering being in China they will catch up quickly.
The financial growth based on that everyone on earth will need to have an OpenAI or Anthropic subscription is quickly falling apart.
DeepSeek V4 is good enough for most of my work that that I can no longer justify paying 100x for something else. The cost difference is astronomical.
Not sure why people here are so upbeat about China. It is almost guaranteed it will also introduce export controls on the models.
> It is almost guaranteed it will also introduce export controls on the models.
The current models are open weights and already out the door. They are hosted by many providers and are already comparatively good in many domains. Even if this generation is the last one to be open, I‘d argue it would already put the US providers in trouble
Also, the evidence isn't that China is doing anything magic - it seems AI is just energy + compute as opposed to any special research edge. There is reason to think that anyone would be capable of building these models. They're generic and every country will eventually catch up at a speed depending on how economically capable they are at buildign data centres.
I'm upbreat about China because they seem to be the biggest player here, but even if they don't come through I expect other countries will be able to put out decent free models.
I would argue that there is somewhat a research edge - there's no reason to think Chinese labs aren't incredibly capable in research though, look at all the recent papers from them on things like efficiency.
Naturally I wasn't implying they'll restrict the current models retroactively. Which either way trail behind even the universally available frontier models.
What's perplexing is people see CCP as some kind of libertarians while they in fact love regulations and routinely leverage them both domestically and in exports.
I’ve been asking myself this question quite a bit lately. People seem to suddenly think China is a good alternative to the US hegemony status. I sincerely hope I’m just misreading things.
Probably due to the US government doing a constant stream of insane things that hurt Americans and their allies and China not doing that.
Yes this. China's leadership is pretty evil and clearly a danger to the world but not insane.
> China's leadership is pretty evil and clearly a danger to the world
Is this how Americans are coping with their civilizatory down fall and vanishing hegemony?
The US has an open media and the western world internet is a non-stop airing of the US's dirty laundry.
China has only state media and little internet overlap with the west.
From the POV of your typical western internet denizen, The US elected a dictator to burn the country to the ground, while China is building a utopia where the fruits are free for everyone.
Can you elaborate?
Uyghurs, Tibet, and Taiwan, for starters. Taiwan in particular could become a conflict if push came to shove. Hard to say. (No nation will go to bat for the Uyghurs or Tibet, though.)
You need to refresh the latest propaganda Codex, those topics are so last decade.
He's not wrong though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-strait_relations#Deterio...
It doesn't change the fact, that as an European I really wish we had a better relationship with China and ditched US and their backward policies. It's OK to point out atrocities made by big empires, they are all guilty anyway.
Are the Hong Kong protests recent enough for you? Disappearing college kids from street rallies?
China’s leadership is pragmatic, transparent, mature.
As the US jerks from being BDFL to bullying zero summer, it’s not surprising that the abstract fears of china seem manageable compared to the new pressing fears of the US.
Why as a European be more afraid of a country that whilst you wouldn’t want to live in and which has supported Russia is quiet and selling you cheap stuff vs a country who used to be a friend who is now wanting you to grovel for a bad deal and is also supporting Russia?
If the Chinese models are open weight the after release you don't care about China at all; they could be running on a server in Bulgaria with zero CCP influence for all you care.
As an Aussie, I see it as a good thing that the US has competition. Wouldn't want China to become dominant either, though.
Consider it from a European perspective: The US under this administration is more unreliable than China. If Trump decides tomorrow that he's unhappy about something he'll pull some random other thing to bully the other side. You can't do business with that.
Rebuilding trust and foreign relationships is going to take a long time after Trump is gone.
As a European I still prefer US over China.
But why?
There are no Chinese military personnel and bases in Europe. The Chinese have not tried to take European land by force and China is also quite stable. It won't change it's mind every 4 years and negate international treaties that have been signed. I also don't recall China invading another country and/or kidnapping leaders of a foreign state in recent history. China also does not control the global reserve currency and can not unilaterally impose debilitating sanction on countries such as Cuba causing the death of thousands of innocent people because of some historical beef.
Yes, China does not have a good human rights record, they imprison a lot of political dissidence but then who are we comparing them too? The US has a 5x worse per capita prison population than China and a horrific human rights record.
What exactly bothers you so much about China that the US does not?
China has a single leader with absolute power.
The irony is that the US is currently getting so much flak because it's leader is trying (and failing, EOs only go so far) to become what Xi Jinpeng is to China.
So if you want to put all your eggs in Xi's basket alone, go ahead. But if he has a stroke tomorrow and thinks China would be best off making pool toys, all your eggs will be smashed in one instant.
> The Chinese have not tried to take European land by force
What did US do? Are you referring to Kosovo?
For context, I am European using both US and Chinese models, not rooting for one side or the other (but prefer openness of Chinese models).
Greenland, Svalbard, Falklands and Sazan Island in just the last two years.
I think the Europeans have had some bad experiences with the communist system so naturally they are not very keen to any get communist influence.
Once China can twist your arm you can be sure they will. Just mention democracy to them and you will see what comes next.
China is an authoritarian ethno nationalist state-capitalist system. They are so far from anything remotely communist. The only thing communist about it is the name of their mono party
They pretty much like to confiscate your property and or force you “donate” your profit (see Alibaba for a very good example), make you disappear, enforce censorship and all that stuff very familiar to European communist regimes. They may be different flavours of communism but they all stink.
> They are so far from anything remotely communist. The only thing communist about it is the name of their mono party
They are far from anything remotely communist except by the one and only thing that defines communist? "Communist" has only ever referred to a political party.
Are you confusing "communist" with "communism"? The latter has held dual meaning, both referring to a nation under rule by a Communist party and an imagined sci-fi world where post-scarcity has taken hold. Obviously we remain far from achieving post-scarcity. However, nobody has ever claimed China has. In context, we know that the political party is the point of focus.
You’re the one who seems to be confused. When china liberalized it kept the esthetic of communism, while shifting to a state capitalism system. Communism is about control of means of production. China has adopted a capitalistic economy
> Communism is about control of means of production.
No, but perhaps you are now confusing communism with Marxism? Long story short, Marx and Engels hypothesized that capitalists would effectively withhold the technology necessary to realize post-scarcity. They suggested that the only way to bring post-scarcity into reality was to have the public take control of the means of production — a.k.a. socialism.
You are right to point out that being the foundation of the Communist party. Their efforts (on paper) revolve around the belief that they need to take action to see us find post-scarcity, believing, like Marx, that vested interests will stonewall the transition.
> China has adopted a capitalistic economy
You might say that is a move away from the Marxist underpinnings, but is not at odds with the Communist agenda. We nearly have post-scarcity in the area of food, and that has been primarily driven by American and European advancements, so today we have come to accept that Marx's ideas have not proven themselves. That does not diminish the quest to find post-scarcity, however. Communists (on paper) still have the same goal. If you look closer, while their system is capitalistic, the Communists still hold the reins to prevent autonomous capitalists from stonewalling post-scarcity.
You know, like as is seen in the original article. We have a purported transformative technology that can lead us towards post-scarcity being withheld by a small guild for their own benefit. Marx may have not gotten the exact mechanics right, but his underlying fear is playing out right before our eyes.
I've been reading Marx for a long time. Everything you've said in this comment is utterly wild.
Most Europeans do not think about some ill-defined "communist threat" at all. The majority of negative opinions about China stem from economic worries.
Also FYI: the CCP has officially adopted the designation "socialist democracy" for themselves*, so I don't think you're going to bother them much by using that term. You'll have to get more specific about what you think their "democracy" should look like for them to start giving you the side-eye.
* Many places that are not really recognizable as democracies from a western POV do this. People, we have democracy at home!
Right now they are the one competing openly
Export controls are only a strategic advantage if the export destinations don't already have the same (or better) technology. That time may come, but first China needs to export to destroy the AI industry in the USA.
I disagree. With America turtling up into a Christian nationalist theocracy the world is China's to win. They still want free trade.
Where the frontier labs still have a business is probably not casual consumer chat
Right, I cancelled my Codex sub yesterday, it ends today. I'm not American and I see the writing on the wall, I'd just as soon improve my tooling to work more effectively with "stupider" open weight models than be dependent on Lutnick and Bessent for "permission" to use the frontier models.
Sad situation is that half the talent that did the primary research and initially created these models and got them out there was educated here or taught here or have citizenship here in Canada. Karpathy, Sutskever, Hinton, there's a huge list. And for other countries, too.
In the short term this play may work for the US administration, in the long run it will only reduce the flow of talent and good will and sharing between G7 nations.
That's not what is implied. Fable may still be widely available.
... in the US.
Be gentle, foreigners using the internet is still a pretty new concept to them
I share the sadness, but I'm not sure the consumer market was ever the main prize here
Well, now I'm rooting for the Europeans/chinese to develop something better and release it.
One can hope.
The last bit might be the point - this has all got a bit out of hand, the US government might have decided now is the time to prick this bubble.
Either because ordinary people hate it or (more likely) because Sam and Dario have got too powerful and they’re now starting to become a genuine rival castle to the US government in elite theory terms - of course at that point you get your wings clipped
I have very little confidence in the current US administration trying to protect the economy. If anything they'd just try to cash out.
Yeah that's what I'm saying - this isn't about "doing the right thing", it's about the existing power structures wanting to preserve their status (the US equivalent of what happened to Jack Ma).
Kushner and the rest of the gang have probably already got a heads up about this and cashed out their stakes, now it's time for Sam and Dario to go through some struggle sessions
Cannot you just obtain them the same way you would obtain any copyrighted material and use them locally?
Don't start to rely on it .
The US might remove access next month in a fit of pique.
The Chinese models look increasingly more reliable and safer.
This is a pithy internet comment, but terrible advice.
Between the Chinese government and Anthropic, I know which one I'd rather send tokens to. For all of the problems of the US, for-profit corporations, data harvesting, etc. the CCP (and, perhaps more troublesome, its allies) is far less likely to align with your interests.
I don't buy that anymore. The day America threatened to invade Canada and Denmark was the day America showed they cannot be trusted any more.
It's not like China can be trusted either, but China isn't planning any direct invasions to the west. Taiwan, perhaps, but they're playing a long-term tactical game rather than a "invade the country we don't like this week" game. They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk, but in that case you shouldn't be uploading your secrets to an AI company in the first place.
America can't be trusted since the patriot act - the day I said to myself I'll never visit.
And I can't trust my gov to grow some balls and say we will no longer negotiate with a senile old child raping man baby.
I can't even trust any company having their workers include or upload my data to a free AI model.
>the day I said to myself I'll never visit
The US is a big and beautiful country. I also dislike contemporary US politics, but don't deny yourself the experience of ever traveling there out of spite.
The world has better places to offer. The past 20 years have only reinforced my stance no need to try.
My friends experiences visiting family (before Trump) have confirmed them multiple times. Imagine visiting family as a 17 year old German and then being questioned for 11 hours because you don't know the exact street where the family lives. While the relative is waiting at the airport without any kind of information.
I agree. Our greatest nation-threats are not the countries we're told they are.
> If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk
Read about GE and Alstom and how the US government (under Obama) forced the sell at a discount, without a true GE financial audit.
No, experience tell if you're a foreign company owner, you risk less allying with the CCP than with the US. At worst with the CCP you'll lose your IP, with the US you will get arrested and be forced to 'sell' (I.E. you'll get overpriced stocks)
> Taiwan, perhaps, but they're playing a long-term tactical game rather than a "invade the country we don't like this week" game.
So one of the world's biggest and most rapid military build-ups in history that is largely intended to give China the ability to seize a democratic country by force by 2027 over any US/Western efforts to protect it is OK because...it's "a long-term tactical game"?
Note that China is not just menacing Taiwan. It's constantly harassing Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam too. Other countries in the region are worried because they understand that if China takes Taiwan successfully, it's not likely to stop there and become a good, peaceful neighbor.
The US, under Trump, is a foreign policy disaster. That doesn't mean that China, with a seemingly more emotionally stable dictator at the helm, is any less dangerous.
> They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
With all due respect, you're really naive about how China operates.
https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...
You're judging China based on some future thing that may happen. The US has been bombing Iran for the last year impacting the entire global economy. I think I'll judge based on actions.
China has been "going after" Taiwan for 80 years, so yeah, they are playing the long game.
Wake me up when they start drone striking neighboring country's fishermen and accusing them of carrying drugs.
Throwaway account to leave a single comment minimizing the Chinese threat against Taiwan? Nah, nothing suspect about that.
https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/a-different-kind-of-army...
Yeah, because criticizing the US, and/or making China look good can get you on certain lists. Maybe that is the reason?
FWIW I do not buy into the "China bad, we good" narrative either.
The US has done really fucked up things, bombed countries for freedom, there has been recent events as well. I do not even think they were ever the "good guys" they thought they are. In Hollywood movies, sure, but in reality? Nah.
> Yeah, because criticizing the US, and/or making China look good can get you on certain lists.
What lists? And what happens to people on those lists?
> Maybe that is the reason?
If you think people are signing up throwaway accounts to post replies to random comments, making no substantive or even controversial statements, I have a bridge to sell you. In the US or China. Take your pick.
> FWIW I do not buy into the "China bad, we good" narrative either.
I never presented that narrative.
> The US has done really fucked up things, bombed countries for freedom, there has been recent events as well. I do not even think they were ever the "good guys" they thought they are. In Hollywood movies, sure, but in reality? Nah.
I'd agree. But what does this have to do with an analysis of China?
My previous comment got flagged about a minute after I posted it to you. It was three paragraphs and it argued a position without any abuse in it. It is probably someone in this thread who hit flag instead of replying because they did not like what I said. Which is suspicious, and it is also the thing I was already talking about. The throwaway shill insinuation earlier was a way to avoid engaging with a disagreement, and a flag does the same job. Welp.
China has a economy which they can't risk. People keep saying same thing for Russia, but they haven't been able to defeat even Ukraine.
At this point I am afraid of US government than China...
> China has a economy which they can't risk. People keep saying same thing for Russia, but they haven't been able to defeat even Ukraine.
Huh? Russia invaded Ukraine, at significant economic cost, and hundreds of thousands of people have died.
> At this point I am afraid of US government than China...
Just as people can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can have reason to be concerned about more than one country at a time.
> The US, under Trump, is a foreign policy disaster.
The US, under every single president has been an imperialistic threat to half the world. From imposing embargoes, to overthrowing governments and supporting dictators and genocides all over the world. Half the world hates you, and the other half has begrudgingly no choice but to half assedly support the greatest threat that the world has ever known, a military in a trenchcoat made to protect their dominance over world trade.
So, respectfully, fuck off. The Chinese are not a worse problem than you are, merely a different one. The NSA already has all my data, no reason the MSS shouldn't get a piece of that data too.
I always find it strange to encounter people whose disposition to one violent imperial power is to welcome...more violent imperial powers. Strange form of sadomasochism.
I don't think China is more violent than the US.
The US has for like 90% of its history been at war in one form or another, typically killing people abroad.
I think the US did this more in a century than China did in a millennium.
> I don't think China is more violent than the US.
You don't have to because that wasn't an argument I made. Both the US and China have done horrible things to innocent people and are both currently engaged in malicious behavior that is an affront to humanity.
> I think the US did this more in a century than China did in a millennium.
Once again, I'm not interested in "who is worse" pissing contests, but please educate yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
> The Great Leap Forward led to between 15 and 55 million deaths in mainland China during the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine it caused, making it the largest or second-largest famine in human history.
https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/persecution-of-uygh...
> https://victimsofcommunism.org/tibet-is-lost-but-not-forever...
The Tibetan government in exile believes as many as 1.2 million Tibetans died as a result of Mao's invasion of Tibet in 1949.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
China was the Khmer Rouge's main backer. The Khmer Rouge's actions were responsible for a genocide in which 1.5-2 million people perished. Afterwards, China offered asylum to Pol Pot and his top aides.
People who are genuinely interested in justice, human rights and peace should be horrified by what both the US and China have done.
> Once again, I'm not interested in "who is worse" pissing contests, but please educate yourself.
Way to speedrun your argument being shit. I am now free to not take it seriously.
I'll reply for the other onlookers anyway.
> The Great Leap Forward
I know quite well about how awful China was to its own citizens during Mao years, thank you very much.
The thing is, I don't care. China can be as awful as it wants to be to it's own citizens.
The US has a very long list of spying and interfering (many times very violently) abroad. That is what I am concerned about, and that was the point I was replying to.
I could say something along the lines of you needing to educate yourself, but I tend to not seed asphalt.
> The Tibetan government in exile believes as many as 1.2 million Tibetans died as a result of Mao's invasion of Tibet in 1949.
Again, I don't care. China sees places like Tibet and Taiwan as China. Not my problem.
China never threated to send troops to invade Greenland.
> People who are genuinely interested in justice, human rights and peace should be horrified by what both the US and China have done.
In many ways, I am. But that is not what is being discussed here.
> The thing is, I don't care. China can be as awful as it wants to be to it's own citizens.
Way to speedrun proof that you're an abhorrent person.
> Again, I don't care. China sees places like Tibet and Taiwan as China. Not my problem.
> China never threated to send troops to invade Greenland.
So China causing more than a million deaths and displacements when it actually invaded a functionally sovereign state (Tibet) and threatening to invade and seize Taiwan, which has its own democratically-elected government, constitution, currency, central bank, military, etc. "is not your problem" but somehow Trump threatening to invade Greenland is your problem?
Unless you're a Greenlander, by your own standard, you have no legitimate reason to care about the ~57,000 people who live in Greenland. Let China take Taiwan, and let the US have Greenland.
You're a real piece of...work.
> So China causing more than a million deaths and displacements when it actually invaded a functionally sovereign state (Tibet) and threatening to invade and seize Taiwan, which has its own democratically-elected government, constitution, currency, central bank, military, etc. "is not your problem"
Correct.
> but somehow Trump threatening to invade Greenland is your problem?
Correct.
> Unless you're a Greenlander, by your own standard, you have no legitimate reason to care about the ~57,000 people who live in Greenland
EU, article 42. Educate yourself.
(Just kidding, it would be in vain).
> You're a real piece of...work.
No, I just live in a country that does not pretend to be the world police.
I can't do shit about China invading Tibet or Taiwan, much in the same way I can't do shit about Israel turning Gaza into an open-air Auschwitz, beyond writing mean words on the internet.
But I can recognize what country poses the biggest threat to my living nowadays. That country is not China, it is the US.
No, you're just looking forward to being the only violent imperial power and to rule unopposed. the existence of another violent imperial power keeps you on a leash. It's not the best case scenario, but an unfettered and unrestricted united states spells doom for the world.
China also happens to be the one that's electrifying the world, producing and improving batteries, solar panels, has a long term plan while the US is going hurr durr VC money printing for smart dog food.
> No, you're just looking forward to being the only violent imperial power and to rule unopposed.
You'd probably be a much more content person if you stopped going around the internet assuming things about random strangers on the basis of their nationalities.
Elsewhere in this thread you insinuated that someone is a Chinese propagandist for pointing out that the US is actually aggressive in ways China is not.
If you're going to assume other people have ulterior agendas without evidence, you can't be surprised when people make assumptions about you in turn.
> Elsewhere in this thread you insinuated that someone is a Chinese propagandist for pointing out that the US is actually aggressive in ways China is not.
Why don't you specifically point to which of my comments you're referring to? Is it my response to the dubious throwaway account https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48695288?
China is increasingly aggressive towards its neighbors, and we don't even have to talk about Taiwan.
https://ipdefenseforum.com/2025/06/ccp-fighter-jets-harass-j...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_China_Coast_Guard_and_Peo...
https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/supply-trade/philippines-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-china-shined-laser-p...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/philippines-china-sea-conflict-...
America's aggression around the world is well-documented and is deplorable. That can be acknowledged and discussed without dismissing Chinese aggression. There's no law of the universe that says only one country can be a bad actor at the same time.
Yes, I was referring to that comment. You knew exactly which one I was talking about without pointing it out specifically, so why should I have bothered?
Now you just dropped five links in an attempt to demonstrate that Chinese aggression is comparable to US aggression, and yet none of those incidents amounted to extrajudicial execution (aka murder), which is what the person with the throwaway account was referencing.
All of it is beside my point anyway, which is that you are making assumptions about people while also asking people not to make assumptions about you.
For all you know, that throwaway account is someone who uses this site for professional development under their real name and does not want their criticism of a vindictive administration tied to them. Instead of considering that, you implied that they are a Chinese troll engaging in bad faith.
I'm inclined to believe that if someone is drawing false equivalencies and needlessly smearing their interlocutors as trolls, they are the one engaging in bad faith.
We are thoroughly off-topic at this point, so let's just end this thread here.
> Now you just dropped five links in an attempt to demonstrate that Chinese aggression is comparable to US aggression, and yet none of those incidents amounted to extrajudicial execution (aka murder), which is what the person with the throwaway account was referencing.
China engages in the extrajudicial execution of its own citizens.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/009/1990/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3598791
China even runs a large network of "overseas police stations" to track and intimidate overseas Chinese, including dissidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...
And China doesn't just target plebs. Government officials literally disappear too.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/02/03/world/asia/ch...
I personally believe that the US has committed a significant number of crimes. That doesn't mean I'm blind to the fact that other countries commit crimes too.
I'm not sure why so many people struggle to acknowledge that all of this stuff is evil, regardless of the country doing it.
> For all you know, that throwaway account is someone who uses this site for professional development ...
Normal people using sites like this for professional development don't decide to create throwaway accounts post a single response to one short comment, buried in the context of a larger thread, that wasn't even highly downvoted or upvoted. This is what troll farms do and I'd have to question your intellectual honesty if you keep pretending that this isn't exactly what China-sponsored troll farm commenting looks like.
> The US, under Trump, is a foreign policy disaster.
This administration only removed the blinds on what has always been an adversarial policy, allies included.
If given a choice you may choose US or Chinese models for whatever reason it's fine, but there's no need to fall into the delusion that it is for moral reasons or obligations.
Less likely to align with your interests maybe, but have you considered that not everyone has the same interests?
Personally I am much more concerned about handing my data over to the government that actually has power over me and labels dissenters terrorists than I am with the government overseas that has no direct effect on my life... well, other than providing alternative LLMs with permissive licenses that can be hosted anywhere in the world... but to each their own, I suppose.
> the government overseas that has no direct effect on my life
Yet.
Things change as well, in all sides. The US might swing back to normal with the next election, or China worse, or vice-versa.
> I know which one I'd rather send tokens to
That's the neat part with the Chinese open weight models. You don't have to send your tokens to the PRC, the models can be hosted stateside or anywhere else you'd like.
Being open weight, the Chinese models can be served the same way as Anthropic's: via AWS or GCP. Or whomever really, or on prem.
You don’t have to run the chinese models in chinese data centers as many of them are open weights. Some could say that trumps both.
> I know which one I'd rather send tokens to.
Do you have access to Mythos? If not the choice has already been made for you.
Don't trust US or China. Trust the open source community.
What if the model is hosted on a 3rd party site ?
As if we have a choice. I'm one of the foreign peasants the US government has cut off from the top tier models. I'll probably switch to GLM 5.2 when my current Anthropic subscription ends.
> Between the Chinese government and Anthropic, I know which one I'd rather send tokens to.
You meant to write "Between the Chinese government and the US government". Completely agreed though, better to send it to the former.
You don't have to send your tokens to the CCP to use the Chinese models, that is the beauty of it. You can find GLM, Minimax, Deepseek, Kimi, etc hosted in China, Europe, the US, and probably elsewhere depending on what your geographic preferences for token transport are.
Given recent history, I'd be more likely to be killed by American actions than Chinese ones.
Except the open weights can live on your hardware so no one gets your tokens.
China won't arrest you for wrongthink where you live now
At least China isn't a terrorist state run by Jeffery Epstein Associates. It's a nation run by engineers, and it has flaws, but at least the people at the top know how to read.
I find interesting that the tactics to nudge people towards US models and away from Chinese models ceased to be on merit or technical capability - anyone that used DeepSeek or MiMo knows that those are nothing short of excellent. Now it's the old-fashioned fearmongering.
You know what? I live in Europe. China was not the country threatening military action against one EU nation that would throw the whole continent into war a few months ago.
Also, it's not Chinese companies harvesting every piece of data about me that they can get their hands on.
If fear is your argument, I know that I fear the US and its big tech corporations a lot more that China.
Not worshipping Jesus and his earthly apostle Trump is in my country's interest though.
Safer?
If I can run it locally, it is certainly more safe than running on some cloud server somewhere.
Others nations’ models run offline, too.
well at least they're a little further away
I’m not sure what the US government is trying to do. At first it seems like they are just trying to stifle some company that said no. Now they are just doing free publicity. It’s like never before have I wanted to try something out as much as this.
They’re in effect saying “nothing else is as powerful as what Anthropic put out”. Even though that might not really be the case it’s what it sounds like.
It’s probably just basic corruption. Want access to Mythos for your company? Enrich someone in the administration. That’s how everything works now: they outlaw/tariff it and then you pay a bribe to get it back or get declared exempt.
It just came out the Kalshi outright gave Donald Trump Jr a $300k stake in the company when it made him a “strategic advisor”. That’s the name of the game now
Could you share some pictures of the rock you're living under? The US regime is concerned with furthering the interests of a closed circle of powerful loyals. This achieves that goal. Access is reserved to those loyals.
Cynic in me thinks it's some or all of the following:
- extract monetary contributions for their side of political spectrum from ai companies
- extract money for personal gain
- grokify ai answers on political / worldview topics, because polls are showing people trust ai answers more than wikipedia
they're flailing is what they're doing
They are collecting tribute is what they are doing.
And they are just getting started.
It sounds insidious, and it probably would be if they weren’t so damn dumb.
Grift. It's all about the grift.
Is there any evidence at all that would convince you that they're trying to mitigate real risks that actually exist?
Yes.
A published policy with the right to appeal exclusions from the list.
An equal standard for all companies rather than ad hoc application.
A countervailing policy to mitigate the unfair advantage conferred on the companies that have early access (such as a higher tax rate that goes to fund ai job loses, and a commitment that AI use of the new models won’t result in layoffs).
A requirement that hardware is made available for open source models rather than locked up in by the AI labs.
A restriction on AI labs being vertically integrated from hardware all the way up through the app layer. I would restrict AI labs to being API providers and prohibit them from building apps. That would allow an ecosystem of independent software development on the app layer without fear of being copied by the labs that have an unfair advantage in seeing the data while apps are being built, the usage data as they become successful and the ability to undercut competitors by subsidizing tokens unfairly.
I could go on.
That would convince me that the US Administration is capable of good governance and interested in a regulatory environment that furthers the public good and curtails excessive corporate power. A tough sell indeed. But that was not the question. They can be incompetent and corrupt and favouring the interests of their buddies, and also genuinely believe that the models are actually becoming dangerous (especially in the hands of other countries). It's simply impossible to tell what mix of motivations led to this mess.
What real risks? Genuinely.
I've read all the sci fi they have. It's not hard to see where the ideas came from.
What's being questioned is this sentiment of "The only way to save humanity is for me and my lighthaven groupies to become Xillionaire god-kings"
The latter question is 100% reasonable, and something I also fall on.
But there's definitely a large contingent who denies that they think there's any risk at all, instead of them engaging in motivated reasoning to think their self interest just so happens to coincide with what is best for safety.
Is there any evidence at all that would convince you they're just blowing smoke up our asses in pursuit of money?
Sure! When Mythos was first announced, there was an obvious prediction to make: if what Anthropic says is even remotely true, the participants will start talking over the next few months about how Mythos has been a big deal for them. Then that happened (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer..., https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-frontier-models/, https://blogs.cisco.com/cisco-on-cisco/how-cisco-defends-aga...), so I became convinced, although I shouldn't make it sound like I ever found the idea implausible.
I might be un-convinced if someone published a clear technical explanation of what error these companies have all made. The only counterarguments I've seen so far are vague speculation about how bubble dynamics might incentivize them to say it worked great, and to me that's not persuasive.
Of course not. I like to complain that AI is dangerous and should be regulated and then out of the other side of my mouth complain that it is unfair and a gimmick if the government tries to regulate anything.
Why? Because I am a social media addict that lives in 2026 and I don't know how to relate to things in the world that don't involve complaining.
Complaining you see is more form of epistemology and entertainment at the same time to me. Reasoned debate and nuance just doesn't get enough likes for me. I am all about the emotional response to a topic.
I mean, we're talking about an administration that has already over-reached in regulating this specific company out of personal bias; is openly seeking leverage over companies for favoritism and graft; hires on the basis of loyalty to whims of a narcissist; makes fun of the whole idea of competent government based on expertise; provides a range of conflicting explanations for whatever it chooses to do; and has been unable to field a team capable of understanding or explaining whatever real risks are here.
Your question is like asking what evidence would convince us that a bag of rocks doesn't have rocks in it. Easy, just take the rocks out.
How does my small company become a "trusted partner"?
Oh you thought this was a competitive free market?
I thought "Free market!!1!" was basic US policy. But apparently you can't do any consumer protection laws, but you can regulate AI access to only your wealthy friends / campaign sponsors.
"there are in-groups that the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups that the law binds but does not protect"
i.e. freedom for me but not for thee
Donate to his ballroom project, perhaps? Pay for tokens with his crypto coin?
Donate money to your President, probably.
This administration doesn't care about small companies anymore than it cares about regular Americans.
Anthropic has been touting how their newest model is basically a cyber weapon and is so dangerous that they need to only role it out to trusted people and make sure it has super restrictive guard rails. They are begging to be regulated. This is exactly what they’ve been asking for.
> This is exactly what they’ve been asking for.
This doesn't directly follow from the first part of your comment, and more importantly seems inaccurate with respect to Anthropic's public statements on this situation. For example:
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
Tech companies have routinely outmaneuvered the slow machinations of regulatory bodies.
In fairness, they are up against a part of government that can move swiftly and authoritatively. They don’t have the luxury of biding time against a sclerotic and process-bound bureaucracy.
There is a good reason no one seriously tests the resolve of these particular regulatory authorities.
What they wanted is to regulate competition but they forgot that current admin is Trump. They should have buy gifts to Trump preferably gold and pay for few exciting dinners in Florida. They should have learned from Bezos and Cook.
Their true intentions were to get the government to regulate open weight models while leaving them alone. Government went after them instead.
As enjoyable as the sheer irony of the situation is, this is a terrible development... Not only are foreign peasants like me cut off from the best models, so are the chinese AI labs that were distilling them into open weights for the rest of us to enjoy. This sudden acceleration has been genuinely terrifying, I'm not sure what to expect of the future anymore.
Easy, pivot to the military industrial complex, dummy!
So what happens to their $1T valuations now, given they can't sell the product to consumers, and open-weight models are closing in on competition?
I have a feeling that’s the same question Whitehouse asked Anthropic and OpenAI.
Ask SpaceX. There is no rational for those valuations, it’s pure FOMO
I wonder if the Founding Fathers knew about AI, they would include it in the 2nd?
The spirit is to provide effective tools for the people to resist federal military tyranny, and Mythos seems like it would be a good tool to defend against that, for so many reasons.
I'm not sure that analogy works: pretty much everyone agrees that there are some types of weapons civilians shouldn't be able to have, even though they might be very effective for resisting military tyranny.
I don’t think everyone agrees on that. It’s just that the government has been able to legislate that as technology evolved.
That being said many legal scholars say the state militia was intended to be the defense against tyranny not individual citizens because there were government led crackdowns on rebellion under Washington and other presidents from the earliest days of the republic. State militias have the full range of weapons
As Iran is showing, the federal government is worried about nukes. I feel like a modern 2nd amendment should ensure every US citizen has a right to up to three (3) nuclear weapons.
Could you explain this like I'm 35?
Dear anthropic, please consider moving your entire business to Canada or Europe where you will be allowed to conduct your business without vindictive and Kafkaesque government interference. I would like to have access to your models too!
> where you will be allowed to conduct your business without vindictive and Kafkaesque government interference
Isn't this basically the reason that no major tech labs or startups ever come out of Canada or Europe though?
No, that’s mostly because there’s no capital market for building mid-sized businesses.
Anthropic is past that. They’d have no trouble moving if they wanted to, except the USG could stop them.
I'd say the UK would be better. DeepMind is in London.
famously friendly business environments europe & canada
lol
Well, as long as you stick to the rules you can do business in Europe and it can't be taken away from you.
As long as you are in the US? No one protects you. Asset forfeiture, arbitrary sanctions, arbitrary tariffs, your employees can get arrested and deported right off the street if they happen to have non-white skin and live in a city under siege by ICE, and if you oppose the regime or just dare to not kiss the ring, say goodbye to planned mergers.
Rule of law matters, and rule of law is gone in the US.
lmao
you have never tried to start a business in europe
pro tip you better have family in high places
Hi I'm from Europe and I'm about to start my second business. I don't have friends in high places, and the process is entirely online and takes about an hour to complete followed by 1-5 weeks of waiting for tax approval etc.
Pro tip: most American anti-Europe propaganda is propaganda.
I do work in a bureaucracy heavy activity in Europe, and without my friends in high places I'd be shut down. I've had wait times for bureaucracy cut from 2 years to 2 weeks, licenses given after a dinner when official processes were denied, etc. I've never had these problems when trying to start the American branch. Competition yes, having to wine and dine local politicians nephews no
Dinner with politicians? Where do you live? Where I'm at(Sweden) someone getting a permit after dining with a politician would be front page news, along with judicial consequences for both the politician and the business owner in question.
Europe is quite diverse, even us Europeans tend to underestimate just how diverse it is.
Right next to Sweden.
Almost like Europe isn't one entity with a single set of regulations. Germany is not Estonia
What? I, and several of my friends, have absolutely started a business. Maybe things are different in some countries (for example, parts of Eastern Europe), but that's not true in general. Europe is big.
Depends on the country but in most you can do it online in 5 minutes at almost no cost.
I think Anthropic could manage
I don't understand how this doesn't entirely screw the TAM for these companies?
As an EU company I think I now basically have to consider US AI as hostile and avoid it.
> As an EU company I think I now basically have to consider US AI as hostile and avoid it
Yes, that’s the only sane conclusion. And yes it does screw the TAM, but it’s not like the AI vendors had actual realistic economic plans to begin with
Watch the eu do the same thing
If the EU develops a market leading model to even control in the first place I think that would at least be a neutrally good outcome.
By doing it, as leader in the industry, the world hegemon, and self-titled „leader of the free world“, the US gave the implicit permission for any other country to do the same
AFAIR there was the evidence posted for the specific three letter creeps snooping specifically on Airbus and sending everything to Boeing, long time ago, when "Echelon" was considered a tinfoil hat conspiracy.
> now
Unfortunately, Europe should had made this conclusion at least 18 months ago, not now.
Watch out European politics procrastinate for at least one more year hoping that Trump will reverse. Then procrastinate more, because “elections soon, maybe Dems will win and reverse”.
I live in Europe and will never go to work in the US; but EU/UK inability to solve national security problems is beyond pathetic.
Oh sure the EU is terrible at all technology policy but it also seems like this is sort of a don't interrupt your enemy when they are making as mistake situation.
If the US commit to handicapping their AI industry like this it's going to destroy the competitiveness of those companies globally. All of those US spending commitments on data centres etc are going to collapse, or americans will need to pay 2x the token cost of the rest of the world. Both very bad options.
Is there a world where frontier labs move to somewhere else like London to escape the business hurdles of the US? There are trillions at stake, is it a plausible scenario?
A world, yes. Plausible, no.
The US is already seeing energy market distortions from the power use of AI; the UK has a much smaller total electricity supply, both from a lower population and the baseline per person being lower.
Total UK demand in 2023 was 316.8 TWh[0], or an average of about 36 GW. The US currently has 33 GW of data centres, and the AI boom plan, so far as discern actual plans from AI hallucinations in the modern web, is about ten times that.
From the scales people talk about, my expectation is that even the smaller additional supply needed for the constant churn of newly trained frontier models would probably exceed what London alone can manage.
[0] generation less than that, it has imports; chapter 5: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a7e14da3c2a...
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=316.8+TWh+%2F+year
Why London of all places?
Talent concentration, little tech regulation, English speaking, decent funding, close to GMT. There's a reason why a big chunk Google deepmind is already there.
> Talent concentration
Lol
To my knowledge there's still talent left in London, even after the wage stagnation.
Deepmind is based there. Anthropic's biggest research base outside the US is there. OpenAI has just announced a big new office there.
It's the place outside US and China with the greatest concentration of AI talent. Deepmind was founded in London for instance.
Sadly UK is fully into nanny state "safetyism" culture so I am not convinced it'd be better.
They already have offices in London and Zurich, but it doesn't let them to escape anything
I know, but what about leaving the US entirely to escape the export bans ? Like ByteDance and Shein left China for Singapore.
London sucks, not to mention the UK’s political future seems even more nationalistic than MAGA
Well, I think right now Antropic is going crazy with their safety rules. I got banned after creating a new account for a new employer. Went through some code with Claude Code, and that's... it. Came back the following morning and I was banned.
10 days for an appeal is too long. Company is a startup, so no team/enterprise support.
usgov picking winners and losers in AI --> usgov picking winners and losers in every industry (speedrun, any %)
This appears to be only for Mythos 5 access, NOT Fable 5.
So only 100 companies have exclusive access to frontier AI.
> So only 100 companies have exclusive access to frontier AI.
Only the frontier AI labs have true access to frontier AI. Everyone else gets a reduced version.
Tri-modal distribution of frontier AI
Aren't these the same models?
Under the hood, yes, but Mythos had more relaxed safeguards and was/is only available to a subset of approved customers under Project Glasswing, similar to the situation with GPT-5.6 now.
Fable was available to me as a normal person using Claude.ai
Mythos never was and I don’t think that’s changing.
Until the chinese make a comparable open source model at some point
Gatekeeping so only the big companies in the USA keep their 1%
As a small business owner this is unacceptable
I recommend making a donation to the Trump administration, that seems like the way to go.
Sadly I cannot afford a gold brick and a custom etched piece of glass
I’d say we’re about 5 years out from the Great Firewall of America, and requiring government ID associated with serial number to legally purchase components.
America will do that before gun control.
Flocking hell.
Not the future I want but I see that too.
The nra has more lobby power than anyone.
Maybe you need to argue that LLMs are so dangerous effectively weapons, and therefore should be covered by the second amendment? /s
That might just get me a job at anthropic
Mythos doesn't have the strict safeguards of Fable and is only accessible by a very small number of pre-approved companies.
This will be more validation that the rest of the world needs to be very wary of US technology.
It never made same sense that the most capable model was used by the CIA to create vault 7-like exploits while the same model was being used by another government project / random little people to patch up the vulnerabilities the exploits relied on.
So the general public get to bail-out & subsidize Anthropic / and downstream xAI/SpaceX via the State Wallet, but of course with no access.
It's fairly obvious at this point, it's a plutocracy.
Rather cleptocracy. Pedocracy or kakistocracy would also fit.
Makes me question whether de-planetizing Pluto was just a clever tax dodge
Trusted US organisation: this must be the latest oxymoron.
I'm looking forward to better open source models. Now I just need to afford the compute to run these models.
Most people can't afford 6 digits for hardware that deprecates in a couple of years.
The current digital hellscape that's developing is something we've been warned about consistently over the past 30 years.
All these dangers were known and predicted.
There's an uncanny parallel with the climate crisis.
Fatalistic somnambulism.
But contrary to the climate crisis and what all the AI boosters are saying, it is not inevitable. Its something that is actively being built, it’s not something that just happens. It can be stopped, a different system can exist. The AI crowd also hasn’t proven at all that what they are building can self sustain. So far the economics are monstrously bad, there is no viable business model
The climate “crisis” was also completely preventable but we chose not to.
It was, yes. The difference is that if we stop the AI stuff, it stops. There is no external feedback loop that sustain itself. The climate crisis, after we pass some thresholds (and we likely did), that becomes out of human control
There is, because even if “we” stop “they” will continue.
By „we“ I meant humans
Yes, but that just means you don’t understand human nature.
> So far the economics are monstrously bad, there is no viable business model
Maybe frontier models will end up being traded at a nation state level; much like arms and weapons are.
China will just buy a "trusted partner" one way or another.
It's like the epidemic of scam nvidia cards being resold without gpu or memory - where do you think those are going?
This seems like it will have pretty huge negative affects on startups needing to compete with 'trusted partners'
Other than maybe some in-the-moment cybersec wrappers, is this really true? Does anyone think a startup with a good product is going to be materially disadvantaged by not having access to an incrementally better security focused LLM release? It’s lots of fun to pretend it’s some step-change that’s too dangerous for general release, but in real life it’s not conferring some massive advantage that any real startup would need to compete. Almost everyone would be best just to ignore it and keep building.
(Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
> Does anyone think a startup with a good product is going to be materially disadvantaged by not having access to an incrementally better security focused LLM release?
- It's not "incrementally better". It's a complete game changer. Opus 4.8 on max thinking does X amount of mistakes in my commercial work. Fable 5 did 5% of X. Counted. I barely had anything to contribute in the work sessions, for a full week I could count on my two hands the total amount of times I actually caught Fable 5 -- and one part of those were not true mistakes, more like divergence from policy in our `CLAUDE.md` files.
- It's not "security focused". It's simply better in every way _plus_ it's also security-conscious.
- It legitimately accelerated my work. I don't have too much unknowns in my work, I simply have way too much to do. Fable 5 was an objective and measurable improvement over Opus 4.8. Returning to it after Fable 5 was removed was extremely discouraging and frustrating, and still is to some extent.
> It’s lots of fun to pretend it’s some step-change that’s too dangerous for general release
Maybe, but not as much fun as tearing down a straw man apparently. :)
> (Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
It's ridiculous for multiple other reasons but ridiculous nonetheless.
> I don't have too much unknowns in my work, I simply have way too much to do.
Interesting, I'm curious what work you do? My software engineering career has never been in that situation, it's always so much ambiguity and unknown that trumps everything.
Fair question, and I was vague just so as not to balloon the comment.
I work in a financial startup. The codebase is a mess and very much spaghettified. One rework that forced us to migrate our data model from 1:1 users<->loans to M:N (many-to-many) took two months and touched ~40% of the codebase... multiple times. Huge churn. And it just crossed two months of work, even though it's now in its very final phases.
I know what must I do:
- Introduce and enforce structs for passing context and input shapes around. So as to stop fighting with NULLs, lack of keys in maps and other maddening cases that inflate your coding lines for no other reason than programming languages not having higher-order constructs on well-researched and mostly resolved computer science problems (sigh; not going to rant here about that but it does tick me off how we are _all_ constantly reinventing the same wheels almost every day).
- Saga discipline: if step 6/9 in a pipeline fails, revert everything up to this point, even if it was touched by a 3rd party API.
- Compensation/undo steps. Including flagging / logging those that cannot be undone (sadly one part of our 3rd party APIs are like that).
- Introduce an universal runtime validator library that enforces contracts -- including conditional validation i.e. "only validate field Z if field X is present and is a positive integer and if field Y is present and is a valid UUID".
- Introduce runtime contracts / invariant enforcement.
- Introduce our own dynamic workflow engine, piggybacking off of a few free and unencumbered solutions in the language of choice's ecosystem.
...And these are just off the top of my head after I slept only 4.5h and woke up due to the heat. And each one of these can take from 2 to 6 weeks _even_ with Opus driving all coding and me reviewing and keeping it behaving within my policies and coding standards.
Me & Claude are maintaining a TODO list that is no smaller than 150 items at this point (though in fairness, at least 75% of them are fairly small and not architectural like the ones above).
I believe I know how to architect this thing but business customers and the CEO keep coming back with feature requests which of course always take priority.
When Fable 5 was around, for mere 4 workdays, I not only went ahead of my own schedule feature-work-wise but even had the bandwidth to start tackling a few other architectural decisions, tightened them up in `CLAUDE.md` and Fable even devised an opinionated AST linter for test discipline (disallow direct DB access in our tests, only go through the domain/context modules to do so). It helped me start turning the tide.
This all went out the window when I had to go back to Opus 4.8. It's still _very_ good, mind you, but it does feel like I am a special-education teacher periodically. It forgets disciplines we discussed and codified likely 15-20 times at this point, forgets important project context and attempts to reintroduce subtle bugs, and a few others.
My next game is, with or without Fable, to continue its work and just enrich the AST-based linters to convert the theoretical prompt-based guard-rails into actual LLM hooks and compiler / runtime-at-startup hooks so the agent cannot ignore them.
I don't enjoy harness engineering but the interesting and very positive effect has been that it helped me think more like an architect and less like a coding monkey, which I do hugely appreciate and only realized I was missing it for years after it actually started happening again.
Hope that helps put things in context.
I know this is a tangent, but
> Introduce and enforce structs for passing context and input shapes around. So as to stop fighting with NULLs, lack of keys in maps and other maddening cases that inflate your coding lines for no other reason than programming languages not having higher-order constructs on well-researched and mostly resolved computer science problems
Amen to that.
It's not that much of a tangent tbf. It's one of the things that is an endless churn in millions of codebases out there and yet no core programming language team has the courage and the grit to solve this problem.
Those who tried are only doing it in mostly academic/toy languages which is a damned shame. We _really_ need those constructs, compile-time enforced, in commercial codebases, like 25 years ago at least!
People are trying everywhere though but I've witnessed CTOs getting cold feet and fearing their codebase will get too abstract or hard to maintain when they hire the next dev.
Group-think and conformism and fear of change, demonstrated live, every day. :/
So yep -- amen to that indeed.
Fable wasn’t available for a full week. It was released on June 9 and made unavailable June 12.
Okay, might have mistook 4 work days for 5.
That kind of gets to the absurdity of it. Either it’s a wildly powerful next generation model with incredible capabilities and thus needs to be limited… or it’s another progressive enhancement like we’ve seen already and limiting access to it makes no sense.
I don't think that follows.
Say you had a perfectly smooth progressive chain from rocks to spears to guns to nuclear weapons. When it comes to government restrictions, you still have to choose to draw lines somewhere, right?
True, but we know Opus is more like a "spear" and a progressive enhancement over it still leaves us firmly in the "spear" category, not the "nuke" category. Drawing lines makes sense, but this is premature. Even if you draw the line at human level intelligence, we still seem to be pretty far off.
The enemy is both all-powerful and pathetic, at the same time, all the time.
As someone old enough to remember the party breakdown in Congress when Obama came to office, yes, I can confirm that this is possible.
Yes, i do. I have 10xd my productivity since last year and im not smarter. And yes my code is high quality
Startups don't have as much money to spend on lobbying and gifts, though.
Well... there are crypto startups, and perhaps a generous definition of "money"
Crypto companies were built for anonymous transfers of wealth. It's why they are perfect for money laundering and corruption. Venture backed companies are more difficult, since you would need a paper trail (equity, incorporation documents, beneficial owners, etc.)
It's not impossible, of course. It's not even terribly difficult, but it does require a different level of record.
(No, I'm not saying that the goons running the United States give a shit or won't do it anyway.)
VC companies do not dig into the numbers as you suggest. FTX was able to get away with their fraud for a long time for that very reason. VC companies don’t care if some of their investments are fraudulent as they spread their eggs so thin that it doesn’t matter if any given basket blows up. VC firms stated this to the press outright when FTX blew up.
Also most crypto companies are not good for laundering since the blockchains record that fraud forever and publicly. I could see some specific protocols where that may not be true — like monero or tornado cash — but these projects are not really startups. Most crypto startups pitch their products for enterprise customers and thus would be horrible for laundering money.
Will startups be even a thing now that the VCs obviously just need to funnel all their money to 2 or so companies ad-infinitum for guaranteed returns.
The single most important question to be discussed on this website right now.
Whatever happened to those network states? It's starting to look like it's them, UAE or Singapore
Well, the network states were supposed to be a social thing rather than a place, no? Free Cities movement is more focused on actual, physical places.
No one seeing this as Musk and SpaceX leveraging government support to close the IPO doors on OpenAI and Anthropic?
I know it’s a bold statement but look at this timing and their valuations going south.
It's a win-win game because both Anthropic and the Government are on the front page again pulling on important leavers.
In the mass-marketing world it's less about who's right or wrong but who is perceived by the population to be pulling the leavers on the front page again.
I think this could crash the stock market: Their TAM is now a small percentage of what it was, with all the second and third otder effects that follow from that
This is great for open-source tooling and models. And bad for AI hype which depends on exponential continuous growth.
"I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model"
I assume "trusted partners" means, "companies that have bribed Trump an appropriate amount". A few million for the inauguration, a few million for the ballroom, a few million on a movie about Melania, the don wants a taste.
Hopefully this points toward Fable becoming available again.
And we get the news the same time OpenAI releases 5.6. What a coincidence?
I think they kind of had to since they allowed OpenAI to do a 5.6 "preview to trusted parties" today. The other driver is that the DoD/NSA wanted to get access to Mythos again. I figure OAI will now do several weeks of 'preview' like Anthropic did with Mythos. When OAI wants to release 5.6 wider to actually start making money with it, I expect Fable will get approved the same day.
Back when the administration hit Mythos/Fable with the surprise ban, I figured this would be the endgame. They'd keep Anthropic tied up until a competitor had a roughly comparable model ready, then gate them the same.
It is interesting that there is no public announcement from the US government or Anthropic on this topic. That means there is no form to apply to be a trusted partner.
Does it mean US is allowing accessing to governments' exclusive list?
Are Cyber Verification Program (CVP) members included in this?: "We also intend to scale up our Cyber Verification Program, which would grant Mythos-class capabilities to many more organizations for specific cyberdefense tasks" (https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-project-glasswing).
Hard to see how this does not turn into export controls for models, just with a lot more ambiguity
Imposing a licensing system on models for limiting domestic use should require an act of congress but I mean obviously we're well past that red line.
Regulatory agencies limit uses of other products without acts of congress-- cigarettes, vapes, drugs, pesticides, chemicals, explosives. Even firearms, despite a constitutional amendment! Why not models? (Note I am not arguing it's a good idea; I'm making a narrow argument that there is precedent.)
EDIT: I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.
> Regulatory agencies limit uses of other products without acts of congress-- cigarettes, vapes, drugs, pesticides, chemicals, explosives.
Every one of those is by a regulatory agency that was explicitly empowered by Congress to do such regulation.
until it isn't, i.e. certain rulings over the last couple years...
You're talking about the EPA yes? Such ridiculousness
right, and one minute to the next a gun you bought could be a crime to own and land you in jail LOL.
congress has abdicated its role entirely.
The ATF was created by an act of congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Control_Act_of_1968
> I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.
Should ever new "weapon" invented require a new act of Congress? We've considered software subject this act since the 90s.
If everyone making AI is screaming up and down that we are in an AI arms race creating dangerous entities that will determine the fate of the world is the government just supposed to ignore them?
No. But it could be done in accordance with the rule of law and commitment to equal access rather than an ad hoc approach that creates the impression of corruption and picking winners.
None of those things are knowledge. I think theres something specific around limiting access to knowledge and capabilities that makes this feel insidious.
Information is covered by ITAR, so that's not new. You can illegally export information about an ITAR covered item by just allowing a foreign national the potential to see an item. They don't even have to prove the foreign national actually did see it.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-22/chapter-I/subchapter-M...
Land of the free, clearly.
All of the agencies responsible for those regulations were created by and get their funding from Congress. Currently, they're asleep at the wheel. Or a better idiom might be "cowering in the corner".
I would say, "sitting smugly astride the monster's back, confident that they will never be fed to it".
Fairly certain all those have "acts of congress" attached to them. I mean, it used to take a constitutional amendment to make something illegal but now we have tons of agencies responsible for regulating all the things.
Plus, they're relying on the "math is a weapon" law to ban "export" of the models.
Congress passed the Arms Export Control Act (22 USC 2778) in the Ford administration and it has been applied to software since at least the Clinton administration.
isn't this materially different in that it creates a kind of class system within the US?
how so? Is it a class system that only Raytheon employees can work on cruise missiles, not the average citizen?
(edit: not that these models are equivalent to missiles oc)
I would say this is a fairly equivalent dynamic in action, but it was concentrated to the defense industry. This suggests a future in which every company in the tech industry has "clearance required" or "citizens only" roles for the people who need to be able to use the find-security-problems-bot...
Cruise missiles are not general purpose tools, it's obviously not even remotely similar. Virtually everybody reading this could use Mythos immediately to do real work, collectively in virtually every part of the economy.
It's pretty problematic to not make it more widely available at least to US businesses, and there is not even a vetting process to get approved quickly and easily. If this is the new norm, the intended or unintended consequences of this type of gatekeeping will be an unprecedented consolidation of power amongst the largest corporations. Even more than we have seen over the last 20 years.
the continued exploits of the same kind of class system the US has always had
It has never taken a constitutional amendment to make something illegal.
Prohibition was the 18th amendment
slavery required the 13th amendment
"Malboro cigarettes may once again be sold, but Newport remains banned for everyone except large purchasers that have paid the appropriate bri... fees."
I wonder what kind of emergency will happen when real elections get around
And even if a court places an injunction on the ban, it's possible Anthropic will still choose to keep it unavailable.
They did. Defense Production Act (50 U.S.C. § 4511 );Export Control Reform Act, 50 U.S.C. § 4812 are just two of them.
Overturning the Chevron doctrine is good because it stops lawful people from doing things we don't like. We aren't bound by laws, so we can do whatever we want.
-- GOP probably
The Chevron doctrine gave more power to the executive agencies of the current administration, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
That repealing the chevron doctrine was a calculated play in the unitary executive theory. We all know congress is basically useless these days. But we also know that regulation isn’t, like, optional. It’s going to happen no matter what.
So what’s left? Where does that decision making go? Turns out the executive, so that’s what we’ve been seeing and it’s largely uncontested. This should have been obvious to most people going into this, particularly if they understood Trumps platform or Project 2025.
Repeal of the Chevron doctrine took the power of deference away from executive agencies and replaced it with first-principles judicial interpretation of statutes.
Chevron and the unitary executive theory have essentially nothing to do with each other.
I’m still not sure what point is attempting to be made here.
In effect, it did not. All it said is that the powers enumerated to those executive agencies must be more explicitly laid out by congress. But, that’s just not something that’s going to happen.
So, the gap has been filled largely by executive orders.
perhaps congress could do something other than vacation
Do you remember the export controls on Covid vaccine material during the height of coronavirus? I do
Is there any scenario where it's not catastrophic for for the frontier labs?
They just got their market cut to a fraction. Investing in new tech is now very risky because even if things work out you might not be able to sell anything.
There were already serious doubts about ROI for the frontier labs. If they can only sell to 100 or so entities it's over business wise.
What's the endgame here?
It's bad, very bad, for the frontier labs.
Is there a list of the partners that get access? That should be public, right?
Bless your heart
The Cantillon Effect applied to machine intelligence..
+1 Insightful
Indeed. Very much so. It puts a name to something that is happening.-
They play the game of China, they are stupid. US, as EU, lost everything with this stupid posture.
How would export controls apply if OpenAI or Anthropic released a model as open weights? Not that they would, but asking out of curiosity.
It would be illegal for them to release the weights
The funny thing is, they are planning to just use it for US government and not allow public to use fable 5 atleast..
Begun the AI wars have.
Next time someone tells you this is the party of free market and small government, I guess you just laugh now?
I've been laughing when people tell me that for my entire adult life. It remains a pretty funny bit of dark humor, though.
Growing up rural, the grift has been obvious my whole ĺife
The authority under which this was done has been operative and actively used for several decades. It isn't a partisan issue, it is a policy of American governance. Anyone that has worked on frontier "dual use" technologies will be familiar with the legal regime.
The only thing that changed is people are writing articles about it in the news media.
But it was applied using principles of the rule of law with clear regulatory frameworks. This is not that
I’ve dealt with these regulations across several administrations. Nothing about this is novel, it is just receiving more attention than usual. Anyone could have started caring about this decades ago. You are making an argument from unfamiliarity with the regulations as practiced.
If it takes Trump to force people to educate themselves on how the US government actually works then I guess that is at least one good thing to come out of this.
I am aware that the government has always been involved in these types of issues. Even a season finale of silicon valley shows pied piper being required to navigate government oversight when it became successful and implied it was a badge of honor / success.
But you have to admit this policy seems ad hoc and creates the impression of opening a wide door for corruption.
It isn’t ad hoc, it happens all the time in frontier tech, this particular instance just gained public notoriety. Historically, the government has preferred to keep this reality out of the public consciousness. This time they are either unavoidable or they expect some leverage by making it public.
This was absolutely predictable, and many people made that prediction. The patterns of what tech they apply export controls to is actually pretty legible. People have long tried to ride the gray area so that their tech is not subject to export controls. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This was never not going to be subject to it.
This isn’t a pure export control restriction. It is granting access to “trusted partners” with no criteria of how a firm or person earns that designation. It is also unclear why these models in particular were subject to a restriction or at least evaluation.
I am simply arguing that there is a more effective approach to creating a regulatory framework here. It doesn’t have to take that much effort. But this random announcement with no prior or current guidelines seems ad hoc to me.
Jumping in to reflexively defend the admin again, I see.
Is there any policy from this admin you don't support?
I am making an observation of fact. My feeds are full of ignorant hot takes that clearly demonstrate people have no clue about current law or how the government actually works. Your response is a perfect demonstration of this. This is neither unique to the current administration nor supporters of a particular party.
I don’t support the admin but if you are unwilling to engage with reality then that is on you.
Make a case then based on Prior examples and why they are of the same nature and degree.
We are talking about the government giving exclusive access the the most transformative technology in human history to a select group of companies with no formal policy as to how you gain access, lose access, what you are expected to do with that access or commitment to transparency around any of this.
Also known as, the tu quoque fallacy. Just because politicians in both parties have been doing this for decades doesn't mean that this administration is not especially hypocritical for doing it after whinging so much about free speech and free markets.
The only correct reply.
If by correct you mean, inconsistent with the American tradition of the rule of law and commitment to equal protection of the law, and the emergence of an authoritarian kleptocracy that picks winners and losers. Then yes. Correct.
Which has been obvious trend the last few decades and is now being done openly and shamelessly like a tinpot dicator. Largely through a new populist protectionism ideology that is popular on social media. Which makes it much more public and well documented.
Usually companies do this stuff quietly with lots of small new rules via Congress creating barriers to entry or through national security angles like the Chips act which funneled money and tax breaks to huge weathy companies, or Boeing, or the car industry, etc.
Anthropic and OpenAI went hard in the paint pushing for AI safety and it backfired into hurting their companies rather than protecting their interests.
Stop with the false equivalence.
I’ve been critical of crony capitalism consistently on HN for a decade now. Many people just haven’t been paying attention because nobody cares to follow this stuff unless there’s a useful political angle.
Well, there are the political ideals expressed or embraced by the populace, and then there are politicians. AFAICT political parties at the national level and state level in the US is pure theater.
Now?
the question isn’t about size, it’s about who the government works for. Small government can promote private interests by not entering certain societal spaces, leaving them for profit making — education, healthcare, housing etc. But large government can also promote private interests, by directing tax dollars to corporations (and still not entering certain societal spaces).
It’s not about size, it’s about where it chooses to operate
Having an a collective economy governed by the “free market” is like having a pile of stones governed by gravity. There exists a primary directive force, but if you want to construct a cathedral or a bomb shelter, you need to impose some constraints, lest you revert to the angle of repose.
This is a very bad analogy. Markets behave like an imperfect optimisation algorithm, and you can prove that, under some conditions which are most often met, they give people what they want. In fact, you can almost always expect governments to be less effective and less rational than markets in allocating resources to satisfy the desires of people, even when democratic. You can prove it either by using the same logic that tells you when markets fail (externalities, information asymmetry), or empirically by looking at what was basically the most perfect A/B test we had on society over the 20th century. Although it was a comparison between mixed economies and fully centralised ones, there is no reason to expect the optimum mix of centralisation/distribution to be closer to the worst-performing one (the fully centralised one).
You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.
This is why arguments about this go in circles. You either argue from a pure theoretic POV back and forth, or you go off data - at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
Even the theoreticians on the free-market side are far less solid than.. all the other sides (behavioural economics, information asymmetry.. even Marx) but I regard it as deeply unpragmatic when there's so much data out there indicating what actually happens in the real world when you go one way or the other.
> You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.
You can prove the logic part starting from the assumptions. It's also falsifiable. I just mentioned it was literally the most controlled test on human society you could make. We tested by splitting societies at the level of the entire planet, states and cities.
US healthcare is mostly not a free market; by free market, at minimum, I mean that the quantities and prices (ideally even the quality) are not set. The US healthcare system has a fixed number of practitioners who can get a license every year. This is as far as a market can be from being free (together with the case of having price controls). In fact, free market theory predicts that when you restrict quantity, you get higher prices for the same quality. It literally predicts the US situation.
It's funny you mention Marx, given I regard most of his claims as either unfalsifiable or easily proven false.
at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
I mean, it's not. In a free market you'd have a choice of insurance providers rather than having to take whatever plan your employer offers, and you'd have some idea of what the hospital is going to charge you beforehand rather than receiving random bills for weeks.
Just to be clear, my definition of free-market is just that there is no centralised authority that can use force to set prices/quantities/quality/type of services offered. Of course, the fact that the employer has to offer health insurance in some cases is part of it not being a free market. But there are more fundamental things that make the US healthcare very far from being a free market. The first one is that the supply of doctors is capped in quantity, not just in quality.
> A/B test we had on society over the 20th century.
Well, by your own logic, there's a new a/b test running right now. Its results aren't exactly going your way.
Not sure what you are referring to. Can you elaborate?
Yes. But that was the “big government democrat” argument that republicans said was evil and un American.
Free for me, not for thee
Also free speech/the first amendment and various other rights people are supposed to have but don't in practice.
Fourth Amendment, through corporate data purchase or exfiltration.
If you laugh you’re a communist and against Christianity and part of a satanic cabal.
these days my actual policy is to find whoever is being slandered as a communist and vote for them.
They haven’t claimed to be the free market party since Obama was in office. Trump very much ran an anti free market campaign the first time.
Yes they have.
Not really. They’re all lousy pro tariffs, anti immigration, pro tech regulations, and so on. Paul Ryan is gone.
They still spout off about free markets all the time with no sense of irony.
They'll literally tell you it's not raining while you're standing there getting soaked. [1] Anything the Republicans say is meaningless.
1: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/artic...
Not just that, Biden administration started with some AI regulation that the Trump administration nixed, and then outright banning models. Lunacy.
its all trump, he is a megalomaniac, not affiliated with any party but his own
They have affiliated themselves to him. Watch, within a month of Democrats being back in power they’ll be harping small government, denigrating the national debt they ballooned themselves. There’s no reason to help them attempt to disavow it.
Trump will be called a liberal woke socialist within your lifetime because conservatives will need to distance themselves from him
But it's not just him, it's the entire party aggressively supporting him and everything he does.
> the entire party aggressively supporting him and everything he does.
That's untrue.
If you do some homework you will see Republican politicians and the Supreme Court disagreeing on a number of issues. Amongst Republican voters, his approval rating has been sliding and is now below 80% in most polls.
Wow a whole 20% of dissent. Impressive.
You have to remember that very very few voters agree/support everything their party does. If that wasn't the case, then not a single American voter is morally pure.
They passed one major piece of legislation since he took office and it was loaded with pork to get everyone onboard. I wouldn't call that aggressive. The Right is very fractured right now.
At least in part that's because they've stopped legislating. The executive now basically just does whatever it wants.
The right is fractured is several ways but there is one unifying value: unquestioning support for Trump
I can't tell if you're disingenuous or just ignorant. The Trump admin has been completely coopted by the pro-Israel lobby and Big Tech. He betrayed his entire base. He's ruling by executive fiat (EOs). Anyone that speaks out publicly for the original platform gets a primary challenger funded by Miriam Adelson or threats. See Thomas Massie, MTG, Lauren Boebert, etc. Are you paying attention at all? The Boomers watching Fox News propaganda in their nursing homes all day are not a reflection of party unity.
The Fox News boomers were pawns, but everyone knew that. Trump is a “money talks” kind of guy, that’s why people voted for him.
Yes that was shortsighted but it’s worked out well for trump. He can basically just… do whatever. Nobody needs to legislate, he’s essentially congress at this point.
It's fractured as a consequence of its own actions, which all of its constituent members bear direct responsibility for.
Epstein cover up? Iran? COVID denialism? Complete disregard for rule of law? Accepting massive, direct bribes? Trying to control broadcast media?
That's all on the Republican party as a collective, who did absolutely nothing to resist it and everything to put him in power TWICE. TWICE.
Trump has an 87% approval rating amongst Republicans as of the last poll I can find.
While Trump is a megalomanic and does whatever he wants, he has the mandate of the Republican party, whose elected officials could choose at any moment to end this by withdrawing support.
Don't let them off the hook.
This is what they want. When they say "small government" they mean "small autocratic ruling party". When they say "personal responsibility" they mean "societal harm burdened on the individual"
When they say "liberty" they mean liberty to oppress others ... I've heard this language my whole life. I know what these people stand for and I've seen it in practice. It's heinous and repulsive.
> Trump has an 87% approval rating amongst Republicans as of the last poll I can find.
It's lower than that. Most polls show below 80%.
> Don't let them off the hook.
That's not the way.
80% is cult numbers especially when you consider Trump has changed the platform to be the opposite of basically everything the party stood for.
it's actually the entire party that's propping him up. If it was just trump he would be living on the street.
It seems people can flip that coin whenever it suits them.
And yet the rest of the party falls in behind him.
The entire Republican party in all branches of government is supporting Trump. His politics and the Republican party politics are one and the same. The last election the party did not have a platform because, quite literally, they said that whatever Trump says _is_ their platform.
He's a Republican backed by the Republican establishment funded by Republican donors and massively influential in Republican primaries. Republicans voted him into power twice. Republicans pushed his voter fraud narrative. Republicans embraced his vaccine skepticism and killed countless Americans. Republicans voted for his ICE policies that murdered two citizens of my home state.
Republicans caused this disaster and are all, each and every, individually morally responsible for putting Trump in power.
Republican voters, Republican politicians, Republican donors and the Republican political machine.
They picked the losing side of history and they can sink with it.
If you think that anthropic wasn't pushing aggressive regulatory capture legislation in the Biden administration, why do you think they hired a bunch of people from it?
What Anthropic was pushing for under Biden has very little to do with the values Republicans have been espousing (and failing to live up to) for decades. That's kind of the point op was making. Republicans run on small government but do not deliver it. Democrats do not run on small government. Democrat Presidents campaign on and push for things like the ACA, they don't have fun quips like, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”
A clear regulatory framework to operate within allows businesses to operate within it rather than get surprised by the King's whims upending their business on every few Fridays. If you expect regulation will eventually happen, pushing for it to happen on terms you're able to comply with rather than as haphazard surprises is pretty sensible.
It's very fashionable to hate on the current administration, despite what the previous administration was doing. That's reality and I'll be punished to hell for saying so.
If you don't want the current administration to be blindly hated, perhaps you should ask the president to stop publishing daily statements about how much he hates various people. You reap what you sow.
It'll never stop amusing me how blind we are to politicians that are "on our side".
Again, you're seeing this as some kind of clever invariant of politics, but it's not. People are blind to politicians on their side because Donald Trump has spent the past 10 years working hard to make sure that everyone in politics is constantly enraged at the other side. You're being "punished to hell", in your words, because you're blaming Trump's passionate embrace of hatred-based politics on his opponents.
> you're seeing this as some kind of clever invariant of politics, but it's not. People are blind to politicians on their side because Donald Trump
Yes, sure, it is I who is blind...
lol. Yes. You couldn’t possibly be blind! You’re a both-sides guy. And, as everyone knows, both-sides guys are rational and grounded in reality.
Then cry as you look for the free market/small government leaders.
That's always been a relative, rather than absolute statement.
Genuine question: if Democrats take power, do you expect them to be more interventionist or less interventionist with respect to AI? Bernie's jockeying leads me to suspect "more", but I could very well be wrong.
(FWIW I personally think modern AI falls in the small realm of potentially dangerous technologies that merit careful, ideally bipartisan, government oversight)
I think they’d try to get something through Congress to regulate the industry in a rules-based way.
The current admin flies by the seat of their pants and at least creates the perception of political decision making.
What rules, though?
Bernie and AOC (which aren't DNC mainstream, but prominent) had just pushed for a moratorium on "AI data centers" with a definition that includes "that are used for the development or operation of AI models at scale" (trivially sidesteppable by "we build this GPU farm to sell to whoever bids for compute" - which is actually true), plus a bunch of fancy extras bundled in like "The government must review and approve AI products before they are released to ensure that AI products are safe and effective.", while lacking actual definition of "AI" (given that we had "AI" systems since '50s).
Here's the full text: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Data-Ce...
Yeah, the bill has a cause - it recognizes some pain points. But then it haphazardly tries to address symptoms instead of underlying issues (environmental regulations, utility pricing, land use, job security), while pushing vaguely defined regulations that allow arbitrary application. As if misdirected measures and poorly defined laws aren't already a giant issue.
The whole point of Congress is to get a bunch of people with different ideas and hash them out. Ideas like this are an input, not an output, of Congress.
That’s how it should be. I’m not sure that’s how it works in practice. Certainly not today, when everything seems to be slogan/agenda-driven.
Congress did regulate weapons access when they passed the AECA almost 50 years ago. The rules have been refined via ITAR over time. This isn't arbitrary.
> the perception of political decision making
The what? More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline and those wishing to curry or keep his favor" - quite an expansive definition of "political decision making".
> More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline..."
The previous administration was totally not exactly what's described here...
It wasn’t. Biden largely didn’t do much. The trump administration does illegal things that get struck down in courts on a daily basis. We’re all very desensitized to it.
But yes, Biden was old and cognitively not well. But his “whims” didn’t exist much, and they were always fairly reasonable. Trump is the most unreasonable president, most likely in US history. I would even categorize Andrew Jackson as more restrained.
The courts struck down many Biden policies as well. People just give those a pass because "SCOTUS is rigged" or something...
The only big one I remember is the college loan forgiveness thing.
> https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-dealt-bide...
That would be your politics coloring your memory.
Actually I probably just wasn't paying that much attention.
Ah, so those weren’t mostly 6-3 decisions along partisan lines?
Don't forget the blatant grift and corruption.
Obamacare, but for AI, where every American has to now pay a penalty to not use AI or something like that?
That was the last major thing the Democrats did, and healthcare has gotten substantially worse...but at least it's well regulated now.
That’d land better as a political hit if only it made any sense at all. Truly a low effort attempt.
The IRA and the CHIPS Act were the "last major thing" the Dems did, and both were far better policy for tech than anything out of this current administration.
> I think they’d try to get something through Congress to regulate the industry in a rules-based way.
Is that a joke? We're back in a spat with Iran because Obama refused to engage with Congress, as required by our constitution, to enter the USA in any binding deal.
Any AI actions from the next admin is going to be executive yolos.
Less. They'd use congress and the courts.
We don’t have to guess. Democrats had a pragmatic policy under Biden — which was rescinded by Trump when he took office.
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...
> Democrats had a pragmatic policy under Biden
How well does it stand up to Mythos?
Hard to imagine it would be worse than Republicans, who don’t have any policy except for the whims of a man child.
Marc Andreesen has first-hand knowledge that absolutely refutes what you are saying.
The Democratic party is more anti-ai than the Republican party and unfortunately both of them are increasingly responding to astroturfed populism.
Do you think Bernie Sanders in AOC are pro-ai? Are you kidding me? Have you seen what they say and the legislation they propose?
Yes, but they’re proposing legislation. Trump is legislating from the White House, through a series of bribes and corrupt conduct.
Not even on the same playing field. They just can’t be compared, they’re incomparable.
Ever since I've been conscious (the 80s), it's been the party of fear, violence and greed. They've consistently nominated actual clowns for positions of power. B-movie actor Ronald Reagan... Dan Quayle... Sarah Palin... the current, truly stunning iteration of absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy TWICE after he killed hundreds of thousands of people due to COVID/vaccine skepticism and staged a violent attack on the capitol after losing a democratic election.
Free market? Small government? Big police state, trillions in defense contractor grift, unsustainable tax breaks to the wealthiest leading to massive spending deficits... all while doing everything to erode access to education, healthcare and basic services.
It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
edit: typo
> It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them.
Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc.
That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.
Republicans trust Americans with guns and not an LLM. That should tell you something.
It tells me that the people who buy Republican politicians make money from selling Americans guns, and somebody with influence thinks they can make money by restricting LLM release.
Which party is?
The one currently running the show.
Considering there's no such thing as a "free market" I've been laughing for a real long time. Markets require regulation and enforcement to function.
The US government was created to protect the interests of rich, white, male slave owners. And if you look at Louisiana State Penintentiary (often called "Angola"), which is essentialy a Southern plantation with forced labor, you realize not as much has changed as you might otherwise think.
The it did a pretty shit job of it. Within 100 years it was killing hundreds of thousands to fight against that purpose.
Lincoln disagrees [1]:
> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
While chattel slavery ended when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery continued through debt bondage and convict leasing up until 1941 where FDR suddenly decided to aggressively prosecute the practice for fear of the Japanese using it for propaganda value. I'm referring to Circular 3591 [2]. And while that heavily curtailed abuse (eg by locking people up essentially indefinitely for "vagrancy" or imaged debts), forced prison labor continues to this day, including private companies profiting from prison labor.
Also, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the South arguably won. Reconstruction saw severe curtailment of newly-established civil rights for former enslaved people. And after Reconstruction came Jim Crow until the 1960s.
[1]: https://www.loc.gov/collections/abraham-lincoln-papers/artic...
[2]: https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/state-imposed-fo...
The point of slavery was money, and the point of money was power. By the time of the civil war the real power for the ruling class was coming from industrialization.
I can't wait till employees start helping with the distillation process.
ok, who in the EU is working on our own frontier model? surely we have the drive and ability?
EU just shrunk their AI projects and picked a very, very dodgy Italian company who has been burning money with nothing to show.
The EU is dead in the water on this front mate...
EU has the talent but not the ability due to structural issues and fragmentation.
And even if they solved that (it will take them 40 years of bickering), it’s not something you can top-down create, unless you want the AI equivalent of the Yugo.
China has the drive and the ability. It’s communist in name only, and has truly turned into a hyper-capitalist super producer (less government spending as % of GDP than even the US).
It will beat out both the EU and US and sweep both the digital economy (the US’s golden goose) and industrial economy (the EU’s golden goose) over the next 20 years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1u7j3xc/comment...
Open source should create a new license where it specifically doesn't allow release to these "trusted partners".
And blocks not just training on the oss code but use of it by models. If they want to build on the shoulders of us plebes they shouldn’t be able to include our code in their vibe coded bs
When will the world retaliate? They have been stealing data globally
I thought Fable was a "safer" Mythos?!
I suppose the point is that Mythos was released to a smaller set of partners anyway and Fable is for the masses.
Wowee, just happens to be on the same day of OpenAI's Sol announcement. How convenient for Dario and Anthropic!
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Feels like someone is playing a high-stakes game, putting on a show involving the US government.
This should perhaps not be surprising considering the president.
Weren't they already doing that?
To the surprise of absolutely nobody following the news
It feels the U.S. is moving closer to a textbook definition of crony capitalism. Really sad but unsurprising with the current administration.
I don't think you can move closer to something that you're already fully enmeshed in.
The rate that the ruling class ran into crony capitalism at the first chance they got is something that needs to be remembered. They'll try to act like they were always against it at some point in the near future.
Milton Friedman was prescient on this:
> The two biggest enemies of the free market are two separate groups: my academic colleagues and business people. Business people are enemies of free markets, not friends.
> [...]
> The business people are just the opposite. They're all in favor of freedom for everybody else, and at the drop of a hat you can get any leading businessman to give you an eloquent speech on the virtues of a free market. But when it comes to their own business, they want to go down to Washington and get a special tariff to protect their business. They want a special tax deduction. They want a tax subsidy. And Chrysler is on the verge of failing, which it should have done. It should have been allowed to fail. Chrysler goes down and exercises political influence and tries to get the government to lend it money to subsidize it.
> So businessmen in general — not all, there have been some notable exceptions — and I don't want to include everybody. But in the main, most businessmen are enemies of free markets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgaPVO8aw8
The entire arc reads as a marketing stunt rather than a legitimate national security threat. Maybe Anthropic asked the US for this action to be taken.
edit: > Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (lol)
Fable was out for 3 days, not really long enough for us to properly evaluate it, but the "Sorry we had to remove Fable. Read more. (because it's too powerful btw)" is loudly shown every chance they get for weeks. It creates a halo.
Reminiscent of the 1999 Apple G4 commercial where they displayed it next to military tanks. "For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government."
This is just more marketing hype imo.. "omg its sooo good it has to be restricted"
This reminds me of the following quote
"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed." ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
I'll point out that a lot of the current administration and Republican Congress that enables the current administration are Ayn Rand fans.
They cherry pick and choose the parts of her work that fits their agenda, while forgetting the other parts.
Of course. No true Scotsman would ever do such a thing.
Dario really fucked us all with his fear mongering regulatory capture approach cause there is zero chance this reverts back to government deciding it doesn't want the power.
This is what “stacking the deck” looks like
Why would they allow Mythos but not Fable? Fable is the one with more guardrails.
They only allow it for specific companies and agencies, which are trusted with the less restricted model. The general public is still not trusted to use Fable, apparently.
The ban was on "Mythos-class models" which unfortunately includes Fable regardless of guardrails.
To quote famed businessman and philosopher Eugene Krabs: "Money."
I personally believe that Dario Amodei is probably one of the 'less shitty' AI leaders. But literally no one is going to convince me that either 1. He overplayed his hand and fucked up 2. This is at least 'majority' PR.
Did you mess up your double negation?
You mean neither?
One more aspect where the US can no longer be counted on.
Let's hope this creates a bit more fire under the asses of other countries
* to some US companies.
Asterisk the size of a Mac truck.
Also this administration having say over who gets access to what AI is just so much more grift corruption and picking your favorites / destroying others, for these incdecent undemocratic in American grifters who've seized our state.
If this is the way things are now, isn't that going to crash the AI stocks? All those trillions dumped into it probably weren't with the expectation that it could only be sold to a handful of select US agencies and corporations.
They are all private aren't they? There's nothing to crash since the valuations were all made up funny raise numbers anyway. A donation to the right person likely removes the restrictions
But the effects on the industry as a whole are huge, look at the cost of memory, CPUs and GPUs. Many of the companies that make them are not private.
They all get serious investments from public companies and a lot of public companies rely on those private labs buying stuff from them.
Depends on how much of an overhang there is with the power of existing models. Have we discovered 10%, 50%, or 90% of the valuable applications for Opus 4.8 / GPT 5.5? Hard to be confident at this point.
> If this is the way things are now, isn't that going to crash the AI stocks?
Maybe, maybe not. Tech stocks are mostly vibes-based now, reality isn't really a concern for them.
Congrats sama. Such a great sophisticated 5d chess move.
Please explain. Do you think Altman wanted this to catch-up?
I think it’s a complex dynamic but he certainly preferred this to happen than not, and someone might have nudged the development to his favor while aligned well with this admin’s interests.
I think we should also thank Dario for constantly beaming "Mythos is dangerous". That's why I keep saying we shouldn't support Closed AI and Misanthropic.
When AI bubble pops, no bailouts. I'm not paying for this BS
america is worrying about a civil war and missing the corporate takeover
Welcome to the permanent underclass everyone.
So close to making it 250 years before becoming just like UK/Europe...
presumably those targeting Gaza, Lebanon and Iran? more effective genocide. A wonderful two party system we have here.
I wonder if Anthropic and ChatGPT will continue to scream at the top of their lungs how dangerous their services are and how they will break the security of everything everywhere?
Or may they'll decide to be a little more quiet and less end-of-the-world-is-nigh-if-you-use-our-services?
should see 5.6 any day now
And this is how Chinese AI companies will win over the U.S.
Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
Meanwhile, China is pushing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), which, in the face of internal divisions and impotent leadership among Western nations, could prove to be the first global regime that China gets to build and lead.
Land of the free, land of the brave. Free market. Freedom of speech. Market economy.
These words don’t mean what they use to anymore. Newspeak is in full swing. Words still sound the same and are written in the same way but now mean something completely different. If Mao and Stalin were alive, they would be nodding approvingly.
Free for me, not for thee!
I hope the Chinese models catch up soon so I can stop contributing to the American economy.
Stop contributing now. Why wait?
Claude makes me a 10x better programmer. Giving that up I might as well switch to llama farming.
It just makes you think you're a 10x better programmer. In reality you've just given yourself 10x more busywork because "Claude can handle it." For the parts that Claude has actually improved your programming, the open models compete just fine.
I identify as a trusted partner, can I have one Mythos please.
"trusted" meaning "paid millions to trump admin slush fund account"
despicable
Original source: https://www.semafor.com/article/06/27/2026/us-releases-power...
@dang can you change it?
TL;DR - OpenAI and Anthropic are both allowed to ship their most powerful models to a small number of companies pre-approved by Trump.
Nooice /s
Who needs freedom of speech anyway? I'm just glad the trump admin is looking out for by best interests. /s
>Who needs freedom of speech anyway?
I vividly recall that freedom of speech is racist now, so good riddance.
Sarcasm Detected, -40 Ameripoints have been deducted from your account. Have a nice day!
Why post a content free link to Twitter for this?
80% of the irrationally angry comments here have zero clue how export controls work and is giving me serious Dunning Kruger vibes.
Please go read US history before sounding off on this topic. These laws have existed for decades.
Just because a policy is legal doesn't mean it cannot be disastrous.
"disastrous" seems hyperbolic to me.
what disaster do you foresee?
Favored companies get access to frontier models, which gives them a competitive advantage, starving out smaller companies. Any smaller companies that do manage to innovate ultimately get acquired by the favored companies since they are worth more with access to frontier models than without (which is effectively a discount on the purchase price of those companies).
I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it is one possible scenario that, over time, would be disastrous for innovation and freedom.
Foreseeable corruption by the state. A further slip into cronyism. A large puzzle piece that when simply connected with the recent actions like demanding shares in companies, removing funding for energy projects not aligned with other lobbies, pardoning of white collar criminals. It seems pretty plain and obvious the type of disasters that await.
I'm not being facetious, can you direct us to which laws are in play here? Specifically, why different models can be classified as different exports that need separate approvals?
Section 5 Part 2 (Information Security) of the EAR Commerce Control List likely applies.
IANAL; you need to be one to interpret this stuff. These laws are as thick as a dictionary.
The EAR dates back to the Export Administration Act of 1979 but it was mostly overhauled by Congress in 2018.