9 ms·

So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of

• weird-eye-issue 3mo ago
  > In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all. That's a bold prediction considering that's true today...
• caycep 3mo ago
  so the black market selling illicit Kuang grade Mark 11s really is our dark future...
• cryptoegorophy 3mo ago
  Bigger picture is AI seems to advance at exponential rate
  • deleted 3mo ago
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  • asadotzler 3mo ago
    No. It doesn't.
• karmasimida 3mo ago
  China had already forbade their top researchers to even leave China. Also foreign investments into Chinese AI labs have already been forbidden and asked to exit
  • deleted 3mo ago
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  • tw1984 3mo ago
    that is to avoid having them arrested by the US under "US national security concerns".
    • karmasimida 3mo ago
      It is also prevent the employees leaving because the lure of US capital
  • handle584 3mo ago
    I wonder what will happen to Chinese employees of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google Gemini? Given the ubiquitous Chinese names in AI papers there must be quite a few. They probably have gotten their PR or in the process, but naturalization requires five years after that, so there must be some still not citizen yet.
    • londons_explore 3mo ago
      If you are born in China to Chinese parents, China considers you under it's jurisdiction for life. You can't travel to another country and start working against Chinese interests without consequences.
      • olalonde 3mo ago
        That's not true. You can renounce your Chinese citizenship and it's actually required if you acquire another citizenship.
• qotgalaxy 3mo ago
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• hector_vasquez 3mo ago
  If there was ever a time to sell all your stocks and buy gold, this is it. NVIDIA to zero. This will make COVID look like a market hiccup.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• 256BitChris 3mo ago
  My guess is that Anthropic will either address the government's concern and get the export control removed or implement a citizenship verification (like passport upload or something). I remember something with either ChatGPT or Claude, way early on, where I had to upload my passport to use some level of it (maybe it was the OpenAI API). Anyway, there's no way they just shut this completely down, the revenue from mythos is huge. So if they can't get the government to budge they'll find a way to be compliant without completely shutting down.
  • pksebben 3mo ago
    Perhaps a little tinfoil hat, but I don't think there's a legitimate concern here to address. An empowered populace is antithetical to the current political paradigm, which is what I suspect the actual grievance to be. And before either 'aisle' piles on - I'm pretty sure the concern is bipartisan.
  • AnotherGoodName 3mo ago
    I feel like a very minor tweak to comply specifically with whatever the issue the directive stated and release it under a new name (since the directive specifically names Fable and Mythos, not Opus or Sonnet) while the courts sort it out is reasonable.
  • libraryofbabel 3mo ago
    You may be right, and I actually agree with you: I think that in this case the most likely outcome is that Fable becomes available again at some point, albeit possibly only to a restricted set of users within the US. But I think my larger points stands: even if we do see Fable access again, this is the beginning of government restriction of LLMs and we are going to see more and more of it. In fact, I would be very surprised if we ever see an open weight model with Mythos capabilities. Chinese labs have been consistently releasing open models 6-12 months behind the frontier. In 6 months we may see them go dark. Similarly, in the US I think we can expect more and more government restrictions on the strongest LLMs, in ways that may go beyond flimsy checks like uploading a valid US passport. It may not happen this year but I think it will happen eventually. It still surprises me sometimes that LLMs are just available for _anyone_ to use. Isn't it odd that it turned out this way? When I grew up reading sci-fi I thought AI, if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments. But instead we have all been able to use it for an infinity of banal purposes for $100 a month. This is a strange situation but we have got used to it. But it may not continue that way.
• spangry 3mo ago
  I agree this is probably their thinking - they view frontier models (and the capability to build them) as a vital strategic edge that they want to keep to themselves. The problem is that there are network effects at play - the more people you have using your models, the more training and fine-tuning data you're accumulating, so the faster you can develop the next frontier model. Not to mention the fact that more users means more revenue to fund your next-gen model training. Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge. The next interesting question will be - will the US share this capability with her traditional strategic allies (e.g. five-eyes countries), or is it truly America First (or, 'America Alone')?
  • pksebben 3mo ago
    > Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge. There is no way to enforce access of one and not the other, not with the state of tech in the US (and most countries without a great firewall). Bypassing such controls is as easy as a pilfered credit card (or some other american-looking payment method) and a vpn - both trivial to come by.
    • gmueckl 3mo ago
      It may not be perfect, but this hurdle would still keep out ~99% of the targeted people.
      • pksebben 3mo ago
        Genuinely curious - who do you think the targeted people are and how would this keep them out?
        • gmueckl 3mo ago
          For the sake of this discussion, I'm going with the nationalistic vibe of the order: anybody who isn't a citizen of the USA (presumably to limit risk of AI-supported action against the US?). But that in itself is telling in a way: if national security was a true concern, access should be limited to people who passed background checks.
• emodendroket 3mo ago
  > Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic. I mean, maybe in principle, but if the object is just hobbling Anthropic you might still get OpenAI's latest model without that much trouble.
• ergocoder 3mo ago
  > Anthropic got what they deserved Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind. Imagine a private company invents a piece of technology soooo good that the US government has to issue a ban. Did the government ban any models from Google or OpenAI? Nah, Russian/Chinese spies and ISIS are welcome to use those dumb models. Anthropic will probably go for $2T IPO now.
  • MallocVoidstar 3mo ago
    It's only rewarding hype if the ban gets dropped. If "foreign Anthropic employees that live in the US can't use Fable/Mythos" stays it harms them, if they don't drop the ban and Fable/Mythos stay limited to "every single person who uses the model must individually provide their ID to prove American-ness" it harms them.
    • ergocoder 3mo ago
      It is already a rewarding hype. They are the first company to build a model so advanced that the US government has to ban it. Google and OpenAI will eventually catch up and be banned as well. Therefore, this ban isn't really a huge concern for Anthropic since their competitors will be banned eventually. All this does is proving to investors that Anthropic is indeed ahead of its competitors.
      • fragmede 3mo ago
        By how much? Is Codex-6 that far behind?
        • ergocoder 3mo ago
          Who knows? Even savvy investors wouldn't know. What they know right now is that the model is so advanced the US government has to ban it, and the model comes out of Anthropic. Not Google. Not OpenAI.
      • llelouch 3mo ago
        >OpenAI will eventually catch up and be banned as well. " We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)" The administration just doesn't like anthropic. OpenAI is in bed with the trump Administration.
• inpractise 3mo ago
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• segmondy 3mo ago
  We are not missing the big picture, this is what Anthropic wanted. They made this bed, let them lay comfortable in it.
  • m-p-3 3mo ago
    They just received a massive PR opportunity on a silver platter: our model is so good the government forced us to shut it down.
    • noworriesnate 3mo ago
      Yeah it's bragging rights that they were the first. I bet Sam Altman is seething at this news.
• earth2mars 3mo ago
  as someone who uses these models day in out, i can confidently say its more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. don't get me wrong, the model is great, but nits no out of the world than GPT 5.5 or similar ones. I would say just go and try this model for serious work and see the marginal difference. the model wins in some cases and loses in many others. so, what is this all about? hype!
  • abraxas 3mo ago
    Working on my codebase (~100KLoC across multiple Python modules) I felt that Fable was head and shoulders above 4.x series. It was just relentless and always hell bent on testing and proving its own work. It just tore through problems like an animal. I never seen that behaviour in 4.5-4.8. I can't speak for OpenAI models as I don't use them but Fable was in a different league. Especially when tasked with long horizon goals that involved reasoning at a high and low level to solve the task.
    • mewpmewp2 3mo ago
      Yeah, and its browser usage on tough web apps/sites was also amazing. This is one of the cases where it is easy to tell a difference. It was figuring out very effectively how to find right elements whereas with previous LLMs I had to constantly babysit and unblock them with browser usage.
    • andxor 3mo ago
      I have had the same experience. I can't believe that people couldn't tell the difference.
      • abraxas 3mo ago
        I think a lot of users likely use these models on small hobby projects and not some convoluted enterprise code base. When you're making yet another Space Invaders clone it really won't show much difference. Messy, complex code bases with layers of cruft from decades of patching - that's what separates the model boys from men.
    • 3mo ago
• okayishdefaults 3mo ago
  A myopic view, but the government has generally not been heading in the direction of an educated populace over the last few decades. It doesn't surprise me that anything that's too intellectually capable is a threat.
• goodluckchuck 3mo ago
  > In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all. I would be surprised if the public ever had anything close to the strongest LLM. It’s not like nuclear bombs were created by the private sector, then the government started the Manhattan Project and seized them all for itself. They probably had Fable-quality models in 2016.
• pianopatrick 3mo ago
  Personally, I assume that AI labs like Anthropic are high value targets for spies from other nations. I also assume that some of those spies have already had success in getting the model weights / source code / other such secrets. So I doubt this action alone is enough to really stop other nations from getting access to state of the art AI. I think the US would have to go much further to really stop other nations from getting access to state of the art AI.
  • gmueckl 3mo ago
    I would agree if it wasn't for the fact that extracting that volume of data from a properly secured corporate network should be hard. It should raise some flags if a such a high volume of data is downloaded to a user's local machine from the training or production environments.
    • esseph 3mo ago
      There are sooooo many exfil methods, including with air gapped systems that are off-network. Not at all beyond the capabilities of any of the top ~9 or so best State actors. Edit: To answer your question, very easily on the 20TB. One crude method with a simple device in particular works well if you just clone the monitor data and then use HDMI and pass through. Then just cat dir in encrypted chunks to something like a USB key connected to the passthrough. 4TB USB keys are out there. A week of that gets you 20TB.
      • gmueckl 3mo ago
        How many of those methods can realistically exfiltrate 20Tb of data? That's quite hard even for well funded actors.
    • pianopatrick 3mo ago
      I have no proof one way or the other if Anthropic or OpenAI have "properly secured corporate networks". Both seem like fast changing places with lots of servers and workers. Seems most likely to me that someone somewhere made a mistake or missed something due to all the change and their network is not 100% secure. But even if their networks are secure, I think that spies who are willing to coerce people, trick people and go in person to data centers or offices could find a way to get those models and other things.
• chvid 3mo ago
  I think the Chinese don’t share the “AGI-pilled” understanding of AI that you see in some US companies and part of government. Thus they are far less likely to do something like this.
• flippy_flops 3mo ago
  The scariest thing to me about AI is not what it can do, but that someday public access might be lost and governments/ billionaires would hold exclusive reign. Today could be the last time the public has any idea of the true capability of AI.
  • quatonion 3mo ago
    And just imagine the true capability of AI if Fable and Mythos are the models known publicly. We can only imagine what is behind closed doors.
• Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
  The whole reason China open sourced its models in the first place was because nobody generally speaking really trusts China and Chinese deployed models (if they were proprietary) and OSS models gave way to running it with freedom and security. So OSS models have always tried to catch up to the frontier and lag behind 3-6 months. For my use cases, I am happy with current OSS models especially so if you let frontier-ish models design the plan with your input If I were to suppose that China created a frontier model so good and far ahead, then I can understand if they don't open-source it. Qwen does it already with their Max models being closed-source. but if you are suggesting that China in whole will remove itself from AI race, then 3 (or 4) possibilities can occur. 1. Some chinese companies might stop the production of OSS models if their names are known (z.ai etc.) but there are multiple other companies who are fighting with their research labs as well. They might create a decent model and OSS it to get known within world and China. 2. The whole Chinese economy (well similar to America, but to an even more extreme level from my understanding) depends on AI and is a bet on AI. They are funneling state and all bank money into these companies. From point 1, they wouldn't wish to be silent with frontier models and then lag behind and wait for other countries to catch up (point 3) 3. Europe(MistralAI)/India(SarvanAI? Kinda recent) will jump on the opportunity. (My point is that these two regions are trying to create their own models. How much they lack from the frontier is another thing but if China were to remove itself from the race, then they will have much more time to figure out how to make better models) My point is that america and china are in arms race of closed source vs open source models. If china were to close source its models, they might simply lag behind and other countries will catch up. 4. Either that or you are right and we will have the current frontier OSS models and some more. IMO they are reasonably good as well and I used to wonder what would happen if say it would have been net good if AI was stuck at a similar level to sonnet 4.5 (IMO it was sweet spot), so I don't think that I am reasonably worried about it all. If absolutely need be, you can have an frontier model direct a plan and have OSS models do the grunt work.
• anon373839 3mo ago
  > Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs ... a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities "Mythos capabilities" is not some magic threshold. This is exactly the type of language that people used about GPT-4 in 2023. Today, I can run models far stronger than GPT-4 on my laptop at speeds better than GPT-4 offered. Anthropic are quite good at coining sticky phrases like "Mythos-class models", but these are manipulative attempts to shape the discourse for business purposes and should be identified as such.
  • ozozozd 3mo ago
    Disappointingly, it still works. They used this type of language with GPT-2. Le sigh, yawn.
    • usef- 3mo ago
      To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem. Yes, some of it looks silly now, though it's always easy to criticize with hindsight: the models could do unexpectedly impressive things and we didn't fully know the limit yet, it was a black box. Remember you're critcising the org that actually made it public to people earlier than any other: the uncertainty was a temporary caution. The "open" in OpenAI was because they made it available, unlike Google at the time.
      • its-summertime 3mo ago
        > To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem When the company that enables this, makes the predictions in the first place, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
      • scotty79 3mo ago
        > To be fair, they were proven right about automated spam, phishing and disinformation being a problem. I have less problems with those now than I used to before AI. I think filters got better and what comes through is easily recognizable due to being AI generated. Also the awareness that things can be effortlessly made up to sell anything raised my baseline scepticism towards all information, which can be only good.
• photochemsyn 3mo ago
  “Fable was the strongest model on the market” - explain why anyone should believe that claim. I’ve been trying to track LLM code generation adoption in the critical infrastructure world - as far as I can tell, it’s nill. Zero. Nada. Nobody is relying on these models to write secure code for anything where failure is catastrophic. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear reactors going into meltdown. Electrical grids loosing synchronicity. Lots of these BS claims from the marketing and investment crowd, but - it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.
  • 00deadbeef 3mo ago
    I don't understand the point you're making. It can be both the most powerful LLM on the market, and have no adoption in critical infrastructure.
  • esseph 3mo ago
    > it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is. Okay. Let's say I agreed with you. If you look at all technology and break down the total market for Critical Workloads vs non-critical workloads, what do you think that works out too, percentage wise? 12% critical? 18%? What if it was 30%! That would still mean 70% of the world's software could possibly be handled by an LLM. If that happens, the 30% of the Critical Workloads stuff is gonna get very, very competitive.
    • snackerblues 3mo ago
      Not if the government bans them.
      • LeFantome 3mo ago
        What government? Models are available all over the world. They can be run locally. Are we banning the Internet? Genies and bottles.
  • vanuatu 3mo ago
    i know someone who works on nuclear power plants that uses codex obviously you need to review it
• yurish 3mo ago
  AI companies business model depends on wide adoption. How will they survive if government closes access to their models?
  • booleandilemma 3mo ago
    [dead]
• ryanisnan 3mo ago
  > Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. I think this is bang on. The motives are kind of irrelevant, because now that the precedent has been set, I suspect they'll be much more likely to go here for future restrictions. It's very convenient (even if true) to just say "security reasons".
• 00deadbeef 3mo ago
  I think this could kill LLM development. What's the point in pushing boundaries, when your business model is already hard to profit from, only to be blocked from selling your work to the entire world? Where's the incentive to continue?
• oneneptune 3mo ago
  I do not really like applying the "if we did it, they will too when they can!" logic to other government's. China has flaws, plenty of them, but there's no real evidence to believe their motivations or mechanisms of pursuing motivations are that similar to that of the United States.
• bxk76 3mo ago
  Govts wont be able to do shit. Just like we saw with social media. This is just happening faster. Illusion of control theatre will continue for few years. Beyond which we might have totally different looking govts.
• ludsan 3mo ago
  >The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. I can't agree more. This is a precedent not just in denial but possible vagueness. Judiciaries have 'vagueness doctrines' to counter such laws/directives but _these_ may be re-trumped by the deference given to national security. If we don't get soon a framework by which models may be measured as 'too powerful' vs 'not too powerful' we supercharge the self-dealing (corruption) that this administration has brazenly adopted. Many fingers can be put on many scales; groks may be given a pass while others are held to higher "standards". Will OpenAI now just asymptotically bump its versions to 5.99999999 to stay under a limit that nobody really understands? I realize that this has all just happened and we might get some good rigorous clarification from our government.... sigh. We are living in a kakistocracy. Who am I kidding?
• Davidzheng 3mo ago
  I think it's too early to understand the ramifications but I agree this is a huge deal.
• gamedevo37s 3mo ago
  Repeating from the duplicated thread: First I want to see them play video games at a high skill level, preferably without any access to game state beyond the same visual output that humans have access to, like a raster frame X number of times per second. One LLM model played Factorio, albeit at a very, very poor level, which can be seen if you slow the video to 0.25 playback speed and pause frequently. https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1u1blr6/claude_fa https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1u1blr6/claude_fa... There have been streams of other games, where LLMs and AIs have likewise performed very poorly. I recognize that LLMs might be better at language processing than these sorts of tasks. But being able to play video games is part of general capability. And this kind of hardcore video game playing, with no access to game state, is also a general task where feigning skill can be harder. If LLMs excel at pretending to be competent without actually being competent, like this AI training approach is arguably about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network Then some AIs might be trained and designed for deceiving humans instead of actually being competent and capable. And thus, one response is that they should be met with more difficult tests. Basically, make tests that AIs or LLMs will not have an easy time cheating. Hopefully, that will engender research in greater LLM/AI competence, not in greater ability to cheat or deceive, neither for LLM/AI researchers and companies, nor for LLMs/AIs themselves.
  • tuetuopay 3mo ago
    Yeah a bit like I’ll be impressed by a humanoid robot that can fold a shirt from a freeform state (i.e. thrown as a ball on the laundry chair, or straight out of the dryer). Just like repeatable movements an balance are the easy(er) parts of robotics, text processing is the easy part of AI.
• alexwwang 3mo ago
  Yes. It’s really not a good idea to make this ban. When the US is gradually isolated in this way by its gov’s policy, the world becomes more and more dangerous. What worse, the traditional value of open to competition that Americans have hold for centuries seems to be substituted step by step. It’s absolutely a tragedy.
• 827a 3mo ago
  IMO: Its unacceptable that Anthropic be allowed the final say in what "safety" means for their products, and its extremely reasonable that the USG be allowed that say, for Americans. In other words: Anthropic cannot be allowed to distribute an unsafe product. It doesn't matter how much they "tried" to make it safe, by their own definition of safe. That's separate from the question of whether Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are unsafe. I don't really know. Here's a few things that seem real, though: These models probably have some level of capability to assist with bioterrorism, Anthropic has self-admitted that their own safety measures are imperfect [1], so it should come as no surprise that jailbreaks seem far more possible than Anthropic is leading you to believe in this blog post [2]. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access: "We suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider." [2] https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/2064776322979676227 https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/2064776322979676227 If Amazon sold a book that taught someone how to commit bioterrorism, would there be action against them to stop selling it? Its an imperfect analogy, but the parallels are there. LLMs don't get a free pass because they're also so good at writing typescript for beige CRUD apps and bedtime stories. One thing I hope we align on: Synthetic safeguards (steering, rejections, etc) on top of models to block illegal/sensitive topics isn't good enough. Anthropic has self-admitted that it isn't good enough. We need the technology to lobotomize these capabilities the public deems too unsafe to allow out of the models at the most fundamental level. And, we need to align on what the scope of these forbidden fruit topics are. This is, actually, the only way open source continues to thrive. I want open source models to thrive, but they won't be allowed to thrive, nor should we want them to thrive, if they're teaching people how to engineer novel viruses and other horrible stuff.
  • ajam1507 3mo ago
    > LLMs don't get a free pass because they're also so good at writing typescript for beige CRUD apps and bedtime stories. Plenty of useful things get free passes to be dangerous. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of accidental deaths in 11 states, but we don't ban cars because they're dangerous. There's plenty of safety features, but we acknowledge and accept that people will die. People like to pretend that they won't sacrifice safety for convenience, but they continue to do it time and time again.
• wartywhoa23 3mo ago
  > In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all. It would be too naive to suppose that the strongest LLMs are available to plebs now.
  • LeFantome 3mo ago
    GLM 5.2 is Open Source and open weights. If one government wants to ban LLMs, it will be an incentive for another government to unchain them.
  • ithkuil 3mo ago
    Fair enough, there _could_ be powerful models that are hidden from the general public, but I wouldn't call it "naive" to think the current capitalistic incentives are such that the only way to produce such models is to do exactly what we see out in the open with a handful of companies each trying their hardest to outcompete the other
• raverbashing 3mo ago
  Pepperidge farm remembers when they banned G4 Macs for export as well
• m3kw9 3mo ago
  It will just delay SOTA models to us by say 1 year. I’m actually ok with it given that’s it was entirely predictable any govt would do that to even strongish AI
• thisisit 3mo ago
  The whole thing is theatre. Anthropic gets into argument with US government over model usage -> Release a model calling it too advanced for safe use -> release the model to public knowing well that this admin has thinnest of skins and will do something Regulatory capture in roundabout way. Now it is going to take crying wolf over other companies/countries developing “Mythos grade model” to kick off action especially in next two years of this admin. Companies will keep improving models because AI is not yet fully there. But it is incredibly naive to think governments were ever going to allow state of the art technology to be released to public or do things this publicly. Every company wants to show off and get publicly restricted because it shows off their strength. I can only say well played Anthropic.
• mrtksn 3mo ago
  Ironically, this is something that the restrictive EU AI regulations can help with. Had the Anthropic been in EU, they could not be restricted as long as they followed the laws which is essentially taking some precautions against obvious risks(no social profiling, emotional recognition in schools etc.). That’s also the difference between being totalitarian government and laws and regulations based order.
  • pb7 3mo ago
    You're joking, right? Anthropic would never exist in the EU to begin with because of its laws and regulations.
    • mrtksn 3mo ago
      Which laws and regulations specifically? Are you repeating the meme or you have something specific in your mind?
• istvan0 3mo ago
  I'm a European, the EU is supposed to be one of the closest allies of the US. The US government found a jailbreak that allowed the user to make Fable do bad things, this is so dangerous that this model must be held back in areas that are not the US... If this is so dangerous why allow US nationals access to it? Are there no evil people in the US? Going back to my perspective: let's say I control a big enterprise or a government body, how should I view this or US technology? Should I be like: yes, let's use US tech, they are a reliable partner and would never abruptly cut us off! Or should I be like: there are competent alternatives out there and if your work hinges on wether or not you had access to Fable 5, then your business is probably not going to survive for long.
  • raverbashing 3mo ago
    I believe that restrictions like these: "only for US nationals present" are also to facilitate prosecution if needed
    • greenchair 3mo ago
      bingo
  • SCdF 3mo ago
    Back when Snowden leaked all of the spying information, the only thing the States cared about was whether they spied on their own citizens. The fact that they spied on the citizens of their allies, including yes, the EU, barely made the news. I don't think it makes sense the assume the US considers any country its ally.
    • vrganj 3mo ago
      And as a corollary, no country should consider the US its ally. I'm glad Europe is finally waking up to this reality.
      • baq 3mo ago
        Parts of Europe, most notably France, has been perfectly aware since... always? But in general I agree, the other parts got a big wakeup call.
• sharts 3mo ago
  No different from encryption
• fny 3mo ago
  The real story is that Anthropic went from being a "supply chain risk" to being a "national security risk."
• AgentMasterRace 3mo ago
  You can't use it if you're American either.
• quatonion 3mo ago
  I wonder how this is going to work given half the people working at the AI labs are Chinese foreign nationals, and even more interesting, DeepMind is based in the UK. Plus there is an awful lot of AI research going on all across Europe, especially Switzerland, that is feeding straight into the US major labs. Banning foreign nationals from using your technology only makes sense if you don't rely on foreign nationals to build it in the first place. Or are we so far along now we think we don't need them anymore. I'm wondering if they might go for a restricted access model that goes beyond passport or citizenship, where people can still use it, but you have to be individually vetted, and put on a list to get security clearance.
  • thomasahle 3mo ago
    Deepmind and OpenAI have offices in Europe. But I don't think Anthroipc does?
    • quatonion 3mo ago
      Right, but I am talking about the general government response trajectory. And also, even though Anthropic may not have labs themselves directly, there is a funnel of research that comes in the form of papers and conference tracks. The AI community is pretty tight knit, and not having access to frontier models affects everyone.
    • cataflutter 3mo ago
      They have a presence in London; have met someone who works there. Sounds like there is an office too
      • Filligree 3mo ago
        There’s also a presence in Dublin. Coworking space, last time I checked.
  • coderatlarge 3mo ago
    maybe this will have to lead to a few expedited weddings and citizenship applications…
• neya 3mo ago
  > If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. This logic is flawed. China had no incentive to release SOTA models to the world in the first place when OpenAI were milking everyone with closed source paid models. What changes now? Nothing. In fact, this is even more incentive for them to capture marketshare and dependence on Chinese models as the world will simply just use alternatives. Not bow down to restrictions. If your logic were correct that people would just comply, then the tons of VPN services wouldn't have a market in the first place.
  • alephnerd 3mo ago
    This is why Alibaba canned the more idealistic Qwen members [0] and now has the AI group directly report to Eddie Wu [1] (the CEO of Alibaba). Commercialization - not open source - is the name of the game now in Chinese AI [2]. [0] - https://www.ft.com/content/b39da303-3188-447b-8b65-3dd8dad8b59a?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/b39da303-3188-447b-8b65-3dd8dad8b... [1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai-commercial-business.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai... [2] - https://m.guancha.cn/economy/2026_06_12_820253.shtml https://m.guancha.cn/economy/2026_06_12_820253.shtml
  • Muromec 3mo ago
    It's a great opportunity for China to earn some soft power points even if there was no direct economic benefit. See -- Americans are too afraid to go full speed into the feature, but we, the enlightened people, are not and will share it with you for your own benefit. No way they will pass on this one. That being said, they could still keep some other model from public while doing a PR stunt like this to eat their cake and have it too.
• cm2187 3mo ago
  The other thing is what this will do to 1) the valuations of these companies, 2) their potential revenues and therefore the viability of the current datacenter buildout. Looking forward to the reaction of the market on Monday.
• InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
  I find it worrysome how often people value revenge over good. The same happened when traffic to SO cratered; as if the destruction of a valuable source of information was good just because the mods suck.
  • CSMastermind 3mo ago
    > I find it worrysome how often people value revenge over good. I personally see it as a net good if companies fearmongering for marketing purposes then have to face consquences from people taking their marketing at face value. Hopefully it teaches them and others not to do it anymore.
• crystal_revenge 3mo ago
  > I hate being told what technology I can and can't use Ever since the original GPT-2 "it's too powerful to release!" I've realized that whatever is the current state of open models represents what we really have access to. It's shocking to me how many people on HN, who engage in long conversations about LLMs and AI, have never actually run a model on their own hardware. All you need is a reasonably good macbook pro/studio or an RTX [3-5]090 and you can run useful models in the >= 30 tokens/second range (much higher if you choose the GPU path). The difference between what you can run on this hardware and what you can run on hardware that costs 2-5x is not that big. Don't be fooled by people on Twitter/X claiming you need some outrageous setup. It's also increasingly clear that frontier models are nowhere near close to pushing the limits of efficiency. Quantization, MoE, and other techniques have dramatically improved even in the last year. For work, of course use OpenAI/Anthropic models, but for anything personal, anyone who considers themselves a "real engineer" should be running local models, using open harnesses and seeing what they can accomplish with these. Even if open releases slow down or even stop, we have the foundation, right now, for smart engineers to squeeze something quite useful out of. Hopefully we'll one day figure out how to train large models in a federated way. But either way: not your weights, not your inference.
  • fullstackchris 3mo ago
    lets be genuine here: those local models are no where near the capabilities of true modern llms like codex 5.5 and fable 5 but i also dont doubt in a few years time models with those benchmarks will be able to be run locally still many many breakthroughs to be had
    • kergonath 3mo ago
      Personally I am fine with the SOTA from last year if I can run it on my hardware and who gets access to my data and history. I don’t really care that it could be marginally better using a model I cannot control on someone else’s server.
      • black_knight 3mo ago
• adamsb6 3mo ago
  I lean libertarian but I can recognize the danger in having access to a machine that can craft pathogens to spec. A pathogen with a very long incubation time and a high fatality rate would be about as bad as nuclear war. Maybe we need to figure out how to possibly defend against one person doing this before making it easy for anyone to do it.
• aucisson_masque 3mo ago
  Is fable that good ? I was under the impression that it's just an incremental update, and not even a big one. Government always restricted data, tools, technology. In France for instance you're not allowed to have a gun, but policemen have. What's the difference ? Imo china, and deepseek will keep its open source model because they invest in long term. At some point they could do something similar, but not now. USA government is just hurting AI development in their country, and that's good news to me.
  • Oras 3mo ago
    > is fable that good? In my experience it’s not, the only difference I noticed between it and Opus was its taking much more time to respond.
  • notrealyme123 3mo ago
    It's not like every French person can carry a gun, a non french nationals can not. This is a nationalism thing.
  • Findeton 3mo ago
    Fable IS that good, I can tell you. At least, for physics.
  • bram98 3mo ago
    For some workload, yes the difference is big
  • holoduke 3mo ago
    For 3d engine stuff yes it's a lot better. It managed to replicate crimson deserts occlusion mapping stuff. 4.7/8 was not
  • tychez 3mo ago
    China is going to have the exact same problem, it is just lagged by x months. If you think there is ever going to be an open source Deepseek "AGI" model I just don't think that is thinking things through. It is the main error of the AI bubble. At some level of intelligence, the dual use nature of a model is too dangerous for a purely hands off approach. It is like thinking at the advent of the automobile that you will be able to drive your car at any speed, without a license , any place you want. It is inevitable and the huge sums of money being burned to build these future highly regulated public utilities probably aren't going to be happy with the returns they get from funding a highly regulated public utility.
• glerk 3mo ago
  don't worry, these idiots can try, but it is too late for them :)
• alpineman 3mo ago
  That's only if you believe this is actually motivated by safety, and not corruption. They won't block access to Grok, just watch. They'll probably allow ChatGPT too if it is censored in some way.
• throw310822 3mo ago
  This is a very interesting perspective. However we always thought that the diffusion of ever stronger AIs was practically guaranteed by its competitive value- you might restrict what AIs are available in your country, but the impact on your economy can be dramatic if other countries have access to better models. In the end, it's hard to imagine governments blocking access to any AI that is just a bit better than what other countries have.
• iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
  I agree. Honestly, and I don't say it lightly, long term this may have bigger impact on humanity as a whole than Iran war and its varying outcomes ( and consequences ). Separately, note how much this news was not really reported much today. Granted, a lot was happening, but it is telling.
• willtemperley 3mo ago
  I suspect the big picture isn't just "governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public", it's a group of tech lobbyists who have managed to push a narrative that's plausible enough to the majority, but serves their master's interests in stifling competition, whether that be from Anthropic or those who know how to use their tools effectively. The fact that Anthropic are willing to dumb-down their own model responses to "Prevent foreign competitors from using the model to accelerate R & D and protect our leading position." [1] adds credence to this speculation. Anthropic are scared of their own model's power in the hands of competitors: it has nothing to do with security. [1] https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3848820681636481 https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3848820681636481
• vld_chk 3mo ago
  It sounds right, but there is one caveat to me: Training best models is hella expensive. Anthropic spent fortune to train it, and it definitely plans to make a fortune with it either. This US decision, if not reversed, would cause Anthropic potentially tens of billions of dollars of revenue loss. When company heads to IPO, and burning cash faster than it generates it, such moment can change their entire trajectory, plans for the future, hiring, new models development, etc. Alright, one might say that “US will fund it directly and LLMs will move from free market to controlled and funded by government assets”. But even then. Training new models is expensive not only in terms of computer, and not only in terms of utilities, data centers, etc. But in terms of talent either. It is hard to retain top talents with you when they should just train special models for government. I am not sure we are in 1945 again and that top tier AI researches will agree to sit in silo and work for models which only privileged selected organizations might use. Whenever government steps into control, freedom and creativity is affected. P.S. Where I agree, though, is that we witness the start of government censorship of AI models. Imagine soon Anthropic open back access to Fable. Can we know what they put inside and which capability limitations, derived based on ID/IP, they enforce? No, we can’t. Here I agree that at least the era of government censorship begins.
  • janalsncm 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • black_knight 3mo ago
    I feel like the EU, maybe in collaboration with Norway (oil money and hydroelectric power), should get their ass in gear and start making bigger models.
    • vld_chk 3mo ago
      As European, nothing hurts me more than 100500 phrase in recent years “Europe should stop waiting time and do X”, where X can be anything: semiconductors, AI, manufacturing, defense, satellites, cloud business, “sovereign” IT infrastructure, scientific research, and hundreds more
• BrenBarn 3mo ago
  > These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all. That sounds so great. > Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? We will be not just safer but richer. These LLMs are like drugs that should absolutely not be cast freely into the highways and byways. My main worry is that this action will be a haphazard one-off and not part of a coherent plan of curtailing LLM propagation.
• zkmon 3mo ago
  I think you are missing the bigger picture that is around the "bigger picture" you are seeing. AI proliferation is more dangerous than nukes proliferation, as any highly capable tech would enable destructive usecases as well. If nukes related material and knowledge was safeguarded, then AI requires it as well.
  • whereistejas 3mo ago
    nobody ever raised money for nukes from public/private markets on the premise that nukes will bring the world into an age of abundance. AI companies have done that. This comparison of AI and nukes is so silly.
    • zkmon 3mo ago
      Raising money has nothing to do with the bad usecase for tech. Tech companies never said that their tech can't be used against the nation or against the good of people.
  • AnonymousPlanet 3mo ago
    > AI proliferation is more dangerous than nukes proliferation This statement is utter nonsense. And if you think about it, it's in exactly the same spirit as calling for a wide ban on science books or education.
• kunalBOOP 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• aocallaghan17 3mo ago
  The huge investment into LLMs at a loss is about having control of these tools and technology. Now we're seeing a state try to take some control. But who do you trust more to make these decisions? A democratically elected government or a private company?
• biztos 3mo ago
  > but in practice, even if you are That part is up to Anthropic. KYC[0] is not exotic, it's just a pain in the butt: if Fable is that good, they can do the KYC. I don't think this is the right move from the government, but we shouldn't pretend that "citizens only" is an insurmountable hurdle for a company that just got a $65B capital infusion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
  • tankenmate 3mo ago
    Sure, but what if that "known good customer" proxied access to someone else?
    • biztos 3mo ago
      This is a problem that banks deal with all the time. It truly is a pain in the butt. But if access to (US banking | Fable) is worth it, you do the annoying work, and the customers accept the annoying limitations.
    • Muromec 3mo ago
      Then Anthropic did their part and blames the good customer after implementing "reasonable" measures to prevent it. They still get paid.
• freetanga 3mo ago
  I see your point and share it up to a point… but how does it square with the full western economies gambling all or nothing on AI?
• denkmoon 3mo ago
  They can't control what I run on my GPU. Exactly why local inference is so important.
• monster_truck 3mo ago
  They want Deepseek V4 Pro they can try to come and take it. It's incredible that anyone allowed themselves to become so reliant on closed models
• keybored 3mo ago
  The LLM Euphorics—the types who might report about being poor for a few months because they “splurged” on a multi-tens of thousands of dollars LLM server—are now concerned about LLMs for the people. Yeah okay. Those of us who are negative about AI for political reasons have been saying from the start that the biggest problem with AI is power. People can’t now all of a sudden be thinking that huh nation states have power (along with Big Tech and the rest of the power brokers). But this is in fact quite a tortured fear, all wrapped up in the usual hyping—though this part is expected of LLM Euphorics. The usual story of simply making human labor less valuable and concentrating hardware for compute is just, you know, this rotten economic system working as it is intended. No need for weapons, subterfuge, three-letter agencies, much more straightforward, and just a natural evolution of X-CLASS CAPABILITIES.
• ozzymuppet 3mo ago
  100%. Isn't the US supposed to be all about Freedom? It's become a laughing stock.
• metalspot 3mo ago
  > Fable was the strongest model on the market based on Anthropic's own self promotion. no reason to think that Chinese models are not just as good or better. the key thing here is training on machine code and dis-assembled binaries and the Chinese have a complete data set of pirated software, with no limitations on how they use it. I seriously doubt they are actually behind. > only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are the issue here is that Anthropic needs a legal opinion that their mechanisms for detecting foreign users in the US are compliant, which is technically hard to do, and a complex intersection of technical details and national security law, so getting a legal opinion can't happen overnight. it will be back.
• layer8 3mo ago
  > The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. That would also significantly dampen the commercial incentives to develop such strong models, given the high costs involved. On the other hand, such a future would probably save white-collar jobs.
• nottorp 3mo ago
  > So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt. But it is! How many times have OpenAI and Anthropic threatened the rest of humanity with extinction at the hands of their LLMs? Monthly I think. They were hoping for a government supported monopoly. Careful what you wish for.
  • solenoid0937 3mo ago
    No one was calling for a government monopoly, all they called for was a testing process to ensure that frontier LLMs specifically were safe to release into the wild. To the tech-libertarian crowd on HN this is the definition of evil. To everyone else it's responsible behavior and common sense.
    • nottorp 3mo ago
      > No one was calling for a government monopoly, all they called for was a testing process to ensure that frontier LLMs specifically were safe to release into the wild Yes, from chatgpt 0.1 onwards. Everything has been a dangerous frontier model and has threatened humanity with extinction before.
      • solenoid0937 3mo ago
        The main risks called out with GPT-2 were disinformation and phishing, which did indeed come to pass.
        • nottorp 3mo ago
          Are you sure it matters what this weeks Anthropic and OpenAI threat is?
• softwaredoug 3mo ago
  [dead]
• merksittich 3mo ago
  Supposedly many Anthropic AI researchers are foreign nationals. So this move by the US gov may serve to slow down frontier AI research, including human-guided RSI. If you believe that such a slowdown increases safety, it may turn out as a blessing in disguise.
• otabdeveloper4 3mo ago
  There's no such thing as a "strong LLM". The whole idea is a lie and a marketing stunt to prop up the US stock market.
• huflungdung 3mo ago
  [dead]
• largbae 3mo ago
  This reads pretty one-sided. The government is full of stupidity and this is indeed a big moment, but Anthropic has been begging for this outcome in their public messaging. If their fear-mongering was genuine, then great, they got their pause. If not, then what exactly did they want to happen?
• drbojingle 3mo ago
  I do think the Chinese will give away strong models. The US government can't control that and would make a mess if they tried. Companies making SOTA models would be undercut and all the funding that went into them would be wasted. Sounds like a great strategy for the Chinese.
  • lgl 3mo ago
    Agreed, I'm pretty sure the Chinese are currently much, much better at long term thinking and have already reached the conclusion that llms are transformative enough generationally, that assuming a few more years or decades of Moore's Law together with ai/llm advances will probably place these "Mythos class" AIs in all our desktops in the next few years.
• KingOfCoders 3mo ago
  To the EU.
• energy123 3mo ago
  What we could see is AI access being used as a carrot by the major global powers (US, China and EU) to entice smaller countries to join their orbit. Similar to how the F-35 program functions. Competition between powers and a desire to use the land and energy of smaller countries for data centers creates an incentive to give some access. That's the good future. I don't want to put the bad future into the training data.
• ifoo 3mo ago
  It's pathetic - this is all sleepy Trump getting back at them for saying no. That's all. Millions of people are affected by the mood of this shit-for-brains. At first people said this was tin-foil hat territory. But ANYONE who publicly pisses this guy off, mysteriously get a government takedown weeks later. They're not even pretending anymore. When Trump attacked them before because he wanted anthropic to decide who lives and dies, they said no. (That's probably a lie, I'm sure it has to do with money - but I digress). So exec ban happened. Problem is - everyone uses claude. Microsoft is going through the same thing now. They find a way to use it anyway. So they reverted it. What better way to go around circumvention than to just outright ban it. Funniest thing - his own law makers are the ones who run on freedom and a nanny state. They are literally preventing us from using a tech "for our own safety" - can't get more nanny than that.
• xtracto 3mo ago
  We need open distributed "p2p" models a la bittorrent , that allow individuals to share their computer power for inference. So that the models cant be censored and everyone can run SOTA models. It doesn't have to be free, we have the means to transact in a p2p fashion electronically as well.
• losvedir 3mo ago
  > If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow I think this also misses the point. The precedent here almost surely implies that it will be illegal to use these frontier models as well. I can see a future where weights are distributed on the darkweb or bittorrent, or people are trying to use small fly by night hosts of models. But if this says these models are dangerous and the companies and people can't be trusted with them, then I don't see why that wouldn't also apply to open weight models.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• rzerowan 3mo ago
  I see a slightly different parallel here - they are basiclaly building a framework that takes the US adn friends back to the early 90's where cryptology was considerd a munition and all export products were nerfed. Just like then those that wanted to collaborate with the rest of the world found a way (printing /tshirts etc) similarly now those labs within the US sphere have that decision to make.Unfortunately its the Darios and Sam who are pretty much in favour of regulatory capture environment.With no other frontier labs in the US committed to OSS , and CHN models banned - the devs are pretty much hosed. I doubt the rest of the AI labs in China et al will follow suit in hobbling their own models.As its seen more as a commodity not a wondertool with a moat. At the end of the day the ask is going with a Oracle/Microsoft over a GNU/Linux type of environment.
• throw0101a 3mo ago
  > These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all. I don't necessarily disagree, but who is going to pay for improvements in models if they're not commercially available? Are AI companies going to become defence contractors with (US?) government paying for the training? I don't know much it cost to go from AI model Foo 4 to Foo 5, but it's going to cost a pretty penny to eventually go to 6 and 7. These companies are doing so in the expectation of eventually charging customers to recoup the costs: if the only customer(s) is government(s) then the per-unit cost will be much higher. An analogy: you can get a 'civilian' toilet for USD 200, an FAA/EASA-approved toilet for airlines 2000, and a MILSPEC/NASA toilet for 20000. Now this limited-customer model is certainly doable—tank manufacturers have a smaller base of customers than pickup truck manufacturers—but AI companies probably want regulatory clarity on what they're allowed to sell, and to whom, before they start developing new products/services.
  • antasvara 3mo ago
    I assume (and this is a big assumption) that the US government will be focused on limiting access to the latest model, not necessarily everything smarter than Fable 5. Having access to the frontier model from a year ago (Sonnet 4.7-ish) wouldn't really help you from a cybersecurity perspective. I think there's a world where the US funds development of the next model in exchange for exclusivity, at which point they could "release" the previous version from that exclusivity.
• freehorse 3mo ago
  > Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now now when they have Mythos capabilities [...] The "Mythos capabilities" is a pretty arbitrary threshold. It could have happened any point before or after. China treats this technology in very different ways. And China's economy and foreign policies are very different, in such export-based economy export controls make much no sense. Unless something changes drastically in the global relations. I expect the opposite to happen, if the US leave a void globally, china will be even more incentivised to fill it. This been said, it is likely that big models are soon no longer "open sourced" (qwen has already started), but because the chinese companies will prefer to sell access themselves, not because of government intervention. In any case, what happens now is a huge thing, and not sure we grasp its consequences yet. It is definitely beyond any ai safety marketing stunt. Even if this is rolled back at some point, after "guarantees" are established, it has already moved things to change drastically.
• christkv 3mo ago
  Anthropic already with Fable basically said they will be the arbiter of who gets to use the "godmodel" with no criteria specified. So no thank you. We need to make llm's open source and completely disconnect from these companies or live in a dystopian "Anthropic" etc social credit score system where only the "blessed" have access to models.
• mr_toad 3mo ago
  When the Chinese do it they will use it to attack US infrastructure that won’t have been hardened because the models are behind walled gardens. Despite the damage it’s better to build up an immunity through ongoing exposure, unless you want to end up like the previous American civilisations.
• juleiie 3mo ago
  That would be true if LLMs training was like refining uranium. But it is a computer program and it won’t be long before the dam breaks to open source and anyone can use Mythos level AI at home for anything. There is no stopping that unless you would set up a Police state more strict than China It may be a de facto weapon and for better or worse everyone will be able to use it sooner or later. I predict it will give birth to many great things and many equally terrible. Milions of people will die and milions will be saved. Such is nature of humanity. The good always comes with the bad. That was true for every invention. Cars are used to kill by terrorists, rockets are used to bomb kids but also to go into space. It’s all same, old story. You can’t stop LLMs the way you cannot control fire. Everyone can pour gasoline in the forest and cause terrible damage. And any excuse that we shouldn’t have matches must be viewed as what it is - an authoritarian, futile, desire for control
• animanoir 3mo ago
  [dead]
• readthemanual 3mo ago
  Oh, I'm definitely won't be poorer without one LLM. As a professional I probably will be richer, even. And with more certainty for the future for sure.
• Hexploit 3mo ago
  message sent from iPhone 16 Pro Max
• bonoboTP 3mo ago
  Yes. We will likely have a heavily policed narrow line to some kind of AI during the phase when we as employees will still have value in this centaur configuration, so we'll be allowed to steer the largely autonomous models for our employers, direct them a bit when they do something wrong, if we can convince the guard-AI. All this will be logged and constantly audited by your employer and by the government and the AI companies. For hobby use, only simple models will be allowed. The models of the future will be so large that the huge data centers being built right now will be necessary for training them. Open sourcing will be a strategic nation state level decision. Regular people won't have it. We will have toys, we will have infinite AI generated entertainment and the rest isn't exactly planned out I guess.