229 ms·

Did Anthropic ask for this?

195 points by ad8e 3mo ago

spwa4 3mo ago
Exactly the question I've been wondering. Anthropic has been behaving as if serving Fable is way too expensive. And now they got people's money, and don't have to serve anything. Convenient.
- noah34 3mo ago
  they've been offering refunds for people specifically because of the Fable situation
  - chillfox 3mo ago
    Isn’t that just because people started doing chargebacks, and refunds are cheaper than chargebacks?
    - noah34 3mo ago
      good intentions or not, they are letting people have their money back - not that this would put a dent in current enterprise spend anyways
rvz 3mo ago
Yes. They got even more than what they asked for.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
aaron695 3mo ago
[dead]
optimalsolver 3mo ago
Citizenship guarantees service.
animanoir 3mo ago
[dead]
CamperBob2 3mo ago
The Fable debacle will justify the imposition of a solid legislative framework to serve as a legal foundation for the entire business sector. A DMCA for AI, if you will. The other incumbent players will demand it, because they can't do business subject to the arbitrary (or worse) whims of Donald Trump or whoever follows him. That framework is, of course, what Amodei did ask for, but he mistakenly thought he'd have a seat at a table populated by rational actors. Even after the Trump administration explicitly told him otherwise when they declared his whole company to be a national security threat. So what happened is all Amodei's fault. It's possible that the Anthropic board will decide that this particular unforced error is his last one. In fact, given that Amazon is apparently the prime mover behind this whole train wreck, I'd almost bet on it.
- adriand 3mo ago
  I think you are correct about the legislative push, because it’s clear that US AI companies can no longer live without it. However, it is not the case that this is Amodei’s fault. His push for regulation was clearly at least partly mitigated by a desire for this precise situation to be avoided! With an appropriate regulatory framework and a transparent, apolitical certification or review process, this kind of situation would not happen. Banning Fable is not “regulation”, it’s capricious retribution, and I believe it is the single most damaging thing that has happened to the US AI industry to date.
  - CamperBob2 3mo ago
    Banning Fable is not “regulation”, it’s capricious retribution Yes, and my point is, I can't imagine why Amodei expected anything different to happen. If he wanted regulation, he should have asked Congress. But instead he waved a red cape in front of Trump.
- nicce 3mo ago
  > So what happened is all Amodei's fault. It's possible that the Anthropic board will decide that this particular unforced error is his last one. In fact, given that Amazon is apparently the prime mover behind this whole train wreck, I'd almost bet on it. How it sounds like that everyone who tries to work with safety or morals will get eventually kicked out? That this is an ”error”? Like what happened with OpenAI? What a nice world to live.
bravetraveler 3mo ago
It's aggrandizing and spares compute, I'd have to assume so... if not done so publicly. Clearly was requested. A silly title proposition: 's/Anthropic/Dario/'; he wrote the essay TFA discusses. No 'think' required, they're surprised at the shape. $ xdg-open fakerake.png Claude: regulate me USA: YOU ARE BEING REGULATED Claude: oh my god Might believe I'm overstating compute; consider, how often does OpenAI falter? Now, Anthropic before and after their recent capacity deals. We got to see the girlfriend that goes to another school, now she can go home [with cover from Uncle Sam, the trip is ~~expensive~~ dangerous].
ivraatiems 3mo ago
Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would. Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday devices are dangerous and should be regulated. The Doomsday Device Company then says they have the world's best doomsday device. (They don't, but they claim they do.) The US Government hates the Doosmday Device Company for various political reasons, but also has a vested interest in there not being a massive proliferation of doomsday devices. The Doosmday Device company spends a great deal of time and money telling everyone: "Our doomsday device is the most doomy of all time!" (though it probably isn't) and "Everyone can use it!" (for a lot of money) It is completely logical, then, for the US Government to say: No, everyone cannot use your doomsday device, because doomsday is bad. (While also meaning: Only we should be able to use it, and you shouldn't be able to tell us how.) If you do not want to be in the business of having your doomsday devices shut down by the government, well, it would help if you didn't so loudly and aggressively proclaim how doomy they are. It doesn't matter how trustworthy you claim to be, given that your business is making evil doosmday devices. You still won't be trusted!
- threatofrain 3mo ago
  It's quite a bit more complicated than that. The popular narrative is not exactly on Anthropic, as the general public is far more aware of OpenAI than Anthropic. The narrative is on AI and whether everything we know about society is going to change. Also, as far as priorities and worries go, for most people cybersecurity is way down the list.
  - gerdesj 3mo ago
    "It's quite a bit more complicated than that." Ohhh no it isn't! (Ohh yes it is) etc "as the general public is far more aware of OpenAI than Anthropic" I run LLMs on my own gear with llama.cpp (compiled from source) and I could not tell you anything about either company except they fiddle with AI stuff and that (I don't actually care). I glaze over on news about both organisations in equal measure on mention. I think you'll find that the general public would not be able to name either company without being asked to pronounce their name from it being written down.
colonCapitalDee 3mo ago
No, Anthropic clearly did not ask for this. 1. "Dario is known for writing about regulation and the direction of AI as an industry and Anthropic in particular, and what he says is taken very seriously and is considered a definitive statement of the company’s position." This is patently ridiculous. A CEO's blog post is not an official company statement or any sort of binding agreement. 2. "Are there protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions? I believe there are: they are called “courts”." This is so stupid. Of course Anthropic will take this to court (if it's not rescinded before then), and the government's ham-fisted "regulation" will almost certainly be overturned. And it doesn't matter! An unjust action that is overturned by the legal system does not magically become just. 3. "Is This Politically Motivated or Arbitrary? Probably at least somewhat." If the best you can muster here is "probably at least somewhat", then your head is in the sand. It clearly politically motivated, and clearly arbitrary. Perhaps a different government would receive the benefit of the doubt here, but not this one. 4. "“The government” or “society” is meant to deal with all of those things. Well, now the government is — the actual government that really exists, and not an imagined one that only does good things and never does bad things." So that's it? We just throw up our hands and say that this is natural, that it couldn't go any other way? That Anthropic was "asking for it", and it's their fault when the government lashes out? If the government wants to regulate AI, either Congress needs to pass a law, or the Executive needs to furnish a reasonable explanation for their actions. We do not live in a fascist country. There is separation between the government and private industry. The government does not have the power to arbitrarily regulate private enterprise. I am truly baffled by the inability for people to see this as it is -- a blatant, and foolish, attempt at posturing and political intimidation. It's part of a clear pattern of behavior by this administration, and should be interpreted as such.
- ivraatiems 3mo ago
  > A CEO's blog post is not an official company statement or any sort of binding agreement. Uh, then what is it? We should not take the words of the leader of the company published on the company's website to be the official stance of the company??
  - 3mo ago
ianm218 3mo ago
What I feel like is missing in the common discourse here is that Anthropic genuinely believes that AI poses an existential risk for humanity either in terms of literal survival or extreme mass surveillance, human disempowerment etc. So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? I.e. OpenAI just went full evil corpo mode and went all in on the Leading the Future PAC [1] to try and prevent any kind of regulation. I feel like there is a reasonable path where they might agree with OP that the government has "mostly gone insane" but also think that US getting its act together and leading the way on sane regulation will be key to getting to a good outcome with AI. [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_the_Future
- ivraatiems 3mo ago
  > So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies. With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done. Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in their stated philosophies.
  - Davidzheng 3mo ago
    If they only opposed it they wouldn't have had these billions of dollars? Also I think they genuinely believe they cannot stop it because the Chinese companies are close behind (I also believe it's impossible to stop b/c of strong economic pressures selecting for those who will advance this tech and there are many who can)
  - s3p 3mo ago
    Again, how would they do that? Are they not doing what they should do, which is call for increased regulation? Last I checked, they were not able to create and enact laws.
  - fwipsy 3mo ago
    Anthropic has called for a coordinated pause: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-says-ai-labs-need-coordinated-plan-halt-development-if-risks-rise-2026-06-04/ https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-says-ai-labs-need... I characterize the culture of companies based on who works there. Anthropic is founded by people who left OpenAI because it didn't take safety seriously enough. But if AI development has to happen, they want to be the ones leading it. People who do not feel that way, including Anthropic's former head of safety, just don't work there. Generally, corporations spending billions of dollars on lobbyists is frowned upon. I suspect individual Anthropic employees may make significant donations to AI safety politics and charities, but I don't have proof.
mitthrowaway2 3mo ago
I posted this comment on the other thread, but it deserves mention here too, because Anthropic also asked for this ~10 days ago, separately from the post linked in the article. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme... > We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. In their subsequent post this week responding to the announcement of the export ban, Anthropic wrote: > If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers. Which is what they said would be good.
- reasonableklout 3mo ago
  Great, so let's have the government apply the standard across the industry and see whether Anthropic sticks to their stated beliefs.
- cdestroyer 3mo ago
  the link appears to be broken. Only shows a 404 poem :(
  - fwipsy 3mo ago
    It's missing a "nt:" https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
alaribi 3mo ago
> and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions. Didn't Anthropic say that the same jailbreak is possible with GPT 5.5? > I believe there are: they are called “courts”. Dario is as free as the rest of us are to file a lawsuit and go in front of a judge and tell the judge that he is the victim of political favoritism or an arbitrary decision. That is, in fact, one of the primary purposes of the legal system. This isn't realistic here. Yes, there's a system in place, but at the speed of these iterations/deployments, filing a lawsuit that will take months/years to resolve isn't a practical path forward.
TalkingCodeMonk 3mo ago
The premise here is rather ridiculous, and only entertainable if you don't know about the recent history of the admin declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk because they required the government to agree to ethical clauses that would've been considered unthinkable until recently. Remember, all AI companies openly claimed to oppose military usage just a few short years ago. Now they all have government contracts that allow the government to use them "lawfully", while also being able to decide that anything they do with them is lawful. Anthropic is the only one who required clauses against killbots and domestic mass surveillance. Anthropic never asked for arbitrary or opaque shutdowns. They asked for clearly defined regulations to apply equally (which would've helped their market position and advantage, coincidentally I'm sure /s), moreso to reduce their own risk and liability.
- charcircuit 3mo ago
  >because they required the government to agree to ethical clauses that would've been considered unthinkable until recently This theory doesn't make sense with the context that they happily signed a follow up deal with OpenAI containing the same restrictions. The more likely theory was that it was because Anthropic wanted to be the ultimate arbiter of what was considered violating.
hmokiguess 3mo ago
When you are both the source of fear and hope people will always side with fear. If you sold everyone on the idea of "safety is paramount, we urge everyone not to rush into development here" then certainly becomes hard to believe a blanket "we figured out safety, come play with our toys for 10x cost" when stuff is less than a month apart in your news page.
jdw64 3mo ago
To speak my mind without filtering, Amodei looks pretty terrible in this situation. They've positioned their company as 'We're the serious AI company that understands safety, while others underestimate the risks.' That strategy itself is understandable. They're not like OpenAI, which carved out the pioneer position in LLMs, nor do they have a trustworthy brand like Google (Gemini isn't trustworthy, but still). So branding around 'responsibility' made sense. The problem is that they pushed that narrative with the Trump administration. Without considering that LLM strategies need to change depending on the political context, they just input the same prompt into a different context and got bad results. The Trump administration's stance emphasizes external enemies. I guess they didn't know what would happen if they started talking about military weapons in that environment. We East Asians know authoritarian regimes 'very' well. So I guess people from the US, a country with so much freedom that they naturally lie flat on the ground, just didn't understand the difference. If they had advocated for AI freedom and free expression, many people might have helped them, like in the PGP situation in cryptography. But instead, they got caught up in their own claims. If you emphasize how dangerous AI is under an administration like Trump's that stresses external enemies, of course the government will say, 'Then let us manage it.' And the moment Anthropic says, 'Why just us?' it just looks ridiculous. They're the ones who went on about how dangerous it is, and now they're acting victimized for being treated as a dangerous entity. To be even more honest, Amodei's style of communication sometimes looks like a morality superiority hustle. They speak in a tone of 'We're not just a money focused company, we care about humanity,' but isn't Anthropic still a company that takes investments, sells models, rides the cloud, and tries to win government contracts? So it ends up looking like they use regulatory discourse as a shield and marketing when it benefits them, but complain 'it's not fair' when it works against them. Personally, I think Anthropic needs to hire a Korean person as their marketing lead. We Koreans know very well how to behave under authoritarian governments. If you need a marketing person, feel free to contact me. I'll prepare my resume
- chillfox 3mo ago
  Nobody who works at Anthropic is a good person. Just look at any interview with Amodei, he gets super excited/happy every time he gets to talk about his tech making people unemployed. The guy loves firing people not at his company. Deliberately trying to cause mass poverty and starvation by firing as many people as possible and being excited about it is cartoon villain stuff. Anyone who works at Anthropic is basically a henchman to a cartoon villain.
ralph84 3mo ago
This was an opportunistic hit job by Amazon. After the SpaceX IPO, Amazon realized there was a good chance Anthropic's post-IPO market cap would exceed Amazon's. No doubt they are maneuvering behind the scenes for regulations that the big cloud vendors be the only authorized operators of LLMs for national security reasons.
- gordonhart 3mo ago
  Amazon owns 15-20% of Anthropic.
  - alchemism 3mo ago
    The next % stake will be acquired at a discount, it seems.
  - ralph84 3mo ago
    They don't have a seat on the board. They're smart enough to understand the threat to their business posed by frontier models they don't control.
peter422 3mo ago
Anybody who isn't at least treating this situation as possibly just an authoritarian government picking winners and losers is not paying attention to the political environment. Companies/countries/people are paying off the government in all sorts of various ways (crypto, gifts, bogus settlements, planes, inaugurations, ballrooms). The companies that pay off the government get big fat contracts and merger agreements, and the ones that don't get increased scrutiny, lawsuits and threats. OpenAI and SpaceX are friends of the administration, and Anthropic is (politically at least), not friends with the administration. Could this penalty be a rational and reasonable reaction to the new model? Perhaps. Or maybe it is just a made up excuse to do what the government wants to do, which is punish its political enemies. It wouldn't be the first, second, third or 10th time that has happened so far in this administration.
- estearum 3mo ago
  Ah but you have forgotten that HN is full of people who are so aloof and "above the fray" (compliments to their raw intellect, of course) that it would be beneath them to consider the realities of the political situation.
  - SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
    I just think that it's dodging the question in this case. It's true that the US government is run by crooks who'd all be serving prison sentences in a just world, and that they'd certainly do whatever Anthropic wants in exchange for a sufficiently large bribe. But the US government also serves a number of important roles in American society that we can't simply turn off and come back to in 2029.
    - pdimitar 3mo ago
      Your last sentence sounds reasonable. Can you give examples?
      - SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
        I think most people would agree, for example, that the FTC should continue going after fraudsters (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/06/ftc-files-contempt-motion-against-amare-global-three-individuals-over-unsubstantiated-health-claims https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/06/...) and the FBI should continue prosecuting arsonists (https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdtx/pr/former-turkey-leg-hut-owner-admits-role-arson-hire-scheme https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdtx/pr/former-turkey-leg-hut-o...), even if both agencies are run by partisan hacks right now.
moezd 3mo ago
Chekhov's gun. If you keep pointing to it, someone will fire that gun until the game ends.
quatonion 3mo ago
Half of me wonders if it was all a live simulation/drill, to practice what happens if a much more serious event occurs, and a model needed to be quickly shut down. Under such conditions we would be looking at Amazon's actions through a much more benevolent lens. Not saying it has been, but it certainly crossed my mind as something worth doing regardless.
- davebren 3mo ago
  > "to practice what happens if a much more serious event occurs" A pair of bolt cutters should do.
  - quatonion 3mo ago
    That's certainly one way to do it, but where would you place them? No, but seriously, you could imagine what we witnessed playing out in a high stakes Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton style fable. The fiery blowhard Pentagon chief, the arrogant know it all tech bro lab head, an alarm being called in from a remote office and surfaced through Amazon. It almost writes itself. But we can use your name for the novel. "Bolt Cutter" Has a nice ring to it.
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
  Even if it's not intended to be a drill, this dynamic is why I can't take Anthropic's side here. If you believe what they claim to believe about the future of AI, which I at least do, there are going to be future cases where an emergency block is required for much more real threats than this one. Why in the world would Amodei think that the model provider, with massive financial incentives to keep the money flowing, should be allowed to make the final shutdown call? If a team of researchers at Netflix discovers a few days after release that GPT 6.0 has a safety-compromising jailbreak, I want Sam Altman initiating a shutdown the second he gets that call, and I had thought until Friday that Anthropic agreed with me.
theturtletalks 3mo ago
I haven’t used Claude in more than a year and didn’t even try Fable. As someone that doesn’t have a dog in this race, I feel like anthropic has been very consistent with their moral stance. First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations and throughout all this, Anthropic has been the one to neuter their model and make sure that it’s not able to do a lot of things that might can be destructive. So them saying that there should be a pause on new AI and then releasing this new product makes me inclined to believe them. Maybe I’ve drank the koolaid but it seems like Anthropic isn’t inherently “evil.”
- slopinthebag 3mo ago
  > First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations They did not do this, they just wanted to ensure there was a human somewhere in the loop. Despite this, the U.S. military utilized Anthropic's Claude model in classified operations, including target selection during conflicts in the Middle East.
amazingamazing 3mo ago
Yes. > We’re proposing stronger regulation of the technology. We’re proposing giving the government the ability to, again in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology. Anthropic CEO, last week. https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stronger-regulation-ai-exclusive/19275685/ https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...
s3p 3mo ago
> if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. >Yes. This assessment was made by Amazon, a frequent and serious government contractor which is generally trusted to handle high-security government, intelligence, and military contractor concerns. Reads as partially disingenuous. Amazon did not conduct some thoroughly vetted, responsible security audit. Someone gave them examples of a 'jailbreak' and they notified the white house rather quickly. This was nary an official process. Calling it one is ignoring the facts of what happened.
- SilverElfin 3mo ago
  That’s not what articles on it say. They say that a team of security researchers at Amazon were able to trivially jailbreak the model and it’s not as guardrailed as claimed. Articles say in particular the model was shown to be usable for identifying security holes that it was supposed to not be able to be used for. That’s why Anthropic has only given access to Mythos to some people but not everyone, right? Personally I don’t think we should impose guardrails on something so close to speech. But I can imagine Amazon was worried about how an explosion of cybersecurity incidents might affect the world. After all, they run AWS and have good intuition for the landscape of cybersecurity. Imagine if many of their cloud customers are suddenly facing one breach after another.
airstrike 3mo ago
Anthropic had countless ways to fight this and they chose to cave. The government can't apply export controls based on a control that does not exist. Creating one for model inference, if at all possible, would take 3-6 months at a minimum and it even includes a public comment process. That control is not cited anywhere because it does not exist. The president can invoke emergency powers but that requires pointing to a specific foreign threat, notifying congress formally, posting on the national register, and it only lasts six months unless congress votes to renew it. Given how easy it would have been for them to fight this, we can only conclude this was either outright designed or incredibly convenient for Anthropic. Given their stated goal of pulling Fable by June 22nd, it seems likely they underestimated the amount of compute they would need or, even if they had perfectly estimated it, pivoting so that "the government shut it down because it's so powerful" on June 12nd is a better story than "we shut it down because we lack the compute" on the 22nd. This is especially true because the net new revenue from Fable is just from new signups between the two dates, which is likely smaller each day elapsed since the launch.
PunchyHamster 3mo ago
Any tool you give government to impede your competition/politicial opponents can and will be used in same way against you
pclowes 3mo ago
I wonder if you can just use fable/mythos to basically re-create core Anthropic research. They seem to be very touchy about using their models for LLM R&D given the guard rails they built into the product. None of the large language model providers have a very defensible product moat yet and if the models themselves can reveal research fundamentals their position would become extremely precarious. It would be very tempting to hide behind a national security excuse to try and preserve the research moat.
s3p 3mo ago
Have been adding a few too many comments here but I have to add this one. Most of the people complaining about Anthropic's behavior, while simultaneously avoiding the argument at heart about whether AI regulation is good, remind me of the "we should improve society" meme: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-4-9faefa-1.jpg https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-...
j-bos 3mo ago
Amodei exhibits the common failure of guys on the spectrum, gleefully recounting gruesome news and portents. And that's fine, everybody's different and I like to believe he's not happy that everybody will be shaken and jobless, but you are the CEO of a "trillion" dollar company and the portentious news is being written about your actions. Presentation matters, more so when your audience is A world leaders B the entire world.
willsmith72 3mo ago
What's the actual verdict on who reported it? The article is writing as if Amazon did a complex analysis and then reported it. But the latest reporting id read was it was not a jailbreak, and reported by the ceo (not the old technical CEO btw, the new bizdev guy)
matheusmoreira 3mo ago
> In my opinion, they mostly imagined these regulations applying to other people, especially open source projects, academics and smaller companies. Now that they are being subjected to the exact sort of regulation they have proposed, they do not like it. > I think all of this was extremely irresponsible of them, and I feel a good amount of schadenfreude that the leopard ate their face first. Can't say I disagree. Hope this costs them many, many billions.
ergonaught 3mo ago
A government sign off on release potentially reduces liability/exposure if the models can do what it says on the box. I’m sure Anthro wants this applied to everyone and not only them, but there is a potential benefit to them.
zmmmmm 3mo ago
I think it's a near universal phenomenon that people with extraordinary amounts of power become victims of their own hubris. Once you get sufficiently decoupled from the consequences of your own actions, it is near impossible to tether yourself to a calibrated sense of reality. So I genuinely think that Amodei thought here that he was building a moat - set a very high bar for safety at exactly the line Anthropic but nobody else meets, and then declare anything less to be too unsafe to be allowed. That would put a permanent halt to open models, Chinese models and throw a significant barrier in front of competitors - if OpenAI is about to release something competitive with Mythos, they would have to immediately double back and implement at least equivalent safeguards. It might cost them months at the most critical juncture in Anthropic's history, when they are filing for IPO. Having said this, I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their own model being restricted. They probably still see it as a win because it acts as a strong endorsement of them as the market leader and the model as the most powerful available model. So I think both things are true, but we are in the "plan B" scenario now rather than "plan A".
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  > I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their own model being restricted. Doubt. Had they foreseen this, they would have started verifying the identity of their customers. That would have allowed them to keep their US customers when the US government banned foreign persons from accessing Fable. Since they were forced to turn off Fable for everyone, it follows that they were not prepared for that possibility at all.
  - CamperBob2 3mo ago
    The big problem Anthropic faces isn't implementing a KYC workflow, but the fact that many if not most of their own employees are no longer allowed to work on Fable/Mythos.
    - dannyw 3mo ago
      Also their API customers and downstream customers (e.g. Cursor users) would also need similar infra, and probably a decent amount of users would just choose another model that doesn't require ID & an immigration status check. And API is much more profitable (relatively) than subscribers for them.
aetch 3mo ago
Yes, maybe don’t say your product is so good that the customer can’t use it.
vld_chk 3mo ago
In all such discussions, it is interesting to track the tipping point at which public perception of Anthropic shifted. In my mind, as recently as February, Anthropic was considered by far “the best” company on the planet, with an insane fanbase and praise left, right, and centre. The story around the DoD contract solidified them in the public eye as “the hero the city deserved.” Then they fell into a classic monetisation trap. Unable to sustain growth at such a discount, they started nerfing models, removing caching, and doubling costs per token to make any money here. The lack of transparency in that process cost them public perception. By early May, all the charm of the magical, ethical super-company was gone. The entire campaign around the Mythos release, intentional or not, landed on top of that new narrative and didn’t play well for them. What is interesting to me here is the realisation that a good chunk of the hate the company received came simply because of their most recent hostile, for-profit actions. Had it happened in March, HN and the public reaction would have been vastly different. It took them just two months of “bad actions” to ruin quite a good margin of the public praise they so desperately needed now.
tensility 3mo ago
It's all interesting advertising / news; however, why does it have to constantly cost me five precious vertical lines of text worth of screen real estate in Claude Code that apparently can't be dismissed? FFS
thelonelyborg 3mo ago
the whole Anthropic is philanthropic will go the way of the buffalo as soon as they IPO
dualvariable 3mo ago
I tend to think this is all just PR and hype, baking in the idea that Fable/Mythos is so good that it attracted all these regulations and controls. So you need to spend >$20k per developer per month, or you'll fall behind. Don't try to get by on Opus, you need to really open that wallet up...
- fwipsy 3mo ago
  Most people at my company default to Opus 4.6. I personally use Sonnet for a lot of stuff.
zoogeny 3mo ago
I think the big lesson of this that hasn't yet been learned: it literally doesn't matter how moral Amodei or anyone else is at Anthropic. When push comes to shove, the US government can step in and take it away. They will either play ball with the US government on the US government's terms or they will be replaced or destroyed. It is a misconception for them to believe they can dictate the terms of this technology.
aforwardslash 3mo ago
Yes, they did. And the motivation is quite simple: money. Having the US control export your flagship model is the ultimate stamp approval in the AI race. All headliners are american, but one us too poweful to be made available. It just reads like if someone was riding an IPO. It is also, paradoxically, a wink to the 90's. But we're not in the 90's, and the cat is out of the box, and in 6-12 months everyone else will be at this tier. This is, clearly, an attempt to boost a model that isnt that revolutionary. I used Fable, and for my work, its mostly a waste of tokens. It seems a bit better than Opus 4.8 - but 4.8 the past week(s) has actually been top knotch; so lets make it a "myth" and have secops tell stories about it, so everyone will pay when the time comes; will you, ceo/cto, allow your company to fall behind? Of course not. You will pay. For modest results, apparently, but the hype is there.
furyofantares 3mo ago
This is a terrible take. Dario obviously did not mean any old 3rd party should be able to provoke the government to shut down a model by insinuations in the directions of the given concerns. He rather obviously is asking to establish a 3rd party specifically for this task, and to establish guidelines relating to the given concerns, and to establish guidelines for government actions based on the evaluation by the 3rd party.
kordlessagain 3mo ago
Regardless of whether they asked for it or not is irrelevant. That they released a product and encouraged use of it, then had to walk it back and now we're likely looking at proving we are US citizens to them to use it - if it returns at all - is insanity in action.
sothatsit 3mo ago
Would the US government have slapped Anthropic with this export control if Anthropic never fearmonger'ed about Mythos? I think the answer is very likely no. But is this the type of regulation Anthropic has been asking for? Not at all. This is a failure of Anthropic's politicking, and a warning that they need to be more careful with their communication in the future. If they truly want constructive regulations because of their fears about AI, they will need to repair their relationship with the administration, and it is still unclear to me how they plan to do that.
groan 3mo ago
Waiting for the next hot take from Ed Citroën.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
pu_pe 3mo ago
The Amodei quote they use is illuminating: "The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. This power must be scoped to the above four specific risks and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions." The article uses this as a gotcha, but I think there is nuance here. Amazon is a competitor, not an officially appointed third-party that can assess anything. And while Amodei says government oversight is needed, I think it's fair to say we would all expect something more rigorous and neutral than getting a phone call on a Friday based on vibes.
sam_lowry_ 3mo ago
Everyone looks bad in this story: Anthropic for lying too much and for too long about their capabilities US Government for taking these marketing stunts for ground truth EU for freaking out about its Digital Sovereignty over US companies, as if it had it before.
classified 3mo ago
Antithetical to Betteridge's law of headlines: Yes. I doubt the outcome is what they had in mind, but still. Be careful what you wish for.

195 points by ad8e 3mo ago

spwa4 3mo ago

Exactly the question I've been wondering. Anthropic has been behaving as if serving Fable is way too expensive. And now they got people's money, and don't have to serve anything. Convenient.

noah34 3mo ago
they've been offering refunds for people specifically because of the Fable situation
- chillfox 3mo ago
  Isn’t that just because people started doing chargebacks, and refunds are cheaper than chargebacks?
  - noah34 3mo ago
    good intentions or not, they are letting people have their money back - not that this would put a dent in current enterprise spend anyways

rvz 3mo ago

Yes. They got even more than what they asked for.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

aaron695 3mo ago

[dead]

optimalsolver 3mo ago

Citizenship guarantees service.

animanoir 3mo ago

[dead]

CamperBob2 3mo ago

The Fable debacle will justify the imposition of a solid legislative framework to serve as a legal foundation for the entire business sector. A DMCA for AI, if you will. The other incumbent players will demand it, because they can't do business subject to the arbitrary (or worse) whims of Donald Trump or whoever follows him. That framework is, of course, what Amodei did ask for, but he mistakenly thought he'd have a seat at a table populated by rational actors. Even after the Trump administration explicitly told him otherwise when they declared his whole company to be a national security threat. So what happened is all Amodei's fault. It's possible that the Anthropic board will decide that this particular unforced error is his last one. In fact, given that Amazon is apparently the prime mover behind this whole train wreck, I'd almost bet on it.

adriand 3mo ago
I think you are correct about the legislative push, because it’s clear that US AI companies can no longer live without it. However, it is not the case that this is Amodei’s fault. His push for regulation was clearly at least partly mitigated by a desire for this precise situation to be avoided! With an appropriate regulatory framework and a transparent, apolitical certification or review process, this kind of situation would not happen. Banning Fable is not “regulation”, it’s capricious retribution, and I believe it is the single most damaging thing that has happened to the US AI industry to date.
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  Banning Fable is not “regulation”, it’s capricious retribution Yes, and my point is, I can't imagine why Amodei expected anything different to happen. If he wanted regulation, he should have asked Congress. But instead he waved a red cape in front of Trump.
nicce 3mo ago
> So what happened is all Amodei's fault. It's possible that the Anthropic board will decide that this particular unforced error is his last one. In fact, given that Amazon is apparently the prime mover behind this whole train wreck, I'd almost bet on it. How it sounds like that everyone who tries to work with safety or morals will get eventually kicked out? That this is an ”error”? Like what happened with OpenAI? What a nice world to live.

bravetraveler 3mo ago

It's aggrandizing and spares compute, I'd have to assume so... if not done so publicly. Clearly was requested. A silly title proposition: 's/Anthropic/Dario/'; he wrote the essay TFA discusses. No 'think' required, they're surprised at the shape. $ xdg-open fakerake.png Claude: regulate me USA: YOU ARE BEING REGULATED Claude: oh my god Might believe I'm overstating compute; consider, how often does OpenAI falter? Now, Anthropic before and after their recent capacity deals. We got to see the girlfriend that goes to another school, now she can go home [with cover from Uncle Sam, the trip is ~~expensive~~ dangerous].

ivraatiems 3mo ago

Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would. Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday devices are dangerous and should be regulated. The Doomsday Device Company then says they have the world's best doomsday device. (They don't, but they claim they do.) The US Government hates the Doosmday Device Company for various political reasons, but also has a vested interest in there not being a massive proliferation of doomsday devices. The Doosmday Device company spends a great deal of time and money telling everyone: "Our doomsday device is the most doomy of all time!" (though it probably isn't) and "Everyone can use it!" (for a lot of money) It is completely logical, then, for the US Government to say: No, everyone cannot use your doomsday device, because doomsday is bad. (While also meaning: Only we should be able to use it, and you shouldn't be able to tell us how.) If you do not want to be in the business of having your doomsday devices shut down by the government, well, it would help if you didn't so loudly and aggressively proclaim how doomy they are. It doesn't matter how trustworthy you claim to be, given that your business is making evil doosmday devices. You still won't be trusted!

threatofrain 3mo ago
It's quite a bit more complicated than that. The popular narrative is not exactly on Anthropic, as the general public is far more aware of OpenAI than Anthropic. The narrative is on AI and whether everything we know about society is going to change. Also, as far as priorities and worries go, for most people cybersecurity is way down the list.
- gerdesj 3mo ago
  "It's quite a bit more complicated than that." Ohhh no it isn't! (Ohh yes it is) etc "as the general public is far more aware of OpenAI than Anthropic" I run LLMs on my own gear with llama.cpp (compiled from source) and I could not tell you anything about either company except they fiddle with AI stuff and that (I don't actually care). I glaze over on news about both organisations in equal measure on mention. I think you'll find that the general public would not be able to name either company without being asked to pronounce their name from it being written down.

colonCapitalDee 3mo ago

No, Anthropic clearly did not ask for this. 1. "Dario is known for writing about regulation and the direction of AI as an industry and Anthropic in particular, and what he says is taken very seriously and is considered a definitive statement of the company’s position." This is patently ridiculous. A CEO's blog post is not an official company statement or any sort of binding agreement. 2. "Are there protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions? I believe there are: they are called “courts”." This is so stupid. Of course Anthropic will take this to court (if it's not rescinded before then), and the government's ham-fisted "regulation" will almost certainly be overturned. And it doesn't matter! An unjust action that is overturned by the legal system does not magically become just. 3. "Is This Politically Motivated or Arbitrary? Probably at least somewhat." If the best you can muster here is "probably at least somewhat", then your head is in the sand. It clearly politically motivated, and clearly arbitrary. Perhaps a different government would receive the benefit of the doubt here, but not this one. 4. "“The government” or “society” is meant to deal with all of those things. Well, now the government is — the actual government that really exists, and not an imagined one that only does good things and never does bad things." So that's it? We just throw up our hands and say that this is natural, that it couldn't go any other way? That Anthropic was "asking for it", and it's their fault when the government lashes out? If the government wants to regulate AI, either Congress needs to pass a law, or the Executive needs to furnish a reasonable explanation for their actions. We do not live in a fascist country. There is separation between the government and private industry. The government does not have the power to arbitrarily regulate private enterprise. I am truly baffled by the inability for people to see this as it is -- a blatant, and foolish, attempt at posturing and political intimidation. It's part of a clear pattern of behavior by this administration, and should be interpreted as such.

ivraatiems 3mo ago
> A CEO's blog post is not an official company statement or any sort of binding agreement. Uh, then what is it? We should not take the words of the leader of the company published on the company's website to be the official stance of the company??
- 3mo ago

ianm218 3mo ago

What I feel like is missing in the common discourse here is that Anthropic genuinely believes that AI poses an existential risk for humanity either in terms of literal survival or extreme mass surveillance, human disempowerment etc. So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? I.e. OpenAI just went full evil corpo mode and went all in on the Leading the Future PAC [1] to try and prevent any kind of regulation. I feel like there is a reasonable path where they might agree with OP that the government has "mostly gone insane" but also think that US getting its act together and leading the way on sane regulation will be key to getting to a good outcome with AI. [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_the_Future

ivraatiems 3mo ago
> So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies. With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done. Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in their stated philosophies.
- Davidzheng 3mo ago
  If they only opposed it they wouldn't have had these billions of dollars? Also I think they genuinely believe they cannot stop it because the Chinese companies are close behind (I also believe it's impossible to stop b/c of strong economic pressures selecting for those who will advance this tech and there are many who can)
- s3p 3mo ago
  Again, how would they do that? Are they not doing what they should do, which is call for increased regulation? Last I checked, they were not able to create and enact laws.
- fwipsy 3mo ago
  Anthropic has called for a coordinated pause: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-says-ai-labs-need-coordinated-plan-halt-development-if-risks-rise-2026-06-04/ https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-says-ai-labs-need... I characterize the culture of companies based on who works there. Anthropic is founded by people who left OpenAI because it didn't take safety seriously enough. But if AI development has to happen, they want to be the ones leading it. People who do not feel that way, including Anthropic's former head of safety, just don't work there. Generally, corporations spending billions of dollars on lobbyists is frowned upon. I suspect individual Anthropic employees may make significant donations to AI safety politics and charities, but I don't have proof.

mitthrowaway2 3mo ago

I posted this comment on the other thread, but it deserves mention here too, because Anthropic also asked for this ~10 days ago, separately from the post linked in the article. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme... > We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. In their subsequent post this week responding to the announcement of the export ban, Anthropic wrote: > If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers. Which is what they said would be good.

reasonableklout 3mo ago
Great, so let's have the government apply the standard across the industry and see whether Anthropic sticks to their stated beliefs.
cdestroyer 3mo ago
the link appears to be broken. Only shows a 404 poem :(
- fwipsy 3mo ago
  It's missing a "nt:" https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

alaribi 3mo ago

> and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions. Didn't Anthropic say that the same jailbreak is possible with GPT 5.5? > I believe there are: they are called “courts”. Dario is as free as the rest of us are to file a lawsuit and go in front of a judge and tell the judge that he is the victim of political favoritism or an arbitrary decision. That is, in fact, one of the primary purposes of the legal system. This isn't realistic here. Yes, there's a system in place, but at the speed of these iterations/deployments, filing a lawsuit that will take months/years to resolve isn't a practical path forward.

TalkingCodeMonk 3mo ago

The premise here is rather ridiculous, and only entertainable if you don't know about the recent history of the admin declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk because they required the government to agree to ethical clauses that would've been considered unthinkable until recently. Remember, all AI companies openly claimed to oppose military usage just a few short years ago. Now they all have government contracts that allow the government to use them "lawfully", while also being able to decide that anything they do with them is lawful. Anthropic is the only one who required clauses against killbots and domestic mass surveillance. Anthropic never asked for arbitrary or opaque shutdowns. They asked for clearly defined regulations to apply equally (which would've helped their market position and advantage, coincidentally I'm sure /s), moreso to reduce their own risk and liability.

charcircuit 3mo ago
>because they required the government to agree to ethical clauses that would've been considered unthinkable until recently This theory doesn't make sense with the context that they happily signed a follow up deal with OpenAI containing the same restrictions. The more likely theory was that it was because Anthropic wanted to be the ultimate arbiter of what was considered violating.

hmokiguess 3mo ago

When you are both the source of fear and hope people will always side with fear. If you sold everyone on the idea of "safety is paramount, we urge everyone not to rush into development here" then certainly becomes hard to believe a blanket "we figured out safety, come play with our toys for 10x cost" when stuff is less than a month apart in your news page.

jdw64 3mo ago

To speak my mind without filtering, Amodei looks pretty terrible in this situation. They've positioned their company as 'We're the serious AI company that understands safety, while others underestimate the risks.' That strategy itself is understandable. They're not like OpenAI, which carved out the pioneer position in LLMs, nor do they have a trustworthy brand like Google (Gemini isn't trustworthy, but still). So branding around 'responsibility' made sense. The problem is that they pushed that narrative with the Trump administration. Without considering that LLM strategies need to change depending on the political context, they just input the same prompt into a different context and got bad results. The Trump administration's stance emphasizes external enemies. I guess they didn't know what would happen if they started talking about military weapons in that environment. We East Asians know authoritarian regimes 'very' well. So I guess people from the US, a country with so much freedom that they naturally lie flat on the ground, just didn't understand the difference. If they had advocated for AI freedom and free expression, many people might have helped them, like in the PGP situation in cryptography. But instead, they got caught up in their own claims. If you emphasize how dangerous AI is under an administration like Trump's that stresses external enemies, of course the government will say, 'Then let us manage it.' And the moment Anthropic says, 'Why just us?' it just looks ridiculous. They're the ones who went on about how dangerous it is, and now they're acting victimized for being treated as a dangerous entity. To be even more honest, Amodei's style of communication sometimes looks like a morality superiority hustle. They speak in a tone of 'We're not just a money focused company, we care about humanity,' but isn't Anthropic still a company that takes investments, sells models, rides the cloud, and tries to win government contracts? So it ends up looking like they use regulatory discourse as a shield and marketing when it benefits them, but complain 'it's not fair' when it works against them. Personally, I think Anthropic needs to hire a Korean person as their marketing lead. We Koreans know very well how to behave under authoritarian governments. If you need a marketing person, feel free to contact me. I'll prepare my resume

chillfox 3mo ago
Nobody who works at Anthropic is a good person. Just look at any interview with Amodei, he gets super excited/happy every time he gets to talk about his tech making people unemployed. The guy loves firing people not at his company. Deliberately trying to cause mass poverty and starvation by firing as many people as possible and being excited about it is cartoon villain stuff. Anyone who works at Anthropic is basically a henchman to a cartoon villain.

ralph84 3mo ago

This was an opportunistic hit job by Amazon. After the SpaceX IPO, Amazon realized there was a good chance Anthropic's post-IPO market cap would exceed Amazon's. No doubt they are maneuvering behind the scenes for regulations that the big cloud vendors be the only authorized operators of LLMs for national security reasons.

gordonhart 3mo ago
Amazon owns 15-20% of Anthropic.
- alchemism 3mo ago
  The next % stake will be acquired at a discount, it seems.
- ralph84 3mo ago
  They don't have a seat on the board. They're smart enough to understand the threat to their business posed by frontier models they don't control.

peter422 3mo ago

Anybody who isn't at least treating this situation as possibly just an authoritarian government picking winners and losers is not paying attention to the political environment. Companies/countries/people are paying off the government in all sorts of various ways (crypto, gifts, bogus settlements, planes, inaugurations, ballrooms). The companies that pay off the government get big fat contracts and merger agreements, and the ones that don't get increased scrutiny, lawsuits and threats. OpenAI and SpaceX are friends of the administration, and Anthropic is (politically at least), not friends with the administration. Could this penalty be a rational and reasonable reaction to the new model? Perhaps. Or maybe it is just a made up excuse to do what the government wants to do, which is punish its political enemies. It wouldn't be the first, second, third or 10th time that has happened so far in this administration.

estearum 3mo ago
Ah but you have forgotten that HN is full of people who are so aloof and "above the fray" (compliments to their raw intellect, of course) that it would be beneath them to consider the realities of the political situation.
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
  I just think that it's dodging the question in this case. It's true that the US government is run by crooks who'd all be serving prison sentences in a just world, and that they'd certainly do whatever Anthropic wants in exchange for a sufficiently large bribe. But the US government also serves a number of important roles in American society that we can't simply turn off and come back to in 2029.
  - pdimitar 3mo ago
    Your last sentence sounds reasonable. Can you give examples?
    - SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
      I think most people would agree, for example, that the FTC should continue going after fraudsters (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/06/ftc-files-contempt-motion-against-amare-global-three-individuals-over-unsubstantiated-health-claims https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/06/...) and the FBI should continue prosecuting arsonists (https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdtx/pr/former-turkey-leg-hut-owner-admits-role-arson-hire-scheme https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdtx/pr/former-turkey-leg-hut-o...), even if both agencies are run by partisan hacks right now.

moezd 3mo ago

Chekhov's gun. If you keep pointing to it, someone will fire that gun until the game ends.

quatonion 3mo ago

Half of me wonders if it was all a live simulation/drill, to practice what happens if a much more serious event occurs, and a model needed to be quickly shut down. Under such conditions we would be looking at Amazon's actions through a much more benevolent lens. Not saying it has been, but it certainly crossed my mind as something worth doing regardless.

davebren 3mo ago
> "to practice what happens if a much more serious event occurs" A pair of bolt cutters should do.
- quatonion 3mo ago
  That's certainly one way to do it, but where would you place them? No, but seriously, you could imagine what we witnessed playing out in a high stakes Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton style fable. The fiery blowhard Pentagon chief, the arrogant know it all tech bro lab head, an alarm being called in from a remote office and surfaced through Amazon. It almost writes itself. But we can use your name for the novel. "Bolt Cutter" Has a nice ring to it.
SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
Even if it's not intended to be a drill, this dynamic is why I can't take Anthropic's side here. If you believe what they claim to believe about the future of AI, which I at least do, there are going to be future cases where an emergency block is required for much more real threats than this one. Why in the world would Amodei think that the model provider, with massive financial incentives to keep the money flowing, should be allowed to make the final shutdown call? If a team of researchers at Netflix discovers a few days after release that GPT 6.0 has a safety-compromising jailbreak, I want Sam Altman initiating a shutdown the second he gets that call, and I had thought until Friday that Anthropic agreed with me.

theturtletalks 3mo ago

I haven’t used Claude in more than a year and didn’t even try Fable. As someone that doesn’t have a dog in this race, I feel like anthropic has been very consistent with their moral stance. First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations and throughout all this, Anthropic has been the one to neuter their model and make sure that it’s not able to do a lot of things that might can be destructive. So them saying that there should be a pause on new AI and then releasing this new product makes me inclined to believe them. Maybe I’ve drank the koolaid but it seems like Anthropic isn’t inherently “evil.”

slopinthebag 3mo ago
> First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations They did not do this, they just wanted to ensure there was a human somewhere in the loop. Despite this, the U.S. military utilized Anthropic's Claude model in classified operations, including target selection during conflicts in the Middle East.

amazingamazing 3mo ago

Yes. > We’re proposing stronger regulation of the technology. We’re proposing giving the government the ability to, again in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology. Anthropic CEO, last week. https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stronger-regulation-ai-exclusive/19275685/ https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...

s3p 3mo ago

> if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. >Yes. This assessment was made by Amazon, a frequent and serious government contractor which is generally trusted to handle high-security government, intelligence, and military contractor concerns. Reads as partially disingenuous. Amazon did not conduct some thoroughly vetted, responsible security audit. Someone gave them examples of a 'jailbreak' and they notified the white house rather quickly. This was nary an official process. Calling it one is ignoring the facts of what happened.

SilverElfin 3mo ago
That’s not what articles on it say. They say that a team of security researchers at Amazon were able to trivially jailbreak the model and it’s not as guardrailed as claimed. Articles say in particular the model was shown to be usable for identifying security holes that it was supposed to not be able to be used for. That’s why Anthropic has only given access to Mythos to some people but not everyone, right? Personally I don’t think we should impose guardrails on something so close to speech. But I can imagine Amazon was worried about how an explosion of cybersecurity incidents might affect the world. After all, they run AWS and have good intuition for the landscape of cybersecurity. Imagine if many of their cloud customers are suddenly facing one breach after another.

airstrike 3mo ago

Anthropic had countless ways to fight this and they chose to cave. The government can't apply export controls based on a control that does not exist. Creating one for model inference, if at all possible, would take 3-6 months at a minimum and it even includes a public comment process. That control is not cited anywhere because it does not exist. The president can invoke emergency powers but that requires pointing to a specific foreign threat, notifying congress formally, posting on the national register, and it only lasts six months unless congress votes to renew it. Given how easy it would have been for them to fight this, we can only conclude this was either outright designed or incredibly convenient for Anthropic. Given their stated goal of pulling Fable by June 22nd, it seems likely they underestimated the amount of compute they would need or, even if they had perfectly estimated it, pivoting so that "the government shut it down because it's so powerful" on June 12nd is a better story than "we shut it down because we lack the compute" on the 22nd. This is especially true because the net new revenue from Fable is just from new signups between the two dates, which is likely smaller each day elapsed since the launch.

PunchyHamster 3mo ago

Any tool you give government to impede your competition/politicial opponents can and will be used in same way against you

pclowes 3mo ago

I wonder if you can just use fable/mythos to basically re-create core Anthropic research. They seem to be very touchy about using their models for LLM R&D given the guard rails they built into the product. None of the large language model providers have a very defensible product moat yet and if the models themselves can reveal research fundamentals their position would become extremely precarious. It would be very tempting to hide behind a national security excuse to try and preserve the research moat.

s3p 3mo ago

Have been adding a few too many comments here but I have to add this one. Most of the people complaining about Anthropic's behavior, while simultaneously avoiding the argument at heart about whether AI regulation is good, remind me of the "we should improve society" meme: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-4-9faefa-1.jpg https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-...

j-bos 3mo ago

Amodei exhibits the common failure of guys on the spectrum, gleefully recounting gruesome news and portents. And that's fine, everybody's different and I like to believe he's not happy that everybody will be shaken and jobless, but you are the CEO of a "trillion" dollar company and the portentious news is being written about your actions. Presentation matters, more so when your audience is A world leaders B the entire world.

willsmith72 3mo ago

What's the actual verdict on who reported it? The article is writing as if Amazon did a complex analysis and then reported it. But the latest reporting id read was it was not a jailbreak, and reported by the ceo (not the old technical CEO btw, the new bizdev guy)

matheusmoreira 3mo ago

> In my opinion, they mostly imagined these regulations applying to other people, especially open source projects, academics and smaller companies. Now that they are being subjected to the exact sort of regulation they have proposed, they do not like it. > I think all of this was extremely irresponsible of them, and I feel a good amount of schadenfreude that the leopard ate their face first. Can't say I disagree. Hope this costs them many, many billions.

ergonaught 3mo ago

A government sign off on release potentially reduces liability/exposure if the models can do what it says on the box. I’m sure Anthro wants this applied to everyone and not only them, but there is a potential benefit to them.

zmmmmm 3mo ago

I think it's a near universal phenomenon that people with extraordinary amounts of power become victims of their own hubris. Once you get sufficiently decoupled from the consequences of your own actions, it is near impossible to tether yourself to a calibrated sense of reality. So I genuinely think that Amodei thought here that he was building a moat - set a very high bar for safety at exactly the line Anthropic but nobody else meets, and then declare anything less to be too unsafe to be allowed. That would put a permanent halt to open models, Chinese models and throw a significant barrier in front of competitors - if OpenAI is about to release something competitive with Mythos, they would have to immediately double back and implement at least equivalent safeguards. It might cost them months at the most critical juncture in Anthropic's history, when they are filing for IPO. Having said this, I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their own model being restricted. They probably still see it as a win because it acts as a strong endorsement of them as the market leader and the model as the most powerful available model. So I think both things are true, but we are in the "plan B" scenario now rather than "plan A".

matheusmoreira 3mo ago
> I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their own model being restricted. Doubt. Had they foreseen this, they would have started verifying the identity of their customers. That would have allowed them to keep their US customers when the US government banned foreign persons from accessing Fable. Since they were forced to turn off Fable for everyone, it follows that they were not prepared for that possibility at all.
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  The big problem Anthropic faces isn't implementing a KYC workflow, but the fact that many if not most of their own employees are no longer allowed to work on Fable/Mythos.
  - dannyw 3mo ago
    Also their API customers and downstream customers (e.g. Cursor users) would also need similar infra, and probably a decent amount of users would just choose another model that doesn't require ID & an immigration status check. And API is much more profitable (relatively) than subscribers for them.

aetch 3mo ago

Yes, maybe don’t say your product is so good that the customer can’t use it.

vld_chk 3mo ago

In all such discussions, it is interesting to track the tipping point at which public perception of Anthropic shifted. In my mind, as recently as February, Anthropic was considered by far “the best” company on the planet, with an insane fanbase and praise left, right, and centre. The story around the DoD contract solidified them in the public eye as “the hero the city deserved.” Then they fell into a classic monetisation trap. Unable to sustain growth at such a discount, they started nerfing models, removing caching, and doubling costs per token to make any money here. The lack of transparency in that process cost them public perception. By early May, all the charm of the magical, ethical super-company was gone. The entire campaign around the Mythos release, intentional or not, landed on top of that new narrative and didn’t play well for them. What is interesting to me here is the realisation that a good chunk of the hate the company received came simply because of their most recent hostile, for-profit actions. Had it happened in March, HN and the public reaction would have been vastly different. It took them just two months of “bad actions” to ruin quite a good margin of the public praise they so desperately needed now.

tensility 3mo ago

It's all interesting advertising / news; however, why does it have to constantly cost me five precious vertical lines of text worth of screen real estate in Claude Code that apparently can't be dismissed? FFS

thelonelyborg 3mo ago

the whole Anthropic is philanthropic will go the way of the buffalo as soon as they IPO

dualvariable 3mo ago

I tend to think this is all just PR and hype, baking in the idea that Fable/Mythos is so good that it attracted all these regulations and controls. So you need to spend >$20k per developer per month, or you'll fall behind. Don't try to get by on Opus, you need to really open that wallet up...

fwipsy 3mo ago
Most people at my company default to Opus 4.6. I personally use Sonnet for a lot of stuff.

zoogeny 3mo ago

I think the big lesson of this that hasn't yet been learned: it literally doesn't matter how moral Amodei or anyone else is at Anthropic. When push comes to shove, the US government can step in and take it away. They will either play ball with the US government on the US government's terms or they will be replaced or destroyed. It is a misconception for them to believe they can dictate the terms of this technology.

aforwardslash 3mo ago

Yes, they did. And the motivation is quite simple: money. Having the US control export your flagship model is the ultimate stamp approval in the AI race. All headliners are american, but one us too poweful to be made available. It just reads like if someone was riding an IPO. It is also, paradoxically, a wink to the 90's. But we're not in the 90's, and the cat is out of the box, and in 6-12 months everyone else will be at this tier. This is, clearly, an attempt to boost a model that isnt that revolutionary. I used Fable, and for my work, its mostly a waste of tokens. It seems a bit better than Opus 4.8 - but 4.8 the past week(s) has actually been top knotch; so lets make it a "myth" and have secops tell stories about it, so everyone will pay when the time comes; will you, ceo/cto, allow your company to fall behind? Of course not. You will pay. For modest results, apparently, but the hype is there.

furyofantares 3mo ago

This is a terrible take. Dario obviously did not mean any old 3rd party should be able to provoke the government to shut down a model by insinuations in the directions of the given concerns. He rather obviously is asking to establish a 3rd party specifically for this task, and to establish guidelines relating to the given concerns, and to establish guidelines for government actions based on the evaluation by the 3rd party.

kordlessagain 3mo ago

Regardless of whether they asked for it or not is irrelevant. That they released a product and encouraged use of it, then had to walk it back and now we're likely looking at proving we are US citizens to them to use it - if it returns at all - is insanity in action.

sothatsit 3mo ago

Would the US government have slapped Anthropic with this export control if Anthropic never fearmonger'ed about Mythos? I think the answer is very likely no. But is this the type of regulation Anthropic has been asking for? Not at all. This is a failure of Anthropic's politicking, and a warning that they need to be more careful with their communication in the future. If they truly want constructive regulations because of their fears about AI, they will need to repair their relationship with the administration, and it is still unclear to me how they plan to do that.

groan 3mo ago

Waiting for the next hot take from Ed Citroën.

deleted 3mo ago

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pu_pe 3mo ago

The Amodei quote they use is illuminating: "The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. This power must be scoped to the above four specific risks and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions." The article uses this as a gotcha, but I think there is nuance here. Amazon is a competitor, not an officially appointed third-party that can assess anything. And while Amodei says government oversight is needed, I think it's fair to say we would all expect something more rigorous and neutral than getting a phone call on a Friday based on vibes.

sam_lowry_ 3mo ago

Everyone looks bad in this story: Anthropic for lying too much and for too long about their capabilities US Government for taking these marketing stunts for ground truth EU for freaking out about its Digital Sovereignty over US companies, as if it had it before.

classified 3mo ago

Antithetical to Betteridge's law of headlines: Yes. I doubt the outcome is what they had in mind, but still. Be careful what you wish for.