Is regulation unregulated in the US? As in it’s missing consistency and transparency. Beyond Anthropic, the US signals to the world that depending and using American solutions is high risk. Is that what the US government desires? The digital battleground across regions is on the rise. I don’t see us as the US on the right path.
In the US regulation is, in theory, regulated by Congress, which passes laws granting regulation powers to the federal agencies. Congress and the laws it passes are, in theory, regulated by the Constitution, and interpretation thereof by the Supreme Court.
> 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.
You can be annoyed by a person or company without wanting the federal government of the United States to grind a personal axe against that person or company.
What you're advocating for here is banana republic governance. It's bad.
During the Obama administration, when solar companies were subsidized, the refrain was that "government was picking winners and losers". But now, there's a cut and dry case of one company getting targeted by the administration. Either ban all the powerful models or ban none of them.
Any company building this kind of tech should have a separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country.
Any government work can be done via MOU with a US subsidiary staffed by Americans.
This kind of capricious, unexplained control is bullsh*t.
I’m not saying that I want companies to have to go offshore or that that would be a good thing. Just that you’ve got no leverage if your corporate structure can be destroyed on a whim. This goes for any company reliant on a whimsical executive branch.
While there could still be fights over the technology and the company, a tech provider would still be able to serve other customers and have more leverage.
Without going that far, send a few people a couple hours North instead and serve international customers from Canadian data centers. As far as I understand, it is only blocked in the US, right?
> Any company building this kind of tech should have a separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country.
Like where? How about Cuba? Where Guantanamo is, where we put terrorists because we don't want them to be subject to US laws (or more specifically, we don't want ourselves to be subject to those laws when we are dealing with said terrorists). How about no.
International law has only as much power as the biggest military willing to enforce it. Hiding on some little island is not at all a good strategy for trying to evade the US government.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone following the news.
Trump has said broadcasters who allow criticism of him should lose their FCC broadcast licenses [1], demanded that "Bondi Move Now" to prosecute foes, ordered DOJ investigation of two first-term administration aides who criticized him.
Trump is doing this to members of congress (threat of primarying by Trump and Musk), judges (threat of impeachment and even the threat of eliminating federal courts that oppose him), law firms (threat of canceling federal contracts and security clearances), press and media (threat of banning from White House press pool, launching FCC investigations), etc. This atmosphere of fear and intimidation — of pretty much everyone — is the norm for this administration.
Frankly, they've been asking for the AI industry to be regulated. They just didn't expect it would be just them. Although I'm going to say here now that I think this is going to have a broader ripple effect all the way down to open source and foreign countries developed models.
Anthropic employees are right, but maybe this is for good. It certainly has opened my eyes.
I can’t rely on using a technology that the US administration can ban at will.
IMO without getting into personal thoughts about how capable the current US administration is, last Friday move sent a very powerful signal to the industry.
Also I don’t think China releasing so many good models, capable to compete with Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, all at once, is a coincidence.
Are you saying that you think the US government is unpredictable and arbitrary, but that the People’s Republic of China is not? Do you remember all the PRoC’s strange and sudden policy shifts (e.g. steel, real estate, education, football/soccer, etc.)?
It seems to me that in the case of AI (as with many other modern technologies), you rely on vendor/creator support and updates to stay relevant, so the ‘next’ model matters more than the current one, and we have no idea whose next model will be open (and whose won’t).
Not OP and I wholly agree, but you can’t dismiss the fact that they are releasing those weights. Their agenda is quite obviously to make Anthropic and OpenAI CFOs sweat bullets, but it isn’t our problem as AI consumers, right?
Yes, I agree that it is possible that the 'open source model providers' are doing the equivalent of 'dumping' in an attempt to establish a dominant market position, or at least a foot-hold. I am generally a skeptic when it comes to the effectiveness of 'dumping' as a long-term strategy (as the producer tends to hemorrhage consumers when it increases prices), but some may see it as problematic.
> And Trump showed us he is willing to take it out whenever he wants.
Yes, the actions of this administration on Friday should have sent shockwaves through the market - a market that's currently "high on AI". How do you get a return on all of that AI investment if the administration can jump in at any time and say "Nope, you can't use this very advanced model!"? (the Iran "deal" over the weekend, I think helped cushion that blow, but eventually it's going to sink in)
The problem is there’s a real wall on the vram side. While fused main memory is ok the inference speeds on larger models are impractical. With vram on a GPU the machine class, power requirement, GPU costs, and other factors put them out of most people’s reach. Cloud GPUs require a second job to keep available and hot. What closed providers offer is packing and scale advantages as well as infrastructure. The scaling laws here aren’t the same as Moore’s law - in fact they predict more required hardware and more scale over time. Moore’s laws isn’t keeping up with expanded needs and the ability to fab and produce at scale the specific things that weren’t needed a few years ago are lagging. So it’s not a 6-8 month lag; it’s a lag that will be induced by hardware scarcity and an ever increasing lag until something fundamentally changes with matmul.
You can run the Chinese models on your infra, most are open weights. Not saying it’s out of the goodness of their heart, but the fact is, they’re open.
Unfortunately saying it in the press is going to make it even harder for them in the current environment. I know this administration gets non-trivial support from the valley, but what to most outsiders seems like "targeting businesses based on personal vibes" is going to do long-term harm to the U.S.
I hope those who represent technology in government, especially the AI head David Sacks are giving this due consideration.
One wonders if this might be a net positive for the world if Anthropic is forced to terminate it's non-US citizen employees.
I would hope they return to their home countries with their expertise and start or join new competing frontier labs, similar to how Taiwan's homegrown semiconductor industry arose from US companies enforcing a bamboo ceiling on their Asian engineers. Taiwan was able to repatriate their nationals and make incredible compounding leaps in the semiconductor industry, to the loss and chagrin of the US. [1]
I can't imagine how you'd restrict access to these models to USA nationals only. Every company in the USA would have to verify the id of every employee's model use. What do you do about programmatic AI workflows? How does Anthropic even continue to function internally right now on this Mythos and the future model development?
Nothing of value is lost for Europe because we mostly work with natural intelligence. The malinvestment bubble happens in the US, and hardware prices will come down.
We're all dependent on Taiwan but others also depend on ASML which is located in Europe. Available AI services are good enough, and we sit and watch while US leadership and population is beta testing AI mass surveillance for us.
In terms of AI-based warfare Ukraine is very much ahead and they are also European for which we are very thankful.
So feel free to keep your AI scene and AI hustlers in the US, we don't need them.
I mean obviously they're correct but also the complaints of the administration aren't totally without basis.
- They're obviously being targeted politically because they refuse to kiss the ring, vibes, whatever you want to call it.
- They're also justifiably being scrutinized because they just spent like 3 months telling everyone that Mythos is a nuclear bomb and telling the government to fuck off as they drip fed access to a bunch of random corporations.
Yes. It's true that the pretext is not entirely without merit. But it's also true that it's a pretext.
But in cases like this, the pretext shouldn't be taken too seriously. Because they would have just found another one. It isn't actually particularly important that it is plausible, it's more like a happy coincidence.
The amount of self owning that is happening to AI companies is crazy.
I don't understand why their marketing department/execs can't see the conflict between claiming AI is going to take all jobs, that the model is super dangerous and AI hate among the general public, increased governmental oversight.
Anthropic is guilty of the latter but the former applies to most of these AI companies.
As far as I can tell, much of Anthropic genuinely believes that someone will build an AI in the next 3-20 years that's significantly smarter than any human alive. Sounds wild, but a lot of their people have been saying this since 2018 or even earlier. I think they're true believers. Furthermore, they believe that building such an AI would be dangerous.
So their plan is:
1. We can't stop other people from building something dangerous.
2. But we can get there first.
3. If we build it, it has maybe a 15% chance of killing everyone alive. (I think that's a number I've seen Dario use before, but I may be wrong.) If OpenAI or China build it, the odds would be worse.
Obviously, if Anthropic is actually correct about (1) and (3), then nobody should allowed to build frontier AI.
People find it really hard to believe that (a) anyone believes in the possibility of dangerous AI in our lifetimes, and (b) that someone could believe what Anthropic seems to believe and then still go ahead and gamble with everyone's lives anyway.
To me they are genuinely trying to walk a tough line - they legitimately believe that they need to warn the public and make a lot of noise so society can try to adapt to this technology. OTOH no adaption (good or bad) can take place if the models themselves are so restricted as to be inaccessible, or if the powers that be don't understand it well enough to put the right policy/laws in place.
I think they were totally correct in spirit. But RE: details about them giving access to an SK corp with possible Chinese ties. Of course that raises eyebrows in the USG, justifiably. Sloppy work from Anthropic.
Genuinely, if the policy is that this capability is too dangerous to be in private hands, and thus all "frontier" labs must be publicly owned, that would be a defensible policy (that I would disagree with). But picking and choosing preferred companies like this is just indefensible gangster stuff.
> Workers at the artificial intelligence company have been puzzled and increasingly concerned by the administration’s move to limit their latest A.I. models.
There is no way any employees at anthropic are this dumb.
It can both be true that models at Fable capability level are national security concerns while Anthropic is being hypocritical.
If the Trump admin is also willing to apply the same scrutiny to GPT-5.6 and other Fable-level models, I think it is a good thing. But given the admin's history with Anthropic (such as declaring it a supply chain risk while ignoring Chinese labs), there is some smell of targeting.
Yes, obviously. People really need to update their priors on how the US operates now. Laws are out, loyalty is in. There is an extraordinarily powerful unitary executive in whom the will of the people resides and it is the job of the government and society to work towards the will of this powerful executive. There are no checks or balances or alternative centres of power (civil, political, clerical, etc) allowed.
This particular executive loves money, praise, and submission. When Anthropic submits (eg agreeing to whatever the DoD demands), issues public praise and makes appropriate donations (eg ballroom, memecoin, etc), then they can do as they please.
Students of history will find this new MO very familiar and very depressing.
The most depressing part is how few people are students of basic civics, history and political science. We truly live amongst house cats that don’t know how good they have it and have begun dismantling the very house that they’ve lived properously in for so long. (Obviously not including historically and currently marginalized etc)
People don't need to update their priors to accept that this is the new way, they need to recognize the reality of the current situation and also its aberrance.
If you manage the corner coffeeshop, and the city health director calls with an urgent matter, you take the call and assure them you'll take care of it.
They were asking for regulation. They were not asking to be singled out and prevented from releasing newer models while everybody else keeps going as usual.
Based on the reasoning for blocking Fable, every current model should be blocked. GPT 5.5 is similarly strong and has fewer guardrails, for example.
Yes, most likely, but not in this form, obviously. They want open weight models regulated for regulatory capture, and I'd assume they want an actually documented framework applied equally across all labs.
If GPT5.5 has the same capabilities Fable did, then for consistency sake, it should have also been subject to this ban.
Regulate or not regulate, but the government should not pick winners and losers.
I can't see into their heads, and I also don't think it matters whether they were making a good-faith argument or lying through their teeth. The fact remains that what is currently happening is not what Anthropic asked for.
That's hilarious. They aren't even wrong, but they asked for this. They accuse Trump of targeting them? I accuse Anthropic of targeting open source models with outright banishment in order to solidify its own economic position. They tried some "enlightened" variation of regulatory capture, but didn't dance to Trump's tune, so Trump gave them the regulation they wanted so much.
Anthropic declares: "Mythos is too dangerous too release to the public"
Proceeds to release Mythos plus safety guardrails as Fable.
Amazon removes guardrails from Fable, getting access to Mythos.
Government takes Anthropic's word for it and tells them to pull it until the guardrails can't be removed. They refuse. Government forces them.
> Amazon removes guardrails from Fable, getting access to Mythos.
This doesn't seem like an accurate description to me. I think something like "Amazon demonstrates a jailbreak of one class of Fable guardrails" would be a more accurate description.
It doesn't even really mess up your narrative to state it accurately, but your choice of a more hyperbolic statement brings into question the good faith of the narrative you're painting.
We really don't know for sure exactly what Amazon did. They're being quiet, the other parties aren't trustworthy, and the reporters mostly don't know what they're talking about.
Was Fable really the full Mythos model but with guardrails added? I had assumed Fable had a reduced parameter count or something, like a Sonnet to an Opus. Interesting!
What? I personally experienced Fable outright refuse to do ANY security-related tasks, including hardening code or modifying security-related features. That was a guardrail. It was bypassed.
Anthropic themselves specifically called them safeguards. [1]
"When Fable’s classifiers detect a request related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation, the response is automatically handled by Claude Opus 4.8 instead"
This is exactly what was bypassed. They got Fable to work on security topics.
What? Fable was designed to refuse to work on security issues, as Anthropic specifically confirmed. How is forcing Fable to work on things behind guardrails not breaking a guardrail?
This is Anthropic's own claim. They were very specific. Have you read their own claims?
... it isn't? What word would you use for a government policy that controls the behavior of a private company? The word for that kind of policy is "regulation".
> Amazon removes guardrails from Fable, getting access to Mythos.
Amazon did not remove any "guardrails" from Fable. They created a fake, obviously insecure program. And apparently their prompt was exactly, "Fix this code." And Fable fixed the bugs.
This is something that even dinky local Chinese models running on a high-end gaming GPU can often do. Certainly Opus, GPT 5.5 and Gemini can all do this. And any high-end Chinese "near-frontier" model can do this, too.
But either (1) the administration is too clueless to know most models can do this, (2) Trump wants to be paid a bribe, (3) someone thinks Anthropic is "woke" and should therefore be destroyed by the power of the state, or possibly, if you're really cynical, (4) maybe the NSA SIGINT wants access to Mythos so they can break into everyone's computers, but they don't want you to have a model good enough to keep them out. Take your pick, I guess.
Anyway, apparently we don't do free markets or rule of law in the United States any more?
> "We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology," he said.
The government: "We're restricting its usage to US citizens only"
I mean, yes, correct, literally "not like that" is the complaint. Government arbitrarily picking and choosing what's allowed in order to force everyone to curry favor is very different from an general well-documented regulatory framework. It is not weird for someone who favors the latter to call foul at the former.
Their CEO was asking for it. Their whole marketing angle is their model is so powerful and dangerous.
Someone showed the government how the powerful and dangerous features can be unlocked with a 'fix bugs' prompt then it when and did exactly what their CEO asked for.
Where is the favoritism? Did other CEOs come out and say their models are crazy dangerous? Dario asked for this behavior and he got it. I guess he hoped to kneecap Deepseek or others. That's how companies operate, once they are big enough they want all the regulations because they know they can navigate them and others catching up may not be able to. Their own fear mongering around this demand backfired.
Anthropic CEO https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...
https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...
Goverment: ...
Anthropic CEO: NO, NO, NO NOT LIKE THIS.
He told the world about 20 months ago that all software developers would be gone in 12 months. Why has he not fired all Anthropic Devs yet?
What you're advocating for here is banana republic governance. It's bad.
I'm sure it says something that you think makes this a slam-dunk rebuttal, but you should fix your link first.
Edit: Saw the link. I was right. Nothing in that link makes a difference.
Any government work can be done via MOU with a US subsidiary staffed by Americans.
This kind of capricious, unexplained control is bullsh*t.
I’m not saying that I want companies to have to go offshore or that that would be a good thing. Just that you’ve got no leverage if your corporate structure can be destroyed on a whim. This goes for any company reliant on a whimsical executive branch.
While there could still be fights over the technology and the company, a tech provider would still be able to serve other customers and have more leverage.
Like where? How about Cuba? Where Guantanamo is, where we put terrorists because we don't want them to be subject to US laws (or more specifically, we don't want ourselves to be subject to those laws when we are dealing with said terrorists). How about no.
International law has only as much power as the biggest military willing to enforce it. Hiding on some little island is not at all a good strategy for trying to evade the US government.
Trump has said broadcasters who allow criticism of him should lose their FCC broadcast licenses [1], demanded that "Bondi Move Now" to prosecute foes, ordered DOJ investigation of two first-term administration aides who criticized him.
Trump is doing this to members of congress (threat of primarying by Trump and Musk), judges (threat of impeachment and even the threat of eliminating federal courts that oppose him), law firms (threat of canceling federal contracts and security clearances), press and media (threat of banning from White House press pool, launching FCC investigations), etc. This atmosphere of fear and intimidation — of pretty much everyone — is the norm for this administration.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/us/politics/trump-fcc-lic...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/trump-justice...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/09/donald-trump-retrib...
I can’t rely on using a technology that the US administration can ban at will.
IMO without getting into personal thoughts about how capable the current US administration is, last Friday move sent a very powerful signal to the industry.
Also I don’t think China releasing so many good models, capable to compete with Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, all at once, is a coincidence.
It seems to me that in the case of AI (as with many other modern technologies), you rely on vendor/creator support and updates to stay relevant, so the ‘next’ model matters more than the current one, and we have no idea whose next model will be open (and whose won’t).
Why not both?
That seems the crux of the state we're currently in; what daylight there was between the two is quickly fading.
I didn't realize I could download a Shanghai apartment.
I wholeheartedly agree with what you said about China.
But I can’t shrug off the fact that fable was taken down within minutes for reasons that are childish and petty.
I am sorry but I can’t use any US AI if I don’t have the guarantee that I will be able to use it tomorrow.
And Trump showed us he is willing to take it out whenever he wants.
An opensource model on the contrary, I can host myself, or use a miriad of providers, mostly non chinese.
Yes, the actions of this administration on Friday should have sent shockwaves through the market - a market that's currently "high on AI". How do you get a return on all of that AI investment if the administration can jump in at any time and say "Nope, you can't use this very advanced model!"? (the Iran "deal" over the weekend, I think helped cushion that blow, but eventually it's going to sink in)
The latest open models are so good it’s worth the 6-8 months delayed capabilities. At least for coding
Fable was around 10x GPT5 pricing and 100x Chinese models pricing, was it really 100x better? I Don't think so.
If you want a personal story, I just solved a complicated coding problem with Kimi 2.7 that GPT 5.4 failed with.
And you think China will not do the same thing if their models ever become genuinely frontier-level?
What’s intolerable is having a tool that’s subject to this risk.
So open models it is
I hope those who represent technology in government, especially the AI head David Sacks are giving this due consideration.
I would hope they return to their home countries with their expertise and start or join new competing frontier labs, similar to how Taiwan's homegrown semiconductor industry arose from US companies enforcing a bamboo ceiling on their Asian engineers. Taiwan was able to repatriate their nationals and make incredible compounding leaps in the semiconductor industry, to the loss and chagrin of the US. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/07/1127595393/taiwan-miracle-sem...
We're all dependent on Taiwan but others also depend on ASML which is located in Europe. Available AI services are good enough, and we sit and watch while US leadership and population is beta testing AI mass surveillance for us.
In terms of AI-based warfare Ukraine is very much ahead and they are also European for which we are very thankful.
So feel free to keep your AI scene and AI hustlers in the US, we don't need them.
- They're obviously being targeted politically because they refuse to kiss the ring, vibes, whatever you want to call it.
- They're also justifiably being scrutinized because they just spent like 3 months telling everyone that Mythos is a nuclear bomb and telling the government to fuck off as they drip fed access to a bunch of random corporations.
But in cases like this, the pretext shouldn't be taken too seriously. Because they would have just found another one. It isn't actually particularly important that it is plausible, it's more like a happy coincidence.
I don't understand why their marketing department/execs can't see the conflict between claiming AI is going to take all jobs, that the model is super dangerous and AI hate among the general public, increased governmental oversight.
Anthropic is guilty of the latter but the former applies to most of these AI companies.
So their plan is:
1. We can't stop other people from building something dangerous.
2. But we can get there first.
3. If we build it, it has maybe a 15% chance of killing everyone alive. (I think that's a number I've seen Dario use before, but I may be wrong.) If OpenAI or China build it, the odds would be worse.
Obviously, if Anthropic is actually correct about (1) and (3), then nobody should allowed to build frontier AI.
People find it really hard to believe that (a) anyone believes in the possibility of dangerous AI in our lifetimes, and (b) that someone could believe what Anthropic seems to believe and then still go ahead and gamble with everyone's lives anyway.
This has some insight in my many cyber security professionals want Fable/Mythos open.
They're not simply petty; instead, they're vindictive, retaliatory, and vengeful.
There is no way any employees at anthropic are this dumb.
Anthropic reaping: Hey wait a second you weren't supposed to take that seriously it was just marketing :(
If the Trump admin is also willing to apply the same scrutiny to GPT-5.6 and other Fable-level models, I think it is a good thing. But given the admin's history with Anthropic (such as declaring it a supply chain risk while ignoring Chinese labs), there is some smell of targeting.
Now they want them back on?
AI for me and not for thee?
Or just another opportunity for a petulant administration to target Anthropic for not doing what they wanted the first time?
This particular executive loves money, praise, and submission. When Anthropic submits (eg agreeing to whatever the DoD demands), issues public praise and makes appropriate donations (eg ballroom, memecoin, etc), then they can do as they please.
Students of history will find this new MO very familiar and very depressing.
Elon vs openai
Trump vs elon
Bezos vs anthropic
When movie?
How is this “targeting”? It’s literally what was requested.
Based on the reasoning for blocking Fable, every current model should be blocked. GPT 5.5 is similarly strong and has fewer guardrails, for example.
I've heard others call it a marketing ploy that AI companies keep coming back to-- the idea that "it's soooo dangerous, we have to be careful".
Yes, most likely, but not in this form, obviously. They want open weight models regulated for regulatory capture, and I'd assume they want an actually documented framework applied equally across all labs.
If GPT5.5 has the same capabilities Fable did, then for consistency sake, it should have also been subject to this ban.
Regulate or not regulate, but the government should not pick winners and losers.
This doesn't seem like an accurate description to me. I think something like "Amazon demonstrates a jailbreak of one class of Fable guardrails" would be a more accurate description.
It doesn't even really mess up your narrative to state it accurately, but your choice of a more hyperbolic statement brings into question the good faith of the narrative you're painting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552687
Anthropic themselves specifically called them safeguards. [1]
"When Fable’s classifiers detect a request related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation, the response is automatically handled by Claude Opus 4.8 instead"
This is exactly what was bypassed. They got Fable to work on security topics.
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5
This is Anthropic's own claim. They were very specific. Have you read their own claims?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552687
>noun
>the act of controlling or directing according to rule
So where is the rule? There is no rule. There is just a random order. This is not regulation.
Amazon did not remove any "guardrails" from Fable. They created a fake, obviously insecure program. And apparently their prompt was exactly, "Fix this code." And Fable fixed the bugs.
This is something that even dinky local Chinese models running on a high-end gaming GPU can often do. Certainly Opus, GPT 5.5 and Gemini can all do this. And any high-end Chinese "near-frontier" model can do this, too.
But either (1) the administration is too clueless to know most models can do this, (2) Trump wants to be paid a bribe, (3) someone thinks Anthropic is "woke" and should therefore be destroyed by the power of the state, or possibly, if you're really cynical, (4) maybe the NSA SIGINT wants access to Mythos so they can break into everyone's computers, but they don't want you to have a model good enough to keep them out. Take your pick, I guess.
Anyway, apparently we don't do free markets or rule of law in the United States any more?
https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...
> "We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology," he said.
The government: "We're restricting its usage to US citizens only"
Anthropic: "No, no, not like that! "
Their CEO was asking for it. Their whole marketing angle is their model is so powerful and dangerous.
Someone showed the government how the powerful and dangerous features can be unlocked with a 'fix bugs' prompt then it when and did exactly what their CEO asked for.
The story is: anthropic refuses to give the US give an abliterated version of Claude for their weapons system, the US gov retaliates.
You’re rooting for the mass murderers, good job
How did you figure that? Who are you talking about?