The damage is done. You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model. Especially not with the current crew in charge.
Now whether AI tech is in the same league as say Nuclear tech and therefore by any reasonable standard should be regulated is a different question.
We hit the slippery slope on a random day in June 2026 and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Any exec or manager that puts load bearing weight on top of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/AmericanCorp frontier model deserves the stress.
Wouldn’t you just have fallbacks? Today’s frontier models are just better than the other models, they don’t really have a ton of entirely unique abilities that can’t be replicated with more time and effort.
So you use the frontier model, then when you can’t you accept things are less efficient. The alternative (right now) is to be less efficient all the time, I don’t see any advantage to that.
I'm a small software business owner in Europe. I have to assume my competition is willing to pay for any business advantage they can get. And so I also have to pay for the SOTA model, whatever it is.
The good news (for you and most everyone other than the current leading AI companies), the gap between the SOTA and the near-frontiers is getting smaller every week or two. The leading Chinese models are only a few months behind now (GLM 5.2 tickles the tail of GPT 5.3 or 5.4 and Opus 4.6, according to benchmarks and the vibes among heavy users who've spent some time with it), where they were a couple of years behind a year ago.
This x 10 . I don’t understand how people are saying you can’t use LLMs to get crazy productivity gains. If you can’t write quality code with LLMs at ludicrous speed, you’re holding it wrong. You will have occasional bad days and regressions. But overall you’re still going to be able to 4x your progress.
I wonder if the people getting 10x productivity gains are spending less time on HN and more times tending to their agents. Personally I now spend so much time productively arguing with agents that it feels like an utter waste of effort arguing with humans, if people can't see the value in LLMs by now I'm not sure what I could say to change their minds.
do you think your current operation and niche is so optimized that not using Fable would put you out of business? Or is this a hope that using Fable will allow you to stay in business?
Nonsense. Do you buy state of the art pens, pencils, printers, paper, computers, disks, etc.? No. You buy whatever is the best value for the case at hand. That’s often not the SOTA option.
But if the job requires the best intelligence you can get with an LLM, then you use that.
Taking as an assumption that the quality of your product is a function of the quality of the inference you are using: if you use an inferior model because "what if it gets export controlled again" and your competitors don't, then your competitors are likely to win.
If you don't need frontier models for you job then this is all moot, but the thread started with
> You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model
Which is silly. HN likes to roleplay bringing everythgin "business critical" in house because sometimes vendors mess up. Self host, don't use the cloud, run open models locally, built redundant supply chains in case of another covid, etc etc. Sometimes the risk is real, but most of the time the risk is rare and the cost of an interruption event is less than the cost of bringing everything in house or using lower quality vendors "just in case"
This won't age well. You just need to code in a way that has fallbacks. Whether that is to older models, different companies. It's going to be a commodity (if it isn't already).
Of course Anthropic is still relevant, but people have realized they’re not special, and between this and the ID verification thing, they’ve given up a ton of their relevance vs a month ago.
I bought a GLM 1 year subscription and changed my environment variables to use Claude Code... yep the same one that is using stegonography to send details about users to the model. China knows where I live, I'm not getting ripped off or rug pulled on their models either.
That is part of why downvotes exist. They also exist for personal attacks, off topic tangents, posts that don't make sense, trolling, advertisements, AI generated content, and other such things we don't want to see here.
But "downvote for disagreement" is a legitimate use. I personally tried to tell someone that it wasn't, and I got corrected by dang.
Tom Brown
Chief Compute Officer
Anthropic
548 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94104
Dear Mr. Brown:
Since the issuance of my previous letters, dated June 12, 2026 and June 26, 2026, Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address
the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
In light of these actions and commitments, as well as the Bureau of Industry and Security's evaluation of the diversion risks now presented by Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, the controls in the June 12 letter are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.
Commerce reserves the right to reevaluate the decisions made in this letter and the necessity of reimposing a license requirement, should circumstances change or should Anthropic fail to adhere to its commitments.
If you have any questions about this letter, please contact me or the Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler, at (202) 255-1864.
You're suggesting a for-profit company both hobbled it's own product and is actively lying about doing so. The only way that's true is if the Trump admin has crawled all the way up Anthropic's ass. But by all accounts, this is just another 10% effort by Trump and friends.
I don't think this is the case just because of the 'fallback' method they described, where suspicious requests are routed to Opus 4.8. If the model was degraded for certain categories of knowledge, then they'd probably be fine letting the model answer to it. IMO, of course
Either way, I do hope they lift those draconian bans. Using the model was a terrible experience because of the constant downgrades. I didn't manage to harden my own projects before Fable got banned.
are export controls the right thing ? Probably not.
but the american economy is over-exposed on "A.I" - the capital expenditure, while the Chinese are proving you don't need to spend tons of capital to get close to the frontier.
the Chinese have better building capacity & cheaper energy. that means the market has to correct at some point.
It's a little too later for export controls. Chinese models have made massive gains through legitimate research but also being trained on billions of tokens from Claude/GPT. The politicians have no idea how to stop that from happening so they pull the only lever they know.
It's ridiculous, but I challenge that it "leaves everything worse". Your first sentence said nothing changed. They're creating churn, and it's annoying, but most of what they do, like this, just gets reversed. Sure, a few people on the internet will freak out and yell, but Fable comes back tomorrow and we'll all be using it going forward.
Honestly, this pressure test has been pretty interesting - there are now a bunch of really good organizing efforts to harden institutions we didn't realize were too easily damaged by the executive. Because a lot of this is procedural protection, nobody really notices it except the people working on it, so a lot of it is happening already, like the ECRA, and reporting requirements around the Impoundment Control Act.
I shudder to think what the definition of "malicious activity" is that they will be reporting to the government. Speech has been severely chilled the last couple of years.
It's nice that the restriction is going to get lifted but I hope this doesn't make anyone complacent that their coding work is going to be scrutinized by the US government, with AI, when using these models.
My only hope is that they don't overdo the guardrails. Claude's been one of the best coding models, and it'd be nice if it stayed that way for real and legitimate developer workflows.
I just finished reading Incorruptible and a central theme (Anthropic is a case study) is that trust is singularly the most important currency a business has. The past few weeks have done wonders for Anthropic’s marketing but just as much if not more damage to the trust factor. Businesses will continue to use Anthropic because it’s the default and accessible where it matters (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake, etc). But the trust factor has dropped. It’ll be interesting to see if they can turn the tide. Maybe Fable will be too awesome for people to care about the past few weeks?
Most people don't care about trust anymore, we live in a low trust society where this is to be expected. People gladly line up to be poisoned by fast food restaurants and trade 1/3 of their life for pieces of paper on a daily basis.
The classic chaotic governance model and creation of an uncertain business environment by the Trump admin in the most important industry for the US economy.
If this is the most important industry for the US economy, the US is screwed. and .... Hopefully you're correct.
In past Empires kings bet their entire nations future on the words of soothsayers , people who said they could predict the future. It seems like Machine Learning engineers are the magicians of Empire of the modern age.
Fable was (is) a major leap forward for my development tasks. The quality of the model compared to Opus 4.8 (when I last used it before the ban hammer) was night and day. Fable single-shotting complex and complete applications was a beautiful thing and I can't wait to get back to developing with it.
>Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
ah, I see. so, Chinese models are getting banned soon.
Hey it's a perfectly pro-business environment as long as your business kisses the ring vigorously and continuously with perpetually escalating intensity.
Weren't they already doing that since the beginning? Fable released with a data retention policy. I assumed US government surveillance was the reason for this.
Now whether AI tech is in the same league as say Nuclear tech and therefore by any reasonable standard should be regulated is a different question.
We hit the slippery slope on a random day in June 2026 and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Any exec or manager that puts load bearing weight on top of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/AmericanCorp frontier model deserves the stress.
So you use the frontier model, then when you can’t you accept things are less efficient. The alternative (right now) is to be less efficient all the time, I don’t see any advantage to that.
Yes you use the right tool for the job.
But if the job requires the best intelligence you can get with an LLM, then you use that.
Taking as an assumption that the quality of your product is a function of the quality of the inference you are using: if you use an inferior model because "what if it gets export controlled again" and your competitors don't, then your competitors are likely to win.
If you don't need frontier models for you job then this is all moot, but the thread started with
> You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model
Which is silly. HN likes to roleplay bringing everythgin "business critical" in house because sometimes vendors mess up. Self host, don't use the cloud, run open models locally, built redundant supply chains in case of another covid, etc etc. Sometimes the risk is real, but most of the time the risk is rare and the cost of an interruption event is less than the cost of bringing everything in house or using lower quality vendors "just in case"
Yes 1000%, please, all my European competition please don't use mythos whatever you do it's total USA trash and the Chinese models work better anyway.
I think Europe and Canada are just happy not to be frozen out of AI access completely at this point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709670
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48721903
Of course Anthropic is still relevant, but people have realized they’re not special, and between this and the ID verification thing, they’ve given up a ton of their relevance vs a month ago.
But "downvote for disagreement" is a legitimate use. I personally tried to tell someone that it wasn't, and I got corrected by dang.
Source: https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2072103733715194048?s=20
-------
June 30, 2026
Tom Brown Chief Compute Officer Anthropic 548 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94104
Dear Mr. Brown:
Since the issuance of my previous letters, dated June 12, 2026 and June 26, 2026, Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
In light of these actions and commitments, as well as the Bureau of Industry and Security's evaluation of the diversion risks now presented by Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, the controls in the June 12 letter are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.
Commerce reserves the right to reevaluate the decisions made in this letter and the necessity of reimposing a license requirement, should circumstances change or should Anthropic fail to adhere to its commitments.
If you have any questions about this letter, please contact me or the Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler, at (202) 255-1864.
Sincerely,
Howard W. Lutnick
------
https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/
I assume they did something to the model itself.
Either way, I do hope they lift those draconian bans. Using the model was a terrible experience because of the constant downgrades. I didn't manage to harden my own projects before Fable got banned.
https://archive.is/9k7qt#selection-2001.41-2001.49 https://archive.is/dybOE
are export controls the right thing ? Probably not.
but the american economy is over-exposed on "A.I" - the capital expenditure, while the Chinese are proving you don't need to spend tons of capital to get close to the frontier.
the Chinese have better building capacity & cheaper energy. that means the market has to correct at some point.
"Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models" LOL, this was already happening.
This clown car administration just keeps making shit up and then backpedalling in a way that just leaves everything worse.
Honestly, this pressure test has been pretty interesting - there are now a bunch of really good organizing efforts to harden institutions we didn't realize were too easily damaged by the executive. Because a lot of this is procedural protection, nobody really notices it except the people working on it, so a lot of it is happening already, like the ECRA, and reporting requirements around the Impoundment Control Act.
We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.
https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2072106151890809341?s=46
It's nice that the restriction is going to get lifted but I hope this doesn't make anyone complacent that their coding work is going to be scrutinized by the US government, with AI, when using these models.
>We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
>We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.
From Anthropic on Twitter
In past Empires kings bet their entire nations future on the words of soothsayers , people who said they could predict the future. It seems like Machine Learning engineers are the magicians of Empire of the modern age.
Depends on how economically useful AI turns out to be. It will be useful, but it needs to be VERY useful for the current valuations.
>In past Empires kings bet their entire nations future on the words of soothsayers
I think AI's rise is much closer to the story of factory machines and computers than to soothsayers and emperors.
https://archive.is/HSIxa
https://archive.is/BbxA1
https://megalodon.jp/2026-0701-0918-51/https://x.com:443/Ant...
All aboard the hype train!
ah, I see. so, Chinese models are getting banned soon.
On a lark, I asked Claude to compare AI to the wild west a while ago. It raised three points of similarity:
- Land-grab economics
- Lack of regulation
- Changing social and professional attitudes.
Whatever it is, it's a wild ride regardless.
I'm sure many teams couldn't do their best work because Claude Fable 5 was unavailable.
I wonder what their hiring pages look like now, are they starting to remove job postings?
I'm absolutely fascinated.