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So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in sma

So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent? And potentially more importantly: if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus, is getting this treatment, how are all the AI investments that are based on the expectation of ASI / AGI / significantly better models going to be recouped?

ncallaway 4mo ago
It seems more likely that the logical conclusion is the executive branch is mad at Anthropic, and lashing out at them with any convenient tool that they have. I suspect if OpenAI or Grok was operating at the same level they wouldn’t find themselves on the sharp end of the government stick
- blueaquilae 4mo ago
  But it was Anthropic initiative to limit the deployment to restricted groups, it's great to see the gov following their analysis. AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't?
  - thewebguyd 4mo ago
    > AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't? IF LLMs are THAT dangerous and powerful (and that's a huge if that I do not currently subscribe to), then no, no one should have access at all, there is no group of people in positions of power (government or corporate power) that I would consider "restrained"
  - ncallaway 4mo ago
    Yes, Dario Amodei definitely opened the door to this kind of attack by trying to market Mythos as being too dangerous to release.
    - svnt 4mo ago
      Which they anticipated, which is why they were flagging and dropping back to opus on anything they could even potentially be called on.
      - sh34r 4mo ago
        They should have just called it Opus 5.1 and released it like normal. All this fanfare, under this corrupt regime, after they declared you a supply chain risk… Wario has horrendously bad judgment.
        uneekname 4mo ago
        That would have been such a different HN thread. "Dang I feel a nice bump in performance here, way to go" and that would be that.
  - Computer0 4mo ago
    I would be okay with that if it actually meant that. Very restrained individuals in reality would see nothing and very unrestrained governments would have access.
  - beepbooptheory 4mo ago
    If its so "powerful" that it's this kind of issue, why does it even matter who "has it" or not? Like what does this mean to you? The super powerful, super intelligent AI is going to have arbitrary loyalty with one person or another?
- nonethewiser 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - LPisGood 4mo ago
    This government has proved time and time again it does not deserve the presumption of regularity and that it is more than capable of acting in arbitrary and capricious manner for petty reasons.
  - ncallaway 4mo ago
    Are you asking me to provide evidence that in this specific instance this is an instance of weaponization of process, or are you asking me for evidence that this particular executive has lost the benefit of the doubt when it comes to weaponization claims, or are you asking for evidence that the executive is hostile to Anthropic?
  - handoflixue 4mo ago
    Anthropic was designated a "supply chain risk" despite this (a) being an absolutely absurd classification and (b) being completely at odds with the continued usage of any Anthropic products within the US government: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-officially-arbitrarily https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-officially-arbitrari... From that, we can very reasonably conclude that the US government has a specific vendetta against Anthropic in particular, and that this vendetta has nothing to do with the technical merits of their product. To my knowledge, they have yet to drop that classification, despite heavy court opposition. Additionally: technical benchmarks suggest that the most recent ChatGPT models are within maybe 10% of Fable 5's capabilities, so this being a pure "capabilities" concern seems unlikely. Uncertainty: It's possible that we have just suddenly reached the end of public AI releases, though - if ChatGPT 5.6 also gets blocked, that would be very good evidence of a general, non-weaponized policy. Given the recent Executive Order requiring pre-release audits of frontier models, this is somewhat more likely than it was a couple weeks ago. I still think things add up to "weaponization is the most likely theory" and that one is being disingenuous to dismiss it as a reasonable possibility. But it's certainly NOT the only reasonable possibility.
- typeofhuman 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ncallaway 4mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511745
  - johnwheeler 4mo ago
    They said "seems"
  - ncallaway 4mo ago
    Are you asking me to provide evidence that in this specific instance this is an instance of weaponization of process, or are you asking me for evidence that this particular executive has lost the benefit of the doubt when it comes to weaponization claims, or are you asking for evidence that the executive is hostile to Anthropic?
- rw2 4mo ago
  Anthropic's own marketing and urban legends spawned by them is to blame too. They built up too much BS around mythos and project glasswing
  - kccqzy 4mo ago
    Marketing is never ever to blame. Remember a few months ago when the U.S. government labelled them a supply chain risk? What eventually happened was that a federal judge issued a temporary injunction while calling it a "classic First Amendment retaliation." The Constitution protects such marketing; the government is not allowed to be maddened by such marketing.
    - joshuastuden 4mo ago
      They certainly can restrict technology that is deemed to be a national security risk.
      - jrajav 4mo ago
        Not much stops them from saying it's due to national security, when it's actually due to the guy in the chair having a fit of emotions. And the current admin has a very long streak of declaring things as national emergencies when those things just so happen to be something they recently lost face on.
        peter422 4mo ago
        It is kinda amazing how quickly everybody else is to support authoritarianism if it agrees with some perceived slight of theirs. I guess that is how it always starts.
        noosphr 4mo ago
        Dario was literally asking for hardware exports to be banned using the same laws as were used to ban his model. The fascist is inside the building.
- jwitthuhn 4mo ago
  Fortunately for us all Dario literally asked for this sort of restriction on model usage so we can be certain Anthropic are not victims here.
- _heimdall 4mo ago
  Regardless of motivations for this case, I take this as a clear sign that we've reached the point where the federal government decides its within their authority to mandate this and its reasonable for them to do it. Governments don't give up power, and once there's precedence for use of that power they'll continue to do it and begin eyeing the next power they can claim.
varispeed 4mo ago
I don't know, I've been using Mythos this week quite sceptically and I found it to be incredibly dumb. For instance gave it a dialogue between 3 people and it was constantly mixing up who said what to whom, which looked like early Gemini behaviour. But latest Opus does that too. It would also make nonsensical inference about given papers and only correct itself when pointed out what it said wrong. If that is what US government fears... maybe the fear is that someone follows the dumb things the model suggests.
- zmmmmm 4mo ago
  it feels like it's mostly just tuned to up it's level of capability on long horizon tasks - stop context rot and keep persisting at all costs until a goal is done. The base intelligence does not feel much greater to me.
- hodgehog11 4mo ago
  This is a ridiculous thing to test on it. Other models are trained on that kind of thing, use those instead. Fable was designed for _really_ hard software engineering problems. Possibly large, but especially hard. For those tasks, you feel the difference immediately.
  - saberience 4mo ago
    No it wasn't, Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding. And yes, the parent poster is accurate, Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was. Stop being so AI-pilled. Codex is still a better model, and yes, for the hardest engineering problems. I use Claude for UI/GUIs and Codex for all my backend, because I have 20 years of experience of actual hard engineering, and I can see that Codex writes, cleaner code, and is far more steerable. Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive", but lines of code doesn't make a better system.
    - hodgehog11 4mo ago
      > Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding This is a forum filled with experts. Putting marketing aside, in a forum like this, it is most useful to assess models according to the toughest problems in the domain they were specifically refined on. For DeepSeek, that's math. For Claude, that's programming. Gemini and ChatGPT are generalist. Yes, you can use every model for anything you like. But Fable is a bit special, it's very expensive, and very clearly designed for particular types of tasks. > Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was. "Just as" is up for debate, but yes, all models are capable of moronic mistakes. That's not helpful information though. > Codex is still a better model You're comparing agentic workflows, which relies on a lot more than just the underlying model. It sounds like you're using it like a precision instrument, which is great! It's very different compared to my use cases though, and the ones that Fable seems to excel at. I'm using it for scientific computing, and you really, really want it to one shot a solution. It's either the right algorithm for the task, or the wrong one. So for the hardest problems, it needs to successfully implement a solution in effectively one shot. I use Codex too, but it's often too careless for the delicate tasks. If it gets it wrong, it is really hard to steer it back. You have to start from scratch. > Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive". Think you missed the mark on this one. Not really an engineer, have as much experience as you do in my job. A solution to my problems comprises few lines of code. Fable actually gets it right, first time, every time (so far), but this is with a very long prompt and a bunch of attachments. No other model has done this for me. Not shilling for Anthropic, just impressed. This isn't particularly subjective for me; it is quantitatively measurable. Don't assume everyone using AI is going to have the same experience you have, or the same types of use cases. And please don't assume that because others have different experiences that it makes them "bad". Also, Claude has always been mediocre at creative tasks. For your line of work, I would have already recommended Codex hands down.
teaearlgraycold 4mo ago
Eh, not any different than the performative encryption restrictions from decades past.
- anonzzzies 4mo ago
  But those were very easy to sidestep: proxy/vpn, download java with US encryption, and move on. That is very different with this.
  - HotHotLava 4mo ago
    How do you "easy" VPN into the US in 1995? The whole consumer VPN industry didn't exist back then.
    - anonzzzies 4mo ago
      Yeah, I was never a consumer. Let's say tunneling/proxies then.
  - 1970-01-01 4mo ago
    "download java" in 1993 wasn't a thing.
    - anonzzzies 4mo ago
      I remember the encryption export mostly from when Java came up; everything had saying that you cannot download specific packages outside the US. We did anyway. Before there were others but Java was biting us the most.
dabinat 4mo ago
I predict in future the best frontier models will be gatekept solely to the wealthy.
- echelon 4mo ago
  Pay $1,000,000 per business function you want to build. Businesses will gladly pay it. Individuals will be locked out and unable to compete. Oracle will be able to "prompt a new smartphone" for $500M or whatever and enter the market to compete with Apple and Google. You and I can't afford that and won't be able to compete. Hyperscalers will hyper scale even faster. They'll port Linux to Rust, remove the GPL, and have all kinds of new entirely proprietary OSes. They'll be attested, signed, and gradually we'll lose open hardware. Thin clients with binary blobs, highly encrypted, no control, only leased to us. Within a generation nobody will be able to program or own devices that can program. That's the scary scenario.
  - pmontra 4mo ago
    Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. But yeah, I got the gist of it. Incumbents like moats and happily pay money to build them. Note that the pricing of Anthropic's models usually increases for new models. Chinese models cost 10 or 100 times less. Are they less capable? Maybe, but they are alternatives unless credit card companies start banning payments to them.
    - echelon 4mo ago
      > Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. Then they won't survive the termination boundary. Too bad. Should have had more cash.
      - pmontra 4mo ago
        People have to eat food so they will keep doing business no matter what. If AI cost too much, they will do it without AI. Any resource that costs too much is replaced with cheaper alternatives. AI is no exception. At worst most of the IT business will die and we will make money doing something else.
gWPVhyxPHqvk 4mo ago
> So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent? 95% odds this gets reversed by Monday morning is why
- lovich 4mo ago
  Tuesday is the traditional reversal day.
  - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
    TACO Tuesday!
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
madrox 4mo ago
I wouldn't say so. Once upon a time, a PlayStation 2 was too powerful to export: https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about-weaponized-consoles-almost-sunk-the-ps2 https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about... ChatGPT 2 was once too powerful to release. AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  I think culture moves a lot faster than you believe. The broader discussion about AI and model capabilities died a couple of years ago precisely because it's so underwhelming now. People did adapt. Startups stopped hiring just to get to MVP. Coding sweatshops had huge layoffs and stopped overhiring. The corporate world got better tools for collaborations and meetings. Accessibility tools are still bad, but improving. I would argue that the a11y topic is still very ripe to be the next big thing as it continues to converge with better UI/UX instead of being an afterthought. The layperson and tech professional alike otherwise agreed that this is a vehicle for blame game, grift, disinformation, etc. This is where all the pushback is and the topic at hand. People aren't dumb. The only people worried about "AI" are the ones who bet too big on it.
  - manbart 4mo ago
    For a laugh, search for "p(doom)" (remember that?) and read some articles from 2023
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  The ban on exporting cryptography in the 90's lasted for years, and got to be a major pain in the arse for the entire web industry in its early years. The US govt can be very stubborn about this stuff when it wants to be.
  - OtomotO 4mo ago
    In the late 90s the US was in a position of power that it no longer holds. It had just one the cold war and China wasn't even a shadow of what it is now.
enraged_camel 4mo ago
>> if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus What an unbelievable claim. Especially since the vast majority of publicly available benchmarks disagree.
- BobbyJo 4mo ago
  The model card for mythos shows it being an incremental improvement in all respects besides security.
  - bonsai_spool 4mo ago
    Ah yes, the model card that shows an over 10% improvement in agentic coding among other things! https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5
  - hodgehog11 4mo ago
    This is utterly daft to say if you actually used the thing for hard problems, something that benchmarks have been known to be unable to capture. It is night and day compared to Opus and every other model out there. It was nice while it lasted.
    - sixothree 4mo ago
      It's strange how uninformed people are when they are so willing to to make assertions. I used it too and it really felt like a generational shift and not an incremental one. These threads about Anthropic always seem so astroturfed with some of the loudest and most uninformed people around.
      - tobyhinloopen 4mo ago
        I agree with this, It feels like a small upgrade like Opus 4.9 or something. It’s still pretty good though
      - saberience 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
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cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
The logical conclusion is that someone "forgot" to pay the right bribe to somebody in the admin, or make the right contributions to the GOP. Same as the new bridge between Windsor and Detroit can't open until some palms are greased. Chaos is a ladder, gotta keep climbing
- nijave 4mo ago
  Almost assuredly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic%E2%80%93United_States_Department_of_Defense_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic%E2%80%93United_State...
- itopaloglu83 4mo ago
  Somebody saying "Such a great $965 billion company you've got there, it would be such a shame if ..." you got the rest.
- not_a_bot_4sho 4mo ago
  Add a Trump son to the Anthropic board and all friction is gone
system2 4mo ago
We definitely reached the available capability plateau. You are 100% correct IMHO.
- anonzzzies 4mo ago
  Wait a few weeks. They won't be able to generate enough without it; it will get reversed and things will just continue as normal.
AbstractH24 4mo ago
There may be a temporary plateau. And it could have fascinating macroeconomic impacts. Efficiency will become the next thing to focus on. It was already emerging, but accelerating the focus on efficiency will lead to a ton of excess capacity and even some investments in data centers to go belly up. And ultimately the AI bubble bursting will look a lot like the dot com, with its surplus fiber. Oh, and this will put gas on the fire that fighting AI and big tech is the next political rally cry. Along with “eat the rich” as they are seen as taking both jobs and money. Curious to see where it’s all headed and how Trump’s call will impact it.
- itopaloglu83 4mo ago
  You touched a great point, I wonder how the markets would react to this. No wonder the order was released just after the end of business on a Friday. Let me guess, something will happen right before market opening on Monday and some bets will pay great dividends.
  - AbstractH24 4mo ago
    If there’s one thing that’s certain it’s that Trump will do something just after markets close on Friday. But I hadn’t considered this fell into that category. Except maybe as a direction from Iran. You make a good point, it may trigger immediate reactions in the market. Not just 3-6 month ones. I wonder what the counterbalance will be by Monday morning.
marcus_holmes 4mo ago
For the sake of argument, assume everyone is working on good faith and at least believes and means the things they're saying. The US government believes that Fable/Mythos is a weapon that needs to be export-controlled, and limited to only US customers. Presumably OpenAI/xAI/Google would face the same constraints, for the same reasons. OS/foreign models are unaffected - OS because they cannot control who runs them, and foreign because they are not controlled by the US government. We could assume that China will implement the same policy controls, but they see the world differently so might not. So US AI companies are then limited to the US market, effectively, after about six months (the lag between the current frontier models and the OS models). They have much less incentive to push the envelope to create better models, because the US govt might also ban those completely. The investor froth around the race to AGI dies, so valuations shrink (the current IPOs may be affected), and presumably the bubble bursts. None of the AI companies can afford to continue building data centres, so that all dies immediately. US GDP drops by ~5% because of that alone. In a year's time, the US is in a major recession because it gambled so hard on AI. Europe less so, only because it was such a distant follower in that race. China is more-or-less unaffected. The best models are now OS/foreign, and AI is moving forward more slowly, but still moving forward. Any other scenarios?
- sixothree 4mo ago
  It is very hard to believe the US government is operating in good faith any more. Do I need to gesture more broadly at the open corruption?
  - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
    Agreed. Going by patterns in the Iran war, members of Trump's family/in-crowd will invest in AI while it suffers from this decision, and then 15 mins later Trump will reverse the decision. The thing is, that blatant market manipulation is playing with fire here, as so much of the US economy is invested in the AI bubble.
  - hyperadvanced 4mo ago
    Expecting “transparency” out of a government trying to protect national interests seems like a tall order. They have to withhold or obfuscate things to do that job.
fireant 4mo ago
This is a good point. If I were an investor, there is no way I'm investing into frontier labs after this announcement. Is this how the bubble pops?
- deadbabe 4mo ago
  No, there is still money to be made in self hosted LLM models. You invest in the AI infrastructure companies, not frontier labs. The bubble continues.
- FridgeSeal 4mo ago
  Moreover, is this a clever way for the frontier labs to try and “dodge” the negative impacts of the bubble popping. “Oh no it’s not our fault!!1! ~~My dad works at Nintendo~~ the govt told us we weren’t allowed to release it”
raincole 4mo ago
The logical conclusion is that the US administration has decided to run the country like a robber baron and is demanding bribes from AI companies. The only question is whether EU and China can effectively attract American researchers.
OtomotO 4mo ago
Simple solution (for now): don't do it under US jurisdiction.
basisword 4mo ago
>> Why invest in smarter models with this precedent? The public may not see more improvements but I'm sure they government will be forcing AI companies to continue improving them for their own use. Those schools aren't going to bomb themselves.
epolanski 4mo ago
There's an obvious rug pull coming on AI.
- bombcar 4mo ago
  It’s obvious those who didn’t live through the dot com bomb; they believe you can’t have a rug pull on something that has some use.
sbochins 4mo ago
It’s the Trump administration trying to pick winners and losers. The chief ai person in the administration is David Sacks. He’s been completely biased and is always going on rants against Anthropic on his podcast (wild that he is participating while in the administration). It’s clear the administration is at odds with Anthropic and will do what they can to stop them from succeeding.
nextaccountic 4mo ago
I think ultimately this is an attack on open computing, the idea that people should own computing devices and run whatever software in them. That's because if things keep advancing at this pace, in a couple of years, we will probably have Mythos-level, open weights models running on consumer or prosumer GPUs. Even if it takes a decade, that's no time in the grand scheme of things. And when the time comes, what will government do? They will probably regulate who can buy GPUs and other tech that can run powerful AI, and what are people allowed to do with them. Probably using trusted computing and remote attestation and so on.

ncallaway 4mo ago

It seems more likely that the logical conclusion is the executive branch is mad at Anthropic, and lashing out at them with any convenient tool that they have. I suspect if OpenAI or Grok was operating at the same level they wouldn’t find themselves on the sharp end of the government stick

blueaquilae 4mo ago
But it was Anthropic initiative to limit the deployment to restricted groups, it's great to see the gov following their analysis. AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't?
- thewebguyd 4mo ago
  > AIs are too powerful and dangerous they should be limited to a very restrained individuals isn't? IF LLMs are THAT dangerous and powerful (and that's a huge if that I do not currently subscribe to), then no, no one should have access at all, there is no group of people in positions of power (government or corporate power) that I would consider "restrained"
- ncallaway 4mo ago
  Yes, Dario Amodei definitely opened the door to this kind of attack by trying to market Mythos as being too dangerous to release.
  - svnt 4mo ago
    Which they anticipated, which is why they were flagging and dropping back to opus on anything they could even potentially be called on.
    - sh34r 4mo ago
      They should have just called it Opus 5.1 and released it like normal. All this fanfare, under this corrupt regime, after they declared you a supply chain risk… Wario has horrendously bad judgment.
      - uneekname 4mo ago
        That would have been such a different HN thread. "Dang I feel a nice bump in performance here, way to go" and that would be that.
- Computer0 4mo ago
  I would be okay with that if it actually meant that. Very restrained individuals in reality would see nothing and very unrestrained governments would have access.
- beepbooptheory 4mo ago
  If its so "powerful" that it's this kind of issue, why does it even matter who "has it" or not? Like what does this mean to you? The super powerful, super intelligent AI is going to have arbitrary loyalty with one person or another?
nonethewiser 4mo ago
[flagged]
- LPisGood 4mo ago
  This government has proved time and time again it does not deserve the presumption of regularity and that it is more than capable of acting in arbitrary and capricious manner for petty reasons.
- ncallaway 4mo ago
  Are you asking me to provide evidence that in this specific instance this is an instance of weaponization of process, or are you asking me for evidence that this particular executive has lost the benefit of the doubt when it comes to weaponization claims, or are you asking for evidence that the executive is hostile to Anthropic?
- handoflixue 4mo ago
  Anthropic was designated a "supply chain risk" despite this (a) being an absolutely absurd classification and (b) being completely at odds with the continued usage of any Anthropic products within the US government: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-officially-arbitrarily https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-officially-arbitrari... From that, we can very reasonably conclude that the US government has a specific vendetta against Anthropic in particular, and that this vendetta has nothing to do with the technical merits of their product. To my knowledge, they have yet to drop that classification, despite heavy court opposition. Additionally: technical benchmarks suggest that the most recent ChatGPT models are within maybe 10% of Fable 5's capabilities, so this being a pure "capabilities" concern seems unlikely. Uncertainty: It's possible that we have just suddenly reached the end of public AI releases, though - if ChatGPT 5.6 also gets blocked, that would be very good evidence of a general, non-weaponized policy. Given the recent Executive Order requiring pre-release audits of frontier models, this is somewhat more likely than it was a couple weeks ago. I still think things add up to "weaponization is the most likely theory" and that one is being disingenuous to dismiss it as a reasonable possibility. But it's certainly NOT the only reasonable possibility.
typeofhuman 4mo ago
[flagged]
- ncallaway 4mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511745
- johnwheeler 4mo ago
  They said "seems"
- ncallaway 4mo ago
  Are you asking me to provide evidence that in this specific instance this is an instance of weaponization of process, or are you asking me for evidence that this particular executive has lost the benefit of the doubt when it comes to weaponization claims, or are you asking for evidence that the executive is hostile to Anthropic?
rw2 4mo ago
Anthropic's own marketing and urban legends spawned by them is to blame too. They built up too much BS around mythos and project glasswing
- kccqzy 4mo ago
  Marketing is never ever to blame. Remember a few months ago when the U.S. government labelled them a supply chain risk? What eventually happened was that a federal judge issued a temporary injunction while calling it a "classic First Amendment retaliation." The Constitution protects such marketing; the government is not allowed to be maddened by such marketing.
  - joshuastuden 4mo ago
    They certainly can restrict technology that is deemed to be a national security risk.
    - jrajav 4mo ago
      Not much stops them from saying it's due to national security, when it's actually due to the guy in the chair having a fit of emotions. And the current admin has a very long streak of declaring things as national emergencies when those things just so happen to be something they recently lost face on.
      - peter422 4mo ago
        It is kinda amazing how quickly everybody else is to support authoritarianism if it agrees with some perceived slight of theirs. I guess that is how it always starts.
        noosphr 4mo ago
        Dario was literally asking for hardware exports to be banned using the same laws as were used to ban his model. The fascist is inside the building.
jwitthuhn 4mo ago
Fortunately for us all Dario literally asked for this sort of restriction on model usage so we can be certain Anthropic are not victims here.
_heimdall 4mo ago
Regardless of motivations for this case, I take this as a clear sign that we've reached the point where the federal government decides its within their authority to mandate this and its reasonable for them to do it. Governments don't give up power, and once there's precedence for use of that power they'll continue to do it and begin eyeing the next power they can claim.

varispeed 4mo ago

I don't know, I've been using Mythos this week quite sceptically and I found it to be incredibly dumb. For instance gave it a dialogue between 3 people and it was constantly mixing up who said what to whom, which looked like early Gemini behaviour. But latest Opus does that too. It would also make nonsensical inference about given papers and only correct itself when pointed out what it said wrong. If that is what US government fears... maybe the fear is that someone follows the dumb things the model suggests.

zmmmmm 4mo ago
it feels like it's mostly just tuned to up it's level of capability on long horizon tasks - stop context rot and keep persisting at all costs until a goal is done. The base intelligence does not feel much greater to me.
hodgehog11 4mo ago
This is a ridiculous thing to test on it. Other models are trained on that kind of thing, use those instead. Fable was designed for _really_ hard software engineering problems. Possibly large, but especially hard. For those tasks, you feel the difference immediately.
- saberience 4mo ago
  No it wasn't, Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding. And yes, the parent poster is accurate, Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was. Stop being so AI-pilled. Codex is still a better model, and yes, for the hardest engineering problems. I use Claude for UI/GUIs and Codex for all my backend, because I have 20 years of experience of actual hard engineering, and I can see that Codex writes, cleaner code, and is far more steerable. Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive", but lines of code doesn't make a better system.
  - hodgehog11 4mo ago
    > Fable is a general purpose model for use in regular chat, analysis, as well as coding This is a forum filled with experts. Putting marketing aside, in a forum like this, it is most useful to assess models according to the toughest problems in the domain they were specifically refined on. For DeepSeek, that's math. For Claude, that's programming. Gemini and ChatGPT are generalist. Yes, you can use every model for anything you like. But Fable is a bit special, it's very expensive, and very clearly designed for particular types of tasks. > Fable is just as prone to moronic mistakes as Opus was. "Just as" is up for debate, but yes, all models are capable of moronic mistakes. That's not helpful information though. > Codex is still a better model You're comparing agentic workflows, which relies on a lot more than just the underlying model. It sounds like you're using it like a precision instrument, which is great! It's very different compared to my use cases though, and the ones that Fable seems to excel at. I'm using it for scientific computing, and you really, really want it to one shot a solution. It's either the right algorithm for the task, or the wrong one. So for the hardest problems, it needs to successfully implement a solution in effectively one shot. I use Codex too, but it's often too careless for the delicate tasks. If it gets it wrong, it is really hard to steer it back. You have to start from scratch. > Bad engineers think Claude is better because it writes more lines of code and is more "proactive". Think you missed the mark on this one. Not really an engineer, have as much experience as you do in my job. A solution to my problems comprises few lines of code. Fable actually gets it right, first time, every time (so far), but this is with a very long prompt and a bunch of attachments. No other model has done this for me. Not shilling for Anthropic, just impressed. This isn't particularly subjective for me; it is quantitatively measurable. Don't assume everyone using AI is going to have the same experience you have, or the same types of use cases. And please don't assume that because others have different experiences that it makes them "bad". Also, Claude has always been mediocre at creative tasks. For your line of work, I would have already recommended Codex hands down.

teaearlgraycold 4mo ago

Eh, not any different than the performative encryption restrictions from decades past.

anonzzzies 4mo ago
But those were very easy to sidestep: proxy/vpn, download java with US encryption, and move on. That is very different with this.
- HotHotLava 4mo ago
  How do you "easy" VPN into the US in 1995? The whole consumer VPN industry didn't exist back then.
  - anonzzzies 4mo ago
    Yeah, I was never a consumer. Let's say tunneling/proxies then.
- 1970-01-01 4mo ago
  "download java" in 1993 wasn't a thing.
  - anonzzzies 4mo ago
    I remember the encryption export mostly from when Java came up; everything had saying that you cannot download specific packages outside the US. We did anyway. Before there were others but Java was biting us the most.

dabinat 4mo ago

I predict in future the best frontier models will be gatekept solely to the wealthy.

echelon 4mo ago
Pay $1,000,000 per business function you want to build. Businesses will gladly pay it. Individuals will be locked out and unable to compete. Oracle will be able to "prompt a new smartphone" for $500M or whatever and enter the market to compete with Apple and Google. You and I can't afford that and won't be able to compete. Hyperscalers will hyper scale even faster. They'll port Linux to Rust, remove the GPL, and have all kinds of new entirely proprietary OSes. They'll be attested, signed, and gradually we'll lose open hardware. Thin clients with binary blobs, highly encrypted, no control, only leased to us. Within a generation nobody will be able to program or own devices that can program. That's the scary scenario.
- pmontra 4mo ago
  Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. But yeah, I got the gist of it. Incumbents like moats and happily pay money to build them. Note that the pricing of Anthropic's models usually increases for new models. Chinese models cost 10 or 100 times less. Are they less capable? Maybe, but they are alternatives unless credit card companies start banning payments to them.
  - echelon 4mo ago
    > Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. Then they won't survive the termination boundary. Too bad. Should have had more cash.
    - pmontra 4mo ago
      People have to eat food so they will keep doing business no matter what. If AI cost too much, they will do it without AI. Any resource that costs too much is replaced with cheaper alternatives. AI is no exception. At worst most of the IT business will die and we will make money doing something else.

gWPVhyxPHqvk 4mo ago

> So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent? 95% odds this gets reversed by Monday morning is why

lovich 4mo ago
Tuesday is the traditional reversal day.
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  TACO Tuesday!

deleted 4mo ago

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madrox 4mo ago

I wouldn't say so. Once upon a time, a PlayStation 2 was too powerful to export: https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about-weaponized-consoles-almost-sunk-the-ps2 https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about... ChatGPT 2 was once too powerful to release. AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.

sublinear 4mo ago
I think culture moves a lot faster than you believe. The broader discussion about AI and model capabilities died a couple of years ago precisely because it's so underwhelming now. People did adapt. Startups stopped hiring just to get to MVP. Coding sweatshops had huge layoffs and stopped overhiring. The corporate world got better tools for collaborations and meetings. Accessibility tools are still bad, but improving. I would argue that the a11y topic is still very ripe to be the next big thing as it continues to converge with better UI/UX instead of being an afterthought. The layperson and tech professional alike otherwise agreed that this is a vehicle for blame game, grift, disinformation, etc. This is where all the pushback is and the topic at hand. People aren't dumb. The only people worried about "AI" are the ones who bet too big on it.
- manbart 4mo ago
  For a laugh, search for "p(doom)" (remember that?) and read some articles from 2023
marcus_holmes 4mo ago
The ban on exporting cryptography in the 90's lasted for years, and got to be a major pain in the arse for the entire web industry in its early years. The US govt can be very stubborn about this stuff when it wants to be.
- OtomotO 4mo ago
  In the late 90s the US was in a position of power that it no longer holds. It had just one the cold war and China wasn't even a shadow of what it is now.

enraged_camel 4mo ago

>> if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus What an unbelievable claim. Especially since the vast majority of publicly available benchmarks disagree.

BobbyJo 4mo ago
The model card for mythos shows it being an incremental improvement in all respects besides security.
- bonsai_spool 4mo ago
  Ah yes, the model card that shows an over 10% improvement in agentic coding among other things! https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5
- hodgehog11 4mo ago
  This is utterly daft to say if you actually used the thing for hard problems, something that benchmarks have been known to be unable to capture. It is night and day compared to Opus and every other model out there. It was nice while it lasted.
  - sixothree 4mo ago
    It's strange how uninformed people are when they are so willing to to make assertions. I used it too and it really felt like a generational shift and not an incremental one. These threads about Anthropic always seem so astroturfed with some of the loudest and most uninformed people around.
    - tobyhinloopen 4mo ago
      I agree with this, It feels like a small upgrade like Opus 4.9 or something. It’s still pretty good though
    - saberience 4mo ago

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cmrdporcupine 4mo ago

The logical conclusion is that someone "forgot" to pay the right bribe to somebody in the admin, or make the right contributions to the GOP. Same as the new bridge between Windsor and Detroit can't open until some palms are greased. Chaos is a ladder, gotta keep climbing

nijave 4mo ago
Almost assuredly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic%E2%80%93United_States_Department_of_Defense_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic%E2%80%93United_State...
itopaloglu83 4mo ago
Somebody saying "Such a great $965 billion company you've got there, it would be such a shame if ..." you got the rest.
not_a_bot_4sho 4mo ago
Add a Trump son to the Anthropic board and all friction is gone

system2 4mo ago

We definitely reached the available capability plateau. You are 100% correct IMHO.

anonzzzies 4mo ago
Wait a few weeks. They won't be able to generate enough without it; it will get reversed and things will just continue as normal.

AbstractH24 4mo ago

There may be a temporary plateau. And it could have fascinating macroeconomic impacts. Efficiency will become the next thing to focus on. It was already emerging, but accelerating the focus on efficiency will lead to a ton of excess capacity and even some investments in data centers to go belly up. And ultimately the AI bubble bursting will look a lot like the dot com, with its surplus fiber. Oh, and this will put gas on the fire that fighting AI and big tech is the next political rally cry. Along with “eat the rich” as they are seen as taking both jobs and money. Curious to see where it’s all headed and how Trump’s call will impact it.

itopaloglu83 4mo ago
You touched a great point, I wonder how the markets would react to this. No wonder the order was released just after the end of business on a Friday. Let me guess, something will happen right before market opening on Monday and some bets will pay great dividends.
- AbstractH24 4mo ago
  If there’s one thing that’s certain it’s that Trump will do something just after markets close on Friday. But I hadn’t considered this fell into that category. Except maybe as a direction from Iran. You make a good point, it may trigger immediate reactions in the market. Not just 3-6 month ones. I wonder what the counterbalance will be by Monday morning.

marcus_holmes 4mo ago

For the sake of argument, assume everyone is working on good faith and at least believes and means the things they're saying. The US government believes that Fable/Mythos is a weapon that needs to be export-controlled, and limited to only US customers. Presumably OpenAI/xAI/Google would face the same constraints, for the same reasons. OS/foreign models are unaffected - OS because they cannot control who runs them, and foreign because they are not controlled by the US government. We could assume that China will implement the same policy controls, but they see the world differently so might not. So US AI companies are then limited to the US market, effectively, after about six months (the lag between the current frontier models and the OS models). They have much less incentive to push the envelope to create better models, because the US govt might also ban those completely. The investor froth around the race to AGI dies, so valuations shrink (the current IPOs may be affected), and presumably the bubble bursts. None of the AI companies can afford to continue building data centres, so that all dies immediately. US GDP drops by ~5% because of that alone. In a year's time, the US is in a major recession because it gambled so hard on AI. Europe less so, only because it was such a distant follower in that race. China is more-or-less unaffected. The best models are now OS/foreign, and AI is moving forward more slowly, but still moving forward. Any other scenarios?

sixothree 4mo ago
It is very hard to believe the US government is operating in good faith any more. Do I need to gesture more broadly at the open corruption?
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  Agreed. Going by patterns in the Iran war, members of Trump's family/in-crowd will invest in AI while it suffers from this decision, and then 15 mins later Trump will reverse the decision. The thing is, that blatant market manipulation is playing with fire here, as so much of the US economy is invested in the AI bubble.
- hyperadvanced 4mo ago
  Expecting “transparency” out of a government trying to protect national interests seems like a tall order. They have to withhold or obfuscate things to do that job.

fireant 4mo ago

This is a good point. If I were an investor, there is no way I'm investing into frontier labs after this announcement. Is this how the bubble pops?

deadbabe 4mo ago
No, there is still money to be made in self hosted LLM models. You invest in the AI infrastructure companies, not frontier labs. The bubble continues.
FridgeSeal 4mo ago
Moreover, is this a clever way for the frontier labs to try and “dodge” the negative impacts of the bubble popping. “Oh no it’s not our fault!!1! ~~My dad works at Nintendo~~ the govt told us we weren’t allowed to release it”

raincole 4mo ago

The logical conclusion is that the US administration has decided to run the country like a robber baron and is demanding bribes from AI companies. The only question is whether EU and China can effectively attract American researchers.

OtomotO 4mo ago

Simple solution (for now): don't do it under US jurisdiction.

basisword 4mo ago

>> Why invest in smarter models with this precedent? The public may not see more improvements but I'm sure they government will be forcing AI companies to continue improving them for their own use. Those schools aren't going to bomb themselves.

epolanski 4mo ago

There's an obvious rug pull coming on AI.

bombcar 4mo ago
It’s obvious those who didn’t live through the dot com bomb; they believe you can’t have a rug pull on something that has some use.

sbochins 4mo ago

It’s the Trump administration trying to pick winners and losers. The chief ai person in the administration is David Sacks. He’s been completely biased and is always going on rants against Anthropic on his podcast (wild that he is participating while in the administration). It’s clear the administration is at odds with Anthropic and will do what they can to stop them from succeeding.

nextaccountic 4mo ago

I think ultimately this is an attack on open computing, the idea that people should own computing devices and run whatever software in them. That's because if things keep advancing at this pace, in a couple of years, we will probably have Mythos-level, open weights models running on consumer or prosumer GPUs. Even if it takes a decade, that's no time in the grand scheme of things. And when the time comes, what will government do? They will probably regulate who can buy GPUs and other tech that can run powerful AI, and what are people allowed to do with them. Probably using trusted computing and remote attestation and so on.