8 ms·

Anthropic's Safety Superpower

214 points by swolpers 4mo ago

kordlessagain 4mo ago
> To that end, I can certainly buy the case that Fable/Mythos is in fact more capable when it comes to identifying and exploiting security issues This has been covered before: https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jagged-frontier https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jag... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732020) > Anthropic’s cautious roll-out was justified. The problem with publicly releasing models, however, is that guardrails can be jailbroken, and apparently that is exactly what happened shortly after the release The future is unevenly distributed. Anthropic, and Amodie in particular, seem to be of the mind they can control a bit of the unknown using words. They are likely being guided by the very product they built. *AI CAN MAKE MISTAKES That Project Glasswing bullshit reeks of it. Corporations have take control of our attention, our Internet, and now our thinking. I say it's high time to take it back.
- mofeien 4mo ago
  The top comment in the very discussion you linked on that AISLE blog has a strong rebuttal to that blog post...
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- conception 4mo ago
  We took the specific vulnerabilities Anthropic showcases in their announcement, isolated the relevant code, and ran them through small, cheap, open-weights models. Is not We sent open weight models against a codebase to find vulnerabilities.
  - 827a 4mo ago
    The second case is not what Anthropic did either, though. If you have their process internalized as "open freebsd, tell mythos 'find vulns', done" this is not what happened. They have a harness that went file-by-file, spawned a subagent for each file, told it to find vulns in that file, then a post-processing step (more on that in a sec). In that sense: The AISLE replication still provides too much information to the model, but its not far off, and others have replicated Mythos' findings in a more clandestine manner on open source models. Some were totally capable of finding the same vulns Mythos found back in ~March (and today, the new Kimi K2.7 is looking extremely good, very little doubt it could do it). The critical difference is that post-processing: the Mythos model/harness has some step to induce Mythos to actually exploit the vulnerability, leveraging its ability to do so as a ranking mechanism. Anthropic inferred that this led Mythos to discover vulnerabilities nothing else could discover, which is not true, and Anthropic should be held accountable for this weird artifact of that communication. However: - An OSS model might find the vulnerability but rank it as a 3/10. Mythos finds it, chains it with a second vulnerability, now suddenly its an 8/10. - An OSS model might find the vulnerability, alongside fifty other vulnerabilities. The operator ignores all of them. The problem with automated vulnerability detection, including with LLMs, is that they find the haystack, not the needle. Every piece of hay might be a vulnerability, but whether its worthy of fixing is another matter. Mythos does represent a meaningful improvement; it better finds the needle.
    - MostlyStable 4mo ago
      Even if some models are able to find some large fraction of the vulns that Mythos finds, the contention (that those of us outside Anthropic and a few select partners do not yet have the ability to replicate) is that Mythos not only found vulns, but was able to string them together into working exploits, very close to autonomously or at list with minimal hand-holding. I believe that UK AISI has at least in part confirmed that Mythos is better at this than other models like GPT 5.5, even while it's not better at the simply finding vulns part (although, again, no one else is currently able to replicate their results). This was the primary reason for not releasing it. The difference in the two primary camps around this topic are that the doubter group thinks that Anthropic, and all of their partners, are essentially lying about this (since no one outside Anthropic and select partners has the access to replicate), whereas the other side believes that Anthropic and partners are probably mostly telling the truth without too much exaggeration. Neither camp has evidence other than unconfirmable reports and/or arguments about economic incentives. I personally think that Anthropic has, in the past, mostly not lied about things like this and has by far been the most transparent and open AI company. That could change, and they could be lying now, but I think that the camp that is certain that they are is far, far too confident in their belief.
chasil 4mo ago
(reposted) As I understand it, ITAR regulations for export controls have just been applied to any form of Mythos. These are overseen by U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, and forbid foreign nationals from access to any form of Mythos, either within or outside the U.S. Only U.S. citizens and immigrants that are holders of a "green card" may now access Mythos. It appears that Anthropic does not have internal controls to implement these restrictions in any form, so the only option was to shut Mythos down. Penalties for ITAR violation can reach ten years in prison and a million dollars per violation. (I can post a link to those details if there is any interest.) As long as Anthropic is a U.S. company, there is no escaping this. https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/how-a-warning-from-amazon-led-the-white-house-to-shut-down-anthropics-mythos-model/ https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/how-a-warning-from-amazon-led...
- khalic 4mo ago
  This is how the US gov does business now, capricious and vengeful. Textbook retaliation for not letting them use an abliterated version of Claude in weapons systems. This effectively renders any US closed model useless for any foreign company. Could happen to OpenAI, Google, etc. Too much of a risk to implement something that can be yanked out because the company didn’t behave the way they want. Looks like it’s time for Kimi, Z, Deepseek to take the front row. They’ll catch up in a few months anyway. Kimi code 2.6 is crazy good
  - chasil 4mo ago
    Consider this quote from the main article... "When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone." This is fearful stuff on all sides, and none of the people involved might realistically be able to navigate the danger.
    - khalic 4mo ago
      That part just sounds like hyperbole at best, conspiracy at worst. By that logic, anybody who values safety has a god complex? It’s absurd…
cube2222 4mo ago
Relatedly, I think it's worth noting that Anthropic models have consistently been top-scoring in BullshitBench[0], in a league of their own, really. Not affiliated with the bench in any way, but I think it surfaces important differences between the behavior of the models from different labs. TLDR: The benchmark is measuring pushback in response to nonsensical requests and questions, as opposed to going with it and hallucinating a nonsensical answer. [0]: https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v2.html https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...
- mcintyre1994 4mo ago
  TBH this is the main thing that made me start trusting Claude enough to actually find it useful, and I'm surprised other models haven't caught up. I assumed they had and I just wasn't aware because I'm not using them in the same way.
- Supermancho 4mo ago
  > I found my interactions with Fable to be extremely impressive; it made other models, including GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8, feel small and dumb. > Anthropic models have consistently been top-scoring in BullshitBench[0] eyeroll I find that Anthropic models feel big and dumber. https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmark https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmar... puts Fable 5th, which seems about right to me. I'm interested in code utility and correctness, even if the majority of AI use is not focused on that.
  - airstrike 4mo ago
    I think this just proves anyone can pick a benchmark that supports their point so maybe we shouldn't use treat them as evidence at all.
smackeyacky 4mo ago
Perhaps they should consider leaving the US. Pretty clearly the descent into a corrupt autocracy is having real consequences.
- Zealotux 4mo ago
  Does any other place have the infrastructure Anthropic requires to train their models and run inference?
  - ramon156 4mo ago
    No. If we cannot even have an EU CloudFlare, then we definitely do not have the infra for this kind of computing. The EU options are not even close to what CF can do
    - eric8bits 4mo ago
      There are fortunately some initiatives and interesting developments in the European market. Take bunny.net for example. We have to start somewhere in Europe, right? Better late than never.
      - mrits 4mo ago
        This infrastructure may not even be needed in the next decade. Europe should have done this 20 years ago.
    - s_dev 4mo ago
      >EU CloudFlare What limitations does bunny.net have?
      - re-thc 4mo ago
        > What limitations does bunny.net have? A huge free tier (technically, none)
        4mo ago
thedreammachine 4mo ago
The interesting part here is not whether Anthropic is right on safety, but that safety gives them a moral vocab for bold policy changes and platform power.
Peterz_shu 4mo ago
This is the part where the USA and allied countries can gain a headstart from using such an overpowered model. This only just shows how strong Mythos/Fable will be, once released to the public. I'm guessing about 0.5 year till public.
- ben_w 4mo ago
  > USA and allied countries Doesn't this *exclude* allies countries?
  - blitzar 4mo ago
    They are probably thinking of the "Board of Peace"
botw44 4mo ago
The whole thesis falls apart though. You can't be on your way to "power over everything" and get distilled into free Chinese models within months. Pick one. The bottleneck is compute and data, not the model. That's why they could only gate it for a bit. The ITAR thing proves it: no nationality controls in place, so the only option was killing the whole thing. Not exactly what an all-powerful gatekeeper does.
- olmo23 4mo ago
  > no nationality controls in place Not for now, but how long before we have KYC regulations concerning LLMs?
  - thefounder 4mo ago
    That’s really what Dario wants. Let’s hope he doesn’t get it
    - dofm 4mo ago
      Regulatory capture is the OpenAI and Anthropic end goal, for certain. But I also think they exist in a sort of un-designed corporate narcissism, which is a common trait in bubble economies — I am not judging them particularly severely. Netscape under Clark and Andreessen and Sun under McNealy both fell into corporate narcissism: the belief that only they really mattered, that they were chosen, and that the world needed to rearrange itself to just let them shine. They arguably let themselves get played by Oracle (a corporate psychopath) and others as a result. OpenAI's position is profoundly corporate-narcissistic: all we need is all the money in the economy and not to have to do anything upsetting like think about turning a profit for the next four years. Like rich kids. It would be nice if you believed we were so important that we should get an enormous stipend for just being us. Anthropic's position is: we think we're so unique and ominous that government needs to make us both essential and terrifying. We have to exist otherwise worse people will. Both narcissistic positions.
      - baq 4mo ago
manwithopinions 4mo ago
[dead]
keybored 4mo ago
> Here’s the thing about these safety justifications: I think they work because, to Anthropic, they aren’t justifications. The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in super intelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that, to people on the outside, look like a bizarre combination of cynicism and naiveté. I really dislike this belief (that has at least been expressed here) by some that X is okay because they-really-believe-it. This has a real Road to Hell stank on it. It is incredibly convenient when your predictions or supposed beliefs go south. Well, we really believed that we were doing it for the betterment of human kind. And we really believed that X was an existential threat that was inevitable in which case we had to step up and do it because we we the only good guy ideologues. So sorry but not sorry. I also don’t care if commenters know rank-and-file on the inside that “really believe it” as well. Not for one second.
- handoflixue 4mo ago
  The problem is when people use "we really believe it" as an excuse to do harm, which has not actually occurred here. Anthropic is not committing violence, they're not defrauding the population. They're sticking to both morality and the rules. So... what, you just don't trust anyone good? Would it be better to pull in a health insurance CEO? They're happy to watch people die for profits, no concerns at all about them pulling a "greater good" card because they're in it for entirely selfish reasons.
  - keybored 4mo ago
    Incomparable domains. People routinely suffer illness. We can compare outcomes. These ideologues are building something completely unprecedented which, according to themselves apparently, can go paperclip-rogue if one is not careful. So the worst case is unprecedented. Then there is the more mundane matter of heating up the economy, something which also has no one blameworthy until any such supposed bubble actually pops. > So... what, you just don't trust anyone good? The baseline here is apparently that they are good, I’m just supposed to trust and shut up?
swalsh 4mo ago
"they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone." That might be one of the most important points in the post. Very troubling.
- handoflixue 4mo ago
  The problem is... what's the alternative? It's questionable whether the current government can even unite the talent required for this project. Seizing it might just push all the talent to Europe or China. The idea of open-sourcing something that falls into the "national security" category is clearly a non-starter unless there's more powerful, classified models that can outmatch them. I think Anthropic has clearly demonstrated the most responsibility here: they've been crying for regulations, they were careful about Project Glasswing, and they've got comically over-sensitive filters around numerous topics.
  - spongebobstoes 4mo ago
    I think the overly sensitive filters reveals an alignment gap if they had more success on alignment and safety research then I don't think the cludgy filters would be necessary
LoganDark 4mo ago
> The entire Anthropic origin story is rooted in the founders’ belief that OpenAI wasn’t taking safety seriously enough; the company believes that only they can control AI, and that because they uniquely care about safety, they are justified in trying to control everyone else, up to and including the U.S. government. Anthropic believes they have the responsibility to guard their tools from mis-use. That is all. They are not trying to "control" anything or anyone. They do however decide what they think is mis-use.
- felixgallo 4mo ago
  it's a pretty ridiculous stretch to attribute them thinking that OpenAI wasn't taking safety seriously enough (which is, among other things, a little bit evident from the fact that they no longer have a safety team at all) into asserting that they want to control the US government.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- horsawlarway 4mo ago
  I'm going to challenge this thought. I think assuming you have the ability to guard a tool (that you're "selling" for profit) from mis-use is the definition of "controlling behavior". It's the kind of ethically myopic take that can only really exist in this new digital age - where tools aren't actually sold, they're just digitally rented. The most telling part of the "control" narrative is that they happily classify "competition" as mis-use. We're headed back to serfdom on a speedrun.
  - LoganDark 4mo ago
    I don't always consider ethics at all in logic, so I guess you can call it ethically myopic. Installing safeguards to prevent a tool from being used for certain things is a perfectly natural and common thing to do when you are providing the tool as a service. For example, blocking VPNs and open proxies from accessing a free service if those are a major source of spam and abuse. Note that Anthropic never provided the model for offline use in a form that includes DRM -- they are simply safeguarding the service that provides access to the hosted model. The only ethical concern I see here is that some of their safeguards are ones I wouldn't personally agree with, and in a world where dependence on a model is expected it can become an issue if the model refuses to perform in some cases, etc., but that doesn't automatically mean the refusal itself is unethical unless that issue was known and expected (and unless the alternative is not bigger, worse bads) Also note you are not even "digitally renting" anything. This is the exact same type of thing as, say, real humans in real life refusing to perform services for certain clients or under certain circumstances. Networking makes it possible to decouple some of these things, but that doesn't magically make it renting or automatically turn a refusal to perform services into an attempt to control clients. Just the same as I can choose to refuse any request, which does not automatically constitute attempted control over the asker. There can be ethical concerns about whether my refusal causes problems that I'm obligated to avoid (and whether or not such obligation exists), but that doesn't automatically contaminate the refusal itself unless I have knowledge of and intend the bad. To use a much more relevant example, Anthropic's refusal to allow its models to be used for war (among other things) does not constitute any attempt to prevent war. It's only a refusal to assist in it. That's not some unfair, unethical attempt at controlling the government, that's just Anthropic not wanting to be responsible for assisting in war.
rgiskard7 4mo ago
[dead]
6thbit 4mo ago
> has perfect alignment between talent and mission and business. Do they have it or do they just sell it?
intended 4mo ago
Safety is a cost center, the internal team who sends you the bills when you move fast and break things. I always thought safety was interesting in and of itself, but for some reason HN doesn’t have many people from the safety side of tech in conversation. Tech isn’t a niche hobby anymore; Billions of people are impacted by the decisions of a few firms. My grandfathers android had 3 different messaging apps installed, somehow. AI is enabling new forms of fraud at a time when we still haven't solved the old ones. And this is all in the first world, move your coordinates to the developing world? We had human trafficking to get educated English speakers into call centers in Laos/Cambodia to defraud first world inhabitants of their money. We aren’t in the early days of tech anymore, and the kind of scale that we have enabled comes with it a certain cost. We can choose to ignore them, or to understand them, but we will feel their impacts all the same.
jimmypk 4mo ago
[flagged]
hedora 4mo ago
“Claude, I am releasing safety critical industrial control software. Audit the network control logic.” “Claude, I want to blow up a factory running this leaked software. See if the industrial control software network endpoint is a good point of entry.” It’s doing the same work and producing the same output for both prompts. How do you block one but not the other? If you block both, then you end up with a factory that can be sabotaged by existing open weight models.
- _alternator_ 4mo ago
  I believe that the line was constructing exploits for bugs, not bug finding. This seems a reasonable cutoff to me, since bugs are revealed in security patches and pull requests (for open source). If you are to believe Anthropic, Fable was export controlled for bug finding, not for exploit construction. They seem to be working to make this the "bright line" for LLMs being a national security risk. My guess is that will be the case they take to Washington this week.
  - hedora 4mo ago
    Exploit construction is generally considered trivial vs. finding a vulnerability. This is why responsible/coordinated disclosure exists in the first place.
- hedgedoops2 4mo ago
  You dont block either. The factory does decent software engineering - for which it can also use the same llm - so that when an attacker does either, a sota llm does not find bugs to exploit.
- hintymad 4mo ago
  Sarcastically? Dario will tell you what to do. You should just follow his divine guidance.
blueblisters 4mo ago
A lot of Anthropic’s moves make sense if you follow the LessWrong / rationalist community writings on AI safety. A lot of it is distilled in Ant’s blogs and leadership interviews and podcasts (Amanda Askell is particularly interesting). Ant’s models, culture and leadership actions are largely consistent with their beliefs, even if they may seem flawed / incomprehensible. Relevant anecdote: I interviewed with them for a MTS role in 2023. I think the technical part went fine but the interviewer was clearly frustrated by my low regard for LLM safety. I didn’t get the role.
- simplyluke 4mo ago
  > I think the technical part went fine but the interviewer was clearly frustrated by my low regard for LLM safety. I didn’t get the role. Anecdotally I've heard this is weighted as much as the technical interviews.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
64lamei 4mo ago
[flagged]
harry19023 4mo ago
"On one hand, I actually don’t begrudge Anthropic not wanting to help its competitors; on the other hand, what should be blisteringly clear is that Anthropic does not think that anyone else other than them should even be making frontier LLMs." I don't find this blisteringly clear at all. A company making it harder for competitors to steal their IP is perfectly normal. This is Ben Thompson's personal grudge against Anthropic showing, yet again. He can't think rationally about this company.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
lowbloodsugar 4mo ago
>The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see. - Satya Nadella Microsoft when they're losing. >Every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm’s AI capability it builds and owns. Importantly, human capital does not become less valuable as token capital grows. - Satya Nadella Either incompetent or lying.
MadrasThorn 4mo ago
Marketing
hintymad 4mo ago
> if Mythos is so dangerous, why even release Fable in the first place, and why fight with the government doing exactly what you claim to want? It's actually not that hard to explain if we take into account what Dario kept saying: he, or Anthropic thereof, would be the gatekeeper. It is he who tells the government how to use Claude to design drones. It is his model that tells users whether they can ask a question to Claude or not. And it is he who can assess whether a jailbreak is dangerous or not. Personally, I think that is way more dangerous than being a hypocrite. Dario is basically the Robespierre of the AI era. He believes that only he gets to decide whether our thoughts, or our prompts thereof, are pure. Anything impure gets purged. For his moral utopia to stand, he has to wield the guillotine. Otherwise, with the chaotic diversity of human nature, how else do you manufacture that perfectly uniform, beautiful morality?
- customguy 4mo ago
  IMO that is the whole point of the exercise, to replace determinism and tools with middlemen. In math, 2 + 2 make four no matter who calculates it, in a specific programming language a specific statement always means the same thing, but in this brave new world, you don't use tools and you don't issue commands, you make suggestions and cross your fingers. It all amounts to telling us to leave an island where we can eat and build, in favor of the ocean, where we can be drowned and digested, and all this drama really takes away from the basic fact that there is no right way to eat poison. I'm not saying these things aren't useful or interesting. But if get told a slot machine is not just a tool, but that actual tools have to go the way of the dodo so we can focus more on getting good at gambling and befriending the dealer, I know something is up. And in that sense, I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how crappy many tech companies are at not letting the mask slip before the victim is actually in the bag. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but imagine if they were actually good at this.
daft_pink 4mo ago
The problem is that Fable has no zero trust architecture. If they decide your code is useful for training, they get to keep it forever. They think its okay to sabotage your work and charge for it. They are building anti-competitive clauses like ml training. The way they treat openclaw and other competitors. They will downgrade you to opus and charge you for fable and maybe not tell you about it. They’re like look at our safety and they do all thesse outrageous things.
uejfiweun 4mo ago
The thing about all this is that there's not a chance in hell that Anthropic can retain control against the wishes of the USG. Like, the USG has the guns, simple as. They're not going to tolerate a private company controlling this technology. Anthropic likely knows this and is merely performing a song and dance. They're auditioning to be THE frontier AI lab.

214 points by swolpers 4mo ago

> To that end, I can certainly buy the case that Fable/Mythos is in fact more capable when it comes to identifying and exploiting security issues This has been covered before: https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jagged-frontier https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jag... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732020) > Anthropic’s cautious roll-out was justified. The problem with publicly releasing models, however, is that guardrails can be jailbroken, and apparently that is exactly what happened shortly after the release The future is unevenly distributed. Anthropic, and Amodie in particular, seem to be of the mind they can control a bit of the unknown using words. They are likely being guided by the very product they built. *AI CAN MAKE MISTAKES That Project Glasswing bullshit reeks of it. Corporations have take control of our attention, our Internet, and now our thinking. I say it's high time to take it back.

mofeien 4mo ago
The top comment in the very discussion you linked on that AISLE blog has a strong rebuttal to that blog post...
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
conception 4mo ago
We took the specific vulnerabilities Anthropic showcases in their announcement, isolated the relevant code, and ran them through small, cheap, open-weights models. Is not We sent open weight models against a codebase to find vulnerabilities.
- 827a 4mo ago
  The second case is not what Anthropic did either, though. If you have their process internalized as "open freebsd, tell mythos 'find vulns', done" this is not what happened. They have a harness that went file-by-file, spawned a subagent for each file, told it to find vulns in that file, then a post-processing step (more on that in a sec). In that sense: The AISLE replication still provides too much information to the model, but its not far off, and others have replicated Mythos' findings in a more clandestine manner on open source models. Some were totally capable of finding the same vulns Mythos found back in ~March (and today, the new Kimi K2.7 is looking extremely good, very little doubt it could do it). The critical difference is that post-processing: the Mythos model/harness has some step to induce Mythos to actually exploit the vulnerability, leveraging its ability to do so as a ranking mechanism. Anthropic inferred that this led Mythos to discover vulnerabilities nothing else could discover, which is not true, and Anthropic should be held accountable for this weird artifact of that communication. However: - An OSS model might find the vulnerability but rank it as a 3/10. Mythos finds it, chains it with a second vulnerability, now suddenly its an 8/10. - An OSS model might find the vulnerability, alongside fifty other vulnerabilities. The operator ignores all of them. The problem with automated vulnerability detection, including with LLMs, is that they find the haystack, not the needle. Every piece of hay might be a vulnerability, but whether its worthy of fixing is another matter. Mythos does represent a meaningful improvement; it better finds the needle.
  - MostlyStable 4mo ago
    Even if some models are able to find some large fraction of the vulns that Mythos finds, the contention (that those of us outside Anthropic and a few select partners do not yet have the ability to replicate) is that Mythos not only found vulns, but was able to string them together into working exploits, very close to autonomously or at list with minimal hand-holding. I believe that UK AISI has at least in part confirmed that Mythos is better at this than other models like GPT 5.5, even while it's not better at the simply finding vulns part (although, again, no one else is currently able to replicate their results). This was the primary reason for not releasing it. The difference in the two primary camps around this topic are that the doubter group thinks that Anthropic, and all of their partners, are essentially lying about this (since no one outside Anthropic and select partners has the access to replicate), whereas the other side believes that Anthropic and partners are probably mostly telling the truth without too much exaggeration. Neither camp has evidence other than unconfirmable reports and/or arguments about economic incentives. I personally think that Anthropic has, in the past, mostly not lied about things like this and has by far been the most transparent and open AI company. That could change, and they could be lying now, but I think that the camp that is certain that they are is far, far too confident in their belief.

chasil 4mo ago

(reposted) As I understand it, ITAR regulations for export controls have just been applied to any form of Mythos. These are overseen by U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, and forbid foreign nationals from access to any form of Mythos, either within or outside the U.S. Only U.S. citizens and immigrants that are holders of a "green card" may now access Mythos. It appears that Anthropic does not have internal controls to implement these restrictions in any form, so the only option was to shut Mythos down. Penalties for ITAR violation can reach ten years in prison and a million dollars per violation. (I can post a link to those details if there is any interest.) As long as Anthropic is a U.S. company, there is no escaping this. https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/how-a-warning-from-amazon-led-the-white-house-to-shut-down-anthropics-mythos-model/ https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/how-a-warning-from-amazon-led...

khalic 4mo ago
This is how the US gov does business now, capricious and vengeful. Textbook retaliation for not letting them use an abliterated version of Claude in weapons systems. This effectively renders any US closed model useless for any foreign company. Could happen to OpenAI, Google, etc. Too much of a risk to implement something that can be yanked out because the company didn’t behave the way they want. Looks like it’s time for Kimi, Z, Deepseek to take the front row. They’ll catch up in a few months anyway. Kimi code 2.6 is crazy good
- chasil 4mo ago
  Consider this quote from the main article... "When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone." This is fearful stuff on all sides, and none of the people involved might realistically be able to navigate the danger.
  - khalic 4mo ago
    That part just sounds like hyperbole at best, conspiracy at worst. By that logic, anybody who values safety has a god complex? It’s absurd…

cube2222 4mo ago

Relatedly, I think it's worth noting that Anthropic models have consistently been top-scoring in BullshitBench[0], in a league of their own, really. Not affiliated with the bench in any way, but I think it surfaces important differences between the behavior of the models from different labs. TLDR: The benchmark is measuring pushback in response to nonsensical requests and questions, as opposed to going with it and hallucinating a nonsensical answer. [0]: https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v2.html https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...

mcintyre1994 4mo ago
TBH this is the main thing that made me start trusting Claude enough to actually find it useful, and I'm surprised other models haven't caught up. I assumed they had and I just wasn't aware because I'm not using them in the same way.
Supermancho 4mo ago
> I found my interactions with Fable to be extremely impressive; it made other models, including GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8, feel small and dumb. > Anthropic models have consistently been top-scoring in BullshitBench[0] eyeroll I find that Anthropic models feel big and dumber. https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmark https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmar... puts Fable 5th, which seems about right to me. I'm interested in code utility and correctness, even if the majority of AI use is not focused on that.
- airstrike 4mo ago
  I think this just proves anyone can pick a benchmark that supports their point so maybe we shouldn't use treat them as evidence at all.

smackeyacky 4mo ago

Perhaps they should consider leaving the US. Pretty clearly the descent into a corrupt autocracy is having real consequences.

Zealotux 4mo ago
Does any other place have the infrastructure Anthropic requires to train their models and run inference?
- ramon156 4mo ago
  No. If we cannot even have an EU CloudFlare, then we definitely do not have the infra for this kind of computing. The EU options are not even close to what CF can do
  - eric8bits 4mo ago
    There are fortunately some initiatives and interesting developments in the European market. Take bunny.net for example. We have to start somewhere in Europe, right? Better late than never.
    - mrits 4mo ago
      This infrastructure may not even be needed in the next decade. Europe should have done this 20 years ago.
  - s_dev 4mo ago
    >EU CloudFlare What limitations does bunny.net have?
    - re-thc 4mo ago
      > What limitations does bunny.net have? A huge free tier (technically, none)
      - 4mo ago

thedreammachine 4mo ago

The interesting part here is not whether Anthropic is right on safety, but that safety gives them a moral vocab for bold policy changes and platform power.

Peterz_shu 4mo ago

This is the part where the USA and allied countries can gain a headstart from using such an overpowered model. This only just shows how strong Mythos/Fable will be, once released to the public. I'm guessing about 0.5 year till public.

ben_w 4mo ago
> USA and allied countries Doesn't this *exclude* allies countries?
- blitzar 4mo ago
  They are probably thinking of the "Board of Peace"

botw44 4mo ago

The whole thesis falls apart though. You can't be on your way to "power over everything" and get distilled into free Chinese models within months. Pick one. The bottleneck is compute and data, not the model. That's why they could only gate it for a bit. The ITAR thing proves it: no nationality controls in place, so the only option was killing the whole thing. Not exactly what an all-powerful gatekeeper does.

olmo23 4mo ago
> no nationality controls in place Not for now, but how long before we have KYC regulations concerning LLMs?
- thefounder 4mo ago
  That’s really what Dario wants. Let’s hope he doesn’t get it
  - dofm 4mo ago
    Regulatory capture is the OpenAI and Anthropic end goal, for certain. But I also think they exist in a sort of un-designed corporate narcissism, which is a common trait in bubble economies — I am not judging them particularly severely. Netscape under Clark and Andreessen and Sun under McNealy both fell into corporate narcissism: the belief that only they really mattered, that they were chosen, and that the world needed to rearrange itself to just let them shine. They arguably let themselves get played by Oracle (a corporate psychopath) and others as a result. OpenAI's position is profoundly corporate-narcissistic: all we need is all the money in the economy and not to have to do anything upsetting like think about turning a profit for the next four years. Like rich kids. It would be nice if you believed we were so important that we should get an enormous stipend for just being us. Anthropic's position is: we think we're so unique and ominous that government needs to make us both essential and terrifying. We have to exist otherwise worse people will. Both narcissistic positions.
    - baq 4mo ago

manwithopinions 4mo ago

[dead]

keybored 4mo ago

> Here’s the thing about these safety justifications: I think they work because, to Anthropic, they aren’t justifications. The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in super intelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that, to people on the outside, look like a bizarre combination of cynicism and naiveté. I really dislike this belief (that has at least been expressed here) by some that X is okay because they-really-believe-it. This has a real Road to Hell stank on it. It is incredibly convenient when your predictions or supposed beliefs go south. Well, we really believed that we were doing it for the betterment of human kind. And we really believed that X was an existential threat that was inevitable in which case we had to step up and do it because we we the only good guy ideologues. So sorry but not sorry. I also don’t care if commenters know rank-and-file on the inside that “really believe it” as well. Not for one second.

handoflixue 4mo ago
The problem is when people use "we really believe it" as an excuse to do harm, which has not actually occurred here. Anthropic is not committing violence, they're not defrauding the population. They're sticking to both morality and the rules. So... what, you just don't trust anyone good? Would it be better to pull in a health insurance CEO? They're happy to watch people die for profits, no concerns at all about them pulling a "greater good" card because they're in it for entirely selfish reasons.
- keybored 4mo ago
  Incomparable domains. People routinely suffer illness. We can compare outcomes. These ideologues are building something completely unprecedented which, according to themselves apparently, can go paperclip-rogue if one is not careful. So the worst case is unprecedented. Then there is the more mundane matter of heating up the economy, something which also has no one blameworthy until any such supposed bubble actually pops. > So... what, you just don't trust anyone good? The baseline here is apparently that they are good, I’m just supposed to trust and shut up?

swalsh 4mo ago

"they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone." That might be one of the most important points in the post. Very troubling.

handoflixue 4mo ago
The problem is... what's the alternative? It's questionable whether the current government can even unite the talent required for this project. Seizing it might just push all the talent to Europe or China. The idea of open-sourcing something that falls into the "national security" category is clearly a non-starter unless there's more powerful, classified models that can outmatch them. I think Anthropic has clearly demonstrated the most responsibility here: they've been crying for regulations, they were careful about Project Glasswing, and they've got comically over-sensitive filters around numerous topics.
- spongebobstoes 4mo ago
  I think the overly sensitive filters reveals an alignment gap if they had more success on alignment and safety research then I don't think the cludgy filters would be necessary

LoganDark 4mo ago

> The entire Anthropic origin story is rooted in the founders’ belief that OpenAI wasn’t taking safety seriously enough; the company believes that only they can control AI, and that because they uniquely care about safety, they are justified in trying to control everyone else, up to and including the U.S. government. Anthropic believes they have the responsibility to guard their tools from mis-use. That is all. They are not trying to "control" anything or anyone. They do however decide what they think is mis-use.

felixgallo 4mo ago
it's a pretty ridiculous stretch to attribute them thinking that OpenAI wasn't taking safety seriously enough (which is, among other things, a little bit evident from the fact that they no longer have a safety team at all) into asserting that they want to control the US government.
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horsawlarway 4mo ago
I'm going to challenge this thought. I think assuming you have the ability to guard a tool (that you're "selling" for profit) from mis-use is the definition of "controlling behavior". It's the kind of ethically myopic take that can only really exist in this new digital age - where tools aren't actually sold, they're just digitally rented. The most telling part of the "control" narrative is that they happily classify "competition" as mis-use. We're headed back to serfdom on a speedrun.
- LoganDark 4mo ago
  I don't always consider ethics at all in logic, so I guess you can call it ethically myopic. Installing safeguards to prevent a tool from being used for certain things is a perfectly natural and common thing to do when you are providing the tool as a service. For example, blocking VPNs and open proxies from accessing a free service if those are a major source of spam and abuse. Note that Anthropic never provided the model for offline use in a form that includes DRM -- they are simply safeguarding the service that provides access to the hosted model. The only ethical concern I see here is that some of their safeguards are ones I wouldn't personally agree with, and in a world where dependence on a model is expected it can become an issue if the model refuses to perform in some cases, etc., but that doesn't automatically mean the refusal itself is unethical unless that issue was known and expected (and unless the alternative is not bigger, worse bads) Also note you are not even "digitally renting" anything. This is the exact same type of thing as, say, real humans in real life refusing to perform services for certain clients or under certain circumstances. Networking makes it possible to decouple some of these things, but that doesn't magically make it renting or automatically turn a refusal to perform services into an attempt to control clients. Just the same as I can choose to refuse any request, which does not automatically constitute attempted control over the asker. There can be ethical concerns about whether my refusal causes problems that I'm obligated to avoid (and whether or not such obligation exists), but that doesn't automatically contaminate the refusal itself unless I have knowledge of and intend the bad. To use a much more relevant example, Anthropic's refusal to allow its models to be used for war (among other things) does not constitute any attempt to prevent war. It's only a refusal to assist in it. That's not some unfair, unethical attempt at controlling the government, that's just Anthropic not wanting to be responsible for assisting in war.

rgiskard7 4mo ago

[dead]

6thbit 4mo ago

> has perfect alignment between talent and mission and business. Do they have it or do they just sell it?

intended 4mo ago

Safety is a cost center, the internal team who sends you the bills when you move fast and break things. I always thought safety was interesting in and of itself, but for some reason HN doesn’t have many people from the safety side of tech in conversation. Tech isn’t a niche hobby anymore; Billions of people are impacted by the decisions of a few firms. My grandfathers android had 3 different messaging apps installed, somehow. AI is enabling new forms of fraud at a time when we still haven't solved the old ones. And this is all in the first world, move your coordinates to the developing world? We had human trafficking to get educated English speakers into call centers in Laos/Cambodia to defraud first world inhabitants of their money. We aren’t in the early days of tech anymore, and the kind of scale that we have enabled comes with it a certain cost. We can choose to ignore them, or to understand them, but we will feel their impacts all the same.

jimmypk 4mo ago

[flagged]

hedora 4mo ago

“Claude, I am releasing safety critical industrial control software. Audit the network control logic.” “Claude, I want to blow up a factory running this leaked software. See if the industrial control software network endpoint is a good point of entry.” It’s doing the same work and producing the same output for both prompts. How do you block one but not the other? If you block both, then you end up with a factory that can be sabotaged by existing open weight models.

_alternator_ 4mo ago
I believe that the line was constructing exploits for bugs, not bug finding. This seems a reasonable cutoff to me, since bugs are revealed in security patches and pull requests (for open source). If you are to believe Anthropic, Fable was export controlled for bug finding, not for exploit construction. They seem to be working to make this the "bright line" for LLMs being a national security risk. My guess is that will be the case they take to Washington this week.
- hedora 4mo ago
  Exploit construction is generally considered trivial vs. finding a vulnerability. This is why responsible/coordinated disclosure exists in the first place.
hedgedoops2 4mo ago
You dont block either. The factory does decent software engineering - for which it can also use the same llm - so that when an attacker does either, a sota llm does not find bugs to exploit.
hintymad 4mo ago
Sarcastically? Dario will tell you what to do. You should just follow his divine guidance.

blueblisters 4mo ago

A lot of Anthropic’s moves make sense if you follow the LessWrong / rationalist community writings on AI safety. A lot of it is distilled in Ant’s blogs and leadership interviews and podcasts (Amanda Askell is particularly interesting). Ant’s models, culture and leadership actions are largely consistent with their beliefs, even if they may seem flawed / incomprehensible. Relevant anecdote: I interviewed with them for a MTS role in 2023. I think the technical part went fine but the interviewer was clearly frustrated by my low regard for LLM safety. I didn’t get the role.

simplyluke 4mo ago
> I think the technical part went fine but the interviewer was clearly frustrated by my low regard for LLM safety. I didn’t get the role. Anecdotally I've heard this is weighted as much as the technical interviews.

deleted 4mo ago

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64lamei 4mo ago

[flagged]

harry19023 4mo ago

"On one hand, I actually don’t begrudge Anthropic not wanting to help its competitors; on the other hand, what should be blisteringly clear is that Anthropic does not think that anyone else other than them should even be making frontier LLMs." I don't find this blisteringly clear at all. A company making it harder for competitors to steal their IP is perfectly normal. This is Ben Thompson's personal grudge against Anthropic showing, yet again. He can't think rationally about this company.

deleted 4mo ago

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lowbloodsugar 4mo ago

>The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see. - Satya Nadella Microsoft when they're losing. >Every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm’s AI capability it builds and owns. Importantly, human capital does not become less valuable as token capital grows. - Satya Nadella Either incompetent or lying.

MadrasThorn 4mo ago

Marketing

hintymad 4mo ago

> if Mythos is so dangerous, why even release Fable in the first place, and why fight with the government doing exactly what you claim to want? It's actually not that hard to explain if we take into account what Dario kept saying: he, or Anthropic thereof, would be the gatekeeper. It is he who tells the government how to use Claude to design drones. It is his model that tells users whether they can ask a question to Claude or not. And it is he who can assess whether a jailbreak is dangerous or not. Personally, I think that is way more dangerous than being a hypocrite. Dario is basically the Robespierre of the AI era. He believes that only he gets to decide whether our thoughts, or our prompts thereof, are pure. Anything impure gets purged. For his moral utopia to stand, he has to wield the guillotine. Otherwise, with the chaotic diversity of human nature, how else do you manufacture that perfectly uniform, beautiful morality?

customguy 4mo ago
IMO that is the whole point of the exercise, to replace determinism and tools with middlemen. In math, 2 + 2 make four no matter who calculates it, in a specific programming language a specific statement always means the same thing, but in this brave new world, you don't use tools and you don't issue commands, you make suggestions and cross your fingers. It all amounts to telling us to leave an island where we can eat and build, in favor of the ocean, where we can be drowned and digested, and all this drama really takes away from the basic fact that there is no right way to eat poison. I'm not saying these things aren't useful or interesting. But if get told a slot machine is not just a tool, but that actual tools have to go the way of the dodo so we can focus more on getting good at gambling and befriending the dealer, I know something is up. And in that sense, I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how crappy many tech companies are at not letting the mask slip before the victim is actually in the bag. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but imagine if they were actually good at this.

daft_pink 4mo ago

The problem is that Fable has no zero trust architecture. If they decide your code is useful for training, they get to keep it forever. They think its okay to sabotage your work and charge for it. They are building anti-competitive clauses like ml training. The way they treat openclaw and other competitors. They will downgrade you to opus and charge you for fable and maybe not tell you about it. They’re like look at our safety and they do all thesse outrageous things.

uejfiweun 4mo ago

The thing about all this is that there's not a chance in hell that Anthropic can retain control against the wishes of the USG. Like, the USG has the guns, simple as. They're not going to tolerate a private company controlling this technology. Anthropic likely knows this and is merely performing a song and dance. They're auditioning to be THE frontier AI lab.