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The Korean telecom giant at the center of Anthropic's Mythos controversy

• dstala 4mo ago
  [dead]
• tristanj 4mo ago
  This whole Fable 5 controversy will look quite silly once China releases a comparable model in six months.
  • suggala 4mo ago
    It would take less than 1 month if not for the restrictions. One of the reason is they might be using distilling to achieve the parity.
    • cyanydeez 4mo ago
      oh, do you not pay attention to the hardware they're allowed to buy from nvidia? At this point, it's more just being nerfed than being able to do the magical training stuff.
  • sigmar 4mo ago
    Fable/mythos are the first models from anthropic that hide 100% of reasoning tokens. So it seems to me like we're about to get a lot more data about to what extent Chinese model progress has been a consequence of distillation techniques.
    • tristanj 4mo ago
      This isn't correct, Claude hasn't displayed the raw chain of thought for any of the Claude 4 series models, which were released in May 2025. Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.8 only display a summarized chain of thought, which is produced by a secondary model. Fable displays its summarized chain of thought in the same manner. The thinking traces disappeared because Anthropic changed them to be hidden by default. The rationale for hiding it was that most people don't look at the thinking traces https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 . You can reenable thinking traces in Claude code settings with the flag showThinkingSummaries: true.
      • sigmar 4mo ago
        Qualified it with "100%" because claude4 models show the first few lines of the chain of thought: >On Claude 4 models, the first few lines of thinking output are more verbose, providing detailed reasoning that's particularly helpful for prompt engineering purposes. Claude Mythos Preview summarizes from the first token, so its thinking blocks do not show this verbose preamble. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/extended-thinking#summarized-thinking https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/extend...
      • Barbing 4mo ago
        Hidden by default should make it easier to identify who’s scraping even those summarized CoTs, I figure. Also figure it’s very expensive to summarize every single chat on the service.
  • FergusArgyll 4mo ago
    Google can't do it, OpenAI didn't do it, Meta didn't do it etc etc. Why do you think China will? I am quite certain the gap will only grow
    • danieltanfh95 4mo ago
      That's a skill issue, not a technology issue.
    • skeledrew 4mo ago
      DeepSeek took everyone by surprise with R1. I'm pretty sure they and/or others will do the unexpected again. Not as if the US has a monopoly on awesome talent.
      • vintermann 4mo ago
        A quick look at the author names on most recent big AI papers, says that's an understatement. US's comparative advantage is in data centers, not in expertise. Of course, they're betting they won't need those experts soon.
        • FergusArgyll 4mo ago
          The question you (and parent) are dodging is why doesn't Google and Meta catch up? US closed labs don't release papers as I'm sure you know
          • vintermann 4mo ago
            US companies used to release lots of papers. You can go back to when they did, and see for yourself how many Chinese names there are on them. Or you can look at those which still publish a lot, like Nvidia. Google is catching up, especially by the metric of "making money". Meta from the start clearly had a strategy not of competing to dominate, but preventing their competitors from dominating by releasing open models and software. (You have them to thank you're not working in Tensorflow right now)
  • cobolcomesback 4mo ago
    How so? The fact that China is going to launch a comparable model soon is the whole point of what’s happening now. Everyone knows there are going to be open models soon that have the same capabilities - Anthropic has literally said so. The restrictions now are to buy time to patch the security issues before those Chinese models are made available to the whole world.
• easygenes 4mo ago
  The Wired headline reframes the issue in a way that’s misleading. SK Telecom was a previously resolved issue (as in prior to Fable launch). It may have been a contributing factor, but the crux of the shutdown was the industry reporting of Fable jailbreaks (reportedly spearheaded by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy). The more interesting and honest angle is that the industry which has taken the seriousness of Glasswing at face value felt blindsided by Fable release and totally exposed by the residual risk, when they know they still have a months-long bugfixing backlog exposed by Glasswing and are desperate to buy more time. This misleading looks deliberate on Wired’s part, to appear as though they’re getting a scoop when they’re really just being dishonest. Shameful.
  • meowface 4mo ago
    Wired has been NY Post-tier (of the inverse polarity) for several years, now.
    • cyanydeez 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • meowface 4mo ago
        If you check my post history, I'm very left-leaning. I'm just establishment-left+woke (i.e., liberal) rather than populist-left+socialist, and Wired is populist-left. I'm the kind of person who actually likes Obama, for example. It's actually unfortunate, because a not very credible publication writing about the vile behavior of the Trump administration (including Elon Musk personally literally killing hundreds of thousands of children, and possibly millions) only serves to help them. Those particular stories may or may not be fine, but I've seen enough truly abysmal stories to not have any trust in them as an organization. Like, within one second of opening the article I already saw the headline is deeply misleading and then checked the comments here to see if anyone else had noticed (and they did). It's a joke. The article doesn't even make sense. It's like an AI-generated high school essay forced to hamfist a response to a contrived prompt.
• kittikitti 4mo ago
  Many of us know coders and cybersecurity professionals who are even better than Claude Fable or Mythos. It's outstanding how much praise and careful consideration it gets. At the same time, humans with even more expertise are discarded and fired.
  • trunnell 4mo ago
    Sure they exist but they're rare, difficult to identify and hire, and take years to train. Mythos/Fable is available on tap.
    • claytonjy 4mo ago
      I can also use the models anytime, and for a lot of time, until i’m anywhere close to salary for an engineer like that
      • ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
        sure. and when you do have that money then you magically become altruistic and decide to pay that salary even though it costs you more
  • theplumber 4mo ago
    You seem to ignore the fact that this kind of praise and attention is not accidental. It’s a direct result of massive PR by Anthropic. AGI and skynet is their marketing. Dario is the supreme hyper on that. Make no mistake this is a trillion dollar company not your average startup so it has the money and potentially the power to influence policy (I.e ban competitors)
  • zuzululu 4mo ago
    > Many of us know coders and cybersecurity professionals who are even better than Claude Fable or Mythos. Like who ? I find your statement to be doubtfyl
  • gverrilla 4mo ago
    Capital over humans. This is the main significance of the "free market" people love so much in HN. And then, after defending this monstruosity, they get sad when the internet becomes this anti-human place, they get sad with layoffs, etc. Abstraction overtook reality.
• OsrsNeedsf2P 4mo ago
  > SK Telecom has poured capital into Anthropic several times, including a $100 million investment in 2023 that coincided with the formation of a commercial partnership to develop an AI model tailored to the telecommunications industry. > the White House asked Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom’s access to Mythos, according to a person close to the AI lab. The company immediately complied, Lesson learned - don't invest in US companies
  • echelon 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • embedding-shape 4mo ago
      > That's not the lesson. There's a tremendous amount of money to make on US investments. Sure, but also, now suddenly you got cut from something and need to fight that fire, meanwhile you surely have other fires you'd much rather spend more effort on. That's not free either, and who knows how much they valued their use of Mythos. The lesson is quite literally to avoid anything US until it has stabilized again, which will probably take a while, sadly.
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      • luma 4mo ago
        What does that have to do with investment? OP didn't say "don't integrate American tech company products into your workflow". Say what one will about the current state of America, it's still a solid place to dump money in hopes of returns.
        • embedding-shape 4mo ago
          Yeah, countries ruled at whim by unstable governments tends to not be great for "dump money in hopes of return" but who am I to stop anyone, make your own informed decision.
• wood_spirit 4mo ago
  The articles and discussion around this and the Amazon story all seem to me to be an earnest tech press and community searching for a genuine reason for the administration blocking Anthropic’s models. However, thinking back to the spat with the DoD and more generally how the administration is much more supportive - and supported by - OpenAI and XAI and it’s easy to imagine this is just another escalation in the fight between a “liberal leaning” company and its competitors and the administration. There might have been something said by someone at Amazon or something but I’d guess Occam’s razor the administration just leapt at the chance after their supplier sanctions fell flat?
  • jeremyjh 4mo ago
    They are searching for a headline that will attract clicks. Everyone knows nothing this administration does is genuine, but pretending there is a controversy related to whether or not it could be has been a money pump for the last decade.
    • throwaway-blaze 4mo ago
      I dont get this at all...how does the administration or people within it get a "money pump" from headlines?
      • jeremyjh 3mo ago
        The administration usually does it through insider trading, but I was referring to the people who write the headlines, which are the news and media companies.
  • tristanj 4mo ago
    Anthropic is going through the classic Ideological Resistance phase where they fight with the government on principles, that every major tech company also went through. Google, Facebook, Apple, Reddit, Microsoft (especially Microsoft) all had this phase. Then the companies realize fighting the US government is a lot of effort, expensive and creates a lot of drama, and it's easier to reach a mutual understanding.
• davidklemke 4mo ago
  https://archive.is/qrHjk https://archive.is/qrHjk
• zuzululu 4mo ago
  its very real, chinese capital is being intertwined/injected into all facet of south korean society through its own domestic companies and politicians.
  • danipark 4mo ago
    Do you have credible evidence to support this claim? Although China is Korea's largest trading partner and numerous Chinese nationals work as foreign laborers in Korea, most are engaged in unskilled manual labor, and very few become knowledge workers or significant business partners. (Conversely, numerous Koreans operate businesses in China.) Those who claim that China exerts political influence over Korea are mostly Korean versions of MAGA.
    • zuzululu 4mo ago
      your claim that Chinese influence in South Korea is merely a MAGA conspiracy theory ignores the substantial economic and corporate reality on the ground, and inaccurately projects an irrelevant American political divide onto Korean geopolitics. In Korea, wariness of Chinese influence is a broad, bipartisan issue. there are many Chinese manual laborers in Korea, Chinese capital has also been heavily integrated into top-tier Korean tech firms and conglomerates. For example, Tencent is one of the largest shareholders in Korea's biggest gaming and tech companies, holding massive stakes in Kakao, Netmarble, and Krafton, while recently attempting to acquire major stakes in Nexon and Kakao Mobility. To say they are rarely 'significant business partners' is factually incorrect. This is just the tip of the iceberg the portfolio of Chinese capital is diverse and expands across media including JTBC which has been pushing very pro-beijing and anti-american view in particular framing the current bipartisan wariness of China as "far right MAGA" exactly as you typed. lee Jae-myung administration which generally leans more toward Beijing has to carefully navigate. Non-partisan groups like Pew Research consistently report that roughly 80% of South Koreans hold an unfavorable view of China making it one of the highest in the world. Notably, Pew also found that South Korea is unique in that its younger generation holds more negative views of China than its older generation the exact opposite demographic makeup of the US MAGA movement. Dismissing these well-documented geopolitical and economic realities as a fringe talking point simply doesn't reflect the situation on the ground in South Korea and this is why I ask, are you really Korean and how come you don't know these basic facts? a quick search in Korean would reveal numerous articles that back up China's capital deployment in South Korea especially in sensitive areas. you can't really fault Koreans for their wariness, many Chinese pretend to be Korean online/offline without good intentions. I can tell you that this is only going to end in violence and more discrimination against Chinese in Korea and people who don't even support CCP are going to be impacted.
• jr3592 4mo ago
  Why can't we use it in the US then?
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• jazz9k 4mo ago
  Over a decade ago, I was going to a tech group with a supposed security leader (that ended up getting a huge buyout from Cisco a few years ago). A student wanted to create a project that bypassed the GF of China. He basically told him he was an idiot, it was impossible, and discouraged the student from even trying. This was a hacker (the security leader) at one point in his life, that claimed to support the freedom of speech and expression. The actual reason he said this to the student is because he supports the government in China. Many other comments I heard after this proved to me that this is true. My guess is that his startup even received funding from the Chinese government. It's really disappointing that tech leaders can publicly support murderous regimes like the Chinese government for decades with no blow back. They are far worse than Putin/the Russian government and have 100X the money and technology. If he supported Russia, he would probably get cancelled and never be able to be involved in the tech industry again.
  • gverrilla 4mo ago
    USA is murderous in levels you can't even compare to China...
• jdw64 4mo ago
  Looking at the comments on Korean political articles, the point is not so much whether SKT is actually related to China, but rather that the switch to cut off AI vendors is now outside the realm of model performance specs. Now, when foreign companies integrate AI into their workflows, they probably need to add a category for vendor continuity in their evaluation criteria. From a corporate standpoint, uninterrupted continuity is what matters, and with this case, Anthropic is likely to lose a lot of trust, contrary to its own stated policies.
  • MikeNotThePope 4mo ago
    Open source models are not immune to a different form of restriction either. I recently learned that China is restricting travel for AI engineers living in China. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-restricts-overseas-travel-top-ai-talent-alibaba-deepseek-bloomberg-news-2026-05-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-restricts-o... It's going to be interesting to see how the AI arms races unfolds over time.
• htrp 4mo ago
  Just a gentle reminder that the SK in Hynix and the SK in Telecom all belong to the same actual family (the Cheys) Anthropic may discover a lack of availability for HBM memory in the near future.
• reliabilitygate 4mo ago
  [flagged]