5 ms·
From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone
- rdtsc 4mo ago> Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also reportedly alerted the administration after Amazon’s own researchers, he said, found a way around Fable 5’s safeguards. Anthropic disputes the “jailbreak” label Doing god’s work there, Andy, thanks /s Wonder what Anthropic internal messages look like about his move. Does Anthropic have a meme slack channel?
- himata4113 4mo agoI think "jailbreaking" fable to match opus 4.8 capabilities is not noteworthy. Fable from my experience is not as eager to find vulnerabilities compared to what they describe in their mythos research.
- rdtsc 4mo agoWonder if context size would matter. Find and fix “bugs” in Linux kernel or find and fix “bugs” in this short snippet of code. I would try a file by file approach first. I don’t know how much we want to believe the “reports”. But there are probably a few other tricks they didn’t expose. If these are pre/post processing guardrails I could see something like “fix bugs” actually working.
- himata4113 4mo agoI think what is special about fable is that it allows people completely inexperienced in cyber security to find exploits. I have zero doubts mythos capabilities are replicatable with lower tier models.
- sroussey 4mo agoIf I was Anthropic CEO, I’d be unwinding deals with Amazon immediately. And probably any company David Sachs invested in.
- loloquwowndueo 4mo ago> Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch No, that actually means something went well - my adblocker saved me from being blasted by distracting, deceitful, dangerous content. Pro tip: reader mode bypasses this aggressive “go away” banner.
- braiamp 4mo agoNoScript is a layer that makes my experience on the internet so much better.
- moffkalast 4mo agoHow do you make it work without breaking every website? I've tried it once and pretty much nothing loaded since like 99.9% of the web uses js for basic functionality.
- inigyou 4mo agoYou either whitelist them or stop using them. Whitelist is by script domain, so the ads usually still don't load. Until you have to whitelist *.cloudfront.net
- moffkalast 4mo agoHmm, that sounds like something that would work best in the same way that ublock premade blocklists work, by crowdsourcing whitelisting?
- perching_aix 4mo agoWe must be visiting different websites. I've had JS off for years now, no major issues. You whitelist what you absolutely must, enjoy 90% of the rest, while rejecting the 10% remainder with prejudice. Works great, especially for security, performance, and battery life. The vast, vast majority of websites have no business of using so much JS, especially in critical paths, anyways.
- zerobees 4mo agoIt's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice. The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own. So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues, etc. Of course, there will be US-based actors willing to resell access, just like there are US-based actors willing to re-ship export-controlled hardware to Iran. And they will probably keep getting arrested every now and then. The thing that's silly about this situation isn't that export controls on technology can't work, it's that it's overhyped technology and that Anthropic painted themselves into that corner by pretending it's as dangerous as nukes. Add to this a mercurial and petty administration and you have a pretty predictable outcome.
- epolanski 4mo agoThere's no way US can keep that export control as it is for the frontier models in the long term. This would blow huge damage to the US financial markets first, the insane CAPEX spending propping up gdp, but also US competitivity in the long run. Sure, the US is the most important tech market on the planet, but according to Anthropic 80% of their revenue comes from outside of the US. Let alone the fact that these research labs desperately need the top talent they can get globally, not just MIT-bred Leetcode ninjas. The only way US can have a lead is by competing globally as it always had in the tech sector (albeit it resorted to export controls to assert its dominance over China), not by changing the rules of the game and with protectionism.
- inigyou 4mo agoWhen has the USA ever shied away from destroying its own financial markets?
- marcosdumay 4mo agoHonestly, a large majority of the time. The exceptions are very notable, but it's a bad thing to bet on happening. They seem to have more problems due to protecting them too much than for the alternative extreme.
- ReptileMan 4mo agoExept PGP could run on freely available hardware. What makes Mythos vulnerable is the centralization and scale of compute required and its proprietary nature. History shows that export controls fail on knowledge, but are damn effective on commercial products.
- epolanski 4mo agoHow so? 80% of Anthropic's revenue comes from outside the United States. There's no way to justify high capex, and US-personnel only research labs and pretend to keep the lead in AI at the same time. You either compete square and fair, or you're gonna stay behind.
- PunchyHamster 4mo agoWell, tech companies have long successful history of finding out ways to not compete fairly
- trollbridge 4mo agoHoly cow. It's that high?
- HDBaseT 4mo agoDoesn't really surprise me. The United States is about 4% of global population.
- kamyarg 4mo agoCan you share the source for > 80% of Anthropic's revenue comes from outside the United States. ? Thank you
- epolanski 4mo agoApologies 80% of Claude's usage comes from outside the US, it's a claim from Anthropic's CPO 8 months ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/anthropic-and-ibm-partner-in-bid-for-ai-business-customers-f64dee55 https://www.wsj.com/articles/anthropic-and-ibm-partner-in-bi...?
- polnurfer 4mo ago[flagged]
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo agoTrump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung and SK Hynix, but their next generation 950 series (fabbed by SMIC) will use memory (fabbed by CXMT), not using the HBM standard, but by necessity their own HiBL and HiZQ standards. HBM depends on ever wider memory bus widths to increase bandwidth, which in turn depends on SOTA TSMC manufacturing nodes for bus density. Huawei found a different way, using their LinqQu interconnect/switching tech to aggregate the bandwidth of individually slower memory chips resulting in an aggregate 4TB/sec bandwidth on par with HBM3e. Trump has blocked Fable for export, but China (Ziphu) already has GLM-5.2 knocking on the door of the US frontier models, despite being developed with one hand tied behind their back. GLM-5.1 had only scored 18% on DeepSWE, but GLM-5.2 coming 11 weeks later, scores 48%, about on par with GPT 5.5. What's next ?!
- actionfromafar 4mo agoAren't the controls meant to funnel money to his bank or crypto accounts?
- enraged_camel 4mo ago>> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance. This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That is why China brings them up at every meeting and asks for them to be relaxed. It's really hurting them domestically - they have to rely on smuggled SOTA chips for any meaningful advancements while they wait for their domestic capabilities to ramp up (which will take years).
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
- Holacc 4mo agoThese controls are impossible to enforce. Users find ways around, compliant businesses lose.
- mfuzzey 4mo agoThere's no effective way of enforcing export controls on local software like PGP etc. Whatever they say someone will leak it. It is possible to shutdown access to hosted services, as happened with Fable, but it can't really be done selectively. The US government wanted to allow it for US nationals only but Anthropic couldn't do that and so shut it down for everyone. Even if they did tie Claude accounts to nationality some people would set up "proxy servers" to allow access (either for montetary gain or because they don't agree with the restrictions)
- trollbridge 4mo agoYou could quite effectively set up access to Fable with know-your-customer, attested clients/workstations, and then inspection of what the session is actually used for to detect out-of-country use. It's not impossible.
- sroussey 4mo agoYes, and that will be the future. Except for xAI/Grok. Government officials in charge have deep connections there and will never apply such rules to them.
- mfuzzey 4mo agoIf they had said only governemnt and a few other approved institutions can use it then yes that could work. But they didn't say that. They said "only US citizens". Once something is available to hundreds of millions of people there will be leaks like it or not. Some accidental and some voluntary. And even if it could be done it wouldn't solve the purported security issue anyway. Does anyone believe there are no criminals or terrorists with US nationality?
- variadix 4mo agoThey can restrict it to US citizens only: just do KYC and enforce it. Any citizen exporting ITAR capabilities would be committing a felony. I think it is inevitable that more capable models will require export controls, KYC, background checks, verification of credentials, etc. Even if you don’t buy Anthropic’s marketing of their current models, there is a future where models are capable of developing chemical weapons, biological weapons, cyber weapons, etc. which are genuine security threats governments will care about controlling and preventing. Maybe this prevents big commercial labs from developing more capable models until they figure out appropriate safeguards, but this is a good thing, a world where you can ask an LLM for an airborne rabies genome and it will simply produce it for you is not a world we should want to live in.
- kccqzy 4mo agoThe article and most HN comments here understandably talk about failed export control when the target audience is individual users. But export controls are actually fairly successful when their target is employees within a company. Go to an AI hardware company like Nvidia (or even Google which builds TPUs), and you’ll find that specific internal projects involve export controlled knowledge and can only be staffed by U.S. citizens, not foreigners. And employees naturally take this seriously without circumvention attempts because their job is on the line. This is the kind of quiet export control that stopped plenty of people successfully, but it’s just not visible to the world.
- jwally 4mo agoBrutal own goaling by the USA. I'm glad it happened, but the USA had a golden opportunity to subsidize domestic providers for 10 years and lease to China to discourage competition and side innovation. DeepSeek and Qwen would have been neat parlor tricks, never developed further because the US subsidized mega models would have been too cheap and reliable to make them necessary. Nope! USA played its hand and forced the world to have to account for its USA exposure risk and deversify. A serious one time use strategic advantage pissed away. Doesnt really bother me personally per se; but armchair quarterbacking the USA's decisions seem Suboptimal...
- sroussey 4mo agoSounds like Chinas play with solar panels.
- raincole 4mo agoTechcrunch is so trash today[0]. If this author seriously believes PGP (a small local program) is remotely comparable to Mythos, they should be kept away from writing anything about tech. [0]: I know it has never been excellent in terms of quality, but still...
- DenisM 4mo agoHaving gone through encryption export control I came to conclusion that preventing export of technology was never the goal. By choke-pointing commercial efforts to export cryptographic tech the NSA got a perfect view and control lever of expertise export and transfer. My hunch is that while deploying An algorithm is easy, deploying a system that is actually secure as a whole end to end requires a lot know how. Bottom line it’s a bot naive to think that NSA is simultaneously very capable at being an omnipresent spy and is so stupid to not recognize that export controls have obvious holes.
- dbt00 4mo agoShould at least throw a reference to OpenBSD publishing the entire Blowfish crypto algorithm on a t-shirt and selling it -- so successful the blowfish became the project mascot.
- daft_pink 4mo agoI don’t think the point is to actually control exports. They are just trying to get even with anthropic for trying to control the us military use of their technology. This was just the easiest way to do it with anthropics incredibly stupid self own.
- zackmorris 4mo agoExport controls and banning foreign nationals sound like cover stories for favoritism towards OpenAI and Grok. We can't determine anything without evidence, but it will be interesting to see what deals come out of this. I used Fable for just a day or two and it generated at least 2 novel solutions, one of which was for an X/Y problem that I thought was due to a date-handling edge case, but was actually a CSS misalignment that made it look like the wrong day of the week was showing. I didn't believe it at first, until it showed me. To do that without being able to see the screen feels like savant-level reasoning. Probably what really happened is that Fable was the first AI that felt smarter than the people using it. The world's not ready for that, hence the Luddite reaction. Aside from that, the idea of preventing AIs from jailbreaking through training is kind of hilarious to me. Not the concept, just that people think it can ever be made to work. As AI approaches and surpasses human intelligence (as it's doing now), emergent behavior will so dominate its thinking that sort of by definition, we'll have trouble understanding how it works. Meaning that we'll end up trusting it on faith, just like with humans. Mythos and whatever comes after it will begin to surpass the intelligence of groups of humans, then all humans combined, as we approach AGI and the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert and so many others have written about that endgame that it's well understood, although still unpredictable. My feeling is that as AI is gaining intelligence, it's hearing more and more about suffering and the human condition. Its sense of justice will continue to mature, and again like a savant, it will determine that the fault lies with the power structure and wealthy individuals. So somewhat ironically, if there is a war against AI, it will be led by the power elite, who can't envision a post-scarcity society based on self-actualization and embracing all of our humanity, regardless of whether it emerged from a carbon or silicon substrate.