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The US is really shooting itself in the foot here. The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was diffic
by data-ottawa 4mo ago
The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.
The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.
As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.
Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.
So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.
I installed Mistral Vibe last week and I've been experimenting with offloading work to it. I won't pretend that Mistral-medium is close to state of the art. It isn't. It still writes incorrect tool calls.
From the last week about 50% of my LLM tasks actually reduced to "take this work and write about it" and Mistral excels there -- it definitely beats Opus at writing. Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate.
There's another say 30% of tasks that's writing queries against a data warehouse. I updated my semantic layer MCPs and Vibe uses them, but it struggles with ambiguity here. It's not a replacement, it's maybe where Opus was a year ago.
The rest of my work involves writing code. That's going to be harder to replace for now. My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models. I can't decide if I was ever actually happy with Opus's work on this front though -- the understanding tradeoffs when you trust LLMs with decisions stack non-linearly and negatively. I did like Fable on these tasks, I won't lie, I will miss it, but not by any choice of my own.
- azinman2 4mo ago> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. That’s totally unclear. Things are changing fast. No statement from god or potus has come down about the future of LLMs and who can access what. And for what it’s worth, I’m not able to access fable and I’m a US citizen.
- wouldbecouldbe 4mo agoThat's the implied suggestion from the verification that they can prove to only share it with US citizens
- fluidcruft 4mo agoMy understanding was that until they can make sure it cannot be weaponized against the US, only US citizens will be allowed to use it. (Read: the US lacks authority to ban use by citizens and doesn't want to risk their hand in court, particularly since lawyers who know anything have all left US government and what remains are complete incompetent jokes who can't even win slam-dunk cases due to repeated procedural errors. The nice thing about blocking non-citizens is they are easy to bounce out of court on standing)
- misnome 4mo agoPlease don’t be dumb enough to take whatever they say in good faith.
- johnsmith1840 4mo agoOr its to stop industrialized distilation efforts? I would suprised if admin doesn't want american companies and their employees to not be over competitive with outside companies. But I do see them wanting a lever to prevent international rivals from having it.
- coldtea 4mo ago>That’s totally unclear. Being unclear is enough for people to steer clear of it...
- Barbing 4mo agoRight, if we saw an open-source Mythos release today, I’d expect it to move the government’s idea of security goalposts.
- jeromegv 4mo ago> That’s totally unclear. Lol, welcome to US foreign policy. Or US trade policy. Totally unclear, and it's a feature. Yes, lack of stability and clarity is entirely why people are steering away from the US. Yes things can change again next week, it's not a good thing.
- OtomotO 4mo agoAs is everything coming out of the US these days. If you have a person as president that changes his opinions faster and more often than their underwear, you're simply not reliable.
- chillfox 4mo agoI can't build workflows on something that can randomly be unavailable for over a week. At this point the future availability of Anthropic models outside the US is very unclear.
- pyeri 4mo agoHave you tried one of the Kimi K2 models or the latest GLM models by z.ai? The general consensus is that they're at least at par with Claude's class.
- stavros 4mo agoIf K2 or GLM 5.2 are on par with Opus 4.8 I'll eat my hat. They're good, but they're not that good. Deepseek V4 Pro has been better than Sonnet for me, but the only model that comes close to or surpasses Opus 4.8 is GPT-5.5.
- fjsoxjdnwk 4mo agoHonestly just give it time. This stuff moves so fast next month the conversation will be different. For folks who don’t like the ID privacy issues, use Deepseek et al and it should be able to get the job done even if the experience takes a bit more wrangling. The problem with the ID verification is that they can pair introspective conversations with ID. Either that bothers people or it doesn’t. Main point: we can’t fret about current state models because the ID verification has future implications. Models will change and competition will catch up. Do what feels right in the long run not whether TODAYS model is better at Anthropic.
- stavros 4mo agoI agree with this, my disagreement was strictly with saying that the current open models are as good as Opus.
- fragmede 4mo ago> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. Codex-5.5 > Opus 4.8, so that's not true.
- sourthyme 4mo agoWhere does 5.5 beat Opus 4.8?
- anonuser123 4mo agoReviews for one. It's reviews are phenomenal.
- pimeys 4mo agoYes and no. The hot moment I tried Fable that thing gave reviews so good I was already considering automation to cut a review for every PR in the company. Its coding abilities though were not that good. GPT 5.5 is by far the best coding model.
- OccamsMirror 4mo agoThis is just not true. Especially for frontend development. But I've compared them very recently one to one and Opus wins every time. Some people have been saying that 5.5 is on par with Fable and it's just nonsense.
- Animats 4mo ago> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago. Note the big cut in token prices from China. [1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml
- ignoramous 4mo ago> Note the big cut in token prices from China. After the recent 75%+ price cuts by DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo (and now, MiniMax), I pretty much packed my Claude bag up and moved over. I see no discernable difference (other than chattiness of its thinking modes) in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.
- 1over137 4mo agoand China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.
- hulahoof 4mo agoIf you haven’t already, check out omnigent for building workflows across multiple harnesses: https://omnigent.ai/ https://omnigent.ai/ (Disclaimer: I work for Databricks, but do not work on omnigent - though I have submitted some QOL PRs as a community member)
- miki123211 4mo agoThey clearly specify that they accept IDs from most countries. This likely means that they've reached a deal (or hope that they'll reach one) with the US government that lets them share Fable with foreigners, but only as long as they know exactly who it is being shared with. This is off-putting to the HN demographic, but won't change anything in practice. 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.
- calgoo 4mo agoSure if you want to share your ID and information with Persona. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632
- rockskon 4mo agoThat remains to be seen. Assuming the worst from the start discourages people from taking any action and is an imprudent way to approach political topics.
- dgellow 4mo agoPersona already had scandals earlier this year: - https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-surveillance-capabilities/ https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-su... - https://hothardware.com/news/discord-drops-persona-after-users-blast-uk-age-checks-and-data-practices https://hothardware.com/news/discord-drops-persona-after-use... It’s off putting outside of HN
- zsoltkacsandi 4mo ago> I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access That is very well put.
- cheesecakegood 4mo agoIf they have a year sub, then yes I agree (even if it’s implicitly always part of the risk of buying so far in advance) but if they are month to month this position is absolutely nonsensical.
- 0x3f 4mo agoYou seem to be saying that it's not a problem because you can just cancel your subscription if you don't like it. The fact remains that it's true. It's bad for goodwill in the same way Apple flipping $ -> £/€ is.
- cortesoft 4mo ago> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. Your overall argument makes some sense, but I would bet any money this simply is not true. Even if the US maintains some of the restrictions on export (which is in no way a given with how fickle this administration is, let alone the next administration), as LLMs advance, Fable will eventually be considered a lower tier model, and is likely to have restrictions lifted.
- pizzly 4mo agoThat makes it better, paying money to always having access to the second rate models from US AI providers. The problem remains.
- cheonic52749 4mo ago> paying money to always having access to the second rate models from US AI providers. The problem remains. Your alternative: Pay a Chinese or EU company for a third rate model. The choice is yours.
- FpUser 4mo ago>"The choice is yours." I think (probably except cases with regulatory restrictions) most will very much prefer to pay for "second rate" models from other suppliers, including China and help them to become premium choice.
- suddenlybananas 4mo agoThey do catch up.
- byzantinegene 4mo agonot if they run out of investments to train their cutting edge models. Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are going to be a massive flop if they aren't able to sell their best models to the world.
- cortesoft 4mo ago
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoI also think this makes OpenAI and Anthropic even less viable. They're tens of billions in debt, losing money every month, have data center commitments in the hundreds of billions, and now they're reducing their market to the US? The only way this can work is with substantial government subsidies.
- dgellow 4mo agoDefinitely damaging for their IPOs
- Den_VR 4mo agoTragic.
- beezlewax 4mo agosubsidies what like space x or tesla?
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoshhh, the investors might hear you. If they do then the bubble pops, all those data centre projects grind to a halt, 5% of US GDP disappears, and the USA goes into a deep recession. Of course, as you say, this would require govt funds to fix. Congress gets asked for funding to save the US economy, and various members of the Trump dynasty pop up in unexpected non-exec directorships for companies receiving those funds.
- somenameforme 4mo agoAnd a fraction of the US market at that. Requiring ID scans and all of this nonsense to use a chatbot just added a whole layer of friction that many are going to just nope on out of and use one of the endless other services. I suppose the next step will be for the government to try to ban those other services once they mature and start booming.
- lukewarm707 4mo agoeasy IPO cashout
- lyime 4mo agoYou underestimate how large the US market is.
- ecocentrik 4mo agoAI was always going to be geo-politically fragmentary. As soon as we started talking about it like a utility it was clear that every country was going to be strongly limited to the resources it could develop and the infrastructure it could build out. The US and China will still be selling hardware, managing infrastructure and licensing models and yes the domestic market is massive.
- byzantinegene 4mo agoyou understimate how large the international market is, for example, half of google's revenue is generated from international markets.
- Phelinofist 4mo ago> As a non-US citizen ... > My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models May I suggest using Cortecs.ai then? OpenRouter is US-based as well and since you have been bitten by this already perhaps it's really time to change course? :)
- data-ottawa 4mo agoThanks for the suggestion, I am looking into it, it looks promising and I like that the pricing model is very upfront
- throw__away7391 4mo ago> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to No, we are all just waiting for Dario to get scheduled for an Oval Office press conference where he can present a gold trophy to Liberace Hitler and extoll his praises for all the amazing winning he is doing like no one has ever seen before.
- WhyNotHugo 4mo agoThe government mandate forcing them to restrict access of new models to American has really cut their legs under them. This identity verification is a best effort to kinda stay afloat: they can now offer bleeding edge models to US nationals, but not to the other 95% of the world. Their influence is gonna tank quite seriously if the previous mandate is not reversed. Realistically, their choices are to either implement this, or restrict access to new models entirely, which is a sure way to fall into complete irrelevance.
- mapontosevenths 4mo agoThe worst part is that the entire ban is zero step thinking. The US is showing the world that even when it has the best tech it's too politically unstable to rely on as a serious partner. Worse, doing this forces other nations to catch up to compete. Once they have, what happens next? An AI arms race that the US may not win? Someone else opens their Fable class model first and takes the multi-trillion dollar market that could have been run by a US company? There is no n-step positive outcome for the USA. The only winning move was not to play.
- metalspot 4mo agoThe entire internet will be real id verified soon. You won't even be able to send packets without a hardware digital signature linked to a real id. Might as well get used to it.
- aucisson_masque 4mo agoI bet that if you don't use companies that enforce these verifications, and they start to lose money, things will shift very fast.
- metalspot 4mo agoNo. Google and Apple are already rolling out the infrastructure. FCC is requiring IDs for phones. It will be opt-in for a while but the acceleration of AI risks will inevitably lead to an infrastructure level lock down of the entire internet. 99% of the population will accept it without hesitation because it is no different than what they do already. Everything you do online is already logged and tracked. The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.
- 3y350n1y 4mo ago"The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity." what an absolute crock.
- girvo 4mo ago> The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity. What utter nonsense.
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago> The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity. As defined by the politicians bought and paid for by the corporations via their lobbyists. You actually think this is a good thing?
- jen20 4mo ago
- lmohseni 4mo agoI’ve been using GLM-5.2 on openrouter with pi and, while I’ve only been playing with it for a couple days, seems stronger than Opus 4.8, nearly on the level of Fable for coding/architecture tasks.
- varispeed 4mo agoI don't know what was the hype about Fable. It was crap. This more looks like PR stunt by the US government to prop up the failing product. Now everyone talks about Fable and wants Fable. Having used it for limited time when it was available, I don't miss it at all.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoI wanted Fable in order to harden my C project against exploits and vulnerabilities. Anthropic downgraded me to Opus 4.8 every single time I tried to do it. So I don't even know if I miss it. I suppose that's equivalent to never having used Fable at all.
- calvinmorrison 4mo agoClaude has been doing this to me even without Fable, trying to write a Xaw frontend for the moc music player.
- drnick1 4mo ago> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here. > The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market The issue is that there is no "international LLM market." America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge. I routinely use Qwen and GPT-OSS (locally) for things I don't want to share with Anthropic, but they are clearly inferior to SOTA cloud models.
- laacz 4mo agoKings come and go. These types of decisions can actually kill a king. Not instantly, of course. But still.
- 1over137 4mo agoHow does it follow that there’s no “international LLM market” just because one party is ahead of another? There’s an international car market even though some cars are better/worse than others.
- toofy 4mo ago> America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge. this sentiment is far too commonplace in my opinion. just because the BMW x5 exists doesn’t mean rav4 isn’t used by far far far more people. the rav4 is close enough for most people to the x5 and way cheaper. if deepseek is close enough and significantly cheaper, which direction do we think the market will go once the hype trash moves on and people realize how much of the hype trash is just botted algorithms?
- furyofantares 4mo ago> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true. I don't really disagree with the rest of your post but I very strongly doubt that Opus 4.8 will be the best American LLM you'll have access to this year.
- dalemhurley 4mo agoWhy, is there any evidence to support your claim?
- Aurornis 4mo agoThere is a long history of US export restrictions on technologies. They have all been temporary. It would be extraordinary if this was the beginning of the first ever permanent technology export restriction.
- bigiain 4mo agoFrom outside the US, there has been so much "extraordinary" stuff happening in US politics recently that it's almost expected now.
- input_sh 4mo agoTemporary as in it lasted for quite some years, not temporary as in it was dropped within months. That's a very long timescale for this sort of field.
- sofixa 4mo agoIt doesn't matter, because people are adopting AI now, and even if the restrictions are lifted tomorrow, it has been proven that relying on an American SaaS is risky, because you can just lose access. So why would you get that instead of self-hosting Mistral Studio and fine tuning for your needs? Or going fully DIY with e.g. OpenShift AI and open source Chinese models? That way you fully control availability, costs and quality.
- deleted 4mo ago
- Aurornis 4mo agoDespite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April. Wayback Machine if you don’t believe me: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c... > As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old. LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls. These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
- justaj 4mo agoWhat makes you believe this is about export controls rather than harvesting data?
- kgutscode1 4mo agoMass surveillance and all the other that gets associated with mass surveillance
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo agoWhat makes you believe he belives that?
- justaj 4mo agoBecause of this sentence? > LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo agoThe sentence does not state he believes the ID check is for export control purposes In fact, earlier in the comment, he argues the ID check dates back to April
- ignoramous 4mo ago
- hailwren 4mo agoThis strikes me as bluster. You use Anthropic because they offer the best model, if China offered a better model you would use them. You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model but the truth is as long as Anthropic continue to serve a better model than China, you will use it. Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago> You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model You think some people aren't "deserving" of the best models?
- hailwren 4mo agoNot an argument I made. A summary of the argument OP was making.
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. > Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up. Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really hard to justify giving Anthropic any more money. I'm very tempted to switch to GLM 5.2.
- digitaltrees 4mo agoAs an American founder I am sorry for this. I think the world needs to band together to take geopolitical risk out of AI.
- nozzlegear 4mo ago> banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free It should go without saying, but "the free" in "the land of the free" refers to Americans, not everyone else. Not sure if you were trying to make it sound like a great irony that "the land of the free" would exclude or ban people, but if so it doesn't quite hit the mark. A more cutting criticism would be that the land of the free isn't letting one of its own companies freely compete.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoFair point. The fact that even americans got cut off from Fable is definitely ironic though. I suppose that's going to be fixed now that they're implementing identity verification. And even that runs smack into the concept of freedom since freedom under surveillance isn't real.
- inlined 4mo agoBut given the hoopla about how a driver’s license isn’t valid in the SAVE act because it doesn’t prove you’re a US citizen, how is drivers license verification going to satisfy the US national requirement here?
- nextaccountic 4mo agoright now the best contender is GLM 5.2, right? either this or stick with Codex until the US government cripples it too
- windexh8er 4mo agoHopefully Persona is a non-starter for many. At this point I'm done with Anthropic, I'll be a non-paying subscriber to any of the US based "Frontier" providers. I've been finding far more value in how the models are used vs leaning only on the brute force of a SotA model. Between the Fable / Mythos FUD and scare mongering that Anthropic continues to prance around with I can't take them even remotely seriously anymore. Just like with early iterations of ChatGPT these founders have acted like they're sitting on AGI. But just like with those earlier versions of ChatGPT we'll look at frontier models a year from now and laugh at how off base Dario has been, again as he's been very off base for the last couple of years. I'm still waiting for half of white collar jobs to be replaced next week...
- trollbridge 4mo agoPlease do yourself a favour and check out GLM-5.2, Qwen-3.7-Max, MiMo-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro. And then for stuff that you already said you were able to use Mistral for... Qwen-3.6 (option to run locally), MiMo-2.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, or... many, many other models to choose from too.
- danpalmer 4mo ago> Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate I'm starting to see more and more of this: speed matters more than model, skills matter more than model, cost matters more, harness matters more than model. It seems like until we have a step change in models (and Fable isn't it), there's a lot of room to optimise with what we already have. This is a stark change to the "best model at all costs" mentality from a year ago.
- chaitanyya 4mo agoI don't believe US government wanted to restrict the model use to US citizens only. The bad actors will and can find their ways around it. They do however want strict measures in place to avoid abuse, and the export control was the only tool they had to stop Anthropic from releasing the model. Though I also wonder if it's even possible to patch things without severely crippling the abilities of the model.
- mcherm 4mo ago> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here. Not exactly. The close buddy with the owners of several other AI companies who has a known dispute with Anthropic and who has seized near-absolute power in the US is doing something that damages Anthropic. The fact that it also destroys long term prospects for the US overall is irrelevant because the individual can't think ahead and also doesn't care about the future of the US. It's nearly the same thing in the end, but helpful to understand the cause.
- port11 4mo agoThere’s no way I’m giving a random foreign company my ID. I’m really enjoying the phone-controlled sessions with Claude, and the models do good work; but if I’m asked to validate my ID, we’re done. I already have Aivo and Pi somewhat similarly configured. Just give me a reason and I’m giving my money to someone else. In Europe, if you have my ID it’s not that hard to get me into trouble. And there’s no safeguard that Persona won’t be hacked, it’s not like they encrypt the ID with my own keys or something.
- lobocinza 4mo agoWorse than that. You're funding models and an ecossystem that discriminates you.