5 ms·

I understand why Anthropic might not want to fight this particular one in court, because they're trying to convince the administration to let them move forward.

• intrasight 3mo ago
  They could just ignore Trump as he has no authority to so limit a private company.
  • mlinsey 3mo ago
    The labs will not just ignore the order, there are too many other levers they can try to pull to mess with those companies. Just for some examples, think about the number of employees reliant on visas that could be revoked, the government contracts that the hyperscalers hosting them that could be canceled, the certifications that all the data centers need to be hooked up to the grid, the tariffs that could be put on critical components, the IPOs that need to be approved by regulators, the bill introduced in Congress to seize 50% of their equity... Lots of these moves would and should be struck down in court as an arbitrary and capricious use of administrative power. Some of them might not be, and in the meantime you're signing up for tons of trouble. A trillion-dollar company does not simply go to war with the US government. A more mid-sized company that's not so intertwined, but not so small that they can't get a good legal team, might be another story.
    • vachina 3mo ago
      US sounds like a communist country.
  • jvanderbot 3mo ago
    Aside from how brazen and stupid this would be, the executive branch does have ways of limiting them and their sharing of tech, as we've seen.
  • ericmay 3mo ago
    Yes he does. They could ignore the US government, but will likely quickly find themselves in court fighting a fight that they are likely to lose and isn’t worth fighting anyway.
    • mcmcmc 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      • ilteris 3mo ago
        You are not wrong but I would also consider that it's relative easier to sentence someone who is nobody than someone famous in that regard.
  • jandrewrogers 3mo ago
    These regulations have been in place since the 1990s and have been applied by every administration. It isn’t a new authority and many companies have had the opportunity to fight it. Anthropic’s lawyers will know this.
    • LamaOfRuin 3mo ago
      None of them have asserted that export controls apply to whatever domestic distribution the administration says that never leaves the country.
      • caseysoftware 3mo ago
        Before you offer legal advice, you should at least check the legal definition of "export": > The EAR definition of “export” extends beyond the transportation of physical goods outside the U.S. > A “Deemed export” is the release of technology or source code to a foreign national in the U.S. The release is “deemed” to be an export to the last permanent residence status/citizenship of the foreign national. This can occur through demonstration, oral briefing, site visit, or through transmission of non-public data. Ref: https://exportcontrol.lbl.gov/training/export-control-overview/ https://exportcontrol.lbl.gov/training/export-control-overvi...
        • deleted 3mo ago
          [deleted]
      • jandrewrogers 3mo ago
        Please read the actual regulations and laws. They do not work the way you are assuming. Companies with obligations under these regulations are required to actively prevent constructive export via domestic distribution. If you let a foreign country launder access to the tech through domestic channels, that is on you. It is why KYC laws exist. You don’t want to fuck around with export control laws.
  • naturalmovement 3mo ago
    Ignoring US export control laws that have been on the books for nearly 50 years is a good way to pay millions of $ in fines and/or land in pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Ask every satellite launch company in the 90s how that worked out.
  • matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    They'd need to build an army of automated AI killbots that could rival the entire US military before they could even begin to think of defying Trump.
  • rdtsc 3mo ago
    > They could just ignore Trump as he has no authority to so limit a private company. Ignore export control regulations? I think you’re trying to say you really feel it’s not fair, and you’d like so and so meany and bully to go and pound sand. And yeah most people feel the same way here but ignoring export control regulations is not a joking matter and not something to play around with. Especially for a company that feels they are having extra eyes on them.
  • KingMob 3mo ago
    If you have power and are willing to use it, you don't need legal authority, it turns out. Trump does many things he lacks the legal authority to do.
• threethirtytwo 3mo ago
  Also there’s no incentive to fight. They already have one of the best models. Mythos remains a trump card when a competitor releases an even better model.
  • bluegatty 3mo ago
    There's huge incentive. The government has arbitrary commandeered their business. This could ruin Anthropic. They are walking a tight rope with respect to revenues, hype, IPO. If this kills their hyper growth prospects, it could kill the IPO. If there's a serious change the gov. is out of line, the judges could put a stay and possibly throw this out. There may however be enough of a case, in which there's maybe not much they can do. Having a crazy person completely control your business is very, very bad.
    • koolala 3mo ago
      Maybe they would prefer Nationalization more than an IPO.
      • bluegatty 3mo ago
        Definitely not. If this technology has export restrictions, then Anthropic and OpenAI will go out of business. Anthropic's revenues are already 66% international.
        • koolala 3mo ago
          Being nationalized removes the fear of going out of business. They would become like the post-office but for delivering and centralizing all digitalizable knowledge.
          • ascorbic 3mo ago
            It also removes the potential for growth or any other upside. I doubt there'd be many AI researchers willing to work on civil service salaries.
• siva7 3mo ago
  sue? whom? usa? have fun..
  • reasonableklout 3mo ago
    A law firm already has: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/legal-tech-firm-sues-us-over-order-limiting-foreign-access-top-tier-anthropic-2026-06-23/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/legal-tech-firm-sue...
  • seizethecheese 3mo ago
    US government regularly loses lawsuits and has to backtrack policy.
• naturalmovement 3mo ago
  Export control is not illegal where are you coming up with this stuff? Claiming ignorance is a good way to pay tens of millions of $ in fines or do prison time. Here's one from TWO DAYS AGO: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/manager-us-freight-forwarding-company-sentenced-18-months-prison-circumventing-export https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/manager-us-freight-forw... She will be doing 18 months in federal lockup. The people in charge of enforcing US export law are worse than city building inspectors and the penalties are orders of magnitude more severe. They're not people you want to mess with, ignore, or pretend you didn't know the rules.
  • sethammons 3mo ago
    > As described in court filings, from at least December 2022 through December 2024, Mazulina conspired with Russian freight forwarding companies and others to unlawfully ship controlled items, including industrial oil and gas equipment, from the United States to Russia, through intermediary countries. At one point, in June 2023, Mazulina told colleagues that her clients were paying through bank accounts in third party countries because “[m]ost of [her] clients [were] currently sanctioned with USA.” Mazulina attempted to conceal the unlawful scheme by submitting and causing the submission of false export documents to the U.S. government, which omitted the information that the goods were destined for Russia. That feels materially different than a software program released in the open domestic market. And while it feels different, the government would apparently disagree: https://exportcontrol.lbl.gov/training/export-control-overview/ https://exportcontrol.lbl.gov/training/export-control-overvi... Distribution of software to a foreign national within the US is an explicit proviso of the law. That is a wild law and I am surprised it stands.
    • polski-g 3mo ago
      Anthropic doesn't have the right to release weapons technologies on the open Internet, that's the point. Lockheed doesn't whine that they aren't allowed to sell their products for a $20/mo subscription to everyone with a pulse.
      • 3mo ago
• zarzavat 3mo ago
  Technically the US government is allowing Anthropic to serve the models to any US citizen, and it's Anthropic who decided that's impossible to comply with and so they pulled the model for everyone. I guess a US business with non-citizen employees could work. A lawsuit would be a hard sell though, because Anthropic themselves argued that the technology is dangerous. Even if many people on HN might think that Anthropic was scaremongering about Mythos, a court is probably going to take their assessment at face value, and courts are loathe to find against governments in cases of national security. There's also the issue that these models are getting better through an iterative process, so even if the line between GPT 5.5 and Fable/GPT 5.6 is somewhat arbitrary, it doesn't mean that the government shouldn't be able to draw a line at all. So you're left arguing that they drew the line too early, which is subjective.
  • wahnfrieden 3mo ago
    Are you certain? Trump admin is hand-picking GPT 5.6 winners
    • zarzavat 3mo ago
      The Government's position is that Anthropic/OpenAI are forbidden from allowing non-US citizens use the models. This is impossible in reality because how can Anthropic know that the person sitting behind a Claude code session or API key is at any given moment a US citizen? You can check their ID on signup but how can they know that they didn't give their credentials to someone else to use? They can't. Given the impossibility of compliance, what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is working with the government to release it to certain organizations with the government's blessing. If this were about missiles and not AI models, nobody would question this turn of events. If the government said that nobody can export this missile or allow non-citizens access to the missile, and then they started giving permission for certain organizations to handle the missile, that would be normal, not picking winners. The only reason people are questioning it in this case is because they believe that these models are not dangerous enough to deserve these kinds of export controls. Personally I'd agree that in my 3 days of using Fable I didn't observe any superpowers. Unfortunately however, Anthropic undermined that argument by claiming that Mythos is highly dangerous, which set them up for any jailbreak of Fable to be considered a national security risk. Who is a court going to believe? Someone who used a model for 3 days? Or the government and the people who made that model?