The entire arc reads as a marketing stunt rather than a legitimate national security threat. Maybe Anthropic asked the US for this action to be taken.
Fable was out for 3 days, not really long enough for us to properly evaluate it, but the "Sorry we had to remove Fable. Read more. (because it's too powerful btw)" is loudly shown every chance they get for weeks. It creates a halo.
Reminiscent of the old Apple G4 commercial where they displayed it next to military tanks. "For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government."
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.
But would another company who is not on the trusted partner list and has less to lose taking on the admin have standing to sue here? On the basis of the export control being illegal and this putting their business at a disadvantage vs. competitors with access
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.
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.
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.
>> More than 100 companies and institutions will now have access to Mythos 5, including many Fortune 500 companies, a source familiar with the new directive said, declining to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Who are those 100 companies? Clearly they can't compete on merit and have rubbed some hands to be picked as winners...at least for now.
I’m not sure what the US government is trying to do. At first it seems like they are just trying to stifle some company that said no. Now they are just doing free publicity. It’s like never before have I wanted to try something out as much as this.
They’re in effect saying “nothing else is as powerful as what Anthropic put out”. Even though that might not really be the case it’s what it sounds like.
I mean, we're talking about an administration that has already over-reached in regulating this specific company out of personal bias; is openly seeking leverage over companies for favoritism and graft; hires on the basis of loyalty to whims of a narcissist; makes fun of the whole idea of competent government based on expertise; provides a range of conflicting explanations for whatever it chooses to do; and has been unable to field a team capable of understanding or explaining whatever real risks are here.
Your question is like asking what evidence would convince us that a bag of rocks doesn't have rocks in it. Easy, just take the rocks out.
This is a pithy internet comment, but terrible advice.
Between the Chinese government and Anthropic, I know which one I'd rather send tokens to. For all of the problems of the US, for-profit corporations, data harvesting, etc. the CCP (and, perhaps more troublesome, its allies) is far less likely to align with your interests.
I don't buy that anymore. The day America threatened to invade Canada and Denmark was the day America showed they cannot be trusted any more.
It's not like China can be trusted either, but China isn't planning any direct invasions to the west. Taiwan, perhaps, but they're playing a long-term tactical game rather than a "invade the country we don't like this week" game. They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk, but in that case you shouldn't be uploading your secrets to an AI company in the first place.
You don't have to send your tokens to the CCP to use the Chinese models, that is the beauty of it. You can find GLM, Minimax, Deepseek, Kimi, etc hosted in China, Europe, the US, and probably elsewhere depending on what your geographic preferences for token transport are.
I’d say we’re about 5 years out from the Great Firewall of America, and requiring government ID associated with serial number to legally purchase components.
Under the hood, yes, but Mythos had more relaxed safeguards and was/is only available to a subset of approved customers under Project Glasswing, similar to the situation with GPT-5.6 now.
It is interesting that there is no public announcement from the US government or Anthropic on this topic. That means there is no form to apply to be a trusted partner.
Does it mean US is allowing accessing to governments' exclusive list?
Crypto companies were built for anonymous transfers of wealth. It's why they are perfect for money laundering and corruption. Venture backed companies are more difficult, since you would need a paper trail (equity, incorporation documents, beneficial owners, etc.)
It's not impossible, of course. It's not even terribly difficult, but it does require a different level of record.
(No, I'm not saying that the goons running the United States give a shit or won't do it anyway.)
VC companies do not dig into the numbers as you suggest. FTX was able to get away with their fraud for a long time for that very reason. VC companies don’t care if some of their investments are fraudulent as they spread their eggs so thin that it doesn’t matter if any given basket blows up. VC firms stated this to the press outright when FTX blew up.
Also most crypto companies are not good for laundering since the blockchains record that fraud forever and publicly. I could see some specific protocols where that may not be true — like monero or tornado cash — but these projects are not really startups. Most crypto startups pitch their products for enterprise customers and thus would be horrible for laundering money.
Other than maybe some in-the-moment cybersec wrappers, is this really true? Does anyone think a startup with a good product is going to be materially disadvantaged by not having access to an incrementally better security focused LLM release? It’s lots of fun to pretend it’s some step-change that’s too dangerous for general release, but in real life it’s not conferring some massive advantage that any real startup would need to compete. Almost everyone would be best just to ignore it and keep building.
(Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
> Does anyone think a startup with a good product is going to be materially disadvantaged by not having access to an incrementally better security focused LLM release?
- It's not "incrementally better". It's a complete game changer. Opus 4.8 on max thinking does X amount of mistakes in my commercial work. Fable 5 did 5% of X. Counted. I barely had anything to contribute in the work sessions, for a full week I could count on my two hands the total amount of times I actually caught Fable 5 -- and one part of those were not true mistakes, more like divergence from policy in our `CLAUDE.md` files.
- It's not "security focused". It's simply better in every way _plus_ it's also security-conscious.
- It legitimately accelerated my work. I don't have too much unknowns in my work, I simply have way too much to do. Fable 5 was an objective and measurable improvement over Opus 4.8. Returning to it after Fable 5 was removed was extremely discouraging and frustrating, and still is to some extent.
> It’s lots of fun to pretend it’s some step-change that’s too dangerous for general release
Maybe, but not as much fun as tearing down a straw man apparently. :)
> (Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
It's ridiculous for multiple other reasons but ridiculous nonetheless.
That kind of gets to the absurdity of it. Either it’s a wildly powerful next generation model with incredible capabilities and thus needs to be limited… or it’s another progressive enhancement like we’ve seen already and limiting access to it makes no sense.
Say you had a perfectly smooth progressive chain from rocks to spears to guns to nuclear weapons. When it comes to government restrictions, you still have to choose to draw lines somewhere, right?
I wonder if the Founding Fathers knew about AI, they would include it in the 2nd?
The spirit is to provide effective tools for the people to resist federal military tyranny, and Mythos seems like it would be a good tool to defend against that, for so many reasons.
I'm not sure that analogy works: pretty much everyone agrees that there are some types of weapons civilians shouldn't be able to have, even though they might be very effective for resisting military tyranny.
I think they kind of had to since they allowed OpenAI to do a 5.6 "preview to trusted parties" today. The other driver is that the DoD/NSA wanted to get access to Mythos again. I figure OAI will now do several weeks of 'preview' like Anthropic did with Mythos. When OAI wants to release 5.6 wider to actually start making money with it, I expect Fable will get approved the same day.
Back when the administration hit Mythos/Fable with the surprise ban, I figured this would be the endgame. They'd keep Anthropic tied up until a competitor had a roughly comparable model ready, then gate them the same.
"I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model"
I assume "trusted partners" means, "companies that have bribed Trump an appropriate amount". A few million for the inauguration, a few million for the ballroom, a few million on a movie about Melania, the don wants a taste.
Regulatory agencies limit uses of other products without acts of congress-- cigarettes, vapes, drugs, pesticides, chemicals, explosives. Even firearms, despite a constitutional amendment! Why not models? (Note I am not arguing it's a good idea; I'm making a narrow argument that there is precedent.)
EDIT: I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.
> I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.
Should ever new "weapon" invented require a new act of Congress? We've considered software subject this act since the 90s.
If everyone making AI is screaming up and down that we are in an AI arms race creating dangerous entities that will determine the fate of the world is the government just supposed to ignore them?
All of the agencies responsible for those regulations were created by and get their funding from Congress. Currently, they're asleep at the wheel. Or a better idiom might be "cowering in the corner".
Fairly certain all those have "acts of congress" attached to them. I mean, it used to take a constitutional amendment to make something illegal but now we have tons of agencies responsible for regulating all the things.
Plus, they're relying on the "math is a weapon" law to ban "export" of the models.
Congress passed the Arms Export Control Act (22 USC 2778) in the Ford administration and it has been applied to software since at least the Clinton administration.
"Malboro cigarettes may once again be sold, but Newport remains banned for everyone except large purchasers that have paid the appropriate bri... fees."
None of those things are knowledge. I think theres something specific around limiting access to knowledge and capabilities that makes this feel insidious.
Information is covered by ITAR, so that's not new. You can illegally export information about an ITAR covered item by just allowing a foreign national the potential to see an item. They don't even have to prove the foreign national actually did see it.
Overturning the Chevron doctrine is good because it stops lawful people from doing things we don't like. We aren't bound by laws, so we can do whatever we want.
That repealing the chevron doctrine was a calculated play in the unitary executive theory. We all know congress is basically useless these days. But we also know that regulation isn’t, like, optional. It’s going to happen no matter what.
So what’s left? Where does that decision making go? Turns out the executive, so that’s what we’ve been seeing and it’s largely uncontested. This should have been obvious to most people going into this, particularly if they understood Trumps platform or Project 2025.
Repeal of the Chevron doctrine took the power of deference away from executive agencies and replaced it with first-principles judicial interpretation of statutes.
Chevron and the unitary executive theory have essentially nothing to do with each other.
I’m still not sure what point is attempting to be made here.
Is there any scenario where it's not catastrophic for for the frontier labs?
They just got their market cut to a fraction. Investing in new tech is now very risky because even if things work out you might not be able to sell anything.
There were already serious doubts about ROI for the frontier labs. If they can only sell to 100 or so entities it's over business wise.
"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed." ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The authority under which this was done has been operative and actively used for several decades. It isn't a partisan issue, it is a policy of American governance. Anyone that has worked on frontier "dual use" technologies will be familiar with the legal regime.
The only thing that changed is people are writing articles about it in the news media.
I’ve dealt with these regulations across several administrations. Nothing about this is novel, it is just receiving more attention than usual. Anyone could have started caring about this decades ago. You are making an argument from unfamiliarity with the regulations as practiced.
If it takes Trump to force people to educate themselves on how the US government actually works then I guess that is at least one good thing to come out of this.
I am making an observation of fact. My feeds are full of ignorant hot takes that clearly demonstrate people have no clue about current law or how the government actually works. Your response is a perfect demonstration of this. This is neither unique to the current administration nor supporters of a particular party.
I don’t support the admin but if you are unwilling to engage with reality then that is on you.
Also known as, the tu quoque fallacy. Just because politicians in both parties have been doing this for decades doesn't mean that this administration is not especially hypocritical for doing it after whinging so much about free speech and free markets.
If by correct you mean, inconsistent with the American tradition of the rule of law and commitment to equal protection of the law, and the emergence of an authoritarian kleptocracy that picks winners and losers. Then yes. Correct.
Which has been obvious trend the last few decades and is now being done openly and shamelessly like a tinpot dicator. Largely through a new populist protectionism ideology that is popular on social media. Which makes it much more public and well documented.
Usually companies do this stuff quietly with lots of small new rules via Congress creating barriers to entry or through national security angles like the Chips act which funneled money and tax breaks to huge weathy companies, or Boeing, or the car industry, etc.
Anthropic and OpenAI went hard in the paint pushing for AI safety and it backfired into hurting their companies rather than protecting their interests.
Well, there are the political ideals expressed or embraced by the populace, and then there are politicians. AFAICT political parties at the national level and state level in the US is pure theater.
the question isn’t about size, it’s about who the government works for. Small government can promote private interests by not entering certain societal spaces, leaving them for profit making — education, healthcare, housing etc. But large government can also promote private interests, by directing tax dollars to corporations (and still not entering certain societal spaces).
It’s not about size, it’s about where it chooses to operate
Having an a collective economy governed by the “free market” is like having a pile of stones governed by gravity. There exists a primary directive force, but if you want to construct a cathedral or a bomb shelter, you need to impose some constraints, lest you revert to the angle of repose.
This is a very bad analogy. Markets behave like an imperfect optimisation algorithm, and you can prove that, under some conditions which are most often met, they give people what they want.
In fact, you can almost always expect governments to be less effective and less rational than markets in allocating resources to satisfy the desires of people, even when democratic. You can prove it either by using the same logic that tells you when markets fail (externalities, information asymmetry), or empirically by looking at what was basically the most perfect A/B test we had on society over the 20th century. Although it was a comparison between mixed economies and fully centralised ones, there is no reason to expect the optimum mix of centralisation/distribution to be closer to the worst-performing one (the fully centralised one).
You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.
This is why arguments about this go in circles. You either argue from a pure theoretic POV back and forth, or you go off data - at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
Even the theoreticians on the free-market side are far less solid than.. all the other sides (behavioural economics, information asymmetry.. even Marx) but I regard it as deeply unpragmatic when there's so much data out there indicating what actually happens in the real world when you go one way or the other.
at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
I mean, it's not. In a free market you'd have a choice of insurance providers rather than having to take whatever plan your employer offers, and you'd have some idea of what the hospital is going to charge you beforehand rather than receiving random bills for weeks.
Just to be clear, my definition of free-market is just that there is no centralised authority that can use force to set prices/quantities/quality/type of services offered.
Of course, the fact that the employer has to offer health insurance in some cases is part of it not being a free market.
But there are more fundamental things that make the US healthcare very far from being a free market. The first one is that the supply of doctors is capped in quantity, not just in quality.
> You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.
You can prove the logic part starting from the assumptions. It's also falsifiable. I just mentioned it was literally the most controlled test on human society you could make. We tested by splitting societies at the level of the entire planet, states and cities.
US healthcare is mostly not a free market; by free market, at minimum, I mean that the quantities and prices (ideally even the quality) are not set. The US healthcare system has a fixed number of practitioners who can get a license every year. This is as far as a market can be from being free (together with the case of having price controls). In fact, free market theory predicts that when you restrict quantity, you get higher prices for the same quality.
It literally predicts the US situation.
It's funny you mention Marx, given I regard most of his claims as either unfalsifiable or easily proven false.
That's always been a relative, rather than absolute statement.
Genuine question: if Democrats take power, do you expect them to be more interventionist or less interventionist with respect to AI? Bernie's jockeying leads me to suspect "more", but I could very well be wrong.
(FWIW I personally think modern AI falls in the small realm of potentially dangerous technologies that merit careful, ideally bipartisan, government oversight)
> I think they’d try to get something through Congress to regulate the industry in a rules-based way.
Is that a joke? We're back in a spat with Iran because Obama refused to engage with Congress, as required by our constitution, to enter the USA in any binding deal.
Any AI actions from the next admin is going to be executive yolos.
The what? More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline and those wishing to curry or keep his favor" - quite an expansive definition of "political decision making".
It wasn’t. Biden largely didn’t do much. The trump administration does illegal things that get struck down in courts on a daily basis. We’re all very desensitized to it.
But yes, Biden was old and cognitively not well. But his “whims” didn’t exist much, and they were always fairly reasonable. Trump is the most unreasonable president, most likely in US history. I would even categorize Andrew Jackson as more restrained.
If you think that anthropic wasn't pushing aggressive regulatory capture legislation in the Biden administration, why do you think they hired a bunch of people from it?
What Anthropic was pushing for under Biden has very little to do with the values Republicans have been espousing (and failing to live up to) for decades. That's kind of the point op was making. Republicans run on small government but do not deliver it. Democrats do not run on small government. Democrat Presidents campaign on and push for things like the ACA, they don't have fun quips like, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”
A clear regulatory framework to operate within allows businesses to operate within it rather than get surprised by the King's whims upending their business on every few Fridays. If you expect regulation will eventually happen, pushing for it to happen on terms you're able to comply with rather than as haphazard surprises is pretty sensible.
It's very fashionable to hate on the current administration, despite what the previous administration was doing. That's reality and I'll be punished to hell for saying so.
If you don't want the current administration to be blindly hated, perhaps you should ask the president to stop publishing daily statements about how much he hates various people. You reap what you sow.
Again, you're seeing this as some kind of clever invariant of politics, but it's not. People are blind to politicians on their side because Donald Trump has spent the past 10 years working hard to make sure that everyone in politics is constantly enraged at the other side. You're being "punished to hell", in your words, because you're blaming Trump's passionate embrace of hatred-based politics on his opponents.
Ever since I've been conscious (the 80s), it's been the party of fear, violence and greed. They've consistently nominated actual clowns for positions of power. B-movie actor Ronald Reagan... Dan Quayle... Sarah Palin... the current, truly stunning iteration of absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy TWICE after he killed hundreds of thousands of people due to COVID/vaccine skepticism and staged a violent attack on the capitol after losing a democratic election.
Free market? Small government? Big police state, trillions in defense contractor grift, unsustainable tax breaks to the wealthiest leading to massive spending deficits... all while doing everything to erode access to education, healthcare and basic services.
It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
> It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them.
Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc.
That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.
They have affiliated themselves to him. Watch, within a month of Democrats being back in power they’ll be harping small government, denigrating the national debt they ballooned themselves. There’s no reason to help them attempt to disavow it.
> the entire party aggressively supporting him and everything he does.
That's untrue.
If you do some homework you will see Republican politicians and the Supreme Court disagreeing on a number of issues. Amongst Republican voters, his approval rating has been sliding and is now below 80% in most polls.
You have to remember that very very few voters agree/support everything their party does. If that wasn't the case, then not a single American voter is morally pure.
They passed one major piece of legislation since he took office and it was loaded with pork to get everyone onboard. I wouldn't call that aggressive. The Right is very fractured right now.
I can't tell if you're disingenuous or just ignorant. The Trump admin has been completely coopted by the pro-Israel lobby and Big Tech. He betrayed his entire base. He's ruling by executive fiat (EOs). Anyone that speaks out publicly for the original platform gets a primary challenger funded by Miriam Adelson or threats. See Thomas Massie, MTG, Lauren Boebert, etc. Are you paying attention at all? The Boomers watching Fox News propaganda in their nursing homes all day are not a reflection of party unity.
The Fox News boomers were pawns, but everyone knew that. Trump is a “money talks” kind of guy, that’s why people voted for him.
Yes that was shortsighted but it’s worked out well for trump. He can basically just… do whatever. Nobody needs to legislate, he’s essentially congress at this point.
Trump has an 87% approval rating amongst Republicans as of the last poll I can find.
While Trump is a megalomanic and does whatever he wants, he has the mandate of the Republican party, whose elected officials could choose at any moment to end this by withdrawing support.
The entire Republican party in all branches of government is supporting Trump. His politics and the Republican party politics are one and the same. The last election the party did not have a platform because, quite literally, they said that whatever Trump says _is_ their platform.
He's a Republican backed by the Republican establishment funded by Republican donors and massively influential in Republican primaries. Republicans voted him into power twice. Republicans pushed his voter fraud narrative. Republicans embraced his vaccine skepticism and killed countless Americans. Republicans voted for his ICE policies that murdered two citizens of my home state.
Republicans caused this disaster and are all, each and every, individually morally responsible for putting Trump in power.
Republican voters, Republican politicians, Republican donors and the Republican political machine.
They picked the losing side of history and they can sink with it.
> a much greater injury and death rate attributable to vaccines than COVID.
Explain Australia then, specifically the absence of nation wide injury and death following the short period in which 98% of a population ~ 24 million or so, got two to three rounds of vaccines with a new definition.
Fantastic case study for such widespread ill effects to clearly and unambiguously show up - the country is isolated and has had world class epidemiology researchers plugged into integrated national health records for 50+ years.
What was that injury rate in Australia, how many of the > 20 million vaccine recipients died or were injured by vaccines.
Where are these deaths and injuries greater in magnitude than COVID deaths and injuries?
I cannot answer for you or your governments odd notions. Feel free to concentrate on actually making and landing a solid point with peer commenter azan.
Right but at the end of the day how many people died from the Covid vaccine?
We all need a healthy dose of reality. Yes the vaccine rollout was not perfect. But 1 million Americans died from Covid. And that’s that, if we can’t even agree on reality then there’s no point in arguing.
Okay. I can't say I care much who he represents. I'm more concerned with the fact that half the country is okay with pardoning a war criminal who committed a biological weapons attack on literally every country in the world, including the US.
If I have to pick between a murderer and literally killing everyone on earth I'll pick the murderer because I'm not a psychopath.
Math please? Specifically citing the research that the FDA cited from the NEJoM. Please include the published injury rate, and the published efficacy.
If you can't make a point with the math, then don't bother replying. My invitation is to discuss with scientists, to be clear. CNN is not qualified as a scientific body, despite claiming to be. I'm aware that most of the US believes that CNN is the arbiter of science. I'm referring specifically to a scientific paper published by the manufacturer of the drug you are pedaling.
And that's my point. You can't. You're consuming media and calling it science. You're lying to yourself.
Please prove me wrong.
Look at the injury rate in the NEJoM study submitted by Pfizer, and look at the rate of disease symptoms (later decreased but we'll ignore that for the sake of driving my point home), and tell me what the rest of us scientists missed. Or at least admit that you didn't really notice that it killed and injured more people in Pfizer's own study than you had realized (for the sake of honest scientists if you care to call yourself one).
I'll even overlook the fact that all the "peer reviewers" were Pfizer employees who couldn't bring themselves to the level of shame so as to falsify the results. Instead they themselves published blatantly that the drug is more destructive than the disease it purports to treat. Thankfully we have some moral fiber in the field.
But you did not make any point, you keep using buzzword without referencing any data. You did not even link exact study you are talking about (there are lots of nejm covid studies…). You did not reference a single number. So please, if you want math actually make your point without bullshit about me consuming media etc.
Seriously? There is only one study that the FDA cited to claim that it was safe and effective submitted by Pfizer. But let me help then. Let's ignore the fact that the head of the FDA was fired and replaced because he refused to say so. Let's just look at the research directly.
Yes, that study shows safety of the vaccine, so what’s your point? Could you actually just say what’s your point? I can’t tell you why you are wrong if you don’t tell me what’s your problem.
Considering there's no such thing as a "free market" I've been laughing for a real long time. Markets require regulation and enforcement to function.
The US government was created to protect the interests of rich, white, male slave owners. And if you look at Louisiana State Penintentiary (often called "Angola"), which is essentialy a Southern plantation with forced labor, you realize not as much has changed as you might otherwise think.
> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
While chattel slavery ended when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery continued through debt bondage and convict leasing up until 1941 where FDR suddenly decided to aggressively prosecute the practice for fear of the Japanese using it for propaganda value. I'm referring to Circular 3591 [2]. And while that heavily curtailed abuse (eg by locking people up essentially indefinitely for "vagrancy" or imaged debts), forced prison labor continues to this day, including private companies profiting from prison labor.
Also, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the South arguably won. Reconstruction saw severe curtailment of newly-established civil rights for former enslaved people. And after Reconstruction came Jim Crow until the 1960s.
The point of slavery was money, and the point of money was power. By the time of the civil war the real power for the ruling class was coming from industrialization.
I wonder if Anthropic and ChatGPT will continue to scream at the top of their lungs how dangerous their services are and how they will break the security of everything everywhere?
Or may they'll decide to be a little more quiet and less end-of-the-world-is-nigh-if-you-use-our-services?
Favored companies get access to frontier models, which gives them a competitive advantage, starving out smaller companies. Any smaller companies that do manage to innovate ultimately get acquired by the favored companies since they are worth more with access to frontier models than without (which is effectively a discount on the purchase price of those companies).
I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it is one possible scenario that, over time, would be disastrous for innovation and freedom.
Foreseeable corruption by the state. A further slip into cronyism. A large puzzle piece that when simply connected with the recent actions like demanding shares in companies, removing funding for energy projects not aligned with other lobbies, pardoning of white collar criminals. It seems pretty plain and obvious the type of disasters that await.
I'm not being facetious, can you direct us to which laws are in play here? Specifically, why different models can be classified as different exports that need separate approvals?
I don't think you can move closer to something that you're already fully enmeshed in.
The rate that the ruling class ran into crony capitalism at the first chance they got is something that needs to be remembered. They'll try to act like they were always against it at some point in the near future.
> The two biggest enemies of the free market are two separate groups: my academic colleagues and business people. Business people are enemies of free markets, not friends.
> [...]
> The business people are just the opposite. They're all in favor of freedom for everybody else, and at the drop of a hat you can get any leading businessman to give you an eloquent speech on the virtues of a free market. But when it comes to their own business, they want to go down to Washington and get a special tariff to protect their business. They want a special tax deduction. They want a tax subsidy. And Chrysler is on the verge of failing, which it should have done. It should have been allowed to fail. Chrysler goes down and exercises political influence and tries to get the government to lend it money to subsidize it.
> So businessmen in general — not all, there have been some notable exceptions — and I don't want to include everybody. But in the main, most businessmen are enemies of free markets.
They only allow it for specific companies and agencies, which are trusted with the less restricted model. The general public is still not trusted to use Fable, apparently.
I think it’s a complex dynamic but he certainly preferred this to happen than not, and someone might have nudged the development to his favor while aligned well with this admin’s interests.
Meanwhile, China is pushing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), which, in the face of internal divisions and impotent leadership among Western nations, could prove to be the first global regime that China gets to build and lead.
Also this administration having say over who gets access to what AI is just so much more grift corruption and picking your favorites / destroying others, for these incdecent undemocratic in American grifters who've seized our state.
If this is the way things are now, isn't that going to crash the AI stocks? All those trillions dumped into it probably weren't with the expectation that it could only be sold to a handful of select US agencies and corporations.
They are all private aren't they? There's nothing to crash since the valuations were all made up funny raise numbers anyway. A donation to the right person likely removes the restrictions
Depends on how much of an overhang there is with the power of existing models. Have we discovered 10%, 50%, or 90% of the valuable applications for Opus 4.8 / GPT 5.5? Hard to be confident at this point.
Land of the free, land of the brave. Free market. Freedom of speech. Market economy.
These words don’t mean what they use to anymore. Newspeak is in full swing. Words still sound the same and are written in the same way but now mean something completely different. If Mao and Stalin were alive, they would be nodding approvingly.
Fable was out for 3 days, not really long enough for us to properly evaluate it, but the "Sorry we had to remove Fable. Read more. (because it's too powerful btw)" is loudly shown every chance they get for weeks. It creates a halo.
Reminiscent of the old Apple G4 commercial where they displayed it next to military tanks. "For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government."
But would another company who is not on the trusted partner list and has less to lose taking on the admin have standing to sue here? On the basis of the export control being illegal and this putting their business at a disadvantage vs. competitors with access
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.
Who are those 100 companies? Clearly they can't compete on merit and have rubbed some hands to be picked as winners...at least for now.
They’re in effect saying “nothing else is as powerful as what Anthropic put out”. Even though that might not really be the case it’s what it sounds like.
I've read all the sci fi they have. It's not hard to see where the ideas came from.
What's being questioned is this sentiment of "The only way to save humanity is for me and my lighthaven groupies to become Xillionaire god-kings"
Your question is like asking what evidence would convince us that a bag of rocks doesn't have rocks in it. Easy, just take the rocks out.
The US might remove access next month in a fit of pique.
The Chinese models look increasingly more reliable and safer.
Between the Chinese government and Anthropic, I know which one I'd rather send tokens to. For all of the problems of the US, for-profit corporations, data harvesting, etc. the CCP (and, perhaps more troublesome, its allies) is far less likely to align with your interests.
It's not like China can be trusted either, but China isn't planning any direct invasions to the west. Taiwan, perhaps, but they're playing a long-term tactical game rather than a "invade the country we don't like this week" game. They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk, but in that case you shouldn't be uploading your secrets to an AI company in the first place.
Do you have access to Mythos? If not the choice has already been made for you.
Only the frontier AI labs have true access to frontier AI. Everyone else gets a reduced version.
Mythos never was and I don’t think that’s changing.
As a small business owner this is unacceptable
America will do that before gun control.
Not the future I want but I see that too.
The nra has more lobby power than anyone.
Does it mean US is allowing accessing to governments' exclusive list?
It's not impossible, of course. It's not even terribly difficult, but it does require a different level of record.
(No, I'm not saying that the goons running the United States give a shit or won't do it anyway.)
Also most crypto companies are not good for laundering since the blockchains record that fraud forever and publicly. I could see some specific protocols where that may not be true — like monero or tornado cash — but these projects are not really startups. Most crypto startups pitch their products for enterprise customers and thus would be horrible for laundering money.
(Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
- It's not "incrementally better". It's a complete game changer. Opus 4.8 on max thinking does X amount of mistakes in my commercial work. Fable 5 did 5% of X. Counted. I barely had anything to contribute in the work sessions, for a full week I could count on my two hands the total amount of times I actually caught Fable 5 -- and one part of those were not true mistakes, more like divergence from policy in our `CLAUDE.md` files.
- It's not "security focused". It's simply better in every way _plus_ it's also security-conscious.
- It legitimately accelerated my work. I don't have too much unknowns in my work, I simply have way too much to do. Fable 5 was an objective and measurable improvement over Opus 4.8. Returning to it after Fable 5 was removed was extremely discouraging and frustrating, and still is to some extent.
> It’s lots of fun to pretend it’s some step-change that’s too dangerous for general release
Maybe, but not as much fun as tearing down a straw man apparently. :)
> (Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
It's ridiculous for multiple other reasons but ridiculous nonetheless.
Say you had a perfectly smooth progressive chain from rocks to spears to guns to nuclear weapons. When it comes to government restrictions, you still have to choose to draw lines somewhere, right?
It's like the epidemic of scam nvidia cards being resold without gpu or memory - where do you think those are going?
The spirit is to provide effective tools for the people to resist federal military tyranny, and Mythos seems like it would be a good tool to defend against that, for so many reasons.
Back when the administration hit Mythos/Fable with the surprise ban, I figured this would be the endgame. They'd keep Anthropic tied up until a competitor had a roughly comparable model ready, then gate them the same.
I assume "trusted partners" means, "companies that have bribed Trump an appropriate amount". A few million for the inauguration, a few million for the ballroom, a few million on a movie about Melania, the don wants a taste.
EDIT: I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.
Every one of those is by a regulatory agency that was explicitly empowered by Congress to do such regulation.
congress has abdicated its role entirely.
Should ever new "weapon" invented require a new act of Congress? We've considered software subject this act since the 90s.
If everyone making AI is screaming up and down that we are in an AI arms race creating dangerous entities that will determine the fate of the world is the government just supposed to ignore them?
Plus, they're relying on the "math is a weapon" law to ban "export" of the models.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-22/chapter-I/subchapter-M...
-- GOP probably
So what’s left? Where does that decision making go? Turns out the executive, so that’s what we’ve been seeing and it’s largely uncontested. This should have been obvious to most people going into this, particularly if they understood Trumps platform or Project 2025.
Chevron and the unitary executive theory have essentially nothing to do with each other.
I’m still not sure what point is attempting to be made here.
Green card holder? No.
Everyone else*: Yes.
* It's far more complicated and nuanced than this.
They just got their market cut to a fraction. Investing in new tech is now very risky because even if things work out you might not be able to sell anything.
There were already serious doubts about ROI for the frontier labs. If they can only sell to 100 or so entities it's over business wise.
What's the endgame here?
"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed." ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The only thing that changed is people are writing articles about it in the news media.
If it takes Trump to force people to educate themselves on how the US government actually works then I guess that is at least one good thing to come out of this.
Is there any policy from this admin you don't support?
I don’t support the admin but if you are unwilling to engage with reality then that is on you.
Usually companies do this stuff quietly with lots of small new rules via Congress creating barriers to entry or through national security angles like the Chips act which funneled money and tax breaks to huge weathy companies, or Boeing, or the car industry, etc.
Anthropic and OpenAI went hard in the paint pushing for AI safety and it backfired into hurting their companies rather than protecting their interests.
It’s not about size, it’s about where it chooses to operate
1: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/artic...
This is why arguments about this go in circles. You either argue from a pure theoretic POV back and forth, or you go off data - at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
Even the theoreticians on the free-market side are far less solid than.. all the other sides (behavioural economics, information asymmetry.. even Marx) but I regard it as deeply unpragmatic when there's so much data out there indicating what actually happens in the real world when you go one way or the other.
I mean, it's not. In a free market you'd have a choice of insurance providers rather than having to take whatever plan your employer offers, and you'd have some idea of what the hospital is going to charge you beforehand rather than receiving random bills for weeks.
You can prove the logic part starting from the assumptions. It's also falsifiable. I just mentioned it was literally the most controlled test on human society you could make. We tested by splitting societies at the level of the entire planet, states and cities.
US healthcare is mostly not a free market; by free market, at minimum, I mean that the quantities and prices (ideally even the quality) are not set. The US healthcare system has a fixed number of practitioners who can get a license every year. This is as far as a market can be from being free (together with the case of having price controls). In fact, free market theory predicts that when you restrict quantity, you get higher prices for the same quality. It literally predicts the US situation.
It's funny you mention Marx, given I regard most of his claims as either unfalsifiable or easily proven false.
Well, by your own logic, there's a new a/b test running right now. Its results aren't exactly going your way.
Genuine question: if Democrats take power, do you expect them to be more interventionist or less interventionist with respect to AI? Bernie's jockeying leads me to suspect "more", but I could very well be wrong.
(FWIW I personally think modern AI falls in the small realm of potentially dangerous technologies that merit careful, ideally bipartisan, government oversight)
The current admin flies by the seat of their pants and at least creates the perception of political decision making.
Is that a joke? We're back in a spat with Iran because Obama refused to engage with Congress, as required by our constitution, to enter the USA in any binding deal.
Any AI actions from the next admin is going to be executive yolos.
That was the last major thing the Democrats did, and healthcare has gotten substantially worse...but at least it's well regulated now.
The what? More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline and those wishing to curry or keep his favor" - quite an expansive definition of "political decision making".
The previous administration was totally not exactly what's described here...
But yes, Biden was old and cognitively not well. But his “whims” didn’t exist much, and they were always fairly reasonable. Trump is the most unreasonable president, most likely in US history. I would even categorize Andrew Jackson as more restrained.
That would be your politics coloring your memory.
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...
How well does it stand up to Mythos?
The Democratic party is more anti-ai than the Republican party and unfortunately both of them are increasingly responding to astroturfed populism.
Do you think Bernie Sanders in AOC are pro-ai? Are you kidding me? Have you seen what they say and the legislation they propose?
Not even on the same playing field. They just can’t be compared, they’re incomparable.
A clear regulatory framework to operate within allows businesses to operate within it rather than get surprised by the King's whims upending their business on every few Fridays. If you expect regulation will eventually happen, pushing for it to happen on terms you're able to comply with rather than as haphazard surprises is pretty sensible.
Yes, sure, it is I who is blind...
Free market? Small government? Big police state, trillions in defense contractor grift, unsustainable tax breaks to the wealthiest leading to massive spending deficits... all while doing everything to erode access to education, healthcare and basic services.
It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
edit: typo
People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them.
Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc.
That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.
That's untrue.
If you do some homework you will see Republican politicians and the Supreme Court disagreeing on a number of issues. Amongst Republican voters, his approval rating has been sliding and is now below 80% in most polls.
Yes that was shortsighted but it’s worked out well for trump. He can basically just… do whatever. Nobody needs to legislate, he’s essentially congress at this point.
Epstein cover up? Iran? COVID denialism? Complete disregard for rule of law? Accepting massive, direct bribes? Trying to control broadcast media?
That's all on the Republican party as a collective, who did absolutely nothing to resist it and everything to put him in power TWICE. TWICE.
While Trump is a megalomanic and does whatever he wants, he has the mandate of the Republican party, whose elected officials could choose at any moment to end this by withdrawing support.
Don't let them off the hook.
It's lower than that. Most polls show below 80%.
> Don't let them off the hook.
That's not the way.
If things are bad are we just supposed to… pretend… they’re not? And that… would help things? Like how? What’s even the mechanism for that?
Republicans caused this disaster and are all, each and every, individually morally responsible for putting Trump in power.
Republican voters, Republican politicians, Republican donors and the Republican political machine.
They picked the losing side of history and they can sink with it.
Explain Australia then, specifically the absence of nation wide injury and death following the short period in which 98% of a population ~ 24 million or so, got two to three rounds of vaccines with a new definition.
Fantastic case study for such widespread ill effects to clearly and unambiguously show up - the country is isolated and has had world class epidemiology researchers plugged into integrated national health records for 50+ years.
What was that injury rate in Australia, how many of the > 20 million vaccine recipients died or were injured by vaccines.
Where are these deaths and injuries greater in magnitude than COVID deaths and injuries?
I cannot answer for you or your governments odd notions. Feel free to concentrate on actually making and landing a solid point with peer commenter azan.
We all need a healthy dose of reality. Yes the vaccine rollout was not perfect. But 1 million Americans died from Covid. And that’s that, if we can’t even agree on reality then there’s no point in arguing.
If I have to pick between a murderer and literally killing everyone on earth I'll pick the murderer because I'm not a psychopath.
Can you blame me?
If you can't make a point with the math, then don't bother replying. My invitation is to discuss with scientists, to be clear. CNN is not qualified as a scientific body, despite claiming to be. I'm aware that most of the US believes that CNN is the arbiter of science. I'm referring specifically to a scientific paper published by the manufacturer of the drug you are pedaling.
And that's my point. You can't. You're consuming media and calling it science. You're lying to yourself.
Please prove me wrong.
Look at the injury rate in the NEJoM study submitted by Pfizer, and look at the rate of disease symptoms (later decreased but we'll ignore that for the sake of driving my point home), and tell me what the rest of us scientists missed. Or at least admit that you didn't really notice that it killed and injured more people in Pfizer's own study than you had realized (for the sake of honest scientists if you care to call yourself one).
I'll even overlook the fact that all the "peer reviewers" were Pfizer employees who couldn't bring themselves to the level of shame so as to falsify the results. Instead they themselves published blatantly that the drug is more destructive than the disease it purports to treat. Thankfully we have some moral fiber in the field.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Love to hear your input here. Check the math carefully.
> "Covid vaccines are very safe and saved lots of lives."
I'm convinced you didn't get this idea from honestly reading research.
The US government was created to protect the interests of rich, white, male slave owners. And if you look at Louisiana State Penintentiary (often called "Angola"), which is essentialy a Southern plantation with forced labor, you realize not as much has changed as you might otherwise think.
> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
While chattel slavery ended when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery continued through debt bondage and convict leasing up until 1941 where FDR suddenly decided to aggressively prosecute the practice for fear of the Japanese using it for propaganda value. I'm referring to Circular 3591 [2]. And while that heavily curtailed abuse (eg by locking people up essentially indefinitely for "vagrancy" or imaged debts), forced prison labor continues to this day, including private companies profiting from prison labor.
Also, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the South arguably won. Reconstruction saw severe curtailment of newly-established civil rights for former enslaved people. And after Reconstruction came Jim Crow until the 1960s.
[1]: https://www.loc.gov/collections/abraham-lincoln-papers/artic...
[2]: https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/state-imposed-fo...
Or may they'll decide to be a little more quiet and less end-of-the-world-is-nigh-if-you-use-our-services?
Let's hope this creates a bit more fire under the asses of other countries
Please go read US history before sounding off on this topic. These laws have existed for decades.
what disaster do you foresee?
I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it is one possible scenario that, over time, would be disastrous for innovation and freedom.
IANAL; you need to be one to interpret this stuff. These laws are as thick as a dictionary.
The EAR dates back to the Export Administration Act of 1979 but it was mostly overhauled by Congress in 2018.
The rate that the ruling class ran into crony capitalism at the first chance they got is something that needs to be remembered. They'll try to act like they were always against it at some point in the near future.
> The two biggest enemies of the free market are two separate groups: my academic colleagues and business people. Business people are enemies of free markets, not friends.
> [...]
> The business people are just the opposite. They're all in favor of freedom for everybody else, and at the drop of a hat you can get any leading businessman to give you an eloquent speech on the virtues of a free market. But when it comes to their own business, they want to go down to Washington and get a special tariff to protect their business. They want a special tax deduction. They want a tax subsidy. And Chrysler is on the verge of failing, which it should have done. It should have been allowed to fail. Chrysler goes down and exercises political influence and tries to get the government to lend it money to subsidize it.
> So businessmen in general — not all, there have been some notable exceptions — and I don't want to include everybody. But in the main, most businessmen are enemies of free markets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgaPVO8aw8
Asterisk the size of a Mac truck.
Also this administration having say over who gets access to what AI is just so much more grift corruption and picking your favorites / destroying others, for these incdecent undemocratic in American grifters who've seized our state.
Maybe, maybe not. Tech stocks are mostly vibes-based now, reality isn't really a concern for them.
These words don’t mean what they use to anymore. Newspeak is in full swing. Words still sound the same and are written in the same way but now mean something completely different. If Mao and Stalin were alive, they would be nodding approvingly.
I hope the Chinese models catch up soon so I can stop contributing to the American economy.
I vividly recall that freedom of speech is racist now, so good riddance.