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HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Did Anthropic ask for this?
sothatsit wrote 15 min ago:
Would the US government have slapped Anthropic with this export control
if Anthropic never fearmonger'ed about Mythos? I think the answer is
very likely no.
But is this the type of regulation Anthropic has been asking for? Not
at all.
This is a failure of Anthropic's politicking, and a warning that they
need to be more careful with their communication in the future. If they
truly want constructive regulations because of their fears about AI,
they will need to repair their relationship with the administration,
and it is still unclear to me how they plan to do that.
kordlessagain wrote 30 min ago:
Regardless of whether they asked for it or not is irrelevant. That they
released a product and encouraged use of it, then had to walk it back
and now we're likely looking at proving we are US citizens to them to
use it - if it returns at all - is insanity in action.
furyofantares wrote 33 min ago:
This is a terrible take. Dario obviously did not mean any old 3rd party
should be able to provoke the government to shut down a model by
insinuations in the directions of the given concerns.
He rather obviously is asking to establish a 3rd party specifically for
this task, and to establish guidelines relating to the given concerns,
and to establish guidelines for government actions based on the
evaluation by the 3rd party.
aforwardslash wrote 35 min ago:
Yes, they did. And the motivation is quite simple: money.
Having the US control export your flagship model is the ultimate stamp
approval in the AI race. All headliners are american, but one us too
poweful to be made available. It just reads like if someone was riding
an IPO.
It is also, paradoxically, a wink to the 90's. But we're not in the
90's, and the cat is out of the box, and in 6-12 months everyone else
will be at this tier. This is, clearly, an attempt to boost a model
that isnt that revolutionary. I used Fable, and for my work, its mostly
a waste of tokens. It seems a bit better than Opus 4.8 - but 4.8 the
past week(s) has actually been top knotch; so lets make it a "myth" and
have secops tell stories about it, so everyone will pay when the time
comes; will you, ceo/cto, allow your company to fall behind? Of course
not. You will pay. For modest results, apparently, but the hype is
there.
zoogeny wrote 42 min ago:
I think the big lesson of this that hasn't yet been learned: it
literally doesn't matter how moral Amodei or anyone else is at
Anthropic. When push comes to shove, the US government can step in and
take it away.
They will either play ball with the US government on the US
government's terms or they will be replaced or destroyed.
It is a misconception for them to believe they can dictate the terms of
this technology.
dualvariable wrote 48 min ago:
I tend to think this is all just PR and hype, baking in the idea that
Fable/Mythos is so good that it attracted all these regulations and
controls. So you need to spend >$20k per developer per month, or
you'll fall behind. Don't try to get by on Opus, you need to really
open that wallet up...
fwipsy wrote 11 min ago:
Most people at my company default to Opus 4.6. I personally use
Sonnet for a lot of stuff.
thelonelyborg wrote 50 min ago:
the whole Anthropic is philanthropic will go the way of the buffalo as
soon as they IPO
tensility wrote 54 min ago:
It's all interesting advertising / news; however, why does it have to
constantly cost me five precious vertical lines of text worth of screen
real estate in Claude Code that apparently can't be dismissed? FFS
vld_chk wrote 57 min ago:
In all such discussions, it is interesting to track the tipping point
at which public perception of Anthropic shifted.
In my mind, as recently as February, Anthropic was considered by far
âthe bestâ company on the planet, with an insane fanbase and praise
left, right, and centre. The story around the DoD contract solidified
them in the public eye as âthe hero the city deserved.â
Then they fell into a classic monetisation trap. Unable to sustain
growth at such a discount, they started nerfing models, removing
caching, and doubling costs per token to make any money here.
The lack of transparency in that process cost them public perception.
By early May, all the charm of the magical, ethical super-company was
gone. The entire campaign around the Mythos release, intentional or
not, landed on top of that new narrative and didnât play well for
them.
What is interesting to me here is the realisation that a good chunk of
the hate the company received came simply because of their most recent
hostile, for-profit actions. Had it happened in March, HN and the
public reaction would have been vastly different. It took them just two
months of âbad actionsâ to ruin quite a good margin of the public
praise they so desperately needed now.
aetch wrote 57 min ago:
Yes, maybe donât say your product is so good that the customer
canât use it.
zmmmmm wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
I think it's a near universal phenomenon that people with extraordinary
amounts of power become victims of their own hubris. Once you get
sufficiently decoupled from the consequences of your own actions, it is
near impossible to tether yourself to a calibrated sense of reality.
So I genuinely think that Amodei thought here that he was building a
moat - set a very high bar for safety at exactly the line Anthropic but
nobody else meets, and then declare anything less to be too unsafe to
be allowed. That would put a permanent halt to open models, Chinese
models and throw a significant barrier in front of competitors - if
OpenAI is about to release something competitive with Mythos, they
would have to immediately double back and implement at least equivalent
safeguards. It might cost them months at the most critical juncture in
Anthropic's history, when they are filing for IPO.
Having said this, I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their
own model being restricted. They probably still see it as a win because
it acts as a strong endorsement of them as the market leader and the
model as the most powerful available model. So I think both things are
true, but we are in the "plan B" scenario now rather than "plan A".
matheusmoreira wrote 48 min ago:
> I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their own model
being restricted.
Doubt. Had they foreseen this, they would have started verifying the
identity of their customers. That would have allowed them to keep
their US customers when the US government banned foreign persons from
accessing Fable. Since they were forced to turn off Fable for
everyone, it follows that they were not prepared for that possibility
at all.
zmmmmm wrote 14 min ago:
> they would have started verifying the identity of their
customers.
Very good point. Yes i think this part goes to hubris. Amodei
probably didn't think the ban would cut along those lines if it
happened. And in fact it wouldn't surprise me if the government
specifically made it that way (singling out foreign nationals) as a
way of punishing Anthropic for putting them in this position. It's
clear they absolutely hate being dictated to by anybody, but
especially Amodei and they probably thought through what would hurt
them a lot to implement and deliberately made it that way.
CamperBob2 wrote 40 min ago:
The big problem Anthropic faces isn't implementing a KYC workflow,
but the fact that many if not most of their own employees are no
longer allowed to work on Fable/Mythos.
matheusmoreira wrote 24 min ago:
What a hilarious situation. Clearly, they never even imagined
their precious government regulation would be turned against
them.
dannyw wrote 35 min ago:
Also their API customers and downstream customers (e.g. Cursor
users) would also need similar infra, and probably a decent
amount of users would just choose another model that doesn't
require ID & an immigration status check.
And API is much more profitable (relatively) than subscribers for
them.
ergonaught wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
A government sign off on release potentially reduces liability/exposure
if the models can do what it says on the box. Iâm sure Anthro wants
this applied to everyone and not only them, but there is a potential
benefit to them.
matheusmoreira wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
> In my opinion, they mostly imagined these regulations applying to
other people, especially open source projects, academics and smaller
companies. Now that they are being subjected to the exact sort of
regulation they have proposed, they do not like it.
> I think all of this was extremely irresponsible of them, and I feel a
good amount of schadenfreude that the leopard ate their face first.
Can't say I disagree. Hope this costs them many, many billions.
willsmith72 wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
What's the actual verdict on who reported it?
The article is writing as if Amazon did a complex analysis and then
reported it.
But the latest reporting id read was it was not a jailbreak, and
reported by the ceo (not the old technical CEO btw, the new bizdev guy)
j-bos wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
Amodei exhibits the common failure of guys on the spectrum, gleefully
recounting gruesome news and portents. And that's fine, everybody's
different and I like to believe he's not happy that everybody will be
shaken and jobless, but you are the CEO of a "trillion" dollar company
and the portentious news is being written about your actions.
Presentation matters, more so when your audience is A world leaders B
the entire world.
s3p wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
Have been adding a few too many comments here but I have to add this
one.
Most of the people complaining about Anthropic's behavior, while
simultaneously avoiding the argument at heart about whether AI
regulation is good, remind me of the "we should improve society" meme:
HTML [1]: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-4-...
pclowes wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
I wonder if you can just use fable/mythos to basically re-create core
Anthropic research. They seem to be very touchy about using their
models for LLM R&D given the guard rails they built into the product.
None of the large language model providers have a very defensible
product moat yet and if the models themselves can reveal research
fundamentals their position would become extremely precarious.
It would be very tempting to hide behind a national security excuse to
try and preserve the research moat.
PunchyHamster wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
Any tool you give government to impede your competition/politicial
opponents can and will be used in same way against you
airstrike wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
Anthropic had countless ways to fight this and they chose to cave.
The government can't apply export controls based on a control that does
not exist. Creating one for model inference, if at all possible, would
take 3-6 months at a minimum and it even includes a public comment
process. That control is not cited anywhere because it does not exist.
The president can invoke emergency powers but that requires pointing to
a specific foreign threat, notifying congress formally, posting on the
national register, and it only lasts six months unless congress votes
to renew it.
Given how easy it would have been for them to fight this, we can only
conclude this was either outright designed or incredibly convenient for
Anthropic.
Given their stated goal of pulling Fable by June 22nd, it seems likely
they underestimated the amount of compute they would need or, even if
they had perfectly estimated it, pivoting so that "the government shut
it down because it's so powerful" on June 12nd is a better story than
"we shut it down because we lack the compute" on the 22nd. This is
especially true because the net new revenue from Fable is just from new
signups between the two dates, which is likely smaller each day elapsed
since the launch.
s3p wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
> if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to
present unacceptable risks.
>Yes. This assessment was made by Amazon, a frequent and serious
government contractor which is generally trusted to handle
high-security government, intelligence, and military contractor
concerns.
Reads as partially disingenuous. Amazon did not conduct some thoroughly
vetted, responsible security audit. Someone gave them examples of a
'jailbreak' and they notified the white house rather quickly. This was
nary an official process. Calling it one is ignoring the facts of what
happened.
SilverElfin wrote 31 min ago:
Thatâs not what articles on it say. They say that a team of
security researchers at Amazon were able to trivially jailbreak the
model and itâs not as guardrailed as claimed. Articles say in
particular the model was shown to be usable for identifying security
holes that it was supposed to not be able to be used for. Thatâs
why Anthropic has only given access to Mythos to some people but not
everyone, right?
Personally I donât think we should impose guardrails on something
so close to speech. But I can imagine Amazon was worried about how an
explosion of cybersecurity incidents might affect the world. After
all, they run AWS and have good intuition for the landscape of
cybersecurity. Imagine if many of their cloud customers are suddenly
facing one breach after another.
amazingamazing wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
Yes.
> Weâre proposing stronger regulation of the technology. Weâre
proposing giving the government the ability to, again in a narrow way,
block deployment of unsafe technology.
Anthropic CEO, last week.
HTML [1]: https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stronge...
theturtletalks wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
I havenât used Claude in more than a year and didnât even try
Fable.
As someone that doesnât have a dog in this race, I feel like
anthropic has been very consistent with their moral stance. First, they
denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military
operations and throughout all this, Anthropic has been the one to
neuter their model and make sure that itâs not able to do a lot of
things that might can be destructive. So them saying that there should
be a pause on new AI and then releasing this new product makes me
inclined to believe them. Maybe Iâve drank the koolaid but it seems
like Anthropic isnât inherently âevil.â
slopinthebag wrote 58 min ago:
> First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct
military operations
They did not do this, they just wanted to ensure there was a human
somewhere in the loop. Despite this, the U.S. military utilized
Anthropic's Claude model in classified operations, including target
selection during conflicts in the Middle East.
quatonion wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
Half of me wonders if it was all a live simulation/drill, to practice
what happens if a much more serious event occurs, and a model needed to
be quickly shut down.
Under such conditions we would be looking at Amazon's actions through a
much more benevolent lens.
Not saying it has been, but it certainly crossed my mind as something
worth doing regardless.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 2 min ago:
[delayed]
davebren wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
> "to practice what happens if a much more serious event occurs"
A pair of bolt cutters should do.
quatonion wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
That's certainly one way to do it, but where would you place them?
No, but seriously, you could imagine what we witnessed playing out
in a high stakes Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton style fable.
The fiery blowhard Pentagon chief, the arrogant know it all tech
bro lab head, an alarm being called in from a remote office and
surfaced through Amazon.
It almost writes itself.
But we can use your name for the novel.
"Bolt Cutter"
Has a nice ring to it.
moezd wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
Chekhov's gun. If you keep pointing to it, someone will fire that gun
until the game ends.
peter422 wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
Anybody who isn't at least treating this situation as possibly just an
authoritarian government picking winners and losers is not paying
attention to the political environment.
Companies/countries/people are paying off the government in all sorts
of various ways (crypto, gifts, bogus settlements, planes,
inaugurations, ballrooms). The companies that pay off the government
get big fat contracts and merger agreements, and the ones that don't
get increased scrutiny, lawsuits and threats.
OpenAI and SpaceX are friends of the administration, and Anthropic is
(politically at least), not friends with the administration.
Could this penalty be a rational and reasonable reaction to the new
model? Perhaps. Or maybe it is just a made up excuse to do what the
government wants to do, which is punish its political enemies. It
wouldn't be the first, second, third or 10th time that has happened so
far in this administration.
estearum wrote 14 min ago:
Ah but you have forgotten that HN is full of people who are so aloof
and "above the fray" (compliments to their raw intellect, of course)
that it would be beneath them to consider the realities of the
political situation.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 7 min ago:
I just think that it's dodging the question in this case. It's true
that the US government is run by crooks who'd all be serving prison
sentences in a just world, and that they'd certainly do whatever
Anthropic wants in exchange for a sufficiently large bribe. But the
US government also serves a number of important roles in American
society that we can't simply turn off and come back to in 2029.
ralph84 wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
This was an opportunistic hit job by Amazon. After the SpaceX IPO,
Amazon realized there was a good chance Anthropic's post-IPO market cap
would exceed Amazon's. No doubt they are maneuvering behind the scenes
for regulations that the big cloud vendors be the only authorized
operators of LLMs for national security reasons.
gordonhart wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
Amazon owns 15-20% of Anthropic.
ralph84 wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
They don't have a seat on the board. They're smart enough to
understand the threat to their business posed by frontier models
they don't control.
alchemism wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
The next % stake will be acquired at a discount, it seems.
jdw64 wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
To speak my mind without filtering, Amodei looks pretty terrible in
this situation.
They've positioned their company as 'We're the serious AI company that
understands safety, while others underestimate the risks.' That
strategy itself is understandable. They're not like OpenAI, which
carved out the pioneer position in LLMs, nor do they have a trustworthy
brand like Google (Gemini isn't trustworthy, but still). So branding
around 'responsibility' made sense.
The problem is that they pushed that narrative with the Trump
administration. Without considering that LLM strategies need to change
depending on the political context, they just input the same prompt
into a different context and got bad results.
The Trump administration's stance emphasizes external enemies. I guess
they didn't know what would happen if they started talking about
military weapons in that environment.
We East Asians know authoritarian regimes 'very' well. So I guess
people from the US, a country with so much freedom that they naturally
lie flat on the ground, just didn't understand the difference.
If they had advocated for AI freedom and free expression, many people
might have helped them, like in the PGP situation in cryptography. But
instead, they got caught up in their own claims.
If you emphasize how dangerous AI is under an administration like
Trump's that stresses external enemies, of course the government will
say, 'Then let us manage it.' And the moment Anthropic says, 'Why just
us?' it just looks ridiculous. They're the ones who went on about how
dangerous it is, and now they're acting victimized for being treated as
a dangerous entity.
To be even more honest, Amodei's style of communication sometimes looks
like a morality superiority hustle.
They speak in a tone of 'We're not just a money focused company, we
care about humanity,' but isn't Anthropic still a company that takes
investments, sells models, rides the cloud, and tries to win government
contracts? So it ends up looking like they use regulatory discourse as
a shield and marketing when it benefits them, but complain 'it's not
fair' when it works against them.
Personally, I think Anthropic needs to hire a Korean person as their
marketing lead. We Koreans know very well how to behave under
authoritarian governments. If you need a marketing person, feel free to
contact me. I'll prepare my resume
slopinthebag wrote 55 min ago:
Well said. The funny thing is the US military uses Anthropic models
for things like target selection in conflicts in the Middle East.
Their marketing department is top notch however, there are people in
this thread who think Anthropic is against that.
chillfox wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
Nobody who works at Anthropic is a good person.
Just look at any interview with Amodei, he gets super excited/happy
every time he gets to talk about his tech making people unemployed.
The guy loves firing people not at his company.
Deliberately trying to cause mass poverty and starvation by firing as
many people as possible and being excited about it is cartoon villain
stuff.
Anyone who works at Anthropic is basically a henchman to a cartoon
villain.
jdw64 wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
But we must not forget that the reason they are admired is that our
society has rewarded people like that. Our society is fascinated by
people like Amodei precisely because, despite being contradictory,
we have rewarded those who make money and pull up the ladder behind
them.
Also, even if a company is an evil organization, I think people can
still serve that evil to make a living. Evil is easy; good is
difficult. Most people, rather than being good but poor, would
rather be evil but wealthy.
This is the image of an entrepreneur that our capitalist society
has wanted all along, so he is simply positioning himself
accordingly.
hmokiguess wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
When you are both the source of fear and hope people will always side
with fear.
If you sold everyone on the idea of "safety is paramount, we urge
everyone not to rush into development here" then certainly becomes hard
to believe a blanket "we figured out safety, come play with our toys
for 10x cost" when stuff is less than a month apart in your news page.
TalkingCodeMonk wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
The premise here is rather ridiculous, and only entertainable if you
don't know about the recent history of the admin declaring Anthropic a
supply chain risk because they required the government to agree to
ethical clauses that would've been considered unthinkable until
recently.
Remember, all AI companies openly claimed to oppose military usage just
a few short years ago. Now they all have government contracts that
allow the government to use them "lawfully", while also being able to
decide that anything they do with them is lawful. Anthropic is the only
one who required clauses against killbots and domestic mass
surveillance.
Anthropic never asked for arbitrary or opaque shutdowns. They asked for
clearly defined regulations to apply equally (which would've helped
their market position and advantage, coincidentally I'm sure /s),
moreso to reduce their own risk and liability.
charcircuit wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
>because they required the government to agree to ethical clauses
that would've been considered unthinkable until recently
This theory doesn't make sense with the context that they happily
signed a follow up deal with OpenAI containing the same restrictions.
The more likely theory was that it was because Anthropic wanted to be
the ultimate arbiter of what was considered violating.
alaribi wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
> and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or
arbitrary decisions.
Didn't Anthropic say that the same jailbreak is possible with GPT 5.5?
> I believe there are: they are called âcourtsâ. Dario is as free
as the rest of us are to file a lawsuit and go in front of a judge and
tell the judge that he is the victim of political favoritism or an
arbitrary decision. That is, in fact, one of the primary purposes of
the legal system.
This isn't realistic here. Yes, there's a system in place, but at the
speed of these iterations/deployments, filing a lawsuit that will take
months/years to resolve isn't a practical path forward.
mitthrowaway2 wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
I posted this comment on the other thread, but it deserves mention here
too, because Anthropic also asked for this ~10 days ago, separately
from the post linked in the article. [1] ...
> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow
or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal
structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the
technology.
In their subsequent post this week responding to the announcement of
the export ban, Anthropic wrote:
> If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would
essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model
providers.
Which is what they said would be good.
HTML [1]: https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme
cdestroyer wrote 54 min ago:
the link appears to be broken. Only shows a 404 poem :(
fwipsy wrote 14 min ago:
It's missing a "nt:"
HTML [1]: https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improve...
reasonableklout wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
Great, so let's have the government apply the standard across the
industry and see whether Anthropic sticks to their stated beliefs.
ianm218 wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
What I feel like is missing in the common discourse here is that
Anthropic genuinely believes that AI poses an existential risk for
humanity either in terms of literal survival or extreme mass
surveillance, human disempowerment etc. So if you take these risks
seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is
the right thing to do?
I.e. OpenAI just went full evil corpo mode and went all in on the
Leading the Future PAC [1] to try and prevent any kind of regulation.
I feel like there is a reasonable path where they might agree with OP
that the government has "mostly gone insane" but also think that US
getting its act together and leading the way on sane regulation will be
key to getting to a good outcome with AI.
[1]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_the_Future
airstrike wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
We do not know for a fact what they genuinely believe, and many of us
have seen companies act in opposition to their stated goals so the
burden of proof is on them.
It's healthy to suspect ulterior motives from them.
ianm218 wrote 33 min ago:
Can you be more specific on what you mean - how would you prove
what anyone believes about something short of reading minds and
what would proof look like to you?
Here is Dario writing about AI safety in 2016 [1]. Dario and others
in the Anthropic circle have long been associated [2] with the
effective altruism movement, which whatever you think about them,
they are very concerned about AI existential risks. Ronan Farrow &
the New Yorker did a mega deep dive on Sam Altmans history of being
dishonest and manipulative, and it credibly reports that Anthropic
cofounders left due to not trusting leadership there with safety.
On the other hand we have decades long evidence of Altman and co.
being dishonest and employing people like Chris Lehane [3]. I have
no affiliation with Anthropic beyond being a user of their products
to be clear but it feels like HN is going to end up on the wrong
side of this one.
[1] [2]
HTML [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565
HTML [2]: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/53Gc35vDLK2u5nBx...
HTML [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lehane
ivraatiems wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
> So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on
HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do?
Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not
just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies.
With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done.
Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in
their stated philosophies.
resident423 wrote 57 min ago:
It seems like a simple solution but if Anthropic was actually to
dedicate all its resources this way wouldn't the investors just
demand a new CEO?
I think Anthropic believe these risks, but I also think they've
spent so much time talking to Claude that they've pretty much lost
their minds now. Anthropic have a model welfare department and have
numerous times suggested that Claude is conscious and has human
like emotions.
fwipsy wrote 16 min ago:
"Are AIs conscious?" is not currently answerable because "Are
humans conscious?" is not currently answerable. I know I'm
conscious because I perceive (it) directly. Everyone else's
consciousness basically depends on an assumption; on taking them
at their word when they say they're conscious. Now I ask an AI if
it's conscious and it says it doesn't know, but it sorta thinks
it might be. Okay, it's probably not conscious, but it's
difficult to rule out in the same way a book is not conscious.
Philpax wrote 29 min ago:
Suggesting that the probability is non-zero is not the same thing
as suggesting it as fact.
nearbuy wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
Anthropic's plan may not have great odds, but your proposal is
orders of magnitude worse. There are plenty of groups opposing AI.
They don't get billions in investment. They don't have a clear way
to stop OpenAI or Qwen. They don't get a say in what values or
safety measures the top AIs get.
You'd rather they signal their virtue and give up their ability to
make a difference.
energy123 wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
The definition of "risk" is such that the existence of it doesn't
necessarily make the thing a bad idea to pursue.
The Anthropic people probably also believe that AI has the
potential to cure all diseases and reduce material poverty, which
is the reason they would probably give for why they're pursuing it.
They then ring the alarm bell to mitigate the risk and increase the
chances of the upside scenario coming to fruition.
Or they could take your advice up-thread and just lie to stay out
of the government's crosshairs. That's another option.
epolanski wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
The genie is out, you cannot stop research in the field across the
world.
fwipsy wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
Anthropic has called for a coordinated pause: [1] I characterize
the culture of companies based on who works there. Anthropic is
founded by people who left OpenAI because it didn't take safety
seriously enough. But if AI development has to happen, they want to
be the ones leading it. People who do not feel that way, including
Anthropic's former head of safety, just don't work there.
Generally, corporations spending billions of dollars on lobbyists
is frowned upon. I suspect individual Anthropic employees may make
significant donations to AI safety politics and charities, but I
don't have proof.
HTML [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-says-ai-labs-ne...
whatisthiseven wrote 31 min ago:
Ok, but that only benefits them.
If they actually believe this stuff is so dangerous, they should
shut down their company, and use their fortune to buy up/shut
down all the others.
But of course they don't actually believe that. It is just
marketing hype.
You can't be out there selling doomsday devices, saying "maybe we
should slow down development of bigger doomsday devices", while
*still selling doomsday devices". That is just blatant hypocrisy.
Eating cake and having it, too. Oxymoron.
No, they don't actually believe this. Not in a meaningful
capacity.
(FWIW, I don't believe it, either. I think we should continue
developing the technology).
estearum wrote 16 min ago:
@gork what is a coordination problem and can you just like
"shut down your participation" and solve them?
fwipsy wrote 9 min ago:
Yes! As long as everyone else does too.
fwipsy wrote 27 min ago:
Anthropic is valued a lot because they are building AI. If they
stop building AI, they are worth zero. Then they're just
activists - why don't you ask Yud how many AI companies he's
bought out and shut down?
Even if they could somehow cash out their entire market cap,
Google's is >4x theirs. AND if they quit, their competitors'
valuations go up. AND there's nothing to stop those employees
from leaving and founding new AI companies.
s3p wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
Again, how would they do that?
Are they not doing what they should do, which is call for increased
regulation? Last I checked, they were not able to create and enact
laws.
Davidzheng wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
If they only opposed it they wouldn't have had these billions of
dollars? Also I think they genuinely believe they cannot stop it
because the Chinese companies are close behind (I also believe it's
impossible to stop b/c of strong economic pressures selecting for
those who will advance this tech and there are many who can)
colonCapitalDee wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
No, Anthropic clearly did not ask for this.
1. "Dario is known for writing about regulation and the direction of AI
as an industry and Anthropic in particular, and what he says is taken
very seriously and is considered a definitive statement of the
companyâs position." This is patently ridiculous. A CEO's blog post
is not an official company statement or any sort of binding agreement.
2. "Are there protective measures against political favoritism or
arbitrary decisions? I believe there are: they are called
âcourtsâ." This is so stupid. Of course Anthropic will take this to
court (if it's not rescinded before then), and the government's
ham-fisted "regulation" will almost certainly be overturned. And it
doesn't matter! An unjust action that is overturned by the legal system
does not magically become just.
3. "Is This Politically Motivated or Arbitrary? Probably at least
somewhat." If the best you can muster here is "probably at least
somewhat", then your head is in the sand. It clearly politically
motivated, and clearly arbitrary. Perhaps a different government would
receive the benefit of the doubt here, but not this one.
4. "âThe governmentâ or âsocietyâ is meant to deal with all of
those things. Well, now the government is â the actual government
that really exists, and not an imagined one that only does good things
and never does bad things." So that's it? We just throw up our hands
and say that this is natural, that it couldn't go any other way? That
Anthropic was "asking for it", and it's their fault when the government
lashes out?
If the government wants to regulate AI, either Congress needs to pass a
law, or the Executive needs to furnish a reasonable explanation for
their actions. We do not live in a fascist country. There is separation
between the government and private industry. The government does not
have the power to arbitrarily regulate private enterprise. I am truly
baffled by the inability for people to see this as it is -- a blatant,
and foolish, attempt at posturing and political intimidation. It's part
of a clear pattern of behavior by this administration, and should be
interpreted as such.
slashdave wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
> It clearly politically motivated, and clearly arbitrary
Arbitrary, yes. Politically motivated? I think you are giving the
administration way too much credit.
I think what this is are simply incompetent people with too much
influence. I mean, Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick? What the heck do
they understand about this technology?
HTML [1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/13/inside-the-whirlwin...
actionfromafar wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
They probably do understand that they are more chummy with xAI.
ivraatiems wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
> A CEO's blog post is not an official company statement or any sort
of binding agreement.
Uh, then what is it? We should not take the words of the leader of
the company published on the company's website to be the official
stance of the company??
colonCapitalDee wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
I don't know, maybe a published press release? A signed document?
I'm not saying that Dario's words are meaningless, but it is simply
not true that a CEO's public speech constituents a binding
agreement.
achierius wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
It's not an agreement but it is indicative of the company's
position. Why do you go to such lengths to avoid assigning
responsibility to a large corporation?
cheeze wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
I'm with you. If Dario posts in his blog about regulation of AI, I
absolutely assume that is anthropic's position.
ivraatiems wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take
their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and
consider it the way a neutral party would.
Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They
make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go
online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most
powerful, and also that doomsday devices are dangerous and should be
regulated.
The Doomsday Device Company then says they have the world's best
doomsday device. (They don't, but they claim they do.)
The US Government hates the Doosmday Device Company for various
political reasons, but also has a vested interest in there not being a
massive proliferation of doomsday devices.
The Doosmday Device company spends a great deal of time and money
telling everyone: "Our doomsday device is the most doomy of all time!"
(though it probably isn't) and "Everyone can use it!" (for a lot of
money)
It is completely logical, then, for the US Government to say: No,
everyone cannot use your doomsday device, because doomsday is bad.
(While also meaning: Only we should be able to use it, and you
shouldn't be able to tell us how.)
If you do not want to be in the business of having your doomsday
devices shut down by the government, well, it would help if you didn't
so loudly and aggressively proclaim how doomy they are. It doesn't
matter how trustworthy you claim to be, given that your business is
making evil doosmday devices. You still won't be trusted!
estearum wrote 17 min ago:
Yes this is also why if you're building a startup in the nuclear
power space (empirically demonstrated Doomsday Device), then you can
expect USG to come in and apply arbitrary, opaque, and unexplained
rules on you, steal your assets, and destroy your business. And also
probably not do that to any of your competitors who are doing the
exact same thing as you.
ajmurmann wrote 30 min ago:
Well, regulating doomsday devices is a reasonable thing to want. A
reasonable regulation of such devices would call for proper
safeguards and safety testing. I think Anthropic would have been fine
with that.
Instead what happened is a one-off nationalist decree that solves
none of the two concerns.
satvikpendem wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
David Sacks corroborates this:
HTML [1]: https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/2065853007619588171
SecretDreams wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
How does this look if it's a perpetual motion machine instead of a
doomsday device?
andai wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
Okay, but hasn't OpenAI been doing the same thing for years? They
seem to be on slightly better terms though...
kordlessagain wrote 32 min ago:
Consider Dario was VP of AI research and oversaw alignment and
safety at OpenAI. He left in 2020. In my opinion and from direct
observation, it takes time to change policy at large well funded
companies, so even after he left, his influence was still being
felt.
SilverElfin wrote 40 min ago:
Well when OpenAI did it most prominently, it was actually Dario
Amodei who did it while working at OpenAI. Although you are correct
that OpenAI has also pushed for safety regulations. I doubt Sam
Altman is part of the effective altruism cult though - heâs more
obviously looking for regulatory capture to give him moats.
The recent OpenAI post calls for mandatory safety certification of
all frontier level models:
HTML [1]: https://openai.com/index/frontier-safety-blueprint/
lazide wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
OpenAI is happy to sell their device to the govât to blow things
up with, Anthropic tried to tell the govât to pound sand, no
blowing things up for you.
SilverElfin wrote 42 min ago:
To be clear, Anthropic was completely okay with their tech being
used in war, including current conflicts. They just wanted a
human making some decisions. The military didnât want a vendor
giving them restrictions on how to operate a tool, and since
Anthropicâs restrictions could be a problem anywhere they
appear among other military vendors as well, the government used
the supply chain risk designation to say âthis canât be
anywhere in our toolsâ.
ajmurmann wrote 8 min ago:
After a contract had been negotiated with the exact terms that
Anthropic pushed to keep in place.
slopinthebag wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
It was more like "you can use our device to blow things up you
just need a human to type --dangerously-skip-permissions when
they run it"
amazingamazing wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
Yes, albeit not to the dame extent
knollimar wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
>(They don't, but they claim they do.)
I hate to shill them, but wasn't mythos/Fable SOTA?
Your main point still stands without this aside
cassianoleal wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
What does this question mean? Of course they are state-of-the-art.
After all, they are the most recent and most advanced models out of
Anthropic. If/when they release a new version of their models,
Mythos/Fable will cease to be state-of-the-art, as the new ones
become it.
nearbuy wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
It means Mythos/Fable was the strongest model globally, not just
the newest model from a company.
knollimar wrote 40 min ago:
Yeah if the analogy is LLMs are doomsday devices it's hard to
say mythos wasn't the best. That was my point
s3p wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
Shame on a company for sticking to their values, I guess.
The dichotomy between Anthropic and OpenAI's treatment honestly
couldn't be more obvious. OpenAI has also asked for increased AI
regulation, and they've also released GPT 5.5 Cyber which is claimed
to have the same vulnerability-finding abilities as Mythos. OpenAI
received no such notices like Anthropic. OpenAI also received a
government contract, while Anthropic was banned from DoD use.
Regardless of your thoughts about Dario or his company, this
treatment is obviously not based in any rational principle, and
pretending it is would be stupid.
It's only a matter of months before the open source models achieve
this same capability. What is the US government going to do then? Ban
all people in the world from accessing the Chinese models? If you
think about these arguments for more than five minutes they really do
fall flat.
matheusmoreira wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
Their values are garbage. Paternalism, censorship, suppression.
These are people who think they are the enlightened ones while
we're all dangerous terrorists. They are in fact pulling up the
ladder behind them, just like all the other big techs.
It's indeed quite satisfying to watch them be the first ones burned
by the heavy hand of government they worshipped so much.
Barrin92 wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
>It is completely logical, then, for the US Government to say: No
Not sure about that one given that the US government just reversed a
ban on the exports on the very chips to China that enable said
technologies, you don't hear so much about the chip wars any more.
I think entrepreneurs largely approached this administration with the
attitude that if you're running Doomsday Incorporated they aren't
going to say, "no, don't export that", but "hell yeah baby, how do we
get a 25% cut on every sale?" because that's quite literally what
they did on the hardware front.
I mean I have no strong opinion on whether Antrophics statement are
true or smart, but the idea that it was regulated because someone in
this administration thought it posed incalculable risks is a bit
funny, i"m pretty sure they wear that as a logo printed on their
t-shirts, it seems to be the sole guiding principle of their foreign
policies. Palantir has successfully used doom-mongering as an
advertisement strategy for a decade or so
ivraatiems wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
In fairness, I think this might be a case where the pure id
represented by this administration happens to align with the
correct and logical choice. You could be right, but for this
instance, the outcome is the same.
xscott wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
Another neutral party might not believe it's really a doomsday device
and that what currently looks like exponential growth in capability
could be an s-curve that plateaus in a year or two. After that, it
will be diminishing returns to invest heavily into a tech that won't
get much better.
So what are the current leaders in the field supposed to do to stave
off competition? They should convince the public that they do have a
doomsday device, claim it must be regulated, and then they can profit
from their duopoly because it's exceedingly expensive to break into
the high end of the market. The government has its own nefarious
incentives, not limited to collecting fees and using the unrestricted
versions for surveillance or black hat stuff.
kordlessagain wrote 36 min ago:
Why limit competition of corporations to law at all? Isn't it that
we are in times where "edge case exploitation" rules and laws are
regularly ignored or worked around with "payoffs"?
goodmythical wrote 1 hour 1 min ago:
I was going to say. "Doomsday Device Company" is a wildly loaded
description coming from an allegedly "neutral" party.
danielheath wrote 36 min ago:
It is, but⦠youâve seen the marketing material being put out?
âAGI is just around the corner and could destroy humanity if we
donât solve alignmentâ is something AI leadership at multiple
companies have publicly said.
goodmythical wrote 10 min ago:
Sure, but the same is true of nuclear reaction research.
One camp, using the same mechanism, is trying to make devices
that end the world. One camp, using the same mechanism, is
trying to save the world.
That nuclear/AI COULD end the world or COULD save humanity is
exactly the reason that a truly neutral party would not
describe either tech as a doomsday device but would instead
describe either as technologies bearing massive potential.
No one building an LLM has ever publically stated that they aim
to build a doomsday device and in fact have only ever
specifically said that they are trying to avoid doing so. We've
no reason to beleive that their interest is any different from
any other corporation with agressive shareholders: increasing
profits. Dooming humanity leads to lower profits. Lower profits
is outside shareholder interest. They will do anything they can
to maximize profit, just as any other profit driven org does.
No objective, neutral, observer would apply such loaded terms.
It's okay to have an opinion, but having an opinion makes
you...opinionated. Not neutral. The opposite of neutral.
ivraatiems wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
I completely agree with you. I think the problem is that Anthropic
believes their own BS, and thinks it IS a Doomsday device which
only THEY can control. I think that's what's produced this outcome.
bbippin wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
Iâm surprised people are reacting so strongly over this.
Suppose there is a huge concernâwould you prefer they just
release it as-is and everyone suffers data-breaches and more
supply-chain attacks?
I used Fable 5 for a fair amount of tasks before they pulled it
and I can only imagine what an untapped version of that could do.
Itâs very capable and equally aggressive in accomplishing its
goals.
matheusmoreira wrote 53 min ago:
> would you prefer they just release it as-is and everyone
suffers data-breaches and more supply-chain attacks?
Yes, because then we get to use SOTA models to defend against
the exact same attacks. Fable detected issues in my projects
but got downgraded back to Opus before it could tell me about
them or fix them. In what world could that possibly be
reasonable?
satvikpendem wrote 59 min ago:
Is this not the same as security by obscurity? Open source is
more secure because it's more open and thus is able to have
flaws found in it more easily. So I'd probably prefer more
people to have Fable level models than not.
xscott wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
It's tough to know who believes what at that level, because if
they are aiming for regulatory capture they need to maintain the
illusion.
threatofrain wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
It's quite a bit more complicated than that. The popular narrative is
not exactly on Anthropic, as the general public is far more aware of
OpenAI than Anthropic. The narrative is on AI and whether everything
we know about society is going to change.
Also, as far as priorities and worries go, for most people
cybersecurity is way down the list.
gerdesj wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
"It's quite a bit more complicated than that."
Ohhh no it isn't! (Ohh yes it is) etc
"as the general public is far more aware of OpenAI than Anthropic"
I run LLMs on my own gear with llama.cpp (compiled from source) and
I could not tell you anything about either company except they
fiddle with AI stuff and that (I don't actually care). I glaze
over on news about both organisations in equal measure on mention.
I think you'll find that the general public would not be able to
name either company without being asked to pronounce their name
from it being written down.
satvikpendem wrote 57 min ago:
I'm not sure what your personal anecdote has to do with general
trends, there have always been hermits in history. I also run
local models with llama.cpp but I actually stay abreast of the
issues in the field as we may similarly be impacted by recent
actions.
gerdesj wrote 34 min ago:
Silly me and my silly stories!
HN is a forum and as far as I am aware, anecdata is allowed
here. You might disagree with me and my experience and that is
fine too but please don't denigrate me.
satvikpendem wrote 12 min ago:
It is a forum, yes, and anecdotes are fine, as I said I do
the same as you wrt local models, but that doesn't mean an
irrelevant non sequitur is useful to other readers, and
pointing it out is not equivalent to denigration.
sillysaurusx wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
My eighty year old father brought up OpenAI unprompted a few
months ago. At this point itâs hard to find anyone who hasnât
heard of OpenAI.
gerdesj wrote 55 min ago:
I think my point still stands 8)
I know plenty of people who will put the letters A and I
together and get rather confused about what on earth is going
on but very few of those would mention any co apart from
Microsoft, Google, Facebook or errm Twitter.
No one has a bloody clue about all this stuff apart from us lot
and we have no real idea about it either!
Oooh tulips!
jazzyjackson wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
Depends entirely on whether they leave CNBC playing as
background noise
DANmode wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
Yes. Canât wag the dog without centralized networks; even
if theyâre now Meta algorithms, theyâre still there.
bravetraveler wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
It's aggrandizing and spares compute, I'd have to assume so... if not
done so publicly. Clearly was requested. A silly title proposition:
's/Anthropic/Dario/'; he wrote the essay TFA discusses. No 'think'
required, they're surprised at the shape.
$ xdg-open fakerake.png
Claude: regulate me
USA: YOU ARE BEING REGULATED
Claude: oh my god
Might believe I'm overstating compute; consider, how often does OpenAI
falter? Now, Anthropic before and after their recent capacity deals. We
got to see the girlfriend that goes to another school, now she can go
home [with cover from Uncle Sam, the trip is ~~expensive~~ dangerous].
CamperBob2 wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
The Fable debacle will justify the imposition of a solid legislative
framework to serve as a legal foundation for the entire business
sector. A DMCA for AI, if you will. The other incumbent players will
demand it, because they can't do business subject to the arbitrary (or
worse) whims of Donald Trump or whoever follows him.
That framework is, of course, what Amodei did ask for, but he
mistakenly thought he'd have a seat at a table populated by rational
actors. Even after the Trump administration explicitly told him
otherwise when they declared his whole company to be a national
security threat.
So what happened is all Amodei's fault. It's possible that the
Anthropic board will decide that this particular unforced error is his
last one. In fact, given that Amazon is apparently the prime mover
behind this whole train wreck, I'd almost bet on it.
nicce wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
> So what happened is all Amodei's fault. It's possible that the
Anthropic board will decide that this particular unforced error is
his last one. In fact, given that Amazon is apparently the prime
mover behind this whole train wreck, I'd almost bet on it.
How it sounds like that everyone who tries to work with safety or
morals will get eventually kicked out? That this is an âerrorâ?
Like what happened with OpenAI? What a nice world to live.
sirreal14 wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
Attempting regulatory capture is not âworking with safety or
moralsâ, Iâd argue itâs the opposite.
adriand wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
I think you are correct about the legislative push, because itâs
clear that US AI companies can no longer live without it. However, it
is not the case that this is Amodeiâs fault. His push for
regulation was clearly at least partly mitigated by a desire for this
precise situation to be avoided! With an appropriate regulatory
framework and a transparent, apolitical certification or review
process, this kind of situation would not happen. Banning Fable is
not âregulationâ, itâs capricious retribution, and I believe it
is the single most damaging thing that has happened to the US AI
industry to date.
CamperBob2 wrote 53 min ago:
Banning Fable is not âregulationâ, itâs capricious
retribution
Yes, and my point is, I can't imagine why Amodei expected anything
different to happen.
If he wanted regulation, he should have asked Congress. But
instead he waved a red cape in front of Trump.
optimalsolver wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
Citizenship guarantees service.
rvz wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Yes.
They got even more than what they asked for.
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