I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:
— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.
— Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)
— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.
— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”
— In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.
— In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.
— The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.
— Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.
Did anyone in U.S. government do any ramifications analysis and realize this move, where U.S. can shut down models on a whim, will incentivize all foreign countries/companies away from building on top of American models pushing them to use China? Gutting U.S. AI industry. Are we really this dumb? Reverse ASAP
Did anyone in U.S. government do any ramifications analysis and realize this move, where U.S. can shut down models on a whim, will incentivize all foreign countries/companies away from building on top of American models pushing them to use China? Gutting U.S. AI industry. Are we really this dumb? Reverse ASAP
My team loves Claude from @AnthropicAI . But this new policy of retaining prompts and usage is a red line...we simply can't give over our usage. Prompts contain our IP; literally all our design files and docs. Why would this ever have been ok?
It's sad because everyone was looking forward to using the new model. Sigh.
If you were wondering what the "pause" was all about, Ben Thompson @stratechery has an interesting theory:
"Late last week the Anthropic Institute released a new safety report warning about the danger of recursive self-improvement... I don’t think the timing is a coincidence. This is a company and leadership that has been honing safety-and-scaremongering-as-marketing-tactic ever since Amodei led the charge to close source OpenAI models because GPT-2 was too dangerous; it’s always fun to see the evolution of tactics, capabilities, and goals, and in this case publishing a widely-discussed report the week before you cite it to silently degrade your offering for potential competitors is impressive."
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ
OpenAI giving users their own usage-limit reset is a much bigger change than it first appears.
If this becomes a permanent monthly feature, and GPT-5.6 delivers, it gives users the freedom to use their allocation when they actually need it instead of constantly worrying about timing and limits.
For power users, builders, and developers, that could be a genuine quality-of-life upgrade.
@RoKhanna@BernieSanders@grok why do people keep comparing individual net worth to GDP? The better comparison would be value of a country, all land and other assets in its borders, to net worth of a person.