The articles and discussion around this and the Amazon story all seem to me to be an earnest tech press and community searching for a genuine reason for the administration blocking Anthropic’s models.
However, thinking back to the spat with the DoD and more generally how the administration is much more supportive - and supported by - OpenAI and XAI and it’s easy to imagine this is just another escalation in the fight between a “liberal leaning” company and its competitors and the administration.
There might have been something said by someone at Amazon or something but I’d guess Occam’s razor the administration just leapt at the chance after their supplier sanctions fell flat?
Anthropic is going through the classic Ideological Resistance phase where they fight with the government on principles, that every major tech company also went through. Google, Facebook, Apple, Reddit, Microsoft (especially Microsoft) all had this phase.
Then the companies realize fighting the US government is a lot of effort, expensive and creates a lot of drama, and it's easier to reach a mutual understanding.
They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.
Have a legal department trained to be the buffer between you and the government any contact any questions goes through them and since you’re paying them a ton of money, they are the only people the politicians should get to know, oh, and again and again do not volunteer anything.
> keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can
this is the antithesis of a tech company whether it is VC funded or not, but especially if it is. you don't attract new users by laying low. you don't attract investors by laying low. laying low isn't even in a tech company's vocab.
If the company is "hot" attracting a lot of users, then of course the gov't is going to come knocking too. They're going to want access to all of that user data even if it's not a service they could use directly. Sure, you don't have to go courting government contracts, but it's not like government employees are not going to see the same PR civilian users see.
In a world where the government has been turned into a massive customer of last resort and the game is a kind of first past the post of government capture, that’s simply not a game they can avoid, even if they’ve also been committing unforced errors.
> They should’ve kept their distance from the government
Can they do it if they have anything of value for that government? Eventually the government comes knocking and they have to say "no". Depending on who's in power the response can range from "fine, no lucrative contracts for you" to "you shall pay through your teeth for this". By the time you win a legal battle, which is not guaranteed with a captured justice system, the damage was done and a lesson was learned.
It's like saying no to the mob (today the comparison is as apt as it gets). You get your knees bent the wrong way, and someone else gets the payoff.
They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.
That was always Microsoft's modus operandi, and it almost cost them their company. You can ignore politicians, but politicians won't ignore you.
Microsoft had it worse. Bill Gates was openly hostile and dismissive of the US government during Microsoft's anti-trust investigation, he believed anti-trust law was illegitimate and shouldn't apply to tech companies. He did not take the investigation seriously and repeatedly argued with investigators in his court deposition. In response, Microsoft got raked over the coals by the government, the company was almost broken up, and Gates stepped down as CEO after the debacle.
Now Microsoft stopped fighting the government, and is one of the US government's biggest partners, with massive DoD Azure cloud contracts.
Microsoft had it worse because Gates was a megalomaniac who was so self-absorbed he didn't understand he was supposed to bribe via "donations". Tech companies all learned the same as other sectors; it's more profitable to have lobbyists greasing the wheels of corrupt politicians from the get go, and "donate" to their success for a lifetime of consultation and quid pro quo.
This is also why all virtues signaled by corporations should be treated as lies unless they are legally bindable, and there are actual consequences for false and misleading advertising, fraud, etc other than a rounding error and cost of doing business.
It's only been several years since all AI companies signaled virtues about morality and ethics by not working with the military. Now they all do.
That's such a bad state of existence for people within that Government. How could anything be improved by new companies from now on? A corrupt government would never make bribes illegal, but a scrum style bribe-outcome management could become measured and used publicly? No idea where all this goes..
There's a difference between ignoring the government while you're blatantly breaking the law and they're suing you for it, and not proactively reaching out to the government while they're breaking the law.
Are you sure it’s about principles and not primarily the bribery involved? OAI leadership has bribed the administration.
It may be due to principles and the principled stand Anthropic has taken has caused trouble, but they have also not delivered a bribery as far as we can see.
When there is a protection money racket in play, it’s hard for me to take other factors as seriously. This is gangster economics not a philosopher’s circle.
Nah, with Google etc it was more realizing their own interests aligned with the interests of the new administration.
By which I mean, they are both interested in being filthy rich, making hay while the sun shines, and stopping centrist forces from adding wealth taxes or anti-monopoly regulations.
Biden and Harris were getting too uppity about such things for their tastes.
Have you seen who Sergey Brin is budding around with these days, and what he -- a formerly very "left liberal" person involved in very vocal anti-Trump protestations inside and outside of Google -- is saying these days? Third richest dude in the world is terrified of wealth taxes being put in place by his former friends, and dating a MAGA "gut-health" influencer.
A gentleman's agreement was brokered between SV and the GOP involving some mutual backscratching.
Indeed, the diff: These previous big tech companies where fighting their neo-liberal agenda against a liberal government, now there's an autocratic fascist one fighting a liberal company.
Are you joking? When was this? Remember, Microsoft was the very first partner to deliver working warrantless surveillance capabilities (against their customers) to the NSA as part of the unconstitutional PRISM program, and this was back in 2007, nearly two decades ago.
And that's over 30 years since the company was founded and a full decade after the US Gov sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds going into the process with every intent on breaking up the company...
Also saying they were the first is laughable. Warrantless telephone surveillance by law enforcement began all the way back in 1895...but really in the way that you would recognize today all the way back in 1994.
They are searching for a headline that will attract clicks. Everyone knows nothing this administration does is genuine, but pretending there is a controversy related to whether or not it could be has been a money pump for the last decade.
They literally are. This is not a case of extra fine tuning, this is a case of enabling or disabling smaller guard models you have to go through first before you get to Mythos.
From another angle that's maybe just a welcome excuse? Or it's some kind of more symbiotic malfeasance? Any way you slice it, it stinks. If it is actually about some misguided attempt at public safety or national security, what could possibly be the actual goal?
> SK Telecom has poured capital into Anthropic several times, including a $100 million investment in 2023 that coincided with the formation of a commercial partnership to develop an AI model tailored to the telecommunications industry.
> the White House asked Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom’s access to Mythos, according to a person close to the AI lab. The company immediately complied,
Their investment in the company and their ability to use the services are orthogonal.
I'm sure they're not happy about losing access to the model, but the amount of money they're going to make from their investment will more than make up for it.
The company having it's product market restricted will negatively impact their financial investment.
Also if you have an agreement with a company for them to provide you with a service, and investing in them is part of that deal, reneging on the service part still isn't okay.
> The company having it's product market restricted will negatively impact their financial investment.
Anthropic's services keep bumping into capacity limits even with Fable disabled.
Revenue is not a problem. This controversy has been good publicity for them: So powerful the government tried to block it!
> Also if you have an agreement with a company for them to provide you with a service, and investing in them is part of that deal, reneging on the service part still isn't okay.
Reneging on the deal implies Anthropic decided not to offer it. That wasn't the case. The government has temporarily restricted it.
>> the amount of money they're going to make from their investment will more than make up for it
Not if the USG locks models down to US citizens. The market will be too small and the model companies have already pumped in far too much money to limit their market to US citizens. Given that most big companies have a global presence they're going to need models that all of their employees can use. They're not going to deploy different products to different employees.
Route the user to a different server based on the citizenship info set on their account? Yeah that'sway to hard for computers and computer programmers to do. There must be more than 100 countries out there! Computers can't possibly count that high.
The Wired headline reframes the issue in a way that’s misleading. SK Telecom was a previously resolved issue (as in prior to Fable launch).
It may have been a contributing factor, but the crux of the shutdown was the industry reporting of Fable jailbreaks (reportedly spearheaded by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy). The more interesting and honest angle is that the industry which has taken the seriousness of Glasswing at face value felt blindsided by Fable release and totally exposed by the residual risk, when they know they still have a months-long bugfixing backlog exposed by Glasswing and are desperate to buy more time.
This misleading looks deliberate on Wired’s part, to appear as though they’re getting a scoop when they’re really just being dishonest. Shameful.
> honest angle is that the industry [felt] exposed by the residual risk [and] have a months-long bugfixing backlog exposed by Glasswing
Two problems with this theory.
1. Amazon complaining to the White House wouldn't have been the opening salvo. Amazon and Anthropic would find it much easier to talk to each other than go through the White House. We'd need evidence that Amazon (and probably others) already asked Anthropic to not release a Mythos-class model but Anthropic released it anyway. Are they on record saying this?
2. The jailbreak Amazon found needs to be real. Maybe the White House staffers are not AI experts and they don't really understand what a jailbreak is... but it's much harder to make that claim about Andy Jassy. For the jailbreak to be the real reason for the export control order, the jailbreak would need to be significant and cause material harm to Amazon. Then Jassy might pass it along to the White House assuming he already was refused by Dario.
But there is no evidence the jailbreak was real. There is one story that it amounted to a request, "fix this code." In any case, Anthropic is on record saying the so-called jailbreak didn't enable any vulnerability work that couldn't already be done by other models.
Is there any serious journalistic magazines/papers left nowadays? Felt like ultimately every single one of them succumbed to the chase of the clickbait in the end.
Is there any interpretation where Amazon is involved but for a reason besides trying to screw over Anthropic? I don't see why Amazon would act against Anthropic when they have a deal to offer Anthropic models on AWS.
actually been like that for ages but people notice it a lot now and have a way to talk about it openly. mid 2000s CNN was really bad about this kind of thing. headline sounds shocking but once you got to paragraph 4 or so the story starts to change. then when you get to the bottom paragraphs the truth starts to come out - in stark contrast to the headline. not sure how they are these days.
Yes. The biology/infosec fallback to Opus is the jail. Promoting to get around it (in my case accidentally) and have Fabre find exploits is the jailbreak.
Yeah ! You should close your eyes on dangerous source code nowadays. Think about a kind of DRM for programming. Perhaps the future is a prompt terminal with no access to the source code. Of course the code should be deployed only on a “secure” anthropic platform.
Looking at the comments on Korean political articles, the point is not so much whether SKT is actually related to China, but rather that the switch to cut off AI vendors is now outside the realm of model performance specs. Now, when foreign companies integrate AI into their workflows, they probably need to add a category for vendor continuity in their evaluation criteria. From a corporate standpoint, uninterrupted continuity is what matters, and with this case, Anthropic is likely to lose a lot of trust, contrary to its own stated policies.
Open source models are not immune to a different form of restriction either. I recently learned that China is restricting travel for AI engineers living in China.
Fable/mythos are the first models from anthropic that hide 100% of reasoning tokens. So it seems to me like we're about to get a lot more data about to what extent Chinese model progress has been a consequence of distillation techniques.
This isn't correct, Claude hasn't displayed the raw chain of thought for any of the Claude 4 series models, which were released in May 2025. Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.8 only display a summarized chain of thought, which is produced by a secondary model. Fable displays its summarized chain of thought in the same manner.
The thinking traces disappeared because Anthropic changed them to be hidden by default. The rationale for hiding it was that most people don't look at the thinking traces https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 . You can reenable thinking traces in Claude code settings with the flag showThinkingSummaries: true.
Qualified it with "100%" because claude4 models show the first few lines of the chain of thought:
>On Claude 4 models, the first few lines of thinking output are more verbose, providing detailed reasoning that's particularly helpful for prompt engineering purposes. Claude Mythos Preview summarizes from the first token, so its thinking blocks do not show this verbose preamble.
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/extend...
Hidden by default should make it easier to identify who’s scraping even those summarized CoTs, I figure. Also figure it’s very expensive to summarize every single chat on the service.
DeepSeek took everyone by surprise with R1. I'm pretty sure they and/or others will do the unexpected again. Not as if the US has a monopoly on awesome talent.
A quick look at the author names on most recent big AI papers, says that's an understatement. US's comparative advantage is in data centers, not in expertise.
Of course, they're betting they won't need those experts soon.
How so? The fact that China is going to launch a comparable model soon is the whole point of what’s happening now. Everyone knows there are going to be open models soon that have the same capabilities - Anthropic has literally said so. The restrictions now are to buy time to patch the security issues before those Chinese models are made available to the whole world.
oh, do you not pay attention to the hardware they're allowed to buy from nvidia? At this point, it's more just being nerfed than being able to do the magical training stuff.
its very real, chinese capital is being intertwined/injected into all facet of south korean society through its own domestic companies and politicians.
Do you have credible evidence to support this claim? Although China is Korea's largest trading partner and numerous Chinese nationals work as foreign laborers in Korea, most are engaged in unskilled manual labor, and very few become knowledge workers or significant business partners. (Conversely, numerous Koreans operate businesses in China.) Those who claim that China exerts political influence over Korea are mostly Korean versions of MAGA.
your claim that Chinese influence in South Korea is merely a MAGA conspiracy theory ignores the substantial economic and corporate reality on the ground, and inaccurately projects an irrelevant American political divide onto Korean geopolitics. In Korea, wariness of Chinese influence is a broad, bipartisan issue.
there are many Chinese manual laborers in Korea, Chinese capital has also been heavily integrated into top-tier Korean tech firms and conglomerates. For example, Tencent is one of the largest shareholders in Korea's biggest gaming and tech companies, holding massive stakes in Kakao, Netmarble, and Krafton, while recently attempting to acquire major stakes in Nexon and Kakao Mobility. To say they are rarely 'significant business partners' is factually incorrect. This is just the tip of the iceberg the portfolio of Chinese capital is diverse and expands across media including JTBC which has been pushing very pro-beijing and anti-american view in particular framing the current bipartisan wariness of China as "far right MAGA" exactly as you typed. lee Jae-myung administration which generally leans more toward Beijing has to carefully navigate. Non-partisan groups like Pew Research consistently report that roughly 80% of South Koreans hold an unfavorable view of China making it one of the highest in the world. Notably, Pew also found that South Korea is unique in that its younger generation holds more negative views of China than its older generation the exact opposite demographic makeup of the US MAGA movement.
Dismissing these well-documented geopolitical and economic realities as a fringe talking point simply doesn't reflect the situation on the ground in South Korea and this is why I ask,
are you really Korean and how come you don't know these basic facts? a quick search in Korean would reveal numerous articles that back up China's capital deployment in South Korea especially in sensitive areas.
you can't really fault Koreans for their wariness, many Chinese pretend to be Korean online/offline without good intentions. I can tell you that this is only going to end in violence and more discrimination against Chinese in Korea and people who don't even support CCP are going to be impacted.
I said this precisely because I am Korean and have been working in the IT industry right here in Korea. How many Chinese people do you think work at Naver, Kakao, Carrot, and Baemin in Korea? (Coupang might be an exception. I have often heard colleagues from Coupang badmouth the Chinese people there.) I have never worked in the Bay Area, and I only know about the US software industry through this site, but it is certain that a much higher proportion of Chinese people work in the IT industry there. (The biggest reason for this is actually that they need to speak Korean to work in Korea.)
Just as there are many young people on MAGA, there are also many young Koreans who are caught up in right-wing conspiracy theories. The fact that they are 'concerned' is not proof that China is actually exerting influence over Korean IT companies and society as a whole. There is a significant difference between making foreign investments and infiltration.
Many of us know coders and cybersecurity professionals who are even better than Claude Fable or Mythos. It's outstanding how much praise and careful consideration it gets. At the same time, humans with even more expertise are discarded and fired.
You seem to ignore the fact that this kind of praise and attention is not accidental. It’s a direct result of massive PR by Anthropic. AGI and skynet is their marketing. Dario is the supreme hyper on that. Make no mistake this is a trillion dollar company not your average startup so it has the money and potentially the power to influence policy (I.e ban competitors)
Over a decade ago, I was going to a tech group with a supposed security leader (that ended up getting a huge buyout from Cisco a few years ago).
A student wanted to create a project that bypassed the GF of China. He basically told him he was an idiot, it was impossible, and discouraged the student from even trying. This was a hacker (the security leader) at one point in his life, that claimed to support the freedom of speech and expression.
The actual reason he said this to the student is because he supports the government in China. Many other comments I heard after this proved to me that this is true. My guess is that his startup even received funding from the Chinese government.
It's really disappointing that tech leaders can publicly support murderous regimes like the Chinese government for decades with no blow back. They are far worse than Putin/the Russian government and have 100X the money and technology.
If he supported Russia, he would probably get cancelled and never be able to be involved in the tech industry again.
The articles and discussion around this and the Amazon story all seem to me to be an earnest tech press and community searching for a genuine reason for the administration blocking Anthropic’s models.
However, thinking back to the spat with the DoD and more generally how the administration is much more supportive - and supported by - OpenAI and XAI and it’s easy to imagine this is just another escalation in the fight between a “liberal leaning” company and its competitors and the administration.
There might have been something said by someone at Amazon or something but I’d guess Occam’s razor the administration just leapt at the chance after their supplier sanctions fell flat?
Anthropic is going through the classic Ideological Resistance phase where they fight with the government on principles, that every major tech company also went through. Google, Facebook, Apple, Reddit, Microsoft (especially Microsoft) all had this phase.
Then the companies realize fighting the US government is a lot of effort, expensive and creates a lot of drama, and it's easier to reach a mutual understanding.
They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.
Have a legal department trained to be the buffer between you and the government any contact any questions goes through them and since you’re paying them a ton of money, they are the only people the politicians should get to know, oh, and again and again do not volunteer anything.
> keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can
this is the antithesis of a tech company whether it is VC funded or not, but especially if it is. you don't attract new users by laying low. you don't attract investors by laying low. laying low isn't even in a tech company's vocab.
I think they meant keep a low profile from the government, not customers. Anthropic is doing the opposite by loudly asking for regulation.
If the company is "hot" attracting a lot of users, then of course the gov't is going to come knocking too. They're going to want access to all of that user data even if it's not a service they could use directly. Sure, you don't have to go courting government contracts, but it's not like government employees are not going to see the same PR civilian users see.
In a world where the government has been turned into a massive customer of last resort and the game is a kind of first past the post of government capture, that’s simply not a game they can avoid, even if they’ve also been committing unforced errors.
> They should’ve kept their distance from the government
Can they do it if they have anything of value for that government? Eventually the government comes knocking and they have to say "no". Depending on who's in power the response can range from "fine, no lucrative contracts for you" to "you shall pay through your teeth for this". By the time you win a legal battle, which is not guaranteed with a captured justice system, the damage was done and a lesson was learned.
It's like saying no to the mob (today the comparison is as apt as it gets). You get your knees bent the wrong way, and someone else gets the payoff.
They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.
That was always Microsoft's modus operandi, and it almost cost them their company. You can ignore politicians, but politicians won't ignore you.
I'm not sure tech companies were ever like that, but even if they were, that world is long gone by now.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley...
To be fair, most of those companies had those phases with administrations that were a lot less petty than the current one.
You're talking like it's business as usual. None of these companies had anything similar to this retaliation
Microsoft had it worse. Bill Gates was openly hostile and dismissive of the US government during Microsoft's anti-trust investigation, he believed anti-trust law was illegitimate and shouldn't apply to tech companies. He did not take the investigation seriously and repeatedly argued with investigators in his court deposition. In response, Microsoft got raked over the coals by the government, the company was almost broken up, and Gates stepped down as CEO after the debacle.
Now Microsoft stopped fighting the government, and is one of the US government's biggest partners, with massive DoD Azure cloud contracts.
Microsoft had it worse because Gates was a megalomaniac who was so self-absorbed he didn't understand he was supposed to bribe via "donations". Tech companies all learned the same as other sectors; it's more profitable to have lobbyists greasing the wheels of corrupt politicians from the get go, and "donate" to their success for a lifetime of consultation and quid pro quo.
This is also why all virtues signaled by corporations should be treated as lies unless they are legally bindable, and there are actual consequences for false and misleading advertising, fraud, etc other than a rounding error and cost of doing business.
It's only been several years since all AI companies signaled virtues about morality and ethics by not working with the military. Now they all do.
That's such a bad state of existence for people within that Government. How could anything be improved by new companies from now on? A corrupt government would never make bribes illegal, but a scrum style bribe-outcome management could become measured and used publicly? No idea where all this goes..
There's a difference between ignoring the government while you're blatantly breaking the law and they're suing you for it, and not proactively reaching out to the government while they're breaking the law.
Are you sure it’s about principles and not primarily the bribery involved? OAI leadership has bribed the administration.
It may be due to principles and the principled stand Anthropic has taken has caused trouble, but they have also not delivered a bribery as far as we can see.
When there is a protection money racket in play, it’s hard for me to take other factors as seriously. This is gangster economics not a philosopher’s circle.
Here’s another take on this with more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593212
The fighting these companies had with the government was very nominal.
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ (2014)
Nah, with Google etc it was more realizing their own interests aligned with the interests of the new administration.
By which I mean, they are both interested in being filthy rich, making hay while the sun shines, and stopping centrist forces from adding wealth taxes or anti-monopoly regulations.
Biden and Harris were getting too uppity about such things for their tastes.
Have you seen who Sergey Brin is budding around with these days, and what he -- a formerly very "left liberal" person involved in very vocal anti-Trump protestations inside and outside of Google -- is saying these days? Third richest dude in the world is terrified of wealth taxes being put in place by his former friends, and dating a MAGA "gut-health" influencer.
A gentleman's agreement was brokered between SV and the GOP involving some mutual backscratching.
Which Dario and crew aren't a part of. Yet.
Indeed, the diff: These previous big tech companies where fighting their neo-liberal agenda against a liberal government, now there's an autocratic fascist one fighting a liberal company.
>(especially Microsoft)
Are you joking? When was this? Remember, Microsoft was the very first partner to deliver working warrantless surveillance capabilities (against their customers) to the NSA as part of the unconstitutional PRISM program, and this was back in 2007, nearly two decades ago.
Oh man, 2007? Wait, wait don't tell me, when was windows 95 a big deal?
And that's over 30 years since the company was founded and a full decade after the US Gov sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds going into the process with every intent on breaking up the company...
Also saying they were the first is laughable. Warrantless telephone surveillance by law enforcement began all the way back in 1895...but really in the way that you would recognize today all the way back in 1994.
>Warrantless telephone surveillance by law enforcement
Not a part of PRISM. Microsoft was the very first PRISM partner, as I said.
They are searching for a headline that will attract clicks. Everyone knows nothing this administration does is genuine, but pretending there is a controversy related to whether or not it could be has been a money pump for the last decade.
Or it is a straight up shake down: Upcoming IPO, Trump insiders demanding 10%.
Maybe as simple as pay to play, bribe solicitation. Similar thing to this administration canceling random programs.
Dario (of Mythos): "Companies we gave it to said – this is a super weapon. you should have to own a gun license to use it. please don't release this"
Mythos is clearly dual use (and automatically subject to export controls), even if Anthropic didn’t understand what that means.
Yes this administration can be capricious and hyperpartisan. This isn’t one of those cases.
Mythos and Fable are not the same model.
They literally are. This is not a case of extra fine tuning, this is a case of enabling or disabling smaller guard models you have to go through first before you get to Mythos.
Right and so they need to work out whether nerfed Mythos is dual use. I doubt that it should be, can’t wait to have it back as soon as possible.
In the near future we may have a flippening where new models appear first on GovCloud (today it’s six months behind)
It smells an awful lot like the government is trying to pick a winner. Or, at least, a loser.
It would be a lot more believable this was pure corruption if it didn't come right after anthropic said mythos was a super weapon.
AI companies always say that whenever they release a bigger model.
From another angle that's maybe just a welcome excuse? Or it's some kind of more symbiotic malfeasance? Any way you slice it, it stinks. If it is actually about some misguided attempt at public safety or national security, what could possibly be the actual goal?
Anthropic is liberal-leaning? Certainly right of OpenAI. Or did OpenAI really do that well at scrubbing their actions from 2020-2024?
> SK Telecom has poured capital into Anthropic several times, including a $100 million investment in 2023 that coincided with the formation of a commercial partnership to develop an AI model tailored to the telecommunications industry.
> the White House asked Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom’s access to Mythos, according to a person close to the AI lab. The company immediately complied,
Lesson learned - don't invest in US companies
Their investment in the company and their ability to use the services are orthogonal.
I'm sure they're not happy about losing access to the model, but the amount of money they're going to make from their investment will more than make up for it.
The company having it's product market restricted will negatively impact their financial investment.
Also if you have an agreement with a company for them to provide you with a service, and investing in them is part of that deal, reneging on the service part still isn't okay.
> The company having it's product market restricted will negatively impact their financial investment.
Anthropic's services keep bumping into capacity limits even with Fable disabled.
Revenue is not a problem. This controversy has been good publicity for them: So powerful the government tried to block it!
> Also if you have an agreement with a company for them to provide you with a service, and investing in them is part of that deal, reneging on the service part still isn't okay.
Reneging on the deal implies Anthropic decided not to offer it. That wasn't the case. The government has temporarily restricted it.
>> the amount of money they're going to make from their investment will more than make up for it
Not if the USG locks models down to US citizens. The market will be too small and the model companies have already pumped in far too much money to limit their market to US citizens. Given that most big companies have a global presence they're going to need models that all of their employees can use. They're not going to deploy different products to different employees.
> The market will be too small
Don't count heads. Use tech spend per capita and wallet share.
Route the user to a different server based on the citizenship info set on their account? Yeah that'sway to hard for computers and computer programmers to do. There must be more than 100 countries out there! Computers can't possibly count that high.
I doubt the US government will be satisfied with allowing access to Fable if the user simply selects "USA" in the "citizenship" dropdown?
Not if the company implodes...
The Wired headline reframes the issue in a way that’s misleading. SK Telecom was a previously resolved issue (as in prior to Fable launch).
It may have been a contributing factor, but the crux of the shutdown was the industry reporting of Fable jailbreaks (reportedly spearheaded by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy). The more interesting and honest angle is that the industry which has taken the seriousness of Glasswing at face value felt blindsided by Fable release and totally exposed by the residual risk, when they know they still have a months-long bugfixing backlog exposed by Glasswing and are desperate to buy more time.
This misleading looks deliberate on Wired’s part, to appear as though they’re getting a scoop when they’re really just being dishonest. Shameful.
> honest angle is that the industry [felt] exposed by the residual risk [and] have a months-long bugfixing backlog exposed by Glasswing
Two problems with this theory.
1. Amazon complaining to the White House wouldn't have been the opening salvo. Amazon and Anthropic would find it much easier to talk to each other than go through the White House. We'd need evidence that Amazon (and probably others) already asked Anthropic to not release a Mythos-class model but Anthropic released it anyway. Are they on record saying this?
2. The jailbreak Amazon found needs to be real. Maybe the White House staffers are not AI experts and they don't really understand what a jailbreak is... but it's much harder to make that claim about Andy Jassy. For the jailbreak to be the real reason for the export control order, the jailbreak would need to be significant and cause material harm to Amazon. Then Jassy might pass it along to the White House assuming he already was refused by Dario.
But there is no evidence the jailbreak was real. There is one story that it amounted to a request, "fix this code." In any case, Anthropic is on record saying the so-called jailbreak didn't enable any vulnerability work that couldn't already be done by other models.
It’s been reported that Amazon has said in the last few days that the gov reached out to Amazon first for their opinion.
Wired has been NY Post-tier (of the inverse polarity) for several years, now.
Is there any serious journalistic magazines/papers left nowadays? Felt like ultimately every single one of them succumbed to the chase of the clickbait in the end.
Ars Technica still fights a good fight, in spite of Conde buyout.
Is there any interpretation where Amazon is involved but for a reason besides trying to screw over Anthropic? I don't see why Amazon would act against Anthropic when they have a deal to offer Anthropic models on AWS.
https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/fedramp/
Most headlines seem to be misleading these days. Social media broke journalism.
actually been like that for ages but people notice it a lot now and have a way to talk about it openly. mid 2000s CNN was really bad about this kind of thing. headline sounds shocking but once you got to paragraph 4 or so the story starts to change. then when you get to the bottom paragraphs the truth starts to come out - in stark contrast to the headline. not sure how they are these days.
Things really did get worse as online gave visibility into what drives clocks and undermines the value of reputation.
Yep - the "company at the center" of this is Amazon. But they're not alone, I was able to jailbreak Fable accidentally last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576628
Is that called jailbreak?
Yes. The biology/infosec fallback to Opus is the jail. Promoting to get around it (in my case accidentally) and have Fabre find exploits is the jailbreak.
Only if you were jailed correctly. Getting out of jail when you shouldn't've been jailed in the first place is not a jailbreak
Yeah ! You should close your eyes on dangerous source code nowadays. Think about a kind of DRM for programming. Perhaps the future is a prompt terminal with no access to the source code. Of course the code should be deployed only on a “secure” anthropic platform.
Looking at the comments on Korean political articles, the point is not so much whether SKT is actually related to China, but rather that the switch to cut off AI vendors is now outside the realm of model performance specs. Now, when foreign companies integrate AI into their workflows, they probably need to add a category for vendor continuity in their evaluation criteria. From a corporate standpoint, uninterrupted continuity is what matters, and with this case, Anthropic is likely to lose a lot of trust, contrary to its own stated policies.
Open source models are not immune to a different form of restriction either. I recently learned that China is restricting travel for AI engineers living in China.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-restricts-o...
It's going to be interesting to see how the AI arms races unfolds over time.
Why can't we use it in the US then?
Just a gentle reminder that the SK in Hynix and the SK in Telecom all belong to the same actual family (the Cheys)
Anthropic may discover a lack of availability for HBM memory in the near future.
https://archive.is/qrHjk
This whole Fable 5 controversy will look quite silly once China releases a comparable model in six months.
Fable/mythos are the first models from anthropic that hide 100% of reasoning tokens. So it seems to me like we're about to get a lot more data about to what extent Chinese model progress has been a consequence of distillation techniques.
This isn't correct, Claude hasn't displayed the raw chain of thought for any of the Claude 4 series models, which were released in May 2025. Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.8 only display a summarized chain of thought, which is produced by a secondary model. Fable displays its summarized chain of thought in the same manner.
The thinking traces disappeared because Anthropic changed them to be hidden by default. The rationale for hiding it was that most people don't look at the thinking traces https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 . You can reenable thinking traces in Claude code settings with the flag showThinkingSummaries: true.
Qualified it with "100%" because claude4 models show the first few lines of the chain of thought:
>On Claude 4 models, the first few lines of thinking output are more verbose, providing detailed reasoning that's particularly helpful for prompt engineering purposes. Claude Mythos Preview summarizes from the first token, so its thinking blocks do not show this verbose preamble. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/extend...
Hidden by default should make it easier to identify who’s scraping even those summarized CoTs, I figure. Also figure it’s very expensive to summarize every single chat on the service.
Google can't do it, OpenAI didn't do it, Meta didn't do it etc etc.
Why do you think China will?
I am quite certain the gap will only grow
DeepSeek took everyone by surprise with R1. I'm pretty sure they and/or others will do the unexpected again. Not as if the US has a monopoly on awesome talent.
A quick look at the author names on most recent big AI papers, says that's an understatement. US's comparative advantage is in data centers, not in expertise.
Of course, they're betting they won't need those experts soon.
That's a skill issue, not a technology issue.
How so? The fact that China is going to launch a comparable model soon is the whole point of what’s happening now. Everyone knows there are going to be open models soon that have the same capabilities - Anthropic has literally said so. The restrictions now are to buy time to patch the security issues before those Chinese models are made available to the whole world.
It would take less than 1 month if not for the restrictions. One of the reason is they might be using distilling to achieve the parity.
oh, do you not pay attention to the hardware they're allowed to buy from nvidia? At this point, it's more just being nerfed than being able to do the magical training stuff.
its very real, chinese capital is being intertwined/injected into all facet of south korean society through its own domestic companies and politicians.
Do you have credible evidence to support this claim? Although China is Korea's largest trading partner and numerous Chinese nationals work as foreign laborers in Korea, most are engaged in unskilled manual labor, and very few become knowledge workers or significant business partners. (Conversely, numerous Koreans operate businesses in China.) Those who claim that China exerts political influence over Korea are mostly Korean versions of MAGA.
your claim that Chinese influence in South Korea is merely a MAGA conspiracy theory ignores the substantial economic and corporate reality on the ground, and inaccurately projects an irrelevant American political divide onto Korean geopolitics. In Korea, wariness of Chinese influence is a broad, bipartisan issue.
there are many Chinese manual laborers in Korea, Chinese capital has also been heavily integrated into top-tier Korean tech firms and conglomerates. For example, Tencent is one of the largest shareholders in Korea's biggest gaming and tech companies, holding massive stakes in Kakao, Netmarble, and Krafton, while recently attempting to acquire major stakes in Nexon and Kakao Mobility. To say they are rarely 'significant business partners' is factually incorrect. This is just the tip of the iceberg the portfolio of Chinese capital is diverse and expands across media including JTBC which has been pushing very pro-beijing and anti-american view in particular framing the current bipartisan wariness of China as "far right MAGA" exactly as you typed. lee Jae-myung administration which generally leans more toward Beijing has to carefully navigate. Non-partisan groups like Pew Research consistently report that roughly 80% of South Koreans hold an unfavorable view of China making it one of the highest in the world. Notably, Pew also found that South Korea is unique in that its younger generation holds more negative views of China than its older generation the exact opposite demographic makeup of the US MAGA movement.
Dismissing these well-documented geopolitical and economic realities as a fringe talking point simply doesn't reflect the situation on the ground in South Korea and this is why I ask,
are you really Korean and how come you don't know these basic facts? a quick search in Korean would reveal numerous articles that back up China's capital deployment in South Korea especially in sensitive areas.
you can't really fault Koreans for their wariness, many Chinese pretend to be Korean online/offline without good intentions. I can tell you that this is only going to end in violence and more discrimination against Chinese in Korea and people who don't even support CCP are going to be impacted.
I said this precisely because I am Korean and have been working in the IT industry right here in Korea. How many Chinese people do you think work at Naver, Kakao, Carrot, and Baemin in Korea? (Coupang might be an exception. I have often heard colleagues from Coupang badmouth the Chinese people there.) I have never worked in the Bay Area, and I only know about the US software industry through this site, but it is certain that a much higher proportion of Chinese people work in the IT industry there. (The biggest reason for this is actually that they need to speak Korean to work in Korea.)
Just as there are many young people on MAGA, there are also many young Koreans who are caught up in right-wing conspiracy theories. The fact that they are 'concerned' is not proof that China is actually exerting influence over Korean IT companies and society as a whole. There is a significant difference between making foreign investments and infiltration.
Many of us know coders and cybersecurity professionals who are even better than Claude Fable or Mythos. It's outstanding how much praise and careful consideration it gets. At the same time, humans with even more expertise are discarded and fired.
Sure they exist but they're rare, difficult to identify and hire, and take years to train. Mythos/Fable is available on tap.
I can also use the models anytime, and for a lot of time, until i’m anywhere close to salary for an engineer like that
sure. and when you do have that money then you magically become altruistic and decide to pay that salary even though it costs you more
> Many of us know coders and cybersecurity professionals who are even better than Claude Fable or Mythos.
Like who ? I find your statement to be doubtfyl
You seem to ignore the fact that this kind of praise and attention is not accidental. It’s a direct result of massive PR by Anthropic. AGI and skynet is their marketing. Dario is the supreme hyper on that. Make no mistake this is a trillion dollar company not your average startup so it has the money and potentially the power to influence policy (I.e ban competitors)
Over a decade ago, I was going to a tech group with a supposed security leader (that ended up getting a huge buyout from Cisco a few years ago).
A student wanted to create a project that bypassed the GF of China. He basically told him he was an idiot, it was impossible, and discouraged the student from even trying. This was a hacker (the security leader) at one point in his life, that claimed to support the freedom of speech and expression.
The actual reason he said this to the student is because he supports the government in China. Many other comments I heard after this proved to me that this is true. My guess is that his startup even received funding from the Chinese government.
It's really disappointing that tech leaders can publicly support murderous regimes like the Chinese government for decades with no blow back. They are far worse than Putin/the Russian government and have 100X the money and technology.
If he supported Russia, he would probably get cancelled and never be able to be involved in the tech industry again.