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.
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.
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.
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.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, flamebait, and snark? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
That's not the lesson. There's a tremendous amount of money to make on US investments.
The lesson is to not depend on US AI models. It's to invest in and build competing foundation models, possibly open weights and open weights infrastructure.
> That's not the lesson. There's a tremendous amount of money to make on US investments.
Sure, but also, now suddenly you got cut from something and need to fight that fire, meanwhile you surely have other fires you'd much rather spend more effort on. That's not free either, and who knows how much they valued their use of Mythos.
The lesson is quite literally to avoid anything US until it has stabilized again, which will probably take a while, sadly.
Yeah, countries ruled at whim by unstable governments tends to not be great for "dump money in hopes of return" but who am I to stop anyone, make your own informed decision.
Lesson learned become more knowledgeable and learn more about the open source models and start getting busy and learn how to use them, also collaborate with any European solution, forget about the US.
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.
If you check my post history, I'm very left-leaning. I'm just establishment-left+woke (i.e., liberal) rather than populist-left+socialist, and Wired is populist-left. I'm the kind of person who actually likes Obama, for example.
It's actually unfortunate, because a not very credible publication writing about the vile behavior of the Trump administration (including Elon Musk personally literally killing hundreds of thousands of children, and possibly millions) only serves to help them. Those particular stories may or may not be fine, but I've seen enough truly abysmal stories to not have any trust in them as an organization.
Like, within one second of opening the article I already saw the headline is deeply misleading and then checked the comments here to see if anyone else had noticed (and they did). It's a joke. The article doesn't even make sense. It's like an AI-generated high school essay forced to hamfist a response to a contrived prompt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That was always Microsoft's modus operandi, and it almost cost them their company. You can ignore politicians, but politicians won't ignore you.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley...
Now Microsoft stopped fighting the government, and is one of the US government's biggest partners, with massive DoD Azure cloud contracts.
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.
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
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ (2014)
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the near future we may have a flippening where new models appear first on GovCloud (today it’s six months behind)
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't count heads. Use tech spend per capita and wallet share.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
That's not the lesson. There's a tremendous amount of money to make on US investments.
The lesson is to not depend on US AI models. It's to invest in and build competing foundation models, possibly open weights and open weights infrastructure.
Sure, but also, now suddenly you got cut from something and need to fight that fire, meanwhile you surely have other fires you'd much rather spend more effort on. That's not free either, and who knows how much they valued their use of Mythos.
The lesson is quite literally to avoid anything US until it has stabilized again, which will probably take a while, sadly.
Say what one will about the current state of America, it's still a solid place to dump money in hopes of returns.
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.
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 actually unfortunate, because a not very credible publication writing about the vile behavior of the Trump administration (including Elon Musk personally literally killing hundreds of thousands of children, and possibly millions) only serves to help them. Those particular stories may or may not be fine, but I've seen enough truly abysmal stories to not have any trust in them as an organization.
Like, within one second of opening the article I already saw the headline is deeply misleading and then checked the comments here to see if anyone else had noticed (and they did). It's a joke. The article doesn't even make sense. It's like an AI-generated high school essay forced to hamfist a response to a contrived prompt.
What’s that high quality news source you got that one from?
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/fedramp/
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.
Anthropic may discover a lack of availability for HBM memory in the near future.
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.
>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...
Why do you think China will?
I am quite certain the gap will only grow
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.