There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.

I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.

But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.

The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.

The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.

Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.

AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.

I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.

1) No one is going to build any workflows/capabilities that could have the underlying intelligence rug pulled instantly by a bureaucracy or malevolent politician.

2) Even if a company was silly enough to take on the risk, is Anthropic going to ask all their enterprise customers to provide passports for all their employees and then setup individual Claude accounts for each and every employee of each and every enterprise customer in order to gatekeep access to Mythos? Because a plain ole api key no longer cuts it

OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.

This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.

But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.

> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.

He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.

What makes you think everyone (and government) should play along and align with your way of dependency on AI? Not even 1% of the people use AI the way you do. Fable model is not a basic need. Government represents the average Joe. You could also say "I make a ton of nuke weapons and this government has stopped the public sharing of how to make them!".

And, on other side of coin, it is more great publicity.

Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.

We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.

The insider trading kleptocrat has found a new toy

If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?

Every non-American company is now at a disadvantage against American companies. The implications can not be overstated.

I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?

Circumstantial, but... timing is odd.

It got me wondering if this means all big models are US-only now? Are they gonna do the same with GPT-5.6, etc? Seems pretty unlikely to me. So I expect Fable to come back pretty soon.

Means you pay full price per token right? (Which I think works out to roughly 10x more than using Claude Code?)

Actually, for enterprise I think it doesn't make a difference anymore, since they switched to per-token billing.

They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm.

> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can’t use it (technically, only if you’re not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.

The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.

I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:

> We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)

It does sound funny to hear this from Anthropic after they spent recent months with scaremongering about Mythos's capabilities, now they say it was a prank bro, you can actually achieve more or less the same with good old GPT-5.5.

> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.

What this has demonstrated: if you can't run the software on your own hardware, you should assume that it can be taken away at any moment.

Looks like the weekly limits again reset prematurely during this change. Interesting how this works.

Edit: if anthropic couldn’t resolve this matter, they can do something reallllly funny right now and open source it to the public :)

Wasn't that when Dario, et al were at the company. One way to view this is that OpenAI expelled the cultists and they went on to form their own organization that continued using the same tactics.

Certainly some of the Anthropic press around Fable seems to me to be just marketing but I also think there's a core of people there who really believe it. I also think like all good advertising/lies there's some truth to the claims even if they're exaggerating.

There are more and more posts coming up recently about AI being problematic. But people use it. It's strange. It's like hitting yourself with a hammer on the head, wondering why that hurts but you keep on doing it.

If AI lived up to a tenth of the promises the American labs produce, the world would be drastically different today. It's not. I'm doubtful of future impact based on that.

I'm happy we can utilise current OSS models to the extent we can now. They'll improve. The world will continue as usual. And hopefully we can put this bubble behind us.