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 think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
I agree. This situation was created in the first place because both parties and their constituents have been OK giving the executive branch more and more power as long as it benefits “their team”.
The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of government anyway)
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
US is in almost no way democratic. There is not enough unity for that. The idea and reasoning behind Democracy was that a people (i.e. a demos) rules itself. But in US there is no longer one people, and it's fracturing even faster and more.
I don't think it's helpful to be flippant in this analysis. The US falls in the category of flawed democracies, together with Botswana, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and many other countries with, shall we say, significant potential for development.
I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many democratic aspects of the US, and it has reasonably strong institutions. But it seems that most Americans have not yet realized what category they're in, and think that the US is some kind of front-runner.
That index confuses voting or even liberal democracy with democracy.
A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes because Zulus and Xhosas are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Xhosa born on territory ruled by Zulus does not make him a Zulu.
Jews ruling over Palestinians is not democratic just because the Palestinians have votes because Jews and Palestinians are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Palestinian born on territory ruled by Jews does not make him a Jew.
Reinventing the dictionary will only confuse you, it won't change reality.
There is not much example of actual democracy at scale though. Even Switzerland which is often cited as the closest form of actual democratic governance is still not ticking all of the basics of a democratic checklist.
No. The average Democracy Index of Western Europe is 8.05 (full democracy), while the US scores 7.65 (flawed democracy, trending downwards). Just below Poland, just below Botswana.
You might shrug and say "well pobody's nerfect", but the disparity between the American narrative and the reality is actually quite extreme.
American hostility to the whole concept of government has led you to Trump’s brand of gangster capitalism (which will lead you to fascism if you let it).
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
What childish nonsense. I honestly don't know how you libertarian morons continue to function. The utter fecklessness and incompetence of the current administration is unmatched in US history, despite its rabid (albeit superficial) adherence to small government dogma. These are your guys, taking a chainsaw to the federal government. Their failures are not proof government is inherently bad. They are proof that the Republican Party is composed of feckless morons like yourself who push idiotic, easily disproven soundbite ideologies that bear absolutely no resemblance to reality but make you feel warm and tingly enough that you persist despite overwhelming evidence that you are completely wrong about how the world functions. You're just another doge-bro moron who will blithely murder millions of people in Africa because you are too arrogant and stupid to take the time to understand the thing you are destroying.
The Republican Party is built on the same stupid idea you are promoting here, the idea that government is inherently bad and evil, and as a result of these beliefs, Republicans are only capable of creating bad and evil government. It's the only vision of government they understand, so of course it is what they manifest. But only a stupendously ignorant idiot like Trump would think that is the only viable vision of government, because you have to ignore thousands of years of history and volumes of contemporary evidence showing how government can do good in the world. By, for example, regulating dangerous things so we don't die when idiots like yourself get your hands on them.
Trump's stupidity, incompetence, and recklessness are not proof government is evil, they are proof that idiots who promote idiotic ideologies like yours are, not coincidentally, remarkably incompetent at running governments. It is not worth listening to the opinions of arsonists on how we should run the fire department. So kindly shut the fuck up, you are too fucking stupid to contribute to the conversation.
I'm enjoying imagining that this comment was typed by Dario. It sure sounds like him. I mean, he's not usually this profane, but maybe on an alt account...
When you get big enough, the govt is always going to want to get involved.
We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another
To be fair, generative AI is wrecking society in new and unexpected ways every week. From lies and misinformation to people choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships, there's a profound impact on society that will only get worse in the coming years. The look for junior programmers who are capable enough to get anything done when the AI is down has been depressing, and things are looking much worse for the years to come.
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
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.
most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top
I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.
Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.
Not all the things that are good will rise to the top, but most of the things that rise to the top will be good. We've gotten pretty good at ranking systems as a species at this point, I'd say
Built a custom tower defense type clone for a client maybe 10 years ago… Coding it up in Objective C & Cocos2d was fairly straightforward. Probably spent 50% of the dev time taking in feedback, balancing the values on everything, progression of items, etc. what i’m saying is the functioning game logic (code) was really only one part of it.
I've built a few little games for myself both with and without AI, and completely agree. AI can help prototype an idea faster, or clone something very specific, but it can't make your control scheme feel good, invent a unique mechanic, etc (at least not yet).
Its because the people that are eager to develop with llms are talent-less and have no brain muscle of their own left, they're letting the connections between nuerons atrophy with every prompt they send (literally)[0].
Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.
> 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.
The government is playing into the whole "oohh Mythos and Fable are too dangerous, and you, Mr. Investor should understand powerful, alright, very dangerous and powerful, now go give all your money to Dario and his cronies, thank you very much!"
I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic the past few months. Reading between the lines of his own output, Dario Amodei comes off as both a dogmatic believer in ASI as a perfect, infallible ruler for humanity and quite an extreme American nationalist. The company, likewise, looks to be in ideological lockstep. I could see them, say, allowing or consciously creating runaway ASI they believed was ideologically aligned with them.
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.
It stinks to high heaven, especially considering how over-the-top security protocols were introduced with Fable. The US government is asserting its influence on the economy and showing Anthropic that their IPO will depend on bending the knee.
Counterintuitively, this is a huge win for misAnthropic and other closed labs in the US. They can nerf the models, ask for IDs from users and do what it takes to comply with whatever regulation they've been fighting for.
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.
Damn. I tried using it yesterday in a conversation about mixing my own carb drings and electrolytes (continuing from opus 4.6) but fable rejected it for whatever reason. Not sure how I could use fructose and maltodextrin for anything shady, but ok. And now it's gone and I couldn't even test it once! Dammit
What makes that more likely than that people at the DoD are alarmed (with or without good justification) at Fable's capabilities plus finding a jailbreak (or what they interpret as a jailbreak while Anthropic seems to dispute the requests met the level Fable should refuse)?
How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?
I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.
And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?
There are many people in this administration invested in OpenAI like the Kushner's. They are attacking Anthropic however they can. You will notice a lot of propaganda on social media sites against anthropic. It's very obvious.
the first one to do IPO will win big. With the government pressing Anthropic, OpenAI IPO will vacuum up the funds that otherwise would have went into Anthropic IPO as OpenAI was falling behind.
>and the whole datacenter buildout.
somebody just did a $2T IPO with the idea of datacenters in space. One can wonder what laws/jurisdiction those datacenters will be subject to.
I seriously feel like there's easier ways for OpenAI to catch up to anthropic and it would be a waste of political capital that the idea of Sam pulling strings for this to happen seems highly unlikely
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door. I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again.
the bigger point i think stands - we're going to have a similar story with AI as for example the 40-bit encryption of the past and drones of today, i.e. sure export controlled and most probably regulated practically away for general public. I.e general license to possess/access 8B model max, and maximum 3 models summing to max 16B in total.
> OpenAI did the same “too dangerous to release” song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.
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.
Chinese model companies are already beginning to close, instead of opening. The latest big Qwen models are not open, for example. And it doesn't look like they will be, either.
The article addresses a pretty compelling reason...
Why would the makers of open models (mostly Chinese firms) continue to open them up, now that the value chain and economy shifts? Previously, it was a (Chinese) national goal to force the market to compress OpenAI/Anthropic margins (and compressing their revenue along the way), to ensure the Chinese had access to high quality models, and could afford to compete. Now there is an opportunity to usurp and be the international default, and claim the margin for themselves by closing their models.
Beyond that, there is likely an upper bound of capability-per-parameter, which means that there is an upper bound on "local" models, and once you need the cloud, why would the government not target clouds next?
> As a brief aside, I am once again extremely disappointed in the myriad of Silicon Valley people who angrily argued that a Democratic led government would ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ are now completely silent or defending the actions of this admin. I cannot help but feel that that previous posturing was just a machiavellian play for power, which has just been the worst feeling in the world.
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
with how the admin is talking about taking a stake in openai, it's so incredibly clear this is the government attempting to kneecap an openai competitor
> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
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.
At this point I'm starting to get scared that the hardware itself could get banned. We went from free personal computing to remote attestation to being priced out and now the threat of being literally regulated looms over us. Even if we amassed a small fortune and decided to spend it on our own inference-capable computers, we might find that we literally can't purchase the hardware.
You can’t just buy H100 there are government limits on that.
RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.
Unfortunately Mistral is not close to the frontier. Their last release Mistral Medium 3.5 128B is near the performance[0] of QWEN-3.6-27B, a much smaller model that was released earlier.
It's good that they exist, and I hope they catch up, but if you don't have origin constraints for your use case I don't see why you would chose their models today.
[0]: On the only benchmark they both published performance results - SWE-bench Verified -they are within a margin of error Mistral 77.6 vs Qwen 77.2.
Within Spec Driven Development style coding for me Claude Sonnet 4.5 was the game changer and Mistral is I believe at that level already. GLM is allegedly also on par with even some of the Opus models, so if the US vendors would vanish tomorrow, there would be alternatives. Would I miss Opus 4.8 and the Claude Code harness? of course I would! But the world wouldn't stop.
What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.
I really hope it's just the USA punishing Anthropic for their insolence. If this is actually the beginning of AI regulation, we're probably heading towards dark times.
Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.
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.
If you mean employment, the world is different because of rising debt, declining economies, and a crazy leader currently in charge of the most powerful country on the planet. If you asked me when I graduated if the world was drastically different from when I first entered university I would also say yes, and I graduated well before GPT2.
Did you think 5 years into the invention of electricity the world already was vastly different? The internet? Would you have written them off because random people didn't know much about them at that point - which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?
I mean, besides the fact that electricity and the internet are orders of magnitude more transformative than a statistical next-token prediction machine, none of the predictions behind LLMs were made of either in the first 5 years.
Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!
If we're cooked, it's only because of a mass hysteria behind this thing. It's an extremely useful technology, we're just losing our collective mind because of it.
For some time now, I've felt this gap across communities and platforms to truly articulate why American corporations, capitalism and American prosperity need the rule of law.
Lately, the US government has been consistently defying the rule of law and adherence to due process; this is the fruit of that poisoned tree.
If members of the Government can point to someone and just disappear them without any due process or recourse, then why can't they do the same with a "Chinese collaborator" corporation's executives? Or, a company whose products are an issue of "national security" and has been designated a "supply chain risk?"
Perhaps it's a threat that could be alleviated by better "oversight" via certain parties who just happen to be connected to certain members of the Government...
This is a thing that happens in authoritarian regimes that lack due process. Even when the people are one of the "elites."
You might be in one moment. You won't be in the next.
The grave sin that Jack Ma committed for which he forfeited years of his life, billions of dollars and control of his company?
He disagreed with the regime. Publicly. Called the regulators geriatrics.
The Financial Times reported that the disappearance may have been connected to a speech given at the annual People's Bank of China financial markets forum,[41] in which Ma criticized China's regulators and banks.[41] Ma described state banks as operating with a pawn shop mentality and criticized the Basel Accords as a "club for the elderly."
And so, spacing mine.
Ant Group made major changes to its ownership structure and corporate governance in January 2023.[42]: 261 That month, Ant Group announced a series of changes in shareholder voting rights,
with Ma no longer the actual controller of Ant Group.[50]
Ma's voting rights were reduced from 50% to 6%.[42]: 271
Following these changes, no single shareholder has a controlling stake in the company.[42]: 261 The company's board also added another independent director.[42]: 261
The Chinese government spoke positively of Ant Group's changes, including describing them as improvements in transparency and accountability
= they forced him to sell his voting shares and forcibly removed him from his company.
The US is now dutifully following the same trajectory.
The reason why the US is a bastion of technological progress, startups and capitalism is because the freedom to do business used to be underwritten by fundamental personal freedoms.
It's just how the incentives shape out.
Why would you want to be a founder in a world where you can show obedience to the party, rise up the ranks, and just... grab shares from the next big startup? Wet your beak a little. Get a cut.
lol if this is an attempt by the admin like the DoD thing to "knock them down a peg" it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
OTOH, maybe Dario is colluding with some people the US government to drum up some PR before the IPO? "OoOoo these models are so scarily good, export controls were forced onto them"
So much smoke, mirrors and SV techbro bullshit going around that it has become impossible to figure out what's what.
This is definitely what it feels like to me, especially since it was going to be taken away from the subscriptions anyway right? Plus I had been having huge reliability issues anyway. Now they got to tease something, put it behind a more intense paywall.
> But this government [...]
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 think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
Then the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.
Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).
Those days are long gone. Trump is much more of a statist when it comes to the economy. Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
“Advertising” vs “doing”
I agree. This situation was created in the first place because both parties and their constituents have been OK giving the executive branch more and more power as long as it benefits “their team”.
The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of government anyway)
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
But in democracy you do get to say which government you want.
You can pick which of the two possibilities, neither of which is even close to your political views, will oppress you for the next 4 years.
Yes, but the other N% of the country still might vote for the government you didn't want.
You say it, but you don't always get it.
US is in almost no way democratic. There is not enough unity for that. The idea and reasoning behind Democracy was that a people (i.e. a demos) rules itself. But in US there is no longer one people, and it's fracturing even faster and more.
I don't think it's helpful to be flippant in this analysis. The US falls in the category of flawed democracies, together with Botswana, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and many other countries with, shall we say, significant potential for development.
I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many democratic aspects of the US, and it has reasonably strong institutions. But it seems that most Americans have not yet realized what category they're in, and think that the US is some kind of front-runner.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
That index confuses voting or even liberal democracy with democracy.
A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes because Zulus and Xhosas are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Xhosa born on territory ruled by Zulus does not make him a Zulu.
Jews ruling over Palestinians is not democratic just because the Palestinians have votes because Jews and Palestinians are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Palestinian born on territory ruled by Jews does not make him a Jew.
Reinventing the dictionary will only confuse you, it won't change reality.
All the more reason to let states and local governments do more. Rather than a unitary congress or executive that only 1/2 the people (+/-) like.
A lot of things are easier at the federal level.
After all the federal budget is so large because you can swap states but you can't get away from the IRS.
The only way to fix things would be proportional representation and moving away from the two party system.
On the one hand giving parties more power sounds a little gross.
On the other hand I don't know a solve for every bill having less than a handful of votes that are bipartisan...
There is not much example of actual democracy at scale though. Even Switzerland which is often cited as the closest form of actual democratic governance is still not ticking all of the basics of a democratic checklist.
No. The average Democracy Index of Western Europe is 8.05 (full democracy), while the US scores 7.65 (flawed democracy, trending downwards). Just below Poland, just below Botswana.
You might shrug and say "well pobody's nerfect", but the disparity between the American narrative and the reality is actually quite extreme.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
It’s actually ok to be more critical of a government that’s capricious than one that merely advances polices one disagrees with
Of course the tired follow-up: “But if the government was functioning properly it would only do the things I want”.
And the logical interpretation of that statement would be "if a government doesn't do things I want, it's not functioning properly".
Seems a little slippery-slopey to me
American hostility to the whole concept of government has led you to Trump’s brand of gangster capitalism (which will lead you to fascism if you let it).
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
This is a very dangerous moment for the US.
What childish nonsense. I honestly don't know how you libertarian morons continue to function. The utter fecklessness and incompetence of the current administration is unmatched in US history, despite its rabid (albeit superficial) adherence to small government dogma. These are your guys, taking a chainsaw to the federal government. Their failures are not proof government is inherently bad. They are proof that the Republican Party is composed of feckless morons like yourself who push idiotic, easily disproven soundbite ideologies that bear absolutely no resemblance to reality but make you feel warm and tingly enough that you persist despite overwhelming evidence that you are completely wrong about how the world functions. You're just another doge-bro moron who will blithely murder millions of people in Africa because you are too arrogant and stupid to take the time to understand the thing you are destroying.
The Republican Party is built on the same stupid idea you are promoting here, the idea that government is inherently bad and evil, and as a result of these beliefs, Republicans are only capable of creating bad and evil government. It's the only vision of government they understand, so of course it is what they manifest. But only a stupendously ignorant idiot like Trump would think that is the only viable vision of government, because you have to ignore thousands of years of history and volumes of contemporary evidence showing how government can do good in the world. By, for example, regulating dangerous things so we don't die when idiots like yourself get your hands on them.
Trump's stupidity, incompetence, and recklessness are not proof government is evil, they are proof that idiots who promote idiotic ideologies like yours are, not coincidentally, remarkably incompetent at running governments. It is not worth listening to the opinions of arsonists on how we should run the fire department. So kindly shut the fuck up, you are too fucking stupid to contribute to the conversation.
I'm enjoying imagining that this comment was typed by Dario. It sure sounds like him. I mean, he's not usually this profane, but maybe on an alt account...
When you get big enough, the govt is always going to want to get involved.
We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another
OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card.
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.
To be fair, generative AI is wrecking society in new and unexpected ways every week. From lies and misinformation to people choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships, there's a profound impact on society that will only get worse in the coming years. The look for junior programmers who are capable enough to get anything done when the AI is down has been depressing, and things are looking much worse for the years to come.
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
Dario's brain child
> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
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.
most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top
> Over time the gems will rise to the top
I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.
Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.
Not all the things that are good will rise to the top, but most of the things that rise to the top will be good. We've gotten pretty good at ranking systems as a species at this point, I'd say
Built a custom tower defense type clone for a client maybe 10 years ago… Coding it up in Objective C & Cocos2d was fairly straightforward. Probably spent 50% of the dev time taking in feedback, balancing the values on everything, progression of items, etc. what i’m saying is the functioning game logic (code) was really only one part of it.
I've built a few little games for myself both with and without AI, and completely agree. AI can help prototype an idea faster, or clone something very specific, but it can't make your control scheme feel good, invent a unique mechanic, etc (at least not yet).
Its because the people that are eager to develop with llms are talent-less and have no brain muscle of their own left, they're letting the connections between nuerons atrophy with every prompt they send (literally)[0].
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.
> 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.
The government is playing into the whole "oohh Mythos and Fable are too dangerous, and you, Mr. Investor should understand powerful, alright, very dangerous and powerful, now go give all your money to Dario and his cronies, thank you very much!"
I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic the past few months. Reading between the lines of his own output, Dario Amodei comes off as both a dogmatic believer in ASI as a perfect, infallible ruler for humanity and quite an extreme American nationalist. The company, likewise, looks to be in ideological lockstep. I could see them, say, allowing or consciously creating runaway ASI they believed was ideologically aligned with them.
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.
It stinks to high heaven, especially considering how over-the-top security protocols were introduced with Fable. The US government is asserting its influence on the economy and showing Anthropic that their IPO will depend on bending the knee.
Counterintuitively, this is a huge win for misAnthropic and other closed labs in the US. They can nerf the models, ask for IDs from users and do what it takes to comply with whatever regulation they've been fighting for.
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.
This is why we must diversify our technology stack back to the 80's style of computing heterogeneity.
Damn. I tried using it yesterday in a conversation about mixing my own carb drings and electrolytes (continuing from opus 4.6) but fable rejected it for whatever reason. Not sure how I could use fructose and maltodextrin for anything shady, but ok. And now it's gone and I couldn't even test it once! Dammit
What a coincidence, Anthropic getting handicapped so xAI can try to catch up
XAI rents out compute to anthropic. I feel like Sam Altman is behind this that little rat.
What makes that more likely than that people at the DoD are alarmed (with or without good justification) at Fable's capabilities plus finding a jailbreak (or what they interpret as a jailbreak while Anthropic seems to dispute the requests met the level Fable should refuse)?
How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?
I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.
And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?
There are many people in this administration invested in OpenAI like the Kushner's. They are attacking Anthropic however they can. You will notice a lot of propaganda on social media sites against anthropic. It's very obvious.
>How is that going to help him?
the first one to do IPO will win big. With the government pressing Anthropic, OpenAI IPO will vacuum up the funds that otherwise would have went into Anthropic IPO as OpenAI was falling behind.
>and the whole datacenter buildout.
somebody just did a $2T IPO with the idea of datacenters in space. One can wonder what laws/jurisdiction those datacenters will be subject to.
I seriously feel like there's easier ways for OpenAI to catch up to anthropic and it would be a waste of political capital that the idea of Sam pulling strings for this to happen seems highly unlikely
Potentially relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361050
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door. I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again.
the bigger point i think stands - we're going to have a similar story with AI as for example the 40-bit encryption of the past and drones of today, i.e. sure export controlled and most probably regulated practically away for general public. I.e general license to possess/access 8B model max, and maximum 3 models summing to max 16B in total.
> OpenAI did the same “too dangerous to release” song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.
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.
Any reason to think that open models will not catch up, given enough time?
Chinese model companies are already beginning to close, instead of opening. The latest big Qwen models are not open, for example. And it doesn't look like they will be, either.
The article addresses a pretty compelling reason...
Why would the makers of open models (mostly Chinese firms) continue to open them up, now that the value chain and economy shifts? Previously, it was a (Chinese) national goal to force the market to compress OpenAI/Anthropic margins (and compressing their revenue along the way), to ensure the Chinese had access to high quality models, and could afford to compete. Now there is an opportunity to usurp and be the international default, and claim the margin for themselves by closing their models.
Beyond that, there is likely an upper bound of capability-per-parameter, which means that there is an upper bound on "local" models, and once you need the cloud, why would the government not target clouds next?
> As a brief aside, I am once again extremely disappointed in the myriad of Silicon Valley people who angrily argued that a Democratic led government would ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ are now completely silent or defending the actions of this admin. I cannot help but feel that that previous posturing was just a machiavellian play for power, which has just been the worst feeling in the world.
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
https://archive.ph/ERGwR
with how the admin is talking about taking a stake in openai, it's so incredibly clear this is the government attempting to kneecap an openai competitor
trump doesn't like dario given what he has said in the past.
> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
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.
At this point I'm starting to get scared that the hardware itself could get banned. We went from free personal computing to remote attestation to being priced out and now the threat of being literally regulated looms over us. Even if we amassed a small fortune and decided to spend it on our own inference-capable computers, we might find that we literally can't purchase the hardware.
But it already is.
You can’t just buy H100 there are government limits on that.
RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.
> The world is a bit bigger than US and China
With respect to AI capabilities is it really?
I don't see anyone else producing frontier closed source LLM's or frontier open source LLM's outside of US and China.
Mistral (French) for one but several governments have sponsored projects too
Mistral in the EU, for one.
Unfortunately Mistral is not close to the frontier. Their last release Mistral Medium 3.5 128B is near the performance[0] of QWEN-3.6-27B, a much smaller model that was released earlier.
It's good that they exist, and I hope they catch up, but if you don't have origin constraints for your use case I don't see why you would chose their models today.
[0]: On the only benchmark they both published performance results - SWE-bench Verified -they are within a margin of error Mistral 77.6 vs Qwen 77.2.
Within Spec Driven Development style coding for me Claude Sonnet 4.5 was the game changer and Mistral is I believe at that level already. GLM is allegedly also on par with even some of the Opus models, so if the US vendors would vanish tomorrow, there would be alternatives. Would I miss Opus 4.8 and the Claude Code harness? of course I would! But the world wouldn't stop.
What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.
I really hope it's just the USA punishing Anthropic for their insolence. If this is actually the beginning of AI regulation, we're probably heading towards dark times.
Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.
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.
Ask a recent college grad if the world is drastically different today then when they started college.
If you mean employment, the world is different because of rising debt, declining economies, and a crazy leader currently in charge of the most powerful country on the planet. If you asked me when I graduated if the world was drastically different from when I first entered university I would also say yes, and I graduated well before GPT2.
Did you think 5 years into the invention of electricity the world already was vastly different? The internet? Would you have written them off because random people didn't know much about them at that point - which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?
> which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?
That part is kind of their point - it doesn't have the distribution issues your other examples have.
I mean, besides the fact that electricity and the internet are orders of magnitude more transformative than a statistical next-token prediction machine, none of the predictions behind LLMs were made of either in the first 5 years.
Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!
If we're cooked, it's only because of a mass hysteria behind this thing. It's an extremely useful technology, we're just losing our collective mind because of it.
If you find yourself cheering for one billionaire versus another, you’re the definition of pathetic.
I've been thinking a lot about Jack Ma tonight.
For some time now, I've felt this gap across communities and platforms to truly articulate why American corporations, capitalism and American prosperity need the rule of law.
Lately, the US government has been consistently defying the rule of law and adherence to due process; this is the fruit of that poisoned tree.
If members of the Government can point to someone and just disappear them without any due process or recourse, then why can't they do the same with a "Chinese collaborator" corporation's executives? Or, a company whose products are an issue of "national security" and has been designated a "supply chain risk?"
Perhaps it's a threat that could be alleviated by better "oversight" via certain parties who just happen to be connected to certain members of the Government...
This is a thing that happens in authoritarian regimes that lack due process. Even when the people are one of the "elites."
You might be in one moment. You won't be in the next.
Ask Jack Ma. How has he been doing lately?
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/china-alibaba-crack...
https://www.wired.com/story/jack-ma-isnt-back/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65084344
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder...
The grave sin that Jack Ma committed for which he forfeited years of his life, billions of dollars and control of his company?
He disagreed with the regime. Publicly. Called the regulators geriatrics.
And so, spacing mine. = they forced him to sell his voting shares and forcibly removed him from his company.The US is now dutifully following the same trajectory.
The reason why the US is a bastion of technological progress, startups and capitalism is because the freedom to do business used to be underwritten by fundamental personal freedoms.
It's just how the incentives shape out.
Why would you want to be a founder in a world where you can show obedience to the party, rise up the ranks, and just... grab shares from the next big startup? Wet your beak a little. Get a cut.
People respond to incentives; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43713798
I guess current AI, IS the best it will ever be
lol if this is an attempt by the admin like the DoD thing to "knock them down a peg" it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
> it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
The Mythos marketing strategy in action
OTOH, maybe Dario is colluding with some people the US government to drum up some PR before the IPO? "OoOoo these models are so scarily good, export controls were forced onto them"
So much smoke, mirrors and SV techbro bullshit going around that it has become impossible to figure out what's what.
This is definitely what it feels like to me, especially since it was going to be taken away from the subscriptions anyway right? Plus I had been having huge reliability issues anyway. Now they got to tease something, put it behind a more intense paywall.