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Notes -
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
A few immediate thoughts:
For one strain of doomer, this is a good thing: the USG showing willingness to directly intervene and cut down the addressable market for capability-pushing models reduces economic incentives to push the frontier at all costs and slows down the race dynamic. Correspondingly, it's going to be a nightmare for the markets: the AI boom is driven by the idea that frontier models are going to be replacing a significant chunk of global labor, and obviously now this is significantly less likely now that frontier models are going to be stuck in Uncle Sam's basement.
For another strain of doomer, this is a horrible thing: really this was fairly clear even with the DOD conflict, but now control of AI is now very firmly a direct White House concern - the fate of the planet and/or the universe is in the end going to be decided by DC bureaucrats and not SF tech nerds.
Companies, especially non-US companies, are going to be rushing to the doors to move their AI workflows off closed-source and onto self-hosted models, another blow for the AI market thesis - the business continuity risks of Anthropic's demonstrated willingness to silently cripple models and USG's demonstrated willingness to now arbitrarily cut off access are simply going to be too much.
Chef's kiss. The subtle deviousness of the USG demonstrated by taking Anthropic at their word. From what I see on HN - people are quite entertained by it. Seems that Dario has ground a lot of gears with his safetysm. And in a way - the USG is absolutely right. If the technology is as potent and dangerous as they claim - then it is not up to Anthropic to decide who can use it and for what.
Unfortunately the timing could be better - it should have been given just before their IPO is irreversible, but enough to tank them hard.
Is this related to the fact that it was Anthropic (at least I think it was them) who took a principled stand against the US gov using their models to automate kill chains and the like?
Yes, but it wasn't principled. It was to get cheap shot at openai and lure the antitrump SV to use Claude when Codex started seriously catching up with them.
This is nonsensical. Anthropic could have avoided signing up to supply the DoD altogether if they wanted to attract anti trump people. And OpenAI could have avoided walking into a pretty obvious trap.
Claude has been crushing GPT for enterprise use for way longer than this case as well
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Almost certainly. More conspiratorially, it’s related to the discussions around government investment in OpenAI. But I think it’s punishment beatings.
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