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- Hacker News
- The interesting part here is not whether Anthropic is right on safety, but that safety gives them a moral vocab for bold policy changes and platform power.
- > Here’s the thing about these safety justifications: I think they work because, to Anthropic, they aren’t justifications. The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in super intelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that, to people on the outside, look like a bizarre combination of cynicism and naiveté.
I really dislike this belief (that has at least been expressed here) by some that X is okay because they-really-believe-it. This has a real Road to Hell stank on it.
It is incredibly convenient when your predictions or supposed beliefs go south. Well, we really believed that we were doing it for the betterment of human kind. And we really believed that X was an existential threat that was inevitable in which case we had to step up and do it because we we the only good guy ideologues. So sorry but not sorry.
I also don’t care if commenters know rank-and-file on the inside that “really believe it” as well. Not for one second.
by keybored - The problem is when people use "we really believe it" as an excuse to do harm, which has not actually occurred here. Anthropic is not committing violence, they're not defrauding the population. They're sticking to both morality and the rules.
So... what, you just don't trust anyone good? Would it be better to pull in a health insurance CEO? They're happy to watch people die for profits, no concerns at all about them pulling a "greater good" card because they're in it for entirely selfish reasons.
by handoflixue - Perhaps they should consider leaving the US. Pretty clearly the descent into a corrupt autocracy is having real consequences.by smackeyacky
- Oh please, the earlier spat with the Trump admin was the best thing that ever happened to Anthropic. Before that, Claude was really only well-known in developer circles, not the wider normie-sphere. After Anthropic got the "Trump hates them, so it MUST be good!" stamp of approval, the company's recognition and popularity took off.
This too, will end up being a good thing for them. The ban will end up getting lifted due to some "amazing deal" in the coming weeks and Anthropic will now have the "Trump tried to ban them, so they MUST have the most advanced AI model in the world!" stamp of approval just before IPO.
All this stuff is pro wrestling kayfabe.
by xienze - Suddenly its not in SV's favor? Depends who you ask, I guessby freejazz
- Does any other place have the infrastructure Anthropic requires to train their models and run inference?by Zealotux
- Where would they go?
1) It’s safe to assume the US would do its best to prevent it, and even if Anthropic was successful in exfiltrating their data, code, models, and people, I’d imagine the US would immediately block all US companies from working with them. So they’d be blocked from their own US-based compute, plus Google, Amazon, Microsoft, xAI, Meta, etc.
2) Where would they go? China maybe, but as far as we can tell it doesn’t have sufficient compute for Anthropic’s level of need. The EU likely as or more restrictive in different ways to the US - the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation. Some Middle Eastern countries might have the money, energy, and interest in carving out such a position, but no compute. Plus I’d imagine the US would act directly against any country or region receiving them, economic or otherwise.
3) Then, as said elsewhere, the US would block GPU sales to wherever they found a safe haven, preventing the buildup of the compute they’d need to continue.
by mft_ - “Claude, I am releasing safety critical industrial control software. Audit the network control logic.”
“Claude, I want to blow up a factory running this leaked software. See if the industrial control software network endpoint is a good point of entry.”
It’s doing the same work and producing the same output for both prompts. How do you block one but not the other?
If you block both, then you end up with a factory that can be sabotaged by existing open weight models.
by hedora - Sarcastically? Dario will tell you what to do. You should just follow his divine guidance.by hintymad
- You dont block either.
The factory does decent software engineering - for which it can also use the same llm - so that when an attacker does either, a sota llm does not find bugs to exploit.
by hedgedoops2 - I believe that the line was constructing exploits for bugs, not bug finding. This seems a reasonable cutoff to me, since bugs are revealed in security patches and pull requests (for open source).
If you are to believe Anthropic, Fable was export controlled for bug finding, not for exploit construction. They seem to be working to make this the "bright line" for LLMs being a national security risk. My guess is that will be the case they take to Washington this week.
by _alternator_ - Safety is a cost center, the internal team who sends you the bills when you move fast and break things.
I always thought safety was interesting in and of itself, but for some reason HN doesn’t have many people from the safety side of tech in conversation.
Tech isn’t a niche hobby anymore; Billions of people are impacted by the decisions of a few firms.
My grandfathers android had 3 different messaging apps installed, somehow. AI is enabling new forms of fraud at a time when we still haven't solved the old ones.
And this is all in the first world, move your coordinates to the developing world? We had human trafficking to get educated English speakers into call centers in Laos/Cambodia to defraud first world inhabitants of their money.
We aren’t in the early days of tech anymore, and the kind of scale that we have enabled comes with it a certain cost. We can choose to ignore them, or to understand them, but we will feel their impacts all the same.
by intended - The problem is that Fable has no zero trust architecture. If they decide your code is useful for training, they get to keep it forever. They think its okay to sabotage your work and charge for it. They are building anti-competitive clauses like ml training. The way they treat openclaw and other competitors. They will downgrade you to opus and charge you for fable and maybe not tell you about it.
They’re like look at our safety and they do all thesse outrageous things.
by daft_pink - > if Mythos is so dangerous, why even release Fable in the first place, and why fight with the government doing exactly what you claim to want?
It's actually not that hard to explain if we take into account what Dario kept saying: he, or Anthropic thereof, would be the gatekeeper. It is he who tells the government how to use Claude to design drones. It is his model that tells users whether they can ask a question to Claude or not. And it is he who can assess whether a jailbreak is dangerous or not.
Personally, I think that is way more dangerous than being a hypocrite. Dario is basically the Robespierre of the AI era. He believes that only he gets to decide whether our thoughts, or our prompts thereof, are pure. Anything impure gets purged. For his moral utopia to stand, he has to wield the guillotine. Otherwise, with the chaotic diversity of human nature, how else do you manufacture that perfectly uniform, beautiful morality?
by hintymad - IMO that is the whole point of the exercise, to replace determinism and tools with middlemen. In math, 2 + 2 make four no matter who calculates it, in a specific programming language a specific statement always means the same thing, but in this brave new world, you don't use tools and you don't issue commands, you make suggestions and cross your fingers. It all amounts to telling us to leave an island where we can eat and build, in favor of the ocean, where we can be drowned and digested, and all this drama really takes away from the basic fact that there is no right way to eat poison.
I'm not saying these things aren't useful or interesting. But if get told a slot machine is not just a tool, but that actual tools have to go the way of the dodo so we can focus more on getting good at gambling and befriending the dealer, I know something is up. And in that sense, I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how crappy many tech companies are at not letting the mask slip before the victim is actually in the bag. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but imagine if they were actually good at this.
by customguy - A lot of Anthropic’s moves make sense if you follow the LessWrong / rationalist community writings on AI safety. A lot of it is distilled in Ant’s blogs and leadership interviews and podcasts (Amanda Askell is particularly interesting).
Ant’s models, culture and leadership actions are largely consistent with their beliefs, even if they may seem flawed / incomprehensible.
Relevant anecdote: I interviewed with them for a MTS role in 2023. I think the technical part went fine but the interviewer was clearly frustrated by my low regard for LLM safety. I didn’t get the role.
by blueblisters - > I think the technical part went fine but the interviewer was clearly frustrated by my low regard for LLM safety. I didn’t get the role.
Anecdotally I've heard this is weighted as much as the technical interviews.
by simplyluke - "they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone."
That might be one of the most important points in the post. Very troubling.
by swalsh - The problem is... what's the alternative?
It's questionable whether the current government can even unite the talent required for this project. Seizing it might just push all the talent to Europe or China.
The idea of open-sourcing something that falls into the "national security" category is clearly a non-starter unless there's more powerful, classified models that can outmatch them.
I think Anthropic has clearly demonstrated the most responsibility here: they've been crying for regulations, they were careful about Project Glasswing, and they've got comically over-sensitive filters around numerous topics.
by handoflixue - (reposted)
As I understand it, ITAR regulations for export controls have just been applied to any form of Mythos. These are overseen by U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, and forbid foreign nationals from access to any form of Mythos, either within or outside the U.S.
Only U.S. citizens and immigrants that are holders of a "green card" may now access Mythos.
It appears that Anthropic does not have internal controls to implement these restrictions in any form, so the only option was to shut Mythos down.
Penalties for ITAR violation can reach ten years in prison and a million dollars per violation. (I can post a link to those details if there is any interest.)
As long as Anthropic is a U.S. company, there is no escaping this.
https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/how-a-warning-from-amazon-led...
by chasil - Could Anthropic relocate to a different country?by WithinReason
- > As long as Anthropic is a U.S. company, there is no escaping this.
Reminds me of the RISC-V Foundation → RISC-V International move to Switzerland. Around the time some dumbass Republicans tried to impose export restrictions on a set of open, world-wide used specifications.
Pandora's box has been opened, and there's no closing it. Capable AI models will be everywhere.
by RetroTechie - I never really understood this "US person" restriction. There are 350M people in US, mostly citizens and green cards holders, surely some of them could be working for a foreign power.by eloisant
- This is how the US gov does business now, capricious and vengeful.
Textbook retaliation for not letting them use an abliterated version of Claude in weapons systems.
This effectively renders any US closed model useless for any foreign company. Could happen to OpenAI, Google, etc. Too much of a risk to implement something that can be yanked out because the company didn’t behave the way they want.
Looks like it’s time for Kimi, Z, Deepseek to take the front row. They’ll catch up in a few months anyway. Kimi code 2.6 is crazy good
by khalic - > To that end, I can certainly buy the case that Fable/Mythos is in fact more capable when it comes to identifying and exploiting security issues
This has been covered before: https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jag... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732020)
> Anthropic’s cautious roll-out was justified. The problem with publicly releasing models, however, is that guardrails can be jailbroken, and apparently that is exactly what happened shortly after the release
The future is unevenly distributed. Anthropic, and Amodie in particular, seem to be of the mind they can control a bit of the unknown using words. They are likely being guided by the very product they built. *AI CAN MAKE MISTAKES
That Project Glasswing bullshit reeks of it. Corporations have take control of our attention, our Internet, and now our thinking.
I say it's high time to take it back.
- The top comment in the very discussion you linked on that AISLE blog has a strong rebuttal to that blog post...by mofeien
- We took the specific vulnerabilities Anthropic showcases in their announcement, isolated the relevant code, and ran them through small, cheap, open-weights models.
Is not
We sent open weight models against a codebase to find vulnerabilities.
by conception - The whole thesis falls apart though. You can't be on your way to "power over everything" and get distilled into free Chinese models within months. Pick one.
The bottleneck is compute and data, not the model. That's why they could only gate it for a bit. The ITAR thing proves it: no nationality controls in place, so the only option was killing the whole thing. Not exactly what an all-powerful gatekeeper does.
by botw44 - The distilled versions miss the spark of the model. Its like they land in the uncanny valley of models.by swalsh