why is the commerce secretary making this decision
But would another company who is not on the trusted partner list and has less to lose taking on the admin have standing to sue here? On the basis of the export control being illegal and this putting their business at a disadvantage vs. competitors with access
A lawsuit would be a hard sell though, because Anthropic themselves argued that the technology is dangerous. Even if many people on HN might think that Anthropic was scaremongering about Mythos, a court is probably going to take their assessment at face value, and courts are loathe to find against governments in cases of national security.
There's also the issue that these models are getting better through an iterative process, so even if the line between GPT 5.5 and Fable/GPT 5.6 is somewhat arbitrary, it doesn't mean that the government shouldn't be able to draw a line at all. So you're left arguing that they drew the line too early, which is subjective.
No. Only if those employees have a green card and the company must not only take on that responsibility but ensure other employees are denied access. Otherwise the company would be subject to millions in fines.
US export laws are no fuckin' joke like everyone here seems to think they are.
It's really frustrating to read pages of comments rooted in emotion and no understanding of the existing laws.
I read your frustration. Try to let go of the fact that there are many smart people who aren't experts in legal affairs. Cite eCFR if they're wrong, and move on. As much as they don't know the rules, you don't know their situation.
For all you know, the subscriber may be a US Citizen + Delaware C Corp owner.
I remember a time not very long ago when everyday crypto like 128-bit SSL was restricted under US export law. The old web browsers came in separate, "exportable" versions.
Phil Zimmermann was in big trouble for releasing PGP. That was the mid-90s. Clinton was President so this stuff transcends politics.
Claiming ignorance is a good way to pay tens of millions of $ in fines or do prison time.
Here's one from TWO DAYS AGO:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/manager-us-freight-forw...
She will be doing 18 months in federal lockup.
The people in charge of enforcing US export law are worse than city building inspectors and the penalties are orders of magnitude more severe. They're not people you want to mess with, ignore, or pretend you didn't know the rules.
The government has arbitrary commandeered their business.
This could ruin Anthropic.
They are walking a tight rope with respect to revenues, hype, IPO.
If this kills their hyper growth prospects, it could kill the IPO.
If there's a serious change the gov. is out of line, the judges could put a stay and possibly throw this out.
There may however be enough of a case, in which there's maybe not much they can do.
Having a crazy person completely control your business is very, very bad.
Lots of these moves would and should be struck down in court as an arbitrary and capricious use of administrative power. Some of them might not be, and in the meantime you're signing up for tons of trouble. A trillion-dollar company does not simply go to war with the US government.
A more mid-sized company that's not so intertwined, but not so small that they can't get a good legal team, might be another story.
> The EAR definition of “export” extends beyond the transportation of physical goods outside the U.S.
> A “Deemed export” is the release of technology or source code to a foreign national in the U.S. The release is “deemed” to be an export to the last permanent residence status/citizenship of the foreign national. This can occur through demonstration, oral briefing, site visit, or through transmission of non-public data.
Ref: https://exportcontrol.lbl.gov/training/export-control-overvi...
Ask every satellite launch company in the 90s how that worked out.
Who are those 100 companies? Clearly they can't compete on merit and have rubbed some hands to be picked as winners...at least for now.
They’re in effect saying “nothing else is as powerful as what Anthropic put out”. Even though that might not really be the case it’s what it sounds like.
- extract monetary contributions for their side of political spectrum from ai companies
- extract money for personal gain
- grokify ai answers on political / worldview topics, because polls are showing people trust ai answers more than wikipedia
It sounds insidious, and it probably would be if they weren’t so damn dumb.
A published policy with the right to appeal exclusions from the list.
An equal standard for all companies rather than ad hoc application.
A countervailing policy to mitigate the unfair advantage conferred on the companies that have early access (such as a higher tax rate that goes to fund ai job loses, and a commitment that AI use of the new models won’t result in layoffs).
A requirement that hardware is made available for open source models rather than locked up in by the AI labs.
A restriction on AI labs being vertically integrated from hardware all the way up through the app layer. I would restrict AI labs to being API providers and prohibit them from building apps. That would allow an ecosystem of independent software development on the app layer without fear of being copied by the labs that have an unfair advantage in seeing the data while apps are being built, the usage data as they become successful and the ability to undercut competitors by subsidizing tokens unfairly.
I could go on.
I've read all the sci fi they have. It's not hard to see where the ideas came from.
What's being questioned is this sentiment of "The only way to save humanity is for me and my lighthaven groupies to become Xillionaire god-kings"
But there's definitely a large contingent who denies that they think there's any risk at all, instead of them engaging in motivated reasoning to think their self interest just so happens to coincide with what is best for safety.
Your question is like asking what evidence would convince us that a bag of rocks doesn't have rocks in it. Easy, just take the rocks out.
The US might remove access next month in a fit of pique.
The Chinese models look increasingly more reliable and safer.
Between the Chinese government and Anthropic, I know which one I'd rather send tokens to. For all of the problems of the US, for-profit corporations, data harvesting, etc. the CCP (and, perhaps more troublesome, its allies) is far less likely to align with your interests.
It's not like China can be trusted either, but China isn't planning any direct invasions to the west. Taiwan, perhaps, but they're playing a long-term tactical game rather than a "invade the country we don't like this week" game. They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk, but in that case you shouldn't be uploading your secrets to an AI company in the first place.
So one of the world's biggest and most rapid military build-ups in history that is largely intended to give China the ability to seize a democratic country by force by 2027 over any US/Western efforts to protect it is OK because...it's "a long-term tactical game"?
Note that China is not just menacing Taiwan. It's constantly harassing Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam too. Other countries in the region are worried because they understand that if China takes Taiwan successfully, it's not likely to stop there and become a good, peaceful neighbor.
The US, under Trump, is a foreign policy disaster. That doesn't mean that China, with a seemingly more emotionally stable dictator at the helm, is any less dangerous.
> They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
With all due respect, you're really naive about how China operates.
https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...
Wake me up when they start drone striking neighboring country's fishermen and accusing them of carrying drugs.
At this point I am afraid of US government than China...
Huh? Russia invaded Ukraine, at significant economic cost, and hundreds of thousands of people have died.
> At this point I am afraid of US government than China...
Just as people can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can have reason to be concerned about more than one country at a time.
Personally I am much more concerned about handing my data over to the government that actually has power over me and labels dissenters terrorists than I am with the government overseas that has no direct effect on my life... well, other than providing alternative LLMs with permissive licenses that can be hosted anywhere in the world... but to each their own, I suppose.
You meant to write "Between the Chinese government and the US government". Completely agreed though, better to send it to the former.
Do you have access to Mythos? If not the choice has already been made for you.
Mythos never was and I don’t think that’s changing.
As a small business owner this is unacceptable
America will do that before gun control.
Not the future I want but I see that too.
The nra has more lobby power than anyone.
Does it mean US is allowing accessing to governments' exclusive list?
It's not impossible, of course. It's not even terribly difficult, but it does require a different level of record.
(No, I'm not saying that the goons running the United States give a shit or won't do it anyway.)
Also most crypto companies are not good for laundering since the blockchains record that fraud forever and publicly. I could see some specific protocols where that may not be true — like monero or tornado cash — but these projects are not really startups. Most crypto startups pitch their products for enterprise customers and thus would be horrible for laundering money.
(Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
- It's not "incrementally better". It's a complete game changer. Opus 4.8 on max thinking does X amount of mistakes in my commercial work. Fable 5 did 5% of X. Counted. I barely had anything to contribute in the work sessions, for a full week I could count on my two hands the total amount of times I actually caught Fable 5 -- and one part of those were not true mistakes, more like divergence from policy in our `CLAUDE.md` files.
- It's not "security focused". It's simply better in every way _plus_ it's also security-conscious.
- It legitimately accelerated my work. I don't have too much unknowns in my work, I simply have way too much to do. Fable 5 was an objective and measurable improvement over Opus 4.8. Returning to it after Fable 5 was removed was extremely discouraging and frustrating, and still is to some extent.
> It’s lots of fun to pretend it’s some step-change that’s too dangerous for general release
Maybe, but not as much fun as tearing down a straw man apparently. :)
> (Just to be clear, I think the gatekeeping is ridiculous, especially given the above)
It's ridiculous for multiple other reasons but ridiculous nonetheless.
Interesting, I'm curious what work you do? My software engineering career has never been in that situation, it's always so much ambiguity and unknown that trumps everything.
Say you had a perfectly smooth progressive chain from rocks to spears to guns to nuclear weapons. When it comes to government restrictions, you still have to choose to draw lines somewhere, right?
The spirit is to provide effective tools for the people to resist federal military tyranny, and Mythos seems like it would be a good tool to defend against that, for so many reasons.
That being said many legal scholars say the state militia was intended to be the defense against tyranny not individual citizens because there were government led crackdowns on rebellion under Washington and other presidents from the earliest days of the republic. State militias have the full range of weapons
Back when the administration hit Mythos/Fable with the surprise ban, I figured this would be the endgame. They'd keep Anthropic tied up until a competitor had a roughly comparable model ready, then gate them the same.
It's like the epidemic of scam nvidia cards being resold without gpu or memory - where do you think those are going?
I assume "trusted partners" means, "companies that have bribed Trump an appropriate amount". A few million for the inauguration, a few million for the ballroom, a few million on a movie about Melania, the don wants a taste.
EDIT: I agree that it should require an act of Congress to explicitly delegate this power.
Every one of those is by a regulatory agency that was explicitly empowered by Congress to do such regulation.
congress has abdicated its role entirely.
Dajcie mi człowieka, a paragraf się znajdzie
Give me the man and I will give you the case against himShould ever new "weapon" invented require a new act of Congress? We've considered software subject this act since the 90s.
If everyone making AI is screaming up and down that we are in an AI arms race creating dangerous entities that will determine the fate of the world is the government just supposed to ignore them?
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-22/chapter-I/subchapter-M...
Plus, they're relying on the "math is a weapon" law to ban "export" of the models.
(edit: not that these models are equivalent to missiles oc)
It's pretty problematic to not make it more widely available at least to US businesses, and there is not even a vetting process to get approved quickly and easily. If this is the new norm, the intended or unintended consequences of this type of gatekeeping will be an unprecedented consolidation of power amongst the largest corporations. Even more than we have seen over the last 20 years.
-- GOP probably
So what’s left? Where does that decision making go? Turns out the executive, so that’s what we’ve been seeing and it’s largely uncontested. This should have been obvious to most people going into this, particularly if they understood Trumps platform or Project 2025.
Chevron and the unitary executive theory have essentially nothing to do with each other.
I’m still not sure what point is attempting to be made here.
So, the gap has been filled largely by executive orders.
Green card holder? No.
Everyone else*: Yes.
* It's far more complicated and nuanced than this.
They just got their market cut to a fraction. Investing in new tech is now very risky because even if things work out you might not be able to sell anything.
There were already serious doubts about ROI for the frontier labs. If they can only sell to 100 or so entities it's over business wise.
What's the endgame here?
The only thing that changed is people are writing articles about it in the news media.
If it takes Trump to force people to educate themselves on how the US government actually works then I guess that is at least one good thing to come out of this.
But you have to admit this policy seems ad hoc and creates the impression of opening a wide door for corruption.
Is there any policy from this admin you don't support?
I don’t support the admin but if you are unwilling to engage with reality then that is on you.
We are talking about the government giving exclusive access the the most transformative technology in human history to a select group of companies with no formal policy as to how you gain access, lose access, what you are expected to do with that access or commitment to transparency around any of this.
Usually companies do this stuff quietly with lots of small new rules via Congress creating barriers to entry or through national security angles like the Chips act which funneled money and tax breaks to huge weathy companies, or Boeing, or the car industry, etc.
Anthropic and OpenAI went hard in the paint pushing for AI safety and it backfired into hurting their companies rather than protecting their interests.
It’s not about size, it’s about where it chooses to operate
1: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/artic...
This is why arguments about this go in circles. You either argue from a pure theoretic POV back and forth, or you go off data - at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
Even the theoreticians on the free-market side are far less solid than.. all the other sides (behavioural economics, information asymmetry.. even Marx) but I regard it as deeply unpragmatic when there's so much data out there indicating what actually happens in the real world when you go one way or the other.
I mean, it's not. In a free market you'd have a choice of insurance providers rather than having to take whatever plan your employer offers, and you'd have some idea of what the hospital is going to charge you beforehand rather than receiving random bills for weeks.
You can prove the logic part starting from the assumptions. It's also falsifiable. I just mentioned it was literally the most controlled test on human society you could make. We tested by splitting societies at the level of the entire planet, states and cities.
US healthcare is mostly not a free market; by free market, at minimum, I mean that the quantities and prices (ideally even the quality) are not set. The US healthcare system has a fixed number of practitioners who can get a license every year. This is as far as a market can be from being free (together with the case of having price controls). In fact, free market theory predicts that when you restrict quantity, you get higher prices for the same quality. It literally predicts the US situation.
It's funny you mention Marx, given I regard most of his claims as either unfalsifiable or easily proven false.
Genuine question: if Democrats take power, do you expect them to be more interventionist or less interventionist with respect to AI? Bernie's jockeying leads me to suspect "more", but I could very well be wrong.
(FWIW I personally think modern AI falls in the small realm of potentially dangerous technologies that merit careful, ideally bipartisan, government oversight)
The current admin flies by the seat of their pants and at least creates the perception of political decision making.
Bernie and AOC (which aren't DNC mainstream, but prominent) had just pushed for a moratorium on "AI data centers" with a definition that includes "that are used for the development or operation of AI models at scale" (trivially sidesteppable by "we build this GPU farm to sell to whoever bids for compute" - which is actually true), plus a bunch of fancy extras bundled in like "The government must review and approve AI products before they are released to ensure that AI products are safe and effective.", while lacking actual definition of "AI" (given that we had "AI" systems since '50s).
Here's the full text: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/AI-Data-Ce...
Yeah, the bill has a cause - it recognizes some pain points. But then it haphazardly tries to address symptoms instead of underlying issues (environmental regulations, utility pricing, land use, job security), while pushing vaguely defined regulations that allow arbitrary application. As if misdirected measures and poorly defined laws aren't already a giant issue.
The what? More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline and those wishing to curry or keep his favor" - quite an expansive definition of "political decision making".
The previous administration was totally not exactly what's described here...
But yes, Biden was old and cognitively not well. But his “whims” didn’t exist much, and they were always fairly reasonable. Trump is the most unreasonable president, most likely in US history. I would even categorize Andrew Jackson as more restrained.
That would be your politics coloring your memory.
That was the last major thing the Democrats did, and healthcare has gotten substantially worse...but at least it's well regulated now.
Is that a joke? We're back in a spat with Iran because Obama refused to engage with Congress, as required by our constitution, to enter the USA in any binding deal.
Any AI actions from the next admin is going to be executive yolos.
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...
How well does it stand up to Mythos?
The Democratic party is more anti-ai than the Republican party and unfortunately both of them are increasingly responding to astroturfed populism.
Do you think Bernie Sanders in AOC are pro-ai? Are you kidding me? Have you seen what they say and the legislation they propose?
Not even on the same playing field. They just can’t be compared, they’re incomparable.
A clear regulatory framework to operate within allows businesses to operate within it rather than get surprised by the King's whims upending their business on every few Fridays. If you expect regulation will eventually happen, pushing for it to happen on terms you're able to comply with rather than as haphazard surprises is pretty sensible.
Yes, sure, it is I who is blind...
Free market? Small government? Big police state, trillions in defense contractor grift, unsustainable tax breaks to the wealthiest leading to massive spending deficits... all while doing everything to erode access to education, healthcare and basic services.
It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
edit: typo
People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them.
Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc.
That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.
That's untrue.
If you do some homework you will see Republican politicians and the Supreme Court disagreeing on a number of issues. Amongst Republican voters, his approval rating has been sliding and is now below 80% in most polls.
Yes that was shortsighted but it’s worked out well for trump. He can basically just… do whatever. Nobody needs to legislate, he’s essentially congress at this point.
Epstein cover up? Iran? COVID denialism? Complete disregard for rule of law? Accepting massive, direct bribes? Trying to control broadcast media?
That's all on the Republican party as a collective, who did absolutely nothing to resist it and everything to put him in power TWICE. TWICE.
While Trump is a megalomanic and does whatever he wants, he has the mandate of the Republican party, whose elected officials could choose at any moment to end this by withdrawing support.
Don't let them off the hook.
It's lower than that. Most polls show below 80%.
> Don't let them off the hook.
That's not the way.
Republicans caused this disaster and are all, each and every, individually morally responsible for putting Trump in power.
Republican voters, Republican politicians, Republican donors and the Republican political machine.
They picked the losing side of history and they can sink with it.
Explain Australia then, specifically the absence of nation wide injury and death following the short period in which 98% of a population ~ 24 million or so, got two to three rounds of vaccines with a new definition.
Fantastic case study for such widespread ill effects to clearly and unambiguously show up - the country is isolated and has had world class epidemiology researchers plugged into integrated national health records for 50+ years.
What was that injury rate in Australia, how many of the > 20 million vaccine recipients died or were injured by vaccines.
Where are these deaths and injuries greater in magnitude than COVID deaths and injuries?
I cannot answer for you or your governments odd notions. Feel free to concentrate on actually making and landing a solid point with peer commenter azan.
We all need a healthy dose of reality. Yes the vaccine rollout was not perfect. But 1 million Americans died from Covid. And that’s that, if we can’t even agree on reality then there’s no point in arguing.
If I have to pick between a murderer and literally killing everyone on earth I'll pick the murderer because I'm not a psychopath.
Can you blame me?
If you can't make a point with the math, then don't bother replying. My invitation is to discuss with scientists, to be clear. CNN is not qualified as a scientific body, despite claiming to be. I'm aware that most of the US believes that CNN is the arbiter of science. I'm referring specifically to a scientific paper published by the manufacturer of the drug you are pedaling.
And that's my point. You can't. You're consuming media and calling it science. You're lying to yourself.
Please prove me wrong.
Look at the injury rate in the NEJoM study submitted by Pfizer, and look at the rate of disease symptoms (later decreased but we'll ignore that for the sake of driving my point home), and tell me what the rest of us scientists missed. Or at least admit that you didn't really notice that it killed and injured more people in Pfizer's own study than you had realized (for the sake of honest scientists if you care to call yourself one).
I'll even overlook the fact that all the "peer reviewers" were Pfizer employees who couldn't bring themselves to the level of shame so as to falsify the results. Instead they themselves published blatantly that the drug is more destructive than the disease it purports to treat. Thankfully we have some moral fiber in the field.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Love to hear your input here. Check the math carefully.
> "Covid vaccines are very safe and saved lots of lives."
I'm convinced you didn't get this idea from honestly reading research.
If things are bad are we just supposed to… pretend… they’re not? And that… would help things? Like how? What’s even the mechanism for that?
The US government was created to protect the interests of rich, white, male slave owners. And if you look at Louisiana State Penintentiary (often called "Angola"), which is essentialy a Southern plantation with forced labor, you realize not as much has changed as you might otherwise think.
> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
While chattel slavery ended when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery continued through debt bondage and convict leasing up until 1941 where FDR suddenly decided to aggressively prosecute the practice for fear of the Japanese using it for propaganda value. I'm referring to Circular 3591 [2]. And while that heavily curtailed abuse (eg by locking people up essentially indefinitely for "vagrancy" or imaged debts), forced prison labor continues to this day, including private companies profiting from prison labor.
Also, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the South arguably won. Reconstruction saw severe curtailment of newly-established civil rights for former enslaved people. And after Reconstruction came Jim Crow until the 1960s.
[1]: https://www.loc.gov/collections/abraham-lincoln-papers/artic...
[2]: https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/state-imposed-fo...
"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed." ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Fable was out for 3 days, not really long enough for us to properly evaluate it, but the "Sorry we had to remove Fable. Read more. (because it's too powerful btw)" is loudly shown every chance they get for weeks. It creates a halo.
Reminiscent of the old Apple G4 commercial where they displayed it next to military tanks. "For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government."
Let's hope this creates a bit more fire under the asses of other countries
The rate that the ruling class ran into crony capitalism at the first chance they got is something that needs to be remembered. They'll try to act like they were always against it at some point in the near future.
> The two biggest enemies of the free market are two separate groups: my academic colleagues and business people. Business people are enemies of free markets, not friends.
> [...]
> The business people are just the opposite. They're all in favor of freedom for everybody else, and at the drop of a hat you can get any leading businessman to give you an eloquent speech on the virtues of a free market. But when it comes to their own business, they want to go down to Washington and get a special tariff to protect their business. They want a special tax deduction. They want a tax subsidy. And Chrysler is on the verge of failing, which it should have done. It should have been allowed to fail. Chrysler goes down and exercises political influence and tries to get the government to lend it money to subsidize it.
> So businessmen in general — not all, there have been some notable exceptions — and I don't want to include everybody. But in the main, most businessmen are enemies of free markets.
Or may they'll decide to be a little more quiet and less end-of-the-world-is-nigh-if-you-use-our-services?
Asterisk the size of a Mac truck.
Also this administration having say over who gets access to what AI is just so much more grift corruption and picking your favorites / destroying others, for these incdecent undemocratic in American grifters who've seized our state.
Maybe, maybe not. Tech stocks are mostly vibes-based now, reality isn't really a concern for them.
Please go read US history before sounding off on this topic. These laws have existed for decades.
what disaster do you foresee?
I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it is one possible scenario that, over time, would be disastrous for innovation and freedom.
IANAL; you need to be one to interpret this stuff. These laws are as thick as a dictionary.
The EAR dates back to the Export Administration Act of 1979 but it was mostly overhauled by Congress in 2018.
These words don’t mean what they use to anymore. Newspeak is in full swing. Words still sound the same and are written in the same way but now mean something completely different. If Mao and Stalin were alive, they would be nodding approvingly.
I hope the Chinese models catch up soon so I can stop contributing to the American economy.