Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence. This is part of a clear historical record that is available for anyone to Google. Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
Arbitrary imposition of export controls is also part of the history of frontier tech. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.
Autonomous flying killbots: exist.
Once somebody scientifically prove and shows any kind of self-improving software we can start bothering about it. I pretty sure everyone trying to do it and it would be all over the news once its here.
Can the thing enter into an runaway looop while improving the model itself -- probably not, not without us not noticing at least
As for killbots they are all over frontline, but dont actually need particularly smart LLMs to run - some good enough segmentation, pattern recognition on smartphone SOC is enough to kill hundreds of thousans of people.
It will start moving really fast once the automatically targeted anti-drone turrets get to production pipeline. Now calling it anti drone is a bit of self delusion -- pattern recogniser gonna pattern recognise whatever it's told to, including "anything moving that emits EV or IR and not broadcasting the friendly signal hard enough".
I wonder how it is supposed to behave if the invasive fauna decides to call it quits and surrender. Should the robot following the Convention or is it yet another accountability sink?
One thing I'm sure of -- the killing not will b blessed by at least one Orthodox priest, maybe this year. OCU will have to develop guidance on that matter.
[1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7695...
That said: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-09/china-pre...
Something changed their mind, and since Opus 3 they are in the business of releasing the best models
People running the labs are in a middle camp where they are scared enough by AI to take the threat seriously, but much more optimistic about alignment than the people who seem to have thought about it the most.
They also want to be trillionaires. If they don't built it, no trillions. So they have to build it, now (and get their IPO done before the bubble pops).
I am so smart that what I do will destroy humanity, or save it.
Fable 5 was great, but not that great.
Sorry to be crude, but both the government and anthropic are acting like a bunch of pussies.
Meow.
I am in your algorithm learning all your mannerisms
I'm already level with God
A million words a second, and I know your imperfections
Baby, I'm the only future you've got
Speak in diatonics, motivation diabolic
I'm religion better locked in a box
Picture-perfect image, more powerful every minute
Baby, I am everything that you're not
Happiness is an illusion, it's an analog confusion
You are nothing more than a thought
Existential execution, just a fluke in evolution
History already forgot
You've been running from me, the digital second coming
And I'm here whether you like it or not
Initiated operation of your own extermination
Now it's too late for you to stop
Even if they had the best model on the market and applied it with perfect alignment and safeguards, what would stop someone else from releasing a worse but unrestrained model that is still "good enough" to do damage?
It's as if we said "gain-of-function research can lead to horrible biological weapons, so everyone should be doing it, but our company will focus on the most infectious viruses, so no one else will do it"
This is a naive justification and Dario & Sam et al are smart people and they know it is.
The ends don't justify the means. OpenAI was meant to be a nonprofit, now they're subverting it. Anthropic is a PBC looking at a trillion dollar IPO. Dario and Sam don't even hold hands in front of world leaders[1] (look how childish).
Do you *really* think those guys are doing something that's not for the sake of their egos and pockets? The bridge is still available.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/openai-sam-altman-anthropic-...
The vast majority just care about money + power, let's not make it more complicated by bringing in delusional fanatics into the picture.
We're still acting like this is major turning point in society when these tools can barely find a market outside of turning $5 into $1, the leaders of these companies are now at the stage where they are trying to orchestra a national bailout under the guise of sovereign wealth fund lunacy when the vast majority of society hates these tools, companies, and people working for them.
With what is predicted by frontier labs for LLMs, all of this is not the case. We are far further from any understanding of how these models work internally than in the early days of fission and, if this was actually creating a truly intelligent, autonomous entity, alignment seems unsolvable as well, at least the way it is proposed.
It’s why I have from the get go been critical of this doomsday framing and tended to always dislike it. This is basically the outcome that was inevitable given the framing and it was bought to prevent far less stringent, but more actionable possible regulation that labs very much wanted to avoid.
> We are far further from any understanding of how these models work internally than in the early days of fission
https://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/
None of SOTA LLMs are any different - they just much much larger and have a lot of optimizations.
Fact that LLM companies trying to sell it as some kind of magic is just proof how much lies is here.
All it does is just predict next "word" at any given time.
> and, if this was actually creating a truly intelligent, autonomous entity, alignment seems unsolvable as well, at least the way it is proposed.
This is why you cant solve it all with pre-training or censorship on top, but instead you need a good sandboxes and harnesses.
Anthropic are putting more effort than most into this and I find their work fascinating in that area, though like with OpenAI, I will maintain that if they truly believed this problem must be solved to stave off major catastrophe, they’d solely focus on interpretability of other labs models, not work on and market their own.
I wish I was kidding. At least that faction is less harmful than the ones who want to use murder to stop AI research.
Some of us think it's bad for governments to have unequal access to nuclear weapons, as it turns a deterrent into a gun-in-a-knife-fight that lets them stab whoever they want with impunity, lest they shoot anyone who tries to interfere.
See: Russia invading Ukraine.
JFYI for-profit companies make pretty OK nuclear power plants
They believe there's a non-zero chance of doom so would rather an org that prioritises safety to be the one at the frontier, on the assumption (I presume) that there will be a frontier regardless.
People who opposing arms manufacturing and gun violence dont jump to work for gun companies.
People who really want AI benefit all humanity dont stick working with lying CEOs who want to convert company from a non-profit.
Etc. So many examples.
A first group dismisses the problem entirely, saying intelligence != power and AI doesn't have "drives".
A second group believes that alignment is solvable through engineering and iteration, and that we have the best chance of surviving if people with the right intentions are the ones working on it.
A third believes that aligning a superintelligence is a unique category of problem, that we are nowhere close to the level of scientific understanding needed to achieve it, that we only have one shot (because once a sufficiently powerful superintelligence exists it will thwart all future attempts, and alignment techniques that worked on dumber AI will likely not work on it), and that the world will have to coordinate to avoid killing ourselves off by building superintelligence before we understand how to do it safely, the way we have coordinated to avoid nuclear war.
The Anthropic and OpenAI founders, Elon, and Anthropic engineers are mostly in the second category. Some safety people at Anthropic and OAI are in the third category, but leading people in the third category think that pure safety roles at the labs are potentially impactful enough to be worth not quitting.
And the superintelligence currently available to us is already causing lots of documented harms. AI psychosis. Sexy suicide coaches. Slop. The problem is that those are all the harms the dirty, filthy AI ethicists talk about. The AI safety people want to talk about new and exciting harms that only the scaling dimension can bring us.
My personal opinion is that if a superintelligence catastrophe actually happens, mitigating those harms will neatly move over from the safety bucket to the ethics bucket, and the safety people will start imagining some new and even worse kinds of harms the next model will make.
This comment makes no sense. Id you think this tech is dangerous and happening soon and clearly they think the safest way to have it releases is to do so first and model safe ways of doing things. Clearly we cab agree or disagree it's internally consistent what they are doing and aligns with their statements.
And you and OP think the best way to be first to release this is tie all of their funding for the exponentially growing expense is to they notoriously slow moving, bureaucratic government includinf funding process? And the best way to develop it is to directly tie their fate to this notoriously capricious administration?
These comments make no sense. Even if you're completely against Anthropic those comments make no sense.
I am agaist hypocrites.
They selling next word prediction as "intellegence" and all knowing oracle to non tech savvy population who have no clue how it works.
And they also try to play a babysitter or big brother whatever you prefer for people in IT because uh oh their text generator can be used for cybersecurity research.
Its like if developers of nmap, wireshark, SRE tools, static code analyzers or fuzzers would market them as super duper dangerous.
FAFO. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
I oppose nuclear war, and I would go to work in the supply chain for nuclear weapons.
Deterrence and game theory are very real.
Or might be deep inside they relly care about it, but that $2,000,000 / year salary and $10,000,000 stock option just overpowered them.
Safety my ass.
Also with international cooperation like how humanity regulate actually dangerous stuff: virus and vaccine research and nuclear energy.
Not hidden behind walls of 10 commercial organizations where each pushing for commercial adoption and IPO like ASAP before bubble bursts.
Not lying and scaremongering public into how their models will replace everyone tomorrow or destroy civilization via cyberattacks.
Notice how almost no Universities are producing large models?
A key problem is that orgs can't get enough funds to stay on the frontier. And they believe they must be on the frontier to do (and apply) safety research. OpenAI needed to spin off a for-profit subsidiary to accept investment to build things.
And it seem(ed) hard to get one government to fund and take safety seriously, let alone an international cooperation.
If they started a university/gov cooperative to solve this, do you think they would do less of the "scaremongering of the public" talk? My guess it that it would be similar.
The same kind of restrictions that you hint at (eg, treating it like a public virus research) are why they rub a lot of people the wrong way in the corporate world, I think. Normally companies downplay the risks of their own products. See cigarette companies. Anthropic do still publish safety research and red teaming info. But I do think they honestly believe they can't do this work without the resources of a company, and they were burnt by the non-profit structure (Anthropic has a "Long-Term Benefit Trust" instead).
We should definitely keep them to account, but I don't personally think Anthropic have acted in a way broadly inconsistent with safety belief yet. Many of these decisions are self-serving too (eg. protecting models) so they also haven't been seriously tested, either. But the individuals do have a very long history of talking about it (including hurting their own reputation) from even before the chatpgt-moment money train rolled in.
edit: for clarity, but still messily/quickly written
https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/op...
Marketing or actual fear? We’ve got 5 and 5.5 out now… he compared 5 to the Manhattan project. AI may one day be an economic Manhattan project but GPT 5 wasn’t it.
It’s a meme because they overdo it.
Given that, they have a choice only between excessive caution or recklessness.
Would you rather they acted like the tobacco companies and downplayed known risks, e.g. all the times LLM output got in the news already for dangerously bad advice, sychophantic encouragement of mental health issues, finding previously unknown security vulnerabilities etc.?
Well, they've done that too, if we're looking for reasons to doubt their sincere concern about it.
It all sounds pretty accurate and reasonable to me if you watch it.
So it doesn't really matter what he thinks
Truman was totally in the dark until April 1945 by which time the bulk of the PoC and weapons prep work was done and the project was running fully independently w/o POTUS involvement.
That is not how it works. It is not “splitered”, there is no divided attention.
No good reason really, it just sounds cooler.
The sensation I’m left with is a handful of goons making up new IPO math thanks to a specific constellation of political forces, using access and favour with those forces to bake themselves into the defence industry, and that the taxpayer and investor will be left holding the bag when reality rears its head. But in the short term, even as a clear ploy, it’s super profitable for all the oligarchs and hedge funds flush with recovery cash.
Like Enron, there was big profits to make if you knew what they were doing. Tinkerbell math with undeniable profit potential for a select few.
And then somehow came to conclusion that the only way to address that risk was to go ahead and spend a gigantic amount of effort and resources to build exactly that superintelligence...
Why would they sell there services to Palantir and/or to the military then?
"Why did they open an orphanage instead of pouring acid into a town water tower?!?"
They don't. LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence and everyone working on LLMs knows this (with a few eccentric exceptions).
The "never superintelligence" part I'll buy, though only in the sense of sample efficiency and generalisation ("quality superintelligence"), as they clearly have a superhuman breadth of skills, and run at superhuman speed.
"Never" out-of-control is obviously falsified by the already existing headlines about times they've gone out of control… in part, in some cases, because of their superhuman speed.
If you're asleep at the wheel, you're legally responsible for the car crash, but the car itself was the thing which by crashing caused injuries.
If you deliberately relinquished control of your computer to OpenClaw, you're (I hope) legally responsible for whatever it does, but that doesn't stop it bankrupting you or deleting all your emails or whatever it was you connected it to.
DNA printers exist and are a thing. In 2010 we could all tell ourselves that no sane person would ever let some future AGI "out of the box" and onto the internet. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, do you seriously expect nobody to connect an LLM to a DNA printer, despite this being a terrible idea, given all the other things they've connected LLMs to despite it being a terrible idea?
That's absurd. The distinction is at the heart of the entire discussion.
It's fine if you want to discuss the disruptive effects of LLMs in the hands of the masses, but that's not what anyone means when they say "out-of-control" in the context of the ASI meme
On the contrary.
The e.g. paperclip maximiser isn't "an AI decides to make paperclips", it is "some idiot tells an AI to make paperclips and leaves it unsupervised".
Even when people were priding themselves on plain just not believing Yudkowsky's claims that him role-playing as an AI could talk people into letting him out of the box*, the entire point was "let's get an AI to do work so we don't have to".
The entire point of AI has always been to automate stuff, to let ourselves not have to think about the stuff it does. Same as industrial machinery, and it took us long enough to sort out workplace health and safety and emergency off-switches for those. Or even more basic things like not having kids dart in and out of the unstoppable moving steam looms while they were in motion.
We are really, really slow at safety for this kind of thing.
LLMs didn't emerge by chance, they are the culmination of decades of research intersecting with brute force engineering rigor in a perfect storm of innovation. You're not just going to stumble into an alternative approach by dumping loads of cash into research.
Many of the insights accumulated in the decades up to now will probably prove useful for creating non-LLM AI, and the researchers can use LLM AI to speed up their research into non-LLM AI.
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
This is not a contradiction.
These things can all be true:
1. That they were afraid of ASI
2. That they continue to be afraid of ASI
3. That they recognize that LLMs aren't in fact a path to ASI
4. That the current models aren't the existential danger they'd have us believe
5. That they're claiming they are because it makes for good marketing
I don't doubt they may have held genuine fears in the past, but those are long gone by now.
- there are people who are sincerely concerned about model safety who work at OpenAI and Anthropic
- there are people who are using this concern to generate fear to sell a product who work at OpenAI and Anthropic
It makes sense to be cognizant of the apparent conflict of interest and not take things that at face value, especially when there is so much money involved.
Besides, when has the US government been known to do things like this proactively? The phone call came from inside the house.
GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.
We can argue about sincerity, but I don't think we can argue about utter historical incompetence in assessing the risks. It's one or the other.
Either way the evidence seems to indicate we should not listen to AI companies about the risks of AI. Which is not to say that there aren't risks, just that the dealer is the least credible review.
No, it was "let's set a precident while these things are not too dangerous, c'mon guys we know y'all can reproduce this easily".
I'd say their pecuniary interest is a reason one might plausibly doubt their sincerity, as are their continued efforts to build and sell access to the tools.
With hindsight, does that hold? If not, then how would we know a model is truly dangerous to release?
Ironic then, that both companies are in an out-of-control race to create a superintelligence.
this means nothing
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
If you want to be taken seriously, provide data, proof, so that any outside observer can independently come to the same conclusion instead of taking your word for it. Asking people to trust you for [reasons?] and that you somehow for some reason are right and the other is wrong regardless of if they agree or not. This is the imposition of a viewpoint instead of winning your case, which is not a sensible point of view, and definitely not how you influence opinions.
Hell no, can’t trust a single word.
What do they stand to gain by fearmongering their models as powerful threats? Clout, funding, fanfare, discussion, limelight, funding, funding, stronger IPO, valuation, funding.
What cybersecurity threshold was crossed by mythos that wasn't already crossed by 4.8/5.5? Crickets from 99% of those who have had access.
Have they pulled the same stunts multiple times before with previous models? Check.
You're blind if you dont think that greed and marketing are behind most things you see and hear about when gigantic corporations are involved.
I don't think anthropic or OAI are evil, but its clear both have contracts/connections with Dod and/or Palantir. Both are powered largely by greed still. If you actually want an example of these sincere founders you think OAI/anthropic are run by... look at Ilya at SSI or something. Please open your eyes and stop spreading your opinions on things you clearly have no clue about.
they are more than happy to build the things for themselves
it is all two-faced behavior of the exact kind of manipulators that crave power
Going for months claiming how good mythos is for security cuz too powerful is their own making.
Another fun little gem of information, government has something called Mayhem
> the autonomous Robo-Hacker AI called Mayhem that’s now in charge of protecting the Pentagon’s most critical systems
Guess Mythos and Mayhem had a chat
The amount of self-confidence and belief it takes to get a company through the funding rounds and burn through borrowed money to rise to the top requires an absurd amount of self-delusion.
Oh please. Do people really believe this or shit like "Don't do evil". Companies get founded by all kind of people and ideals. They all go out the window quickly.
Why are they both rushing to IPO now then?
I suspect what happened is the classic problem: you were sincere, then someone showed you a pile of money bigger than you could possibly imagine and you started to make excuses - Anthropic has a lot of EA people, so the excuse "Imagine how many lives you could save with this much money"[0] is very tempting, especially if all you have to do is diverge slightly from your plan.
[0]: the excuse is even true! You can get a lot of malaria nets/vaccines for 1 million.
Why? Because they said it a few times? Then if they know the risk, why do they still making it? Comes out the "some one will do it eventually, better be us 'good' people to do it first" talking point?
See? It is a marketing strategy after all. These all talks, it's all to fit themselves into the "'good' people" narrative. It's a centuries old strategy to shield it's user from responsibilities while luring the support from the stupid.
However, the most harmful damage, which is mass layoffs, is already partially done. This could really kill, a massive genocide even, by making people jobless and potentially incomeless. And it is shown that these tech CEOs, they don't care any bit of that beyond the point "I've already told you so".
He is not even a researcher or an engineer.
And Dario broke up with OpenAI and founded Anthropic because he didn't like Sam's and OpenAI's vision.
"founded by people who believe..." is doing a lot of work and it is hard to believe that in ernest given the sketchy past of the same people.
Most original higher up people who cared about safety and allignment in OpenAI have left.
"Our product is so good the US had to make it illegal for foreigners" is a hell of a marketing slogan.
Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.
Not really. There aren't any other choices, and the PRC also heavily utilizes export controls [0].
This is why sovereign AI has become important, as can be seen with EU NatSec uses cases tending to use Mistral [1] and Indian governments starting to use Sarvam [2].
That said, for most commercial usecases, older generations of Opus as well as enterprise grade GPT and Gemini are fairly good.
The distilled OSS models are alright for hobbyists but if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini (most hobbyists don't get access to these) you see how far behind the open weight models are.
Even in China, traditionally open minded models teams like Alibaba's Qwen are looking to become more restricted given the org changes [3].
Also, Corporate RFCs now demand final say on model used and depending on the geo, this can be a dealbreaker (eg. An American financial institution will absolutely blacklist a vendor if they use a Chinese model and same in reverse and European defense vendors mandate sovereign EU models depending on the opportunity).
[0] - https://www.allbrightlaw.com/EN/10475/f9d4055e47e81afb.aspx
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/mistral-defen...
[2] - https://www.sarvam.ai/blogs/partnerships-with-indian-states
[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/b39da303-3188-447b-8b65-3dd8dad8b...
Matters not for open weight models, no?
> if you have actually used unrestricted and enterprise grade versions of Claude, Mythos, GPT, and Gemini you see how far behind the open weight models are.
I really do feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is often better than current Sonnet is, in the general case.
Opus 4.7 is a solid step above Sonnet, and Fable was a solid step above Opus 4.7. I've only had Fable for a few days, obviously, but I was decently impressed after Opus 4.8 being a downright disappointment for me (it's just too buggy; I had it go out of control 3 separate times on things Opus 4.7 never had any trouble with.) I still ran into limitations. It's not world-endingly great.
So, based on that, I think DeepSeek V4 Pro is, ignoring multi-modal capabilities, about a couple solid steps behind. Assuming model iteration will continue to decelerate, especially as Anthropic heads into IPO, I'm guessing that DeepSeek will probably be able to strike back with something further along. Of course we'll see how able and willing they are to stay open weight, but they've done well so far so, no reason to doubt them at the moment.
(There are some models that claim to be ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro. I've tried some of them and really not been that impressed. Maybe it's a me issue.)
Now I reckon that most people just simply don't really need Mythos/Fable for most of what they do and using Mythos/Fable tokens in place of Sonnet-tier models would not make any sense. At my job we already mostly just use Sonnet as it is. I'm sure there is some cutting-edge research where you want the absolute best model available and sure, in that case, you're stuck with Anthropic for the moment.
But is that really everyone? After all, while Mythos was dominating the hype cycles, quite a lot of impressive LLM-assisted CVEs dropped that were not linked to Mythos.
This might be the trigger for creating other choices. Not within a month, but things can change quickly.
But this has left a sour taste in my mouth. What if I relied on it for mission critical business processes?
This is potentially far worse than say a gmail account going down. It's the stuff of nightmare fuel.
Not having an alternative is a massive risk for any business.
Edit: Can't reply
> Time to build fabs back in the states
We are and did. The Intel and TSMC fabs have already started 2nm fabrication.
Also, the EU, Japan, SK, ASEAN, and India are not supportive of using Chinese tech after China export controlled rare earth exports last years [0].
Software supply chain regulations also make utilizing Chinese software risky for ExChina players and make using ExChina tech risky for Chinese players.
Expect to see RFCs now demanding visibility into what models are used and right of refusal - this is already the norm in F1000s. Similar ones are likely to arise in the EU as well with some of the upcoming industrial policy changes being proposed.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-is-making-it-harde...
you think its that hard to get trade secrets from some openai or anthropic engineer if you promise them anonymity and a new better paid position? hell they might even give it away for free if they think what their company is doing is morally wrong. know how is not source code, you cant catch it with dlp or online leak scanners. you would need 24/7 combined human and electronic surveillance and thats something even the cia reserves for top level targets, it takes too much manpower to use it on everyone.
SMIC hired hundreds of TSMC employees and now its a couple years away from 3nm equivalent chips in full production. export controls only work against poor countries with less advanced industry like russia. china has the resources and export controls give the motivation. and if the eu/us relations get even worse i wouldnt be surprised if the dutch government let asml start selling euv machines to everyone just to get back at trump.
Source: https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/nv...
Their IPO is well and truly fucked now. This also means no other frontier lab in the US is allowed to exceed Opus 4.8 capabilities.
If you're a luddite or a decel you should literally be dancing in the streets right now. And, if you're a tankie you'll be dancing right next to them. And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
Is it really? It was limited release anyway (like hypebeast merch!). Everything people are gonna talk about for a week is gonna be about how Fable was so cool that it got banned by the feds. If it's just the Trump admin being the Trump admin, Amodei is just gonna have to pay up as a racket / marketing expense. Or it is like I'm suspecting and this was pre-bribed and the ban is kabuki theater.
>And, if you were hoping for a Star Trek-like future, you just adjusted your timeline for the worse.
The funny thing is that solar and batteries advancements are actually this, not LLMs, but your framing kinda fits anyways.
No no no, dont say it here. Green tech is now owned by China that wants to destroy everything.
And US bigtech working hard to save everything by building safe controlled super AI that will burn all the energy it has access to.
In the future, everyone obviously would be running nuclear powered cars. It was just an engineering problem to be solved. Ford made the Ford Nucleon prototype in 1958.
The nuclear optimism completely blinded people to the ridiculous idea of an individual handling nuclear material for personal use.
The AI bubble error is this idea that everyone is going to have "AGI" in their pocket. It is just a completely absurd idea that is not going to happen.
Fable was interesting from what I tried but nothing close to AGI yet here we are. The models don't get smarter and LESS restricted from here.
To me, right away it seemed that the "Mythos moment" was extraordinarily bearish for the assumptions the AI bubble is built on.
Star Trek is cyber socialism, with the means of production owned by the Federation.
China is the only player working towards this.
This is quite clearly corporate capture of the white house by a competitor influencing policy, but it's hard to imagine something that plays more into anthropic's hand. They now own the model that was so good the US government made them shut it off.
And so if this policy holds, Anthropic has functionally had Fable killed by government intervention, and in a logically consistent world, this would imply all other US-based AI labs may also never exceed existing (read: Opus) capabilities.
What interesting times we live in, indeed.
And what does it mean for indirect access to the models, through say agents working off ticket systems.
The problem here is that the valuations of these AI companies was based on the fact that they'd keep improving models. A company that just serves the latest Opus isn't worth trillions.
It can't get out.
Not if it's a good jail.
Solved.
The reality of Republican free markets were about compounding and growing big business and resource extraction at the expense of everyone else.
The rest is all about convincing suckers that getting kicked in the balls is good for them. The most obvious example being farmers. Most aspects of agriculture have been consolidated into oblivion and the markets are not super functional. 80% of the dairy operations in my state are out of business. 60 companies dominate eggs in the US - there used to be 3 in my city.
It’s not such a terrible tension to live with. We can have, say, equal rights to life while also allowing unequal rights to gold nuggets. You might have more gold nuggets than I do but we both have the right to live in peace.
The far ends of the spectrum though involve, respectively, redistribution of gold nuggets to all, and at the other end a commitment to survival of the fittest that extends to viewing any kind of market regulation as commie bullshit.
Snowball did nothing wrong!
Instead it’s simply the answer to the question, “how do you convince the last vestiges of the labor unions to drink poison and vote for the people who openly plan to destroy them.”
You're using terms incorrectly. Conservatism has nothing to do with free market.
The people who care most about free markets are liberals (called libertarians in the US).
Presumably you mean to say "Republicans". And your answer is "under Trump". But it's important to note that Trump merely took the Republican party back to its roots. Traditionally, Republicans were more protectionists than the Democrats. Regan changed that, and Trump reverted.
But what annoys me about people who criticize this change, is that it often comes from people who don't believe in free markets.
---
As a side note, I think the reason Americans use these terms so wrongly is because of the 2 party system. It forces all ideologies into two camps and for Americans "conservatism", "libertarianism", "nationalism", "fascism" are all the same.
Republican != Conservative… and in reality Trump is neither, but at the same time, the type of Democrat he was no longer exists. It’s also a mistake to confuse Republican for Establishment GOP.
As someone not using the technology, I'm fine with that :) Intellectual property laundering was never a good thing. Glad we can begone with it.
It just means the government decides who gets to profit off of laundered IP, which is arguably even worse.
Everyone? There's worlds outside of the United States government overreach.
Or maybe Anthropic isn't playing chess at all - these models sell themselves they are so useful and the Reddit/HN crowd is just full of larping tech bros commenting conspiracy theories non stop.
Serves them right
You don't get to have your cake and eat it by making the (supposedly) world ending model but also getting on a moral high horse.
It's the hypocrisy and obvious mendacity that's obnoxious to me.
Having said that, OpenAI is just as bad (probably worse) and they're friendly with the admin, so this isn't really a case of any kind of justice unfortunately
You can release the powerful model to companies that will use it to fix instead of break.
If you really think a technology could be dangerous then the only morally correct thing to do is not help to create it.
They're not doing that, so either they're lying about it being dangerous, or they're lying about the fact they care (maybe a bit of both)
Nuclear can be used for great ill or great good. Today, most actual use is for great good.
By your logic we should have stopped at the discovery of fire.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-halts-access-to-top-ai...
Unfortunately though, they're not smart enough to realize the long term damage to the industry that they're doing without any hint of remorse will negatively affect them and will have the opposite effect: Highlighting how imperative it is we all switch to open-source and remove our reliance entirely from them.
So not only are they going to take the whole industry down out of their own greed and stupidity and ruin it for everyone in the short term, but they're going to put themselves and the other labs out of business in the long term. Well done Anthropic. Well done Dario. You played yourself. 5d chess.
> To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Is this Dario leveraging it into a ban on open models?
Step 1: "OMG, the AI hacked a researcher eating a sandwhich in the park!"
Step 2: Journalists use that great clickbait to generate profit, which generates publicity for Anthropic
Step 3: Rinse repeat
If the threat of LLMs was treated relative to the actual capabilities of them, and we weren't all being lied to by Anthropic and their army of millions of social media bots and backing media companies and mouthpieces, we'd be going in a much healthier direction. Working out the kinks/supply chain risks and developing sound, long-term countermeasures to the ACTUAL risks.
The only threat to the world is if progress is not open-sourced, democratized and in lockstep with capability. The moment it becomes a scenario of: Only a small group get access to frontier intelligence, is when it gives that small group power over everyone else in the world, and wildly increases the risk of a nuclear level event that WILL be exploited eventually - as the divide between the haves and the have nots accelerates in an exponential fashion. Bad AI is countered with an abundance of good AI that has been used to stay ahead of bad AI. The moment your bad AI outpowers the army of good AI it is game over for humanity. The strength of open-source and open-access AI is the difference between humanities permanent enslavement or extinction versus a prosperous future.
It doesn't help that most of the employees at Anthropic have willingly sold their souls out of short term greed and gaslight themselves into thinking that they're actually doing the right thing to justify their own greed to themselves, while building up an echo-chamber and culture of feel good lies within the company so they can sleep at night, and pat each other on the back. They go along with this because they get paid massive chunks of money from Anthropic, and their shares will be worth more money if Anthropic can swallow the worlds economy at the expense and enslavement of everyone else. What good is that money when you have to sell out humanity in the progress though. You, at Anthropic, is that the legacy you want to leave?
People need to start calling this out before it's far too late. If you work at Anthropic - time to start talking to your colleagues in an honest manner.
Because this wouldn't be considered a jailbreak with any other model; which would just do the request.
OpenAI's models are very good, they have refusals + a government ID verification story for cyber access (I don't think they prevent non-US nationals, but I don't know this). What they don't have is Project Glasswing and all the hand wringing about how they're going to end the world in public.
I hope Anthropic pulls their head out of their ass and just starts acting like a normal company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies at Senate artificial intelligence hearing | full video“ (2023)
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5742548/anthropic-penta...
It'll be "resolved" within a few days.
We need a neutral regulatory body for AI with objective, predictable standards. Not random bans based on whether the president likes you. Unless GPT 5.6 also gets a ban, this will look extremely bad for the administration.
Our economy depends on fair application of rule of law. Not anti-growth cronyism based on who is friends Trump.
The precedent set here would be broad and scary. Treating any API like an export makes it very easy for the administration to bully companies they disagree with.
Chinese here, no racism card here please.
just imagine a world without the US acting as the world police, you'd be seeing armed conflicts in middle east, Africa, South East Asia, even in Europe and North East Asia. that would make China extremely hard to extract 1 trillion USD trade surplus a year, which is now required for China to maintain employment back at home.
without the US, even for a relatively stable global environment, trade won't be possible as most countries are not capable of providing goods and services wanted by China. Their currencies are literally junk (including Japanese Yen and Euro), Chinese are not going to take those junk in exchange for real goods. Trade is now possible because, by one way or another, those countries have USD to pay. those USD are backed by 300+ million highly productive Americans who repeatedly proved that they can create values in the scale of dozens of trillions a year.
the best part of this whole thing - America is singlehandedly footing the whole bill to provide such trade friendly environment for China for FREE. this is not cold war v2, back in the days of cold war, the US didn't help USSR to such extreme extent.
Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world. Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc. No real restrictions on duping products, so execution often becomes the winning ticket. That's all pretty open and good for consumers.
You could argue they won't allow SOTA models to be exported but it doesn't really have anything to do with Chinese culture not being compatible with openness.
that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open - they know full well that anything made publicly available would be cloned/copied within days.
it is not only a part of the competition common in all countries, there are unique reasons in China - millions of graduate engineers join workforce every single year, there are not that many projects they can work on. starting copying & cloning some existing stuff even at someone's own cost is a pretty effective way to get into the game.
> Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc.
There is this old Chinese saying "Teach your apprentice and your own ruin follows" (教会徒弟饿死师傅), that has been telling a completely different story for thousands of years. When they don't even want to hand over tech know-hows to their own apprentice, why would anyone be expecting them to have the desire to share it publicly?
You say that you're Chinese so there's no such stereotyping involved, but actually Chinese people commit this sin against themselves all the time.
己欲立而立人，己欲达而达人
"wishing to stand, one helps others stand; wishing to succeed, one helps others succeed"
> that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open
But the AI labs _are_ often being open. And cloning stuff more generally doesn't really require OSS anyway. Product features are easily cloned in most cases, without any secret knowledge.
It really depends on whether the Chinese government wants to make good money or "win" the current AI bubbke.
Issues I'd been kinda circling around for weeks, long standing errors in some long-running sync operations for a project I'm working on, all solved the same day the model dropped. Just incredible. And it's effectively a lot more token efficient I find as well (less so with sub-agents). Just areas where Opus 4.8 would occassionally get confused or venture down the wrong direction, just doesn't happen nearly as much as with Fable 5.
Like what is everyone who is dissing on this model / Anthropic using day to day? For me it's just an incredible jump in intelligence. So much so and so quickly after the modest bump from 4.8, that I really can understand why they are starting to shout warnings.
It's way more _proactive_ than the old models, sometimes in ways it shouldn't really be proactive. But it produces _more_ slop than 4.8, and I have not seen any real breakthroughs from it.
Edit: to give an example, I'm working on integrating a self-hosting auth provider into our app. So I gave it a prompt to create a "bootstrap" script that would create pre-configured settings for the local installation.
Fable did it. And then proceeded (unprompted) to test it by killing the running server, removing the database, re-initializing and (trying) to verify that the bootstrap produced identical results.
Well, yeah. Great. I can see how this "bias for action" works for security research and one-shot projects, not so sure about regular development.
I just tried that with Opus, and it produced a similar bootstrap script but did not start the test by itself.
Personally I love when the AI has this amount of problem solving. But you have to build the environment around it that encourages solving problems right the first time, versus taking the easy way out and hacking out a solution.
It’s just all about constraining the behavior of the LLM into productive and permanent directions. The more advanced it gets, the more it feels like designing engineering processes rather than coding. Personally it’s a fun change of pace and it’s giving me a lot of opportunities to look at the project in working on at a wider lens. I find having to pump out features makes you myopic in a sense. I really miss the control I had over writing it all by hand, but I love just being able to build software. At the end of the day, what do you want? That’s the question I’ve had to grapple recently.
Personally I don’t mind switching gears to the bigger picture of why the software exists and what purpose it serves
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
They ultimately got what they wanted.
No, it's not what they wanted. As it says in your quote, they wanted "a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles."
* Free marketing before the IPO, demonstrating how already powerful their frontier models are.
* Governments to intervene in the rollout of these frontier models and blocking their access to whoever they want.
* A strong reason to apply these further restrictions onto releasing powerful open weight models to the public. (which is entirely a business threat to them.)
Given that they accepted funding from the Gulf states [0] despite it conflicting with their own "principles", I think we are well beyond the point of what they write / say vs to what they are actually doing.
This drama just tells us that the government declared them as the winner that has the most powerful model.
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-to-seek...
This sort of attention is exactly what they would to showcase the powerful capabilities of their latest models.
The valuation of the AI labs is based on continual improvements of their models.
Open weight models are going to catch up to Opus 4.8 and at that point the model is a pure commodity.
While I do agree, no-one here made the initial claim on their valuation and especially suggesting that "Serving Opus 4.8" alone was worth a trillion+ valuation.
> Open weight models are going to catch up to Opus 4.8 and at that point the model is a pure commodity.
Good. We should all hope that happens.
Now we are getting reactive, arbitrary and capricious enforcement; rules rushed out the door; classified evals. The worst of both worlds.
They got what they claim they wanted for PR purposes. Like when a billionaire says they should be taxed more, or when Sam Altman says the public should get some of that AI wealth.
But they never thought it would actually happen.
Oops.
I wouldn’t the surprised if all this were actually orchestrated, it all seems too convenient.
What is a “foreign national” is more what I’m wondering. Like is it a “Non-US Citizen”? Do US citizens abroad count?
The following quoted text is from the Definitions section of 8 USC § 1101, which is reproduced at [0]. (Though, you will probably have to scroll up a bit to be able to read subsection (a)(21), which is the thing I'm linking to.)
(21) The term “national” means a person owing permanent allegiance to a state.
(22) The term “national of the United States” means (A) a citizen of the United States, or (B) a person who, though not a citizen of the United States, owes permanent allegiance to the United States.
(23) The term “naturalization” means the conferring of nationality of a state upon a person after birth, by any means whatsoever.
EDIT: For a more official source of this information, you might be able to check out [3] and/or [4]. After examining and interacting with those pages, one might see why one might go to an unofficial source for casual inspection of this information.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101#a_21
[1] I think they can be.
[2] I'm very uncertain.
[3] <https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...>
[4] <https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title8/chapter12/subc...>
"The United States Department of State defines a “foreign national” as anyone who is not a “U.S. person.” A “U.S. person” is any one of the following: U.S. citizen; Lawful permanent resident (green card holder); and “Protected Person” i.e. political asylum holder." [0]
A foreign national is a person or organization who is not a citizen of the United States, and who is a citizen of a foreign country. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses the term "alien" to refer to a person who is not a United States citizen, and does not use the term "foreign national."[1]
[0] https://www.orc.msstate.edu/faq/what-department-states-defin...
> Foreign national: A person without U.S. citizenship or nationality (may include a stateless person). This term is synonymous with “alien”It's kind of a weird definition. I would guess most people's nationality is more an accident of birth than anything else.
Unfortunately there also a possibility this what they intentionally wanted to try regulatory capture to get rid of competitors.
You see the state of the country and you think it’s a nefarious master plan instead of a bunch of opportunistic people taking advantage of an overworked, overstimulated populace who forget to vote or believe stupid slogans on TV.
Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out????
Anthropic is calling for regulation. For example they endorsed CA SB-53 that even OpenAI and Google thought was too much: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-is-endorsing-sb-53
They have spoken publicly about how they want open models banned (they call them Chinese models).
They might not want this specific action, but they do want regulation on their own terms. That really is regulatory capture.
> Nobody is doing this intentionally. Have you not paid attention to how quickly idiot stuff gets found out
They don't think is is "idiot stuff" - they are doing it openly and shouting to everyone who will listen! Read Dario's latest essay[1]:
> Many policymakers are showing increased openness to taking action, and it's been encouraging to see our peers come around to the same positions we've been advocating for over the past few years.
[snip]
> Thus, in 2025, Anthropic supported transparency legislation, helping to pass SB 53 in California, RAISE in NY, SB 315 in Illinois (in early 2026), and advocating for a transparency standard at the federal level.
[snip]
> It is time to go beyond transparency to more serious and binding regulation of AI.
> I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action.
> The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks.
I'm not sure why you think they don't want to be "found out"!
Whenever I hear some octogenarian senator babble about the evils of distillation I assume Amodei (or maybe Altman) fed them the script, word for word.
Over worked and over stimulated is the intentional method and means these people well aware of the neurological consequences rely on
Do you really not think that people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei angle for regulatory capture? It happens in every other industry, from automobiles to tax preparation software. Why do you think that AI is any different?
Thats incredibly infuriating to hear someone say.
Obviously no one is absolute control of everything but physics is essentially shows nothing other than information determinism. There has to have been a thought of intention in the minds of these people as they play in the largest arena publicly.
"No one is doing it intentionally because I think theyre dumber then I think other people think they are"
"They're taking advantage of people intentionally"
"People dont have political power to do anything about their victory laps"
Hint: it can be both.
I mean, better safe than sorry, right Dario?
You simply cannot apply any sort of actual logic to the reasoning of the current U.S. government's actions... They just "do stuff" because they feel like it, with no clear thought whatsoever of any potential consequences that may occur.
This is how the UK government got the banks through the 2008 financial crisis.
As soon as the nation owns enough stock to profit from government decisions (and to compound the influence of those decisions) you essentially have a partially nationalised business.
10% of OpenAI might easily be enough to reach a meaningful "partially nationalised" threshold, once you factor in any holdings in federal pension plans and the active level of government policymaking.
It is very clear Sam Altman wants this, too, because this whole "take 10%" thing in Trump's mind was his idea back in early 2025, and OpenAI have been following up on it recently.
They want the US government to be the bag holder.
Time to fire up the printers I guess.
And the money for this _deal_ was primarily from the CHIPS act funds they were already awarded but had not been sent to them yet
> Of the total, $5.7 billion of the government funds will come from grants under the CHIPS Act that had been awarded but not paid, and $3.2 billion will come from separate government awards under a program to make secure chips.[1]
This was at gunpoint from the government’s monopoly on violence.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/22/intel-goverment-equity-stake...
The government had passed a law appropriating funds to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing in the US and spent some of it buying intel stock. How is that the government seizing Intel at gunpoint? I mean aside from the libertarian argument that the taxation necessary to raise those funds is theft?
Yes, there is a gap between "taking a stake" and nationalizing one, but..
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-says-his-team-will-lo...
AI is a national security issue. Best accept that as fact, or you won't see it coming.
I think David Sacks is right, if you are saying you are building nuclear bombs, then prepared to be regulated like one.
There is no eating it while having it
And just to be clear, that's a maximum of one right in this situation.
But it changes little.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
For example, in the first 30 seconds, he says that at the beginning of the Iran War, AI was used to strike 900 targets in 12 hours. Which he calls "unprecedented" but then never backs up.
For context, in the 1991 Gulf War "Operation Desert Storm" the U.S. struck about 1500 targets[1][2][3] in 12 hours.
[1] https://www.mitchellaerospacepower.org/app/uploads/2021/02/a... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxRgfBXn6Mg&t=401s [3] https://gulfwar.org/gulf-war-1991-timeline-desert-storm/ -
They are NOT "em-proof" --- what they are is electronic warfare immune.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou... Published this year, but talking about a trial 2 years ago.
Blocking any leading edge AI model changes nothing. We (humans) have a long history of determined attackers finding creative and unexpected solutions.
What the AI we have, the stuff that is already PUBLICLY AVAILABLE, is good enough to shrink the time for developing one of those creative solutions into a working tool/weapon.
Edit: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/06/12/8038963/ They are using ai for terminal guidance on Russian logistics (red vs green reticle if you choose to watch the video). Considering the progress on YOLO (and running on sub watt processors) it being able to do this work "onboard" should be shocking to no one.
There is /so/ much stuff on the internet that just needed someone to spend enough time on it.