It’s the thousand cuts problem. Look at the stories over the past couple of weeks: silent downgrades that they then walked back, billing errors with claude code, highly sensitive classifiers that made it impossible to do simple things (I asked a few botany questions and my very long chat got lobotomized), and several more. The ban is only part of it. It’s the whole rollout and the fact that it won’t be available in subscriptions in a week or two.

> It's not clear they did anything wrong.

Fable will literally sabotage you if it thinks you're trying to compete with Anthropic.

It's a good reason to not tie your company's success to US based hosted AI though. I've started experimenting with GLM 5.2 and other than the tooling needing a lot more setup once you're there it works pretty well.

I'm hoping that some relatively cost-effective self-hosting solutions come about as a result of Hopper hardware being sold off as they're retired from DC use.

Perception is a lot more important than reason when it comes to trust. Whether or not we like that

We have no idea what GPT 5.6 is going to be.

And 5.5 still ranks higher than Opus 4.8.

Silicon valley may be a low trust society but I havent given up hope on the rest of it yet.

This is assuming the whole "AI safety" thing was anything more than Silicon Valley kool aid. The government just bought into the marketing and radical safety woo woo wholesale and panicked.

You could legitimately argue this is a unique situation, a brief window where cybersecurity is being disrupted by new harnesses + a strong model. But that will be fleeting as other models and products adapt very quickly, and the long term benefits of keeping it from the market are questionable at best.

It's not a coincidence the export control was dropped after Dario (who is a hardcore AI safety activist much like Ilya Sutskever) was replaced by Tom Brown in the government negotiations.