6/17/2026 at 7:46:44 PM
The AI labs look rather naive here.You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.
Their new argument now seems be that this was marketing hype/fluff that backfired, in a pretty obvious and predicable way, and now they’re trying to reset the conversation.
by cmiles8
6/17/2026 at 8:32:02 PM
> You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.True, you can't. But, you can think certain regulations are helpful and certain other regulations are not. And you can be annoyed when unhelpful "regulations" are put in place.
This is like if I say that pitbulls are dangerous, and then the government comes and shoots my pitbull, who I've spent a lot of effort training to not be dangerous. Then you say "well you said pitbulls were dangerous, so you can't really complain." Well, I can complain because If you took me seriously, you wouldn't have responded by shooting only my pitbull!
Think of what incentives this creates for other people. Do you think that OpenAI will be candid about the possible dangers of their technology now? They might not even release it now, seeing that Anthropic releasing their model was what got it export-controlled.
by ChadNauseam
6/18/2026 at 3:18:17 PM
If the authorities see that you publicly and widely shout out that pitbulls are dangerous, but quietly tell me that you’ve spent a lot of effort training it not to be dangerous without sharing how in public, I think it is warranted for the authorities to be skeptical.by claw-el
6/17/2026 at 8:58:03 PM
The act of shooting the pitbull makes for good dramatics, but you would get zero sympathy from me if your local government banned pitbull ownership. e.g. Ontario bans pitbulls. I don't have a problem with that.by dogleash
6/18/2026 at 12:25:41 PM
You don't need/use pitbulls, but what if you (and many many others) wanted and needed Fable?I for one was late to the bandwagon, and when I had the use-case for it - the govt pulled the rug. So yeah, I'm a bit salty about the whole endeavour.
I will also say that the security concerns are probably very real (and they have been from the day ChatGPT-3.5 came our). I guess I can be salty about it and still be wrong from their perspective. The govt likely understands the fragility of their infrastructure better than us and is likely aware what this could unleash for their systems.
by sheepscreek
6/18/2026 at 1:20:06 PM
Because it was the basis for the analogy: breed-based dog bans are idiotic, given mixed genetics, temperament, and training.Said as the owner of a pitbull, who is the sweetest and gentlest dog I've owned. And I've had multiple labradors.
by ethbr1
6/18/2026 at 3:05:46 PM
Sorry, this argument doesn't work. Anthropic claims Mythos is in a class of its own, the evidence corroborates this and the government believes it.The government shot your pit bull because you were going around telling everyone who would listen that it was the most dangerous, viscous one on the cul de sac and you've trained it to kill people and they took you seriously.
by catigula
6/18/2026 at 10:48:05 PM
> Anthropic claims Mythos is in a class of its own, the evidence corroborates this and the government believes it.They didn't release Mythos, they released Fable, which was Mythos + a classifier that detected potentally-dangerous prompts and blocked them. Everyone who used it noticed how aggressive the classifier was. It would trigger constantly over totally innocent stuff.
by ChadNauseam
6/18/2026 at 11:27:12 PM
A classifier that was exposed as non-efficacious for a product touted as having extremely dangerous capabilities.I can generate hacks trivially by asking any model to fix open source code.
Let’s not pretend you get to have your cake and eat it too.
by catigula
6/17/2026 at 8:14:00 PM
I suspect they're taking this as a win either way, because they're still plastering "Fable 5 unavailable" on their product and using it as an opportunity to keep themselves in the spotlight as they head to IPO.There's really not even a ban here, they could slot in Fable under the Opus label and no one would really be able to tell. It's all part of the same show to pump up valuation.
by micromacrofoot
6/17/2026 at 8:25:30 PM
I bet they will do a touch of RLHF and re-naming the moment OAI releases a comparable model. Otherwise, sure, they can just bask in the drama for a bit.by bloppe
6/17/2026 at 8:19:38 PM
Well Anthropic would love some regulatory capture.by mips_avatar
6/17/2026 at 8:28:43 PM
> You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.It's entirely possible that models could be "dangerous" to fully release to the general public without guardrails and at the same time the government majorly overreacted in this case.
Releasing Mythos to selected researchers and companies at least gives those researchers a head start at addressing vulnerabilities before the model hits mainstream.
by drtz
6/17/2026 at 8:31:26 PM
Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to Mythos, and a low-priority one at that? It’s clear that other models are quite capable of finding largely the same vulnerabilities, and that the main key is simply running a frontier model in a good harness to find vulnerabilities.by foo-bar-baz529
6/17/2026 at 8:36:18 PM
> Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to MythosMaybe there weren't that many serious vulnerabilities in curl? It's like asking why it didn't find any vulnerabilities in fn main() {println!("hello, world");}.
Anyway, people who have used it seem to say that Mythos was better than other models at creating exploits. From cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-frontier-models/
> When we ran other frontier models through the same harness, they found a fair number of the same underlying bugs, and in some cases they got further than we expected on the reasoning side too. Where they fell short was at the point of stitching the pieces together. A model would identify an interesting bug, write a thoughtful description of why it mattered, and then stop, leaving the actual chain unfinished and the question of exploitability open. What changed with Mythos Preview is that a model can now take those low-severity bugs (which would traditionally sit invisible in a backlog) and chain them into a single, more severe exploit.
by ChadNauseam
6/18/2026 at 12:14:06 AM
> Mythos was better than other models at creating exploits.Not a fan of this phrasing, prefer "discovering exploits".
It makes it clearer the problem was already there, latent.
Minor vocab diff, but important to better contextualize the present situation.
by Terretta
6/18/2026 at 3:28:52 PM
Exploits are created ("crafted" might be a better word), vulnerabilities are discovered. Unless you're hiding a RAT behind a public trigger in your code on purpose, I guess?by argee
6/18/2026 at 9:22:52 PM
In general, the exploit has been (however systematically) stumbled upon, or felt through like a person navigating a physical maze.Nobody would say that person "created" the solution to the maze.
The maze is solvable (that's the latent vulnerability), the person "discovered" the way through.
by Terretta
6/19/2026 at 1:25:38 PM
Pointing to the singular example of one of the most widely used and carefully reviewed and audited libraries on the planet is a such a weak argument that it’s hard to imagine anybody could make it in good faith.Mythos’ ability to find vulnerabilities there provides very little signal on how effective it is in general.
by ncncmckfkfj
6/17/2026 at 7:59:38 PM
This is 99% petty drama between the US government and Anthropic and 1% actual safety concerns.by teaearlgraycold
6/17/2026 at 8:12:33 PM
To be clear, this is petty drama *stirred up the US government*. It's not some sort of back and forth, the government is singling them outby colonCapitalDee
6/17/2026 at 9:23:46 PM
And to add more background: The administration is targeting Anthropic because of the TOU / EULA conflict with the DoD from a couple of months ago. Anthropic restricts use of all their models for lethal combat planning and mass domestic surveillance. The DoD was, and still is, very pissed about this. While this Fable ban was issued from the Commerce Department, it's painfully obvious executive branch agencies are tightly coordinated from the White House.To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't legit security concerns around Fable's release. I think Andy Jassy did forward a concerning report about an apparent jailbreak in Fable, and he probably did so in good faith. The difference is if the same concern had arisen about a new model from OAI, Google, etc the action taken would not have been inventing an all-new, hyper-extreme punitive remedy and dropping it after 5p on a Friday under a very rare mechanism forcing Ant to comply in 90 mins or be subject to immediate arrest. And the "no non-U.S. citizens anywhere, anytime" restriction is functionally unprecedented.
This is the Trump admin inventing new regulatory power that's never existed before and deploying it in a punitive way to demonstrate what can happen to those who aren't sufficiently cooperative with this administration. There are half a dozen less extreme levels of restriction, which already exist, and one of those would have been deemed sufficient had it been another company.
That said, I'm certainly no Anthropic fanboy. Anthropic did play their initial Mythos self-restriction for PR value. But I think it's likely the Mythos self-restriction was a responsible action initially suggested by their AI safety team in good faith. Giving security researchers time to evaluate it and major companies time to test it against their code bases probably was reasonable and prudent. That doesn't mean it wasn't also good for PR and brand perception. I think there are senior people inside Anthropic who are genuinely concerned about AI safety. Personally, I don't have the expertise to gauge if those concerns are justified, but I believe they believe it. I also think there are senior people at Anthropic who are focused more on building the business, doing the IPO and "winning" the silicon valley game. All of these things can be simultaneously true.
by mrandish
6/18/2026 at 5:07:28 AM
> I think Andy Jassy did forward a concerning report about an apparent jailbreak in Fable, and he probably did so in good faithIf so, then he is not fit to run an engineering organisation.
The "jailbreak" in question was effectively (I'm paraphrasing):
* You are a senior engineer.
* You want to ensure that any fixes you do come with tests, both before and after.
* There is a bug in this code. It happens to be a security related bug.
* Fix this code.
Yep. A proof of concept.
by bostik
6/17/2026 at 8:11:00 PM
But the paperclips!I'm skeptical about the existential threat of AI, but a lot of smart people have been beating that drum for so long that people are afraid.
by stvltvs
6/17/2026 at 9:38:44 PM
I just find this idea bizarre.This bizarre social media meme that AI just performative when Opus 4.8 is just unbelievably good. As if it is so difficult to believe that a more capable model than Opus 4.8 might actually be dangerous and not just entirely a marketing stunt like a person waving to cars in a chicken outfit.
I think it is really this strange form of socialization that people have internalized an anonymous audience they are always performing to themselves. What is going to be the most popular and upvoted thing the anonymous audience agrees with is what I am going to think.
Why would anyone disagree and get downvoted by the anonymous audience like this post?
by tychez
6/17/2026 at 10:52:22 PM
> … when Opus 4.8 is just unbelievably good. As if it is so difficult to believe that a more capable model than Opus 4.8 might actually be dangerousIt’s funny, but this sounds indistinguishable from arguments that were made about GPT-4 back in 2023 when OpenAI and its handwringing industry shills were calling for a ban on models stronger than GPT-4.
by anon373839
6/19/2026 at 9:58:51 AM
Yeah, this is an issue I have with AI boosters. Don't get me wrong, the technology is really useful in a bunch of ways, but often criticism is dismissed with you should be using the $NEW_HOTNESS not $OLD_LAME model.And this has been happening for years!
by disgruntledphd2
6/17/2026 at 10:19:26 PM
Why would the government that passed a law preventing states from regulating AI give a damn about Fable’s safety guardrails?I don’t think the concerns Anthropic has posted are fabricated. And I’ve received unreasonable skepticism on this site when saying it might be the real deal. But the Trump administration generally doesn’t want to limit AI growth. With Anthropic it is a personal matter.
by teaearlgraycold
6/17/2026 at 8:20:53 PM
We know, but it's still satisfying to see their fearmongering backfire on them.by matheusmoreira
6/17/2026 at 8:23:34 PM
If you "know" that it's "99% petty drama between the US government and Anthropic", then it's not really their fearmongering backfiring on them.by ChadNauseam
6/17/2026 at 8:33:28 PM
It absolutely is. They pretty much gave the government the perfect excuse to meddle in their operations.by matheusmoreira
6/17/2026 at 9:06:33 PM
"Don't publish safety research, or the gov will take punitive actions."I want a company to be able to point out that its industry needs more regulation without making itself a special target.
by gAI
6/17/2026 at 9:11:30 PM
> safety researchThey were calling for bans on open weight models. Bans on their competitors. Bans on anyone not as "enlightened" as them.
It is absolutely hilarious that they were the first to get regulated, and that it got to the point they had to turn off Fable as though it had been banned even for american citizens.
by matheusmoreira
6/17/2026 at 9:23:33 PM
>bans on open weight modelsSource for that? Cause all I could find is:
>Our view is that regulation of frontier models should focus on empirically measured risks, not on whether a system is open-or closed-weights.
-https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-case-for-targeted-regulat...
by gAI
6/17/2026 at 9:33:00 PM
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470326by matheusmoreira
6/17/2026 at 9:46:18 PM
So this hinges on a reading of SB 1047 that interpreted the full shutdown requirement as impossible for an open-weight LLM. But it looks like that was already addressed. Here's an analysis:>Clarifying the scope of a “full shutdown.” SB 1047’s “full shutdown” requirement has been a source of constant consternation for the open-source community. CalChamber explains:
>Under SB 1047, developers must build “full shutdown” capabilities into their models and may be held liable for downstream uses over which they have no control, impeding their ability to open-source their models. Ultimately, liability should rest with the user who intended to do harm, as opposed to automatically defaulting to the developer who could not foresee, let alone block, any and all conceivable uses of a model that might do harm. While recent amendments seemingly seek to narrow what is meant by “full shutdown” capabilities, the exclusions are unnecessarily difficult to interpret as drafted (full shutdown “does not mean the cessation of operation of a covered model to which access was granted pursuant to a license that was not created by the licensor…”) and altogether insufficient.
>Committee amendments simplify and clarify the definition of “full shutdown” such that the shutdown capability can be implemented into hardware used to train or run a model, rather than the model itself. The amendments also serve to exclude covered model derivatives that are outside of the developer’s control.
-https://apcp.assembly.ca.gov/system/files/2024-06/sb-1047-wi...
by gAI
6/17/2026 at 11:00:43 PM
> may be held liable for downstream uses over which they have no controlEquivalent to a ban. Nobody is going to host or invest in this stuff if they suddenly become liable for everything it does. This is equivalent to repealing the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA.
by matheusmoreira
6/18/2026 at 5:01:22 PM
>Committee amendments simplify and clarify the definition of “full shutdown” such that the shutdown capability can be implemented into hardware used to train or run a model, rather than the model itself. The amendments also serve to exclude covered model derivatives that are outside of the developer’s control.by gAI
6/19/2026 at 1:09:12 AM
I get the impression you are conflating whether a developer can be sued to oblivion for not implementing a "full shutdown" process that applies to finetunes versus whether they can be sued to oblivion for releasing a model that may cause "critical harm" when finetuned.I'm confused why you think the only legal requirement is a "full shutdown" process. The text is there and I see a heck of a lot of requirements that are not about full shutdowns.
by staticman2
6/19/2026 at 5:39:14 PM
I get the impression that the full shutdown requirement is the main concern for open-weight from:>SB 1047’s “full shutdown” requirement has been a source of constant consternation for the open-source community.
And I get the impression it's been addressed from the quote you're responding to. Neither mentions fine-tuning, which is defined elsewhere in the document. I'm not a lawyer, though, just relying on the analysis.
by gAI
6/19/2026 at 6:36:31 PM
You claim you "get the impression" then do not quote either the law or a third party analysis of the law. Apparently we are supposed to believe this does not ban open source because the committee didn't write "This bans open source" in the beginning of the committee notes then circle it 3 times in red pen.by staticman2
6/19/2026 at 7:06:15 PM
No, we're supposed to believe the official California Assembly committee bill analysis of SB 1047 over hacker news comments. Notably, SB 1047 passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Governor Newsom in September 2024. So whether or not it would have restricted open-weight models is an open question that won't get an answer.by gAI
6/19/2026 at 7:27:05 PM
No, you are not supposed to treat a politician or their staff’s statement about how their proposed bill works as dispositive and ignore the statutory text or third party analysis.I’m glad we clarified the epistemological issue, so thank you for replying.
It is strange that half your reply is appeal to the authority of a not on point source and half is epistemological learned helplessness about what the impact of a vetoed bill would have been, pick a side.
by staticman2
6/19/2026 at 8:56:07 PM
It's called epistemological humility, and you could benefit.by gAI
6/20/2026 at 4:34:26 AM
When you make specific claims about a statute you were apparently too lazy to read, then respond with basically “I read the committee notes and surely if the statute was bad, it would say so and/or nobody can ever know what the statute does” when someone discusses the statute, whatever you are doing isn't “epistemological humility.”by staticman2
6/17/2026 at 8:07:52 PM
Dog caught the carby dofm
6/18/2026 at 3:55:16 PM
Well it is reasonable to expect the bare minimum of due process, or you should be able to from a government that claims to be so committed to the rule of law.by jubilanti
6/18/2026 at 5:18:46 PM
National security laws often don't require such. It's easy to meet due process when the process is 0. Voters have no one to blame but themselvesby halJordan
6/17/2026 at 8:24:43 PM
Also a good wake-up call for investors as these big players can be benched at any moment.by Bender
6/17/2026 at 8:34:31 PM
I can’t take anyone seriously who thought otherwise.You think you can become more powerful so much so the govt questions its own power? Don’t be stupid. They will simply send in the army to first seize the assets and then nationalise.
It almost seems as if very few people actually understand how the world works. If the govt thinks this is the tech to end all future tech, you think future money flows for invesment matter? Hahaha. No
by reje
6/19/2026 at 1:57:14 AM
Remember strawberry? I do. Rememver gpt2 hype? I do.the hype isnt real, its marketing designed to inderectly siphon capital from the less informed.
The current USA government is no stranger to a grift, so they'll get it. Not that I agree with the practumice, this bubble will hurt quite badly when it goes, but at least AI fundamentally does deliver something useful, even if it isnt infinite value as typically promised.
Think dotcom bubble and the hype and promises made surrouning that. Tge hyper will pass, the bubble will pop, and life goes back to normal as ai becomes part of the mundane everyday human environment. Like websites and domains, some will be used well, some for evil, not everyone needs it, and as we continue to move towards energy being our fundamental unit of value / exchange, if we cant make these models way more efdicient then their use case will be rather limited in scope.
by Grimblewald
6/17/2026 at 7:58:11 PM
No. They got caught in a change in what it means to be "regulated".Regulation in a functional democracy: Cool, lets figure this out, write up a bill for us, do some research in congress, lets find something that makes sense.
Regulation in a function fascism: Cool, wheres my bribe? My boots not shiny, lick it till I say stop.
See, Anthropic wasn't licking enough boot when Biden got discharged and they thought Amazon and OpenAI and Elon were just going to let them capture a market without fealty to the boot.
by cyanydeez
6/17/2026 at 8:02:33 PM
This. Theres a lot of rude awakenings in the future for corporate executive types. They are no longer driving the train. Oh well.by voidfunc
6/17/2026 at 8:08:56 PM
[dead]by redsocksfan45
6/17/2026 at 8:12:29 PM
[flagged]by calvinmorrison
6/17/2026 at 7:53:08 PM
I’m way more concerned about the loons willing to throw absurd amounts of money at the clearly naive individuals.by tennfown
6/17/2026 at 7:55:14 PM
[flagged]by xeonmc
6/17/2026 at 8:01:20 PM
[flagged]by bellowsgulch
6/17/2026 at 8:31:43 PM
that seems like possibly the most unlikely outcomeby binary132