back
205 comments
Is regulation unregulated in the US? As in it’s missing consistency and transparency. Beyond Anthropic, the US signals to the world that depending and using American solutions is high risk. Is that what the US government desires? The digital battleground across regions is on the rise. I don’t see us as the US on the right path.
In the US regulation is, in theory, regulated by Congress, which passes laws granting regulation powers to the federal agencies. Congress and the laws it passes are, in theory, regulated by the Constitution, and interpretation thereof by the Supreme Court.
> Is that what the US government desires?

The US desires to show its own citizens and the world how painful it is not to submit to the US government. They're leveraging everything they've got.

The only rational response when faced with this sort of behavior is to reduce dependence on and exposure to the US as much as possible. Develop national technology. Dedollarize the economy. Invest in and use open weight models.

> Is regulation unregulated in the US? As in it’s missing consistency and transparency.

Institutions are not built around zero trust. Because when we assume attackers are identifiable, and there is some level of integrity, that makes things a lot simpler and cheaper.

I will not expect my pediatrician to want to kill my child and they certainly could, but it would be completely bonkers to try to guard against that.

The level of damage that a single really motivated, disgruntled person with a lot of power can do in most settings is intense. The cost inflicted if we tried to build guardrails against all of it is insane, and it probably would never work.

The current administration's actions are for sure signaling a distinct lack of predictability or stability.

The U.S. is either harming itself erratically, or systematically enforcing control on US based businesses in a way that is historically more synonymous with, say, China.

A lot of us worry it is the former. I wonder if it's better or worse if it is the latter. The US, having seen that Europe and the world seem to tolerate interference by CPC based on opinions expressed by Alibaba or Chinese car companies, may have decided that it's fair game.

They don't care about the long term - it's a smash and grab to get as much as they can while they can.
So far the other countries are doing a lot of talking and big government initiatives but nothing has really changed. All the best talent still moves to the US, all the VCs are still unimaginative losers who want 5 meetings to give you $50K, the industry titans are still sclerotic and unable to distinguish their head from their ass, the culture doesn't support risk-taking or innovation. The biggest boom of the next 10 years is AI and it is firmly HQ'ed and centred in the US, as usual. The EU had a predecessor to the Chips Act in 2013 [1] that went nowhere, then a Chips Act that went nowhere, and now a Chips Act 2.0! It would be great to have more options but it doesn't seem like other regions outside China are capable of doing anything at all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqoX9OIR-DI

> I don’t see us as the US on the right path.

I think this can be said in many contexts these days.

> I don’t see us as the US on the right path.

Is anyone still assuming the administration's actions have anything to do with US national interests?

> Is regulation unregulated in the US?

For the most part no. The Administrative Procedures Act outlines a fairly robust process for rulemaking (ie regulations must go through a notice period, must be justified etc) and adjudication (ie per-person decisions must have notice, ability to have counsel, be appealable etc).

However there's also lots of authority given to the president (and executive office of the president) to which the APA doesn't apply. This includes powers the constitution gives to the president directly and (mostly emergency) powers congress gives to the president. Sadly political processes and supreme court cases have hugely increases what can be done with this*.

Moreover, it's been a frequent pattern (over many decades, but especially under Trump) for the president to simply nakedly overstep their authority. Sometimes there's no push back (see: 9/11); sometimes the damage is done even if it's eventually overruled. Never is there any consequences though, so the pattern repeats.

* E.g. The president's control of the military is supposed to be checked by congress deciding when to declare war. However the war powers act has in practice played out to allow the president to unilaterally start wars, especially as the supreme court has stepped in to make the war powers act less effective.

Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake. –Sun Tzu
Unfortunately, in the USA, we are stuck with two parties. Measured along axes of competence and capability of taking action: The (D) party is competent+incapable, and the (R) party is incompetent+capable. So every four years we get to choose between governance that knows what it is doing but too paralyzed to act, and governance that doesn't know what it is doing but acts with impunity.
> We’re proposing stronger regulation of the technology. We’re proposing giving the government the ability to, again in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology.

Anthropic CEO https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...

Okay, so why are other models not banned too? This "jailbreak" works for them as well.
[flagged]
PAGE NOT FOUND The page you requested was not found. You may have followed an old link or typed the address incorrectly.

I'm sure it says something that you think makes this a slam-dunk rebuttal, but you should fix your link first.

Edit: Saw the link. I was right. Nothing in that link makes a difference.

Any company building this kind of tech should have a separate shell headquarters on some low regulation island country.

Any government work can be done via MOU with a US subsidiary staffed by Americans.

This kind of capricious, unexplained control is bullsh*t.

I’m not saying that I want companies to have to go offshore or that that would be a good thing. Just that you’ve got no leverage if your corporate structure can be destroyed on a whim. This goes for any company reliant on a whimsical executive branch.

While there could still be fights over the technology and the company, a tech provider would still be able to serve other customers and have more leverage.

None of the best minds in AI Research are from the United States. We would not be were we are without the work of foreign scientists. There are more STEM students in China than we have students in the United States, and those universities don't give out automatic As like we do here in the United States.
Misleading headline based on one off-hand slack comment and quotations from experts outside the firm.
Unfortunately saying it in the press is going to make it even harder for them in the current environment. I know this administration gets non-trivial support from the valley, but what to most outsiders seems like "targeting businesses based on personal vibes" is going to do long-term harm to the U.S.

I hope those who represent technology in government, especially the AI head David Sacks are giving this due consideration.

Amazon AI and the government is right in saying Fable infosec protection is easily crackable.

I used Fable last week to scan my own work for security errors (and readability issues), I wasn't thinking about the ban on infosec use I just wanted the most well trained output.

One project in the monorepo triggered a Opus fallback and infosec/biology warning.

The other project scanned fine and showed a bunch of potential exploits.

Anthropic employees are right, but maybe this is for good. It certainly has opened my eyes.

I can’t rely on using a technology that the US administration can ban at will.

IMO without getting into personal thoughts about how capable the current US administration is, last Friday move sent a very powerful signal to the industry.

Also I don’t think China releasing so many good models, capable to compete with Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, all at once, is a coincidence.

The Cloud Act instigated the EU's migration away from companies in the USA, and things like this lit a fire under our butts. You should see how companies here are scrambling to move their data and compute to the EU.

The impact will last long, long, after this administration is gone. Trump will have his legacy.

[flagged]
It could be as simple as tipping the scales towards Grok.
One wonders if this might be a net positive for the world if Anthropic is forced to terminate it's non-US citizen employees.

I would hope they return to their home countries with their expertise and start or join new competing frontier labs, similar to how Taiwan's homegrown semiconductor industry arose from US companies enforcing a bamboo ceiling on their Asian engineers. Taiwan was able to repatriate their nationals and make incredible compounding leaps in the semiconductor industry, to the loss and chagrin of the US. [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/07/1127595393/taiwan-miracle-sem...

I'm accusing Anthropic of being facetious
Frankly, they've been asking for the AI industry to be regulated. They just didn't expect it would be just them. Although I'm going to say here now that I think this is going to have a broader ripple effect all the way down to open source and foreign countries developed models.
> Workers at the artificial intelligence company have been puzzled and increasingly concerned by the administration’s move to limit their latest A.I. models.

There is no way any employees at anthropic are this dumb.

Philip Zimmermann
sounds like they got what they asked for
Yes, obviously. People really need to update their priors on how the US operates now. Laws are out, loyalty is in. There is an extraordinarily powerful unitary executive in whom the will of the people resides and it is the job of the government and society to work towards the will of this powerful executive. There are no checks or balances or alternative centres of power (civil, political, clerical, etc) allowed.

This particular executive loves money, praise, and submission. When Anthropic submits (eg agreeing to whatever the DoD demands), issues public praise and makes appropriate donations (eg ballroom, memecoin, etc), then they can do as they please.

Students of history will find this new MO very familiar and very depressing.

Anthropic is just the whipping boy. It keeps everyone else in line.
I mean obviously they're correct but also the complaints of the administration aren't totally without basis.

- They're obviously being targeted politically because they refuse to kiss the ring, vibes, whatever you want to call it.

- They're also justifiably being scrutinized because they just spent like 3 months telling everyone that Mythos is a nuclear bomb and telling the government to fuck off as they drip fed access to a bunch of random corporations.

Trump vs anthropic

Elon vs openai

Trump vs elon

Bezos vs anthropic

When movie?

Another opinion piece?
They just removed Fable in France
That's hilarious. They aren't even wrong, but they asked for this. They accuse Trump of targeting them? I accuse Anthropic of targeting open source models with outright banishment in order to solidify its own economic position. They tried some "enlightened" variation of regulatory capture, but didn't dance to Trump's tune, so Trump gave them the regulation they wanted so much.
If you manage the corner coffeeshop, and the city health director calls with an urgent matter, you take the call and assure them you'll take care of it.
Anthropic sowing: Hehe yeah guys check out this model it's super duper scary and powerful it's a huge deal

Anthropic reaping: Hey wait a second you weren't supposed to take that seriously it was just marketing :(

They did a whole PR cycle about how dangerous their technology was. They refused to release it for public consumption.

How is this “targeting”? It’s literally what was requested.

Anthropic declares: "Mythos is too dangerous too release to the public" Proceeds to release Mythos plus safety guardrails as Fable. Amazon removes guardrails from Fable, getting access to Mythos. Government takes Anthropic's word for it and tells them to pull it until the guardrails can't be removed. They refuse. Government forces them.
When I look at the timeline, it appears that they got exactly what they've been asking for. Or what did I miss?

April: Anthropic announces Claude Mythos. Citing safety concerns regarding the model's capabilities, they restrict access to a small group of testing partners.

May 15: Anthropic executive Chris Olah visits the Vatican to assist the Pope in publishing a 40,000-word manifesto, Magnifica Humanitas. Olah publicly states the model exhibits over 100 distinct emotional traits.

The pre-release: Anthropic briefly calls for a global halt to AI research.

The release: Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5, a consumer-facing version built on the Mythos architecture but with strict safety guardrails.

The post-release throttling: Users discover Fable 5's performance is being silently degraded on specific tasks. Anthropic acknowledges the throttling, citing the need to prevent foreign competitors from extracting synthetic training data. They promise future limitations will be transparent. Performance is notably restricted on biology and chemistry prompts.

The essay: CEO Dario publishes an essay advocating for strict government oversight. He proposes heavy regulation for any AI company exceeding $500 million in AI revenue or $1 billion in R&D spending.

The regulation: Two days later, the US government places export controls on both Mythos and Fable 5, classifying them alongside high-end semiconductor equipment. This immediately blocks Anthropic's own non-US employees from accessing the models.

The fallout: Amodei calls the export controls a "misunderstanding" that disrupts their global internal operations. Anthropic subsequently issues a statement noting that known jailbreaks for Fable 5 are also effective on OpenAI's GPT-5.5, highlighting the lack of equivalent regulatory action against their competitor.

Didn't their CEO argue how super powerful and dangerous their AI models are and government should be able to restricting usage

https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...

> "We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology," he said.

The government: "We're restricting its usage to US citizens only"

Anthropic: "No, no, not like that! "