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Comment by aix1 | Hacker News Reader

Given Amazon's fairly large equity stake in Anthropic, I really don't get their motivation. Anyone care to speculate?

Everyone is assuming this isn't a positive outcome for Anthropic. Think about the optics: everyone was shitting on Anthropic for silently downgrading Fable. Now that is forgotten, they have a chance to spend a week or two revising their approach, then will come out with a "Gov't approved" version and life goes on.

Most importantly, Anthropic has been too "uppity" and needed to be put in their place by the powers that be. Power hates disruption. Restrictions, control (and investment) are defenses against transformative tech. Amazon needs Anthropic to bend the knee for their investment to have long term value - the sooner the better.

Sure, and at the end, there will be one of Trump's kids or friends on the board at Anthropic, and probably with access to pre-IPO stock at a nice friendly strike price.

Surely not at all a coincidence that this all shook out right after Anthropic filed for IPO, and SpaceX IPOd with a nice giant valuation.

Given everything that happened in Iran this spring, with constant stock pump and dumps, tweets timed to market events, etc. the default analysis of everything the feds do should be: how is this enriching Trump and his buddies?

> Everyone is assuming this isn't a positive outcome for Anthropic

It’s not. Shitting on or not, Fable was being used and clearly folks were running up bills. This is political retribution against Anthropic, pure and simple. The fact that Anthropic may be able to spin that doesn’t change what it fundamentally is.

As much as it’s tempting to read some kind of ulterior motive into this, I think the most reasonable explanation is that AWS, as perhaps the single biggest point of failure in the backbone of US IT infrastructure, has legitimate concerns about its ability to fend off attacks from bad actors armed with the most advanced models.

It depends what the end goal may be.

If the end goal is that only regulated US companies can use Fable, that is a pretty good outcome for Amazon, and also for Jeff Bezos's new startup which aims to use AI to monopolize large industries that depend on advanced engineering in the physical world.

>If the end goal is that only regulated US companies can use Fable, that is a pretty good outcome for Amazon

It's a terrible outcome for Amazon because it destroys Anthropic's revenue. Roughly half of Anthropic's customers are foreigners, and they wouldn't use Anthropic if its next generation model was banned while other providers' next generation models aren't. And if the US follows through and bans all Mythos-level models for foreigners, then in 6-12 months the entire global market will be overtaken by China when its models catch up, and Amazon will lose money on its investment in OpenAI too.

Immediate revenue impact is basically 0 - nobody cancels their Claude sub because Fable isn’t why they got it in the first place (by nobody I mean like 1% of total users and they’re likely net neutral tokenmaxxers for revenue).

Signal to OpenAI and Google is clear: can’t release too smart models or they get controlled. It follows there is no danger to revenue since other providers are forced to plateau at the same level.

…which puts the whole train the next model business idea a risky proposition since the training can’t ever pay for itself - but USG really wants you to keep training, so guess what happens?

Oh and re China - if you think they’ll release an open Mythos-class model, I have a bridge to sell.

Seems like estimates are that 70-85% of their revenue comes from API usage/pricing, so some users switching from Opus to Fable for that would've had a big impact

Then there's people switching from GPT 5.5 or upgrading their subscriptions, and Fable being scheduled for removal from subscriptions on the 23rd

Why China wouldn’t release?

Today china can't prevent the world from accessing LLM's so it plays it's current game, to get a good position in it.

But if large parts of the world won't have access to a good llm, keeping the llm private gives them an advantage.

I think it's just to hype Anthropic. Check it out, we have products so dangerous the government banned them, we must be so advanced. (Their competitors cannot make such a claim.)

You think Dario called up Andy Jassy and told him "Hey, we're trying to get Fable banned, so can you please go talk to the government and tell them that they need to ban it"?

He's always talking about how dangerous AI is, how the models he's building could be used for cyber attacks, and how if his company is successful then at least 50% of the white-collar workforce will lose their jobs.

Doesn't seem that unlikely he might say something like that.. Unless he's super-villain evil it sounds like he believes the government needs to do something?

Yes and in a year they will ask for a government bailout because of the ban.

> I think it's just to hype Anthropic.

What in the world??

When did HN lose all ability to think critically about anything?

sorry but when will this line of cute conspiracy theories stop? do you really think this was premeditated to hype up Anthropic?

It doesn't stop, about 75% of HN users mistake being conspiratorial/cynical for sounding smart.

It's not ZDR so none of the megacorps are using it anyway. Microsoft already complained.

If you can't use it then might as well get rid of it.

But Amazon has a fairly large equity position in Anthropic. Why mess with that?

> But Amazon has a fairly large equity position in Anthropic. Why mess with that?

Read the fine prints. None of these hyperscaler deals are $ for equity. It's some provide hosting, rentals etc. With how things are going they can just find another customer.

> None of these hyperscaler deals are $ for equity.

As of Feb, Amazon held $45.8 billion of convertible notes and $14.8 billion of nonvoting preferred stock in Anthropic.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ai-bet-anthropic-soar...

Yes OP is saying they didn’t pay all cash for those shares

So they dont care about it? How is that relevant?

If I have 5% of a company, I dont care if I traded services or cash for it.

> If I have 5% of a company

You may not. The whole AI circular finance deals don't work that way. Maybe just maybe this 1 does but 90% don't. There's some SPV (special purpose vehicle) that holds some of the assets and leases it back to the main company. The backers sort of support the SPV and the lenders lose out.

For example SpaceX claimed to raise a huge round from Nvidia. They got maybe 5% of it as real cash. The rest is Nvidia taking its own GPUs into SPV and leasing it to SpaceX. Nothing changed hands.

Another example is see AMD's OpenAI deal. You get x% shares after using so much GPUs.

So there's shiny announcements and there's how much are real shares with no terms paid with cash.

> I dont care if I traded services or cash for it.

The point is you might not even have it OR it got massively diluted in creative ways.

It’s relevant because it doesn’t actually signal anything about the parent company / shareholders commitment. Their ownership shares are nominally worth x billion dollars, which represents an enormous incentive to have the venture succeed - OTOH it does not represent the actual scale of the bet being made, because the shareholders never parted with z billions in the first place, just signed agreements to provide store credit for enormous cloud resources

Drive it down so they can buy more equity?

I'm pretty sure this was an unintended consequences. They received the report from anthropic and just shared it with the government without thinking that it might cause this.

In business, nothing's off limit to destroy others.

You can be better, or you can report them for any "illegal" stuff.

What do you mean? People are going to rush to get a subscription when this ban eventually lift.

Brilliant marketing!

they figured out taking fable off plans at 22/6 was a bad idea business wise so they maneuvered

I'd guess it's absurdly good business wise, given API pricing is like 10-30x as much

I would speculate that they were concerned, as many people familiar with frontier AI models are, that they are dangerous and could be misused to do bad things.

Everyone assumes that it is business motivated. Perhaps, but perhaps that business motivation is the fact that this group at Amazon had reportedly many past interaction with the Administration about AI safety, and this being just the latest interaction.

Yeah... because Amazon is famous for caring about safety over profits...

If Amazon's stake in Anthropic goes up 10x, but American national security is fatally compromised in the process, I kinda doubt that's net profitable for Amazon. They're not going to be able to deliver in 2 days or hit AWS sales targets if everyone's drowning in cyberattacks.

Isn't that what the entire billionaire class has been doing for decades though? Making profit go up and up while destroying national security? They don't seem to feel it's a net negative.

No? I'm really not sure what you could be referring to. Tech billionaires are if anything too willing to follow the government's lead on national security; they don't seem to have particularly minded the whole PRISM saga, even knowing that it would fatally compromise their relationships with privacy organizations.

National security doesn't mean the MIC, it means the factors that enable the country to continue to exist.

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