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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't. That's probably 90% of the story.

Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).

Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout of their next model that plans for capricious ad-hoc regulation.

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What did they think was going to happen when they were actively doomsday fearmongering around the release of their own model? I assume somehow they thought this would lead to a moat with them being left safely inside the castle, but this response, and Reagan's 9 Words, were always infinitely more likely. It was a demonstration of a child-like level understanding of how regulatory capture works.

The PR from the US frontier labs has been poor to terrible from the beginning.

Among other things, "we have stolen the collected works of your culture, now help us grow so that you can all lose your livelihoods and become our serfs" has to be one of the absolute worst marketing approaches in history.

The government seems like it's in a rough spot. If they let Mythos out, they seem worried people could use it to mass-hack the internet. China seems to not care so much about this and they're right behind. I don't really know what the answer is.

I wonder how much of it is fears over "mass-hacking the internet", and how much of it is fears over the model discovering various NSA/CIA/etc "tailored access operations", and other deliberate side-channels / vulnerabilities / etc?

(Or perhaps vulns that NSA/etc discovered and has been keeping it private; as they're known to do).

I feel there's a lot that's unaccounted for, and the whole "AWS team reports a 'jailbreak' that is just 'review this codebase'" story doesn't add up.

I wonder if there were some parallel construction going on, and if at the same time, the NSA started losing the exploits they had because it was getting patched.

China uses the strategy of letting dangerous technologies loose which causes disruption in the short term but makes people do the right thing like secure their software. The US by comparison gives me the impression of wanting to leave the internet vulnerable by not making Mythos public so that only the US government can use Mythos to gain access to whatever system they like, which is the same thing the pegasus software does

> The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't.... They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable),

But this isn't what happened? It was only a couple of months ago! How can we be getting this completely backwards already!

Fable was aready what they were selling to the general public, and that is what the US government stopped them selling (not Mythos!)

Anthropic tuned the already existing classifier to handle the use case the government highlighted and then they went back to selling it.

They actually loosened the restrictions on ML-programming using it too.

I use Fable as much as I can and I've never had a cyber refusal for it.

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