If you look at the documents again closely, it was never the US government's goal to take down Fable 5. It was simply a consequence of the impossibility of doing so for Anthropic. (i am re-reading the documents atm to get a even better picture of where we are heading)
The single most load-bearing document in the whole affair is the letter itself, obtained in full by Bloomberg four days after it landed. It is on Commerce Department letterhead, addressed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and its operative sentence is dry to the point of menace:
a license is now required for the "export, reexport, or transfer (in-country)" of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 "to all destinations worldwide and to all 'foreign persons' ... wherever located." It threatens "prompt criminal and civil penalties" and stays in force "until superseded by a subsequent letter."
Read that closely, because the whole kill-switch question lives inside it.
The license attaches to foreign persons, not to Americans. The letter never orders Anthropic to take the models offline for US citizens. But American export law has a peculiar reach.
Under a Cold War provision known as a deemed export, the moment you give a foreign national access to controlled technology, even on US soil, the law treats it as an export to that person's home country.
A German engineer logging into Fable 5 from an office in California becomes, on paper, an export to Germany. And because Anthropic cannot sort its users by passport in real time across an API, the only way to comply with a rule aimed at every foreign person on the planet was to pull the plug for everyone.
A rule that targeted only foreign users could be obeyed only by taking the model away from all of them.
Therefore, the question arises whether the US government may have acted too shortsightedly and is now itself, also with Anthropic, looking for a solution that simultaneously secures its national supremacy.
I think many people are not yet aware of the tectonic shift taking place.
By preventing state-of-the-art capabilities - at least insofar as we are able to use them - open source becomes not only more attractive for one’s own applications, but more attractive overall.
This also applies, for example, to entire states such as the European Union, provided it genuinely sets itself the goal of implementing AI.
This not only attracts new investments and fresh capital, but also creates an opportunity for a PR coup that draws many idealists toward open-source companies.
In that sense, I can well imagine that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will suffer the most from regulation by the U.S. government - on two fronts - and that this indirectly does open source a tremendous service, especially given that it now primarily comes from China.
