Anthropic had just rolled out Claude Fable 5 as its most capable generally available model for complex reasoning and agentic tasks when a Commerce Department directive citing export controls required immediate suspension of access for all foreign nationals. The company responded by disabling both Fable 5 and the related Mythos 5 variant for every customer worldwide rather than attempt partial compliance.
Yes this makes it even more complicated even for US companies.
But the spirit of the enforcement seems to be very clearly "US citizens only" and I'm sharing the POV for any non-US company.
This was always a theoretical risk, now it's an actual one
@GergelyOrosz Notice that it says foreign nationals “inside or outside” the US. So you could be in the US but you are not allowed to use it because you are not a US citizen.
Access vanished with no advance notice or phased cutoff, forcing any non-US user or foreign subsidiary to hunt for replacements on the spot. The episode has already triggered visible reliability worries about US frontier models that can be switched off by government order at any moment.
International users are moving workloads to open-source alternatives whose availability they control, though the scale of that shift and any lasting effect on US model adoption remain unquantified in current reporting.
Many users criticized US AI access rules targeting foreign nationals as a rug-pull and major setback creating a chilling effect on development, while fearing they will push non-US users toward Chinese alternatives.
The good thing is that Fable wasn't deployed widely across enterprises and APIs since it was released just a few days ago, and the 30-day data retention policy The damage is mostly contained But, this has caused a huge ripple effect for non-US enterprises and the foreign subsidiaries of US enterprises US AI models over a certain intelligence threshold are completely unreliable due to this action (access can be pulled anytime)
Every enterprise has to either shift its workload to an open source model that they own/control, or at least have it as a backup option Thanks to USG, owning the model layer is super important now
@zephyr_z9 You do know that this will be net positive for Anthropic shareholders and this is just marketing right?
The moment it gets online again the customers still loyal to other LLM companies want to give Fable a try to see what all the buzz is about.
For anyone wondering what this means: - Anthropic (and potentially future OpenAI, Google, xAI) models that cost billions to develop will make 0 revenue outside the US - a big double digit percentage of Anthropic (and potentially OpenAI, Google, xAI) workforce can no longer work there, because they are foreigners and are not allowed to use those models
So Trump just made frontier model development effectively unprofitable and tremendously slowed down Anthropic (and potentially others in the future)
He's handing China the win on a gold platter.
*potentially: if the same restrictions are imposed on other frontier labs and models
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
@scaling01 this is just anthropic specific
@scaling01
There must have been some rather wicked discovery.
Can you imagine having a master hacker able to delete every email, Dropbox, and teams channel in corporation after corporation, government agencies and utilities orgs? That was a simple scenario.
I believe, personally the train has left the station and they trying to disconnect a couple cars.
@scaling01
This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States.
It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.*
I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: https://europe2031.ai
Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky.
We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections.
We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide.
We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-tesla/
Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish.
One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this?
I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-airbus-took-off/
It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
@s8mb Agree with everything you say here, but just want to point out that Ed Miliband’s crusade to cripple British energy production means he could single-handedly finish the UK as a great power.
@cosmorxn Certainly he’s the most culpable person but most of the UK political class is to blame. The Conservatives and Labour have both pushed this madness enthusiastically.
This is not the play.
Anthropic likely pushed for this as proof of how dangerous AI is and why we must pass safety legislation ASAP. Regulatory capture is the only profitable path for Anthropic. Otherwise they end up a Google/Oracle acquisition. AI is deflationary, there is negligible loyalty and China will release their models for near free.
Blaming Trump Admin for a vile biz strategy is not correct.
Fortunately, @DavidSacks and a few others are keen on the real play.
@BLADEEBOYPISS @glutenmorguen @TShirtnJeans2 @scaling01 Not Russia, they added an export ban. I do not know if it is still on.
@scaling01 yeah
@scaling01 No they won't. This slows down open-source model development too. Outside of like Google's open-source models. If they don't have access to frontier models, they can't distill them or whatever they do to create new open source models.
@scaling01 @based16z Obviously a temporary move for leverage. It’s trump. Cmon brah
I can't believe I'm saying this but Trump just made a legitimately extremely good decision on AI safety.
I don't see any possibility of Chinese AI progressing independently. China has routinely failed to innovate in just about every field for decades, AI should be no different. We're already potentially seeing synthetic data regurgitation issues and the insurmountable need for more quality compute than can be built affordably.
Out of practicality, the CCP would be forced to stop dumping money into unprofitable AI development. Imagine AGI being in 4 more generations; that equates to 16 times the amount of training compute compared to what Fable 5 needed.
Of course, something I've long anticipated will occur: San Francisco firms will move to Argentina and Israel, and AI Safety will have to focus on those areas. But that gives us time. Years.
@IsaakMo @scaling01 That's not really a substantive part of open source capability. Closed models do not expose their reasoning data, and that's the important part.
@scaling01 I'm drawing strong parallel between this and the blocking of Nvidia chips to be sold to China. Loss of revenue in billions, loss of training data Anthropic would have gotten, competitors get boost, researchers need to move, companies are better operating outside the US.
@scaling01 it's honestly shocking how the US is still fine when their population tries their damnedest to self-destruct the nation
when you take a step back , the fact that Trump got elected for a second term with net approval after failing a coup at the end of his first is diabolical AF
@cqkten lol
What we are witnessing rn is a political move not a business/smart move.
Chinese guys had 3 days at their disposal to distillate Fable 5, just wait a few months and we will see Deepseek Fable v5.
This is an attack on the US economy by promoting open source development as a side effect of Fable’s ban.
