You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.
Their new argument now seems be that this was marketing hype/fluff that backfired, in a pretty obvious and predicable way, and now they’re trying to reset the conversation.
> You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.
True, you can't. But, you can think certain regulations are helpful and certain other regulations are not. And you can be annoyed when unhelpful "regulations" are put in place.
This is like if I say that pitbulls are dangerous, and then the government comes and shoots my pitbull, who I've spent a lot of effort training to not be dangerous. Then you say "well you said pitbulls were dangerous, so you can't really complain." Well, I can complain because If you took me seriously, you wouldn't have responded by shooting only my pitbull!
Think of what incentives this creates for other people. Do you think that OpenAI will be candid about the possible dangers of their technology now? They might not even release it now, seeing that Anthropic releasing their model was what got it export-controlled.
If the authorities see that you publicly and widely shout out that pitbulls are dangerous, but quietly tell me that you’ve spent a lot of effort training it not to be dangerous without sharing how in public, I think it is warranted for the authorities to be skeptical.
Sorry, this argument doesn't work. Anthropic claims Mythos is in a class of its own, the evidence corroborates this and the government believes it.
The government shot your pit bull because you were going around telling everyone who would listen that it was the most dangerous, viscous one on the cul de sac and you've trained it to kill people and they took you seriously.
The act of shooting the pitbull makes for good dramatics, but you would get zero sympathy from me if your local government banned pitbull ownership. e.g. Ontario bans pitbulls. I don't have a problem with that.
You don't need/use pitbulls, but what if you (and many many others) wanted and needed Fable?
I for one was late to the bandwagon, and when I had the use-case for it - the govt pulled the rug. So yeah, I'm a bit salty about the whole endeavour.
I will also say that the security concerns are probably very real (and they have been from the day ChatGPT-3.5 came our). I guess I can be salty about it and still be wrong from their perspective. The govt likely understands the fragility of their infrastructure better than us and is likely aware what this could unleash for their systems.
> You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.
It's entirely possible that models could be "dangerous" to fully release to the general public without guardrails and at the same time the government majorly overreacted in this case.
Releasing Mythos to selected researchers and companies at least gives those researchers a head start at addressing vulnerabilities before the model hits mainstream.
Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to Mythos, and a low-priority one at that? It’s clear that other models are quite capable of finding largely the same vulnerabilities, and that the main key is simply running a frontier model in a good harness to find vulnerabilities.
> Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to Mythos
Maybe there weren't that many serious vulnerabilities in curl? It's like asking why it didn't find any vulnerabilities in fn main() {println!("hello, world");}.
> When we ran other frontier models through the same harness, they found a fair number of the same underlying bugs, and in some cases they got further than we expected on the reasoning side too. Where they fell short was at the point of stitching the pieces together. A model would identify an interesting bug, write a thoughtful description of why it mattered, and then stop, leaving the actual chain unfinished and the question of exploitability open. What changed with Mythos Preview is that a model can now take those low-severity bugs (which would traditionally sit invisible in a backlog) and chain them into a single, more severe exploit.
Exploits are created ("crafted" might be a better word), vulnerabilities are discovered. Unless you're hiding a RAT behind a public trigger in your code on purpose, I guess?
I can’t take anyone seriously who thought otherwise.
You think you can become more powerful so much so the govt questions its own power? Don’t be stupid. They will simply send in the army to first seize the assets and then nationalise.
It almost seems as if very few people actually understand how the world works. If the govt thinks this is the tech to end all future tech, you think future money flows for invesment matter? Hahaha. No
And to add more background: The administration is targeting Anthropic because of the TOU / EULA conflict with the DoD from a couple of months ago. Anthropic restricts use of all their models for lethal combat planning and mass domestic surveillance. The DoD was, and still is, very pissed about this. While this Fable ban was issued from the Commerce Department, it's painfully obvious executive branch agencies are tightly coordinated from the White House.
To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't legit security concerns around Fable's release. I think Andy Jassy did forward a concerning report about an apparent jailbreak in Fable, and he probably did so in good faith. The difference is if the same concern had arisen about a new model from OAI, Google, etc the action taken would not have been inventing an all-new, hyper-extreme punitive remedy and dropping it after 5p on a Friday under a very rare mechanism forcing Ant to comply in 90 mins or be subject to immediate arrest. And the "no non-U.S. citizens anywhere, anytime" restriction is functionally unprecedented.
This is the Trump admin inventing new regulatory power that's never existed before and deploying it in a punitive way to demonstrate what can happen to those who aren't sufficiently cooperative with this administration. There are half a dozen less extreme levels of restriction, which already exist, and one of those would have been deemed sufficient had it been another company.
That said, I'm certainly no Anthropic fanboy. Anthropic did play their initial Mythos self-restriction for PR value. But I think it's likely the Mythos self-restriction was a responsible action initially suggested by their AI safety team in good faith. Giving security researchers time to evaluate it and major companies time to test it against their code bases probably was reasonable and prudent. That doesn't mean it wasn't also good for PR and brand perception. I think there are senior people inside Anthropic who are genuinely concerned about AI safety. Personally, I don't have the expertise to gauge if those concerns are justified, but I believe they believe it. I also think there are senior people at Anthropic who are focused more on building the business, doing the IPO and "winning" the silicon valley game. All of these things can be simultaneously true.
> I think Andy Jassy did forward a concerning report about an apparent jailbreak in Fable, and he probably did so in good faith
If so, then he is not fit to run an engineering organisation.
The "jailbreak" in question was effectively (I'm paraphrasing):
* You are a senior engineer.
* You want to ensure that any fixes you do come with tests, both before and after.
* There is a bug in this code. It happens to be a security related bug.
* Fix this code.
And the model did what it's supposed to. It wrote a fix, and to prove that the fix worked, it wrote a test for it. What do you call a test that happens to validate a security fix?
This bizarre social media meme that AI just performative when Opus 4.8 is just unbelievably good. As if it is so difficult to believe that a more capable model than Opus 4.8 might actually be dangerous and not just entirely a marketing stunt like a person waving to cars in a chicken outfit.
I think it is really this strange form of socialization that people have internalized an anonymous audience they are always performing to themselves. What is going to be the most popular and upvoted thing the anonymous audience agrees with is what I am going to think.
Why would anyone disagree and get downvoted by the anonymous audience like this post?
> … when Opus 4.8 is just unbelievably good. As if it is so difficult to believe that a more capable model than Opus 4.8 might actually be dangerous
It’s funny, but this sounds indistinguishable from arguments that were made about GPT-4 back in 2023 when OpenAI and its handwringing industry shills were calling for a ban on models stronger than GPT-4.
Why would the government that passed a law preventing states from regulating AI give a damn about Fable’s safety guardrails?
I don’t think the concerns Anthropic has posted are fabricated. And I’ve received unreasonable skepticism on this site when saying it might be the real deal. But the Trump administration generally doesn’t want to limit AI growth. With Anthropic it is a personal matter.
They were calling for bans on open weight models. Bans on their competitors. Bans on anyone not as "enlightened" as them.
It is absolutely hilarious that they were the first to get regulated, and that it got to the point they had to turn off Fable as though it had been banned even for american citizens.
So this hinges on a reading of SB 1047 that interpreted the full shutdown requirement as impossible for an open-weight LLM. But it looks like that was already addressed. Here's an analysis:
>Clarifying the scope of a “full shutdown.” SB 1047’s “full shutdown” requirement has been a source of constant consternation for the open-source community. CalChamber explains:
>Under SB 1047, developers must build “full shutdown” capabilities into their models and may be held liable for downstream uses over which they have no control, impeding their ability to open-source their models. Ultimately, liability should rest with the user who intended to do harm, as opposed to automatically defaulting to the developer who could not foresee, let alone block, any and all conceivable uses of a model that might do harm. While recent amendments seemingly seek to narrow what is meant by “full shutdown” capabilities, the exclusions are unnecessarily difficult to interpret as drafted (full shutdown “does not mean the cessation of operation of a covered model to which access was granted pursuant to a license that was not created by the licensor…”) and altogether insufficient.
>Committee amendments simplify and clarify the definition of “full shutdown” such that the shutdown capability can be implemented into hardware used to train or run a model, rather than the model itself. The amendments also serve to exclude covered model derivatives that are outside of the developer’s control.
> may be held liable for downstream uses over which they have no control
Equivalent to a ban. Nobody is going to host or invest in this stuff if they suddenly become liable for everything it does. This is equivalent to repealing the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA.
I suspect they're taking this as a win either way, because they're still plastering "Fable 5 unavailable" on their product and using it as an opportunity to keep themselves in the spotlight as they head to IPO.
There's really not even a ban here, they could slot in Fable under the Opus label and no one would really be able to tell. It's all part of the same show to pump up valuation.
I bet they will do a touch of RLHF and re-naming the moment OAI releases a comparable model. Otherwise, sure, they can just bask in the drama for a bit.
No. They got caught in a change in what it means to be "regulated".
Regulation in a functional democracy: Cool, lets figure this out, write up a bill for us, do some research in congress, lets find something that makes sense.
Regulation in a function fascism: Cool, wheres my bribe? My boots not shiny, lick it till I say stop.
See, Anthropic wasn't licking enough boot when Biden got discharged and they thought Amazon and OpenAI and Elon were just going to let them capture a market without fealty to the boot.
>Some administration officials have said that a resolution should include an acknowledgment on Anthropic’s part that its rollout of Fable and communication with the White House could have been improved, people familiar with the talks said.
>followed initial frustration Friday among some administration officials when they couldn’t immediately get Amodei on the phone, the people said.
That he didn't drop everything to talk to them seems like the major crux? But Dario doesn't even do the day-to-day operations Daniela does. Feel like Anthropic should just hire Dean Ball to be their liason or something
It's because the "crisis" is a sham for publicity, like Trump's constant bullshit deals and ceasefires that aren't real, they're just happening to find more problems to keep them in the news.
I feel Dario did enough harm. I wonder if he can do the right thing and step down. It’s really just tiresome to follow all his PR/Hype/warnings and this fiasco makes everything he says seem so silly. At the same time he’s dangerous for the industry. In the end he may get more regulation than he asked for. If the gov decides the Opus models are too powerful without KYC they are toast. And to be honest I think they deserve it.
Carlini rocks, but they should have definitely NOT sent him. He will them too much, and they'll find even more excuses to block us.
This needs an experienced negotiator, ie. a manager
I'm tired of this story and the corresponding fake discussions because it's completely obvious that Anthropic was singled out because they didn't play along with the current US administration and this whole charade is just part of an extortion scheme.
Had to disagree with that. However, I don't think you can discount how much Anthropic has been banging the drum about how AI is dangerous (specifically theirs) and an existential threat, etc. etc.
The rollout of Mythos was clearly manufactured to stoke the fears of companies that didn’t have access to it. They also bragged (for Fable) about how they "ran an external bug bounty that produced no universal jailbreaks in over 1,000 hours of testing" only for it be circumvented almost immediately.
So them standing on the high horse and saying it is _so powerful, yet so safe_ only to have that blow up in their face just made it that much easier to make an excuse to do this. Again, not disagreeing, but they made themselves the tall poppy here.
> They also bragged (for Fable) about how they "ran an external bug bounty that produced no universal jailbreaks in over 1,000 hours of testing" only for it be circumvented almost immediately.
Where did you see there was a universal jailbreak?
How do you weigh the DOD fight against warning about Mythos' dangers when determining what made Anthropic 'the tall poppy'?
People here aren’t authoritarians, so we don’t accept your premise that you shouldn’t take on the government. That’s not how things work in the US. Perhaps you’ve encountered Trumpists who tell you that it is, but they’re lying; they routinely applaud businesses defying any government which their dictator-in-chief doesn’t control.
Don’t you see how this shows it wasn’t always the same? The way things work in the US is that the government has a limited, defined role in determining how things are run. Companies don’t have to comply if the government goes beyond its role, and indeed may face liability for complying if they violate a contract in the course of doing so. The idea that it’s fundamentally illegitimate for a company to say “We dislike the government’s actions and feel they’re serving as a poor regulator” is coherent, but almost nobody in the US holds it, although partisans sometimes pretend to when they need a way to defend an indefensible course of government action. (Sometimes they’ll go so far as to claim it’s undemocratic to resist government action, which is incoherent.)
They needed to have administration insiders on their team months if not years ago, not just now
OpenAI, Meta, SpaceX are savvy enough to play ball, but Anthropic's public posturing and government affairs has always seemed too aloof and intellectual
To be fair to Anthropic for a moment (not that they deserve it), but requiring administration insiders and the greasing of palms going on should not continue to be the normal expectations of how to do business in the USA. I'm on the side of any company that refuses to capitulate to this administration. Not saying Anthropic doesn't (because they do), but let's not pretend like the blatant corruption going on should be normalized. Every single citizen should be appalled at this behavior and blatant market manipulation.
OpenAI is also guilty of excessive fear mongering (remember GPT 2 is too dangerous to release?)
This isn't 100% Anthropic's fault, although I'm sure that's part of it. This is the current corrupt administration executing on a grudge they have against Anthropic, and the government's new found love of picking winners and losers.
Public release of GPT (and the following models) did bring negative societal changes with it.
We now live in a world where captchas don't work, astroturfing is indistinguishable, school essays and theses don't prove any learning took place, open source maintainers gradually cease to accept stranger contributions, …
I don't really think they're acting on a grudge against Anthropic here, I think it really is on Anthropic for describing the model's capabilities the way that they did.
IIRC Anthropic claimed to have been working with the government on securing things with Mythos, but then they seemed to have been blindsided by this.
My read is that the guys making the decision to restrict it were not the ones that Anthropic had been working with, and it's more about Anthropic getting caught between infighting within an incoherent government.
OpenAI is much more eager to jump on board with the administration than Anthropic is, Altman is a lot of things, but he definitely knows which wheels need grease.
Nah, that's ridiculous. This admin is corrupt and idiotic and it's silly to pretend that Anthropic's actions matter except in so much as they didn't bribe the president like OpenAI did.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I know you guys are spread pretty thin managing the site, so I went through the comments for this post and collected some other comments which are also probably breaking site rules.
On that note it would be interesting to do a sentiment analysis of flagged replies. They seem all over the place and it would be interesting to see if there were any biases.
Some are, some aren't, but could you please just flag comments that break the guidelines, or if they're particularly egregious, email us (hn@ycombinator.com).
I have good friends in the AI industry who are the living embodiment of that Upton Sinclair quote.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
You've never heard such strong one-sided cope until you've talked to an NVDA employee about AI. I'm not even against AI. It's just that a combination of intense financial incentives around a product that provides a good simulation of the Chinese Room has really fucked peoples brains up.
You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.
Their new argument now seems be that this was marketing hype/fluff that backfired, in a pretty obvious and predicable way, and now they’re trying to reset the conversation.
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