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There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

theahura

Comments (299)

  • modeless
    > But this government [...]I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
  • uludag
    > I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
  • andrewparker
    OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card.But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.
  • temporaryacc2
    The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse.The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.
  • drevil-v2
    This kills the entire enterprise market for AI models better than Opus 4.81) No one is going to build any workflows/capabilities that could have the underlying intelligence rug pulled instantly by a bureaucracy or malevolent politician.2) Even if a company was silly enough to take on the risk, is Anthropic going to ask all their enterprise customers to provide passports for all their employees and then setup individual Claude accounts for each and every employee of each and every enterprise customer in order to gatekeep access to Mythos? Because a plain ole api key no longer cuts it
  • resters
    Clearly Anthropic should have anticipated this and voluntarily banned all but native-born US citizens from using Fable from the outset. This would have had the benefit of preventing David Sacks from accessing the model and would have kept us all safer.
  • pu_pe
    It stinks to high heaven, especially considering how over-the-top security protocols were introduced with Fable. The US government is asserting its influence on the economy and showing Anthropic that their IPO will depend on bending the knee.
  • PeterStuer
    "Meanwhile, Anthropic’s competitors have friends up and down the administration — the Kushners are heavily invested in OpenAI, as an example.2 So another way to read this is that this is an opportunity for other labs to give Anthropic a black eye. Fable is, by all accounts, an incredibly strong model. Very convenient that it’s no longer available for consumers, especially right as Anthropic is about to IPO."This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.
  • somesortofthing
    I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic the past few months. Reading between the lines of his own output, Dario Amodei comes off as both a dogmatic believer in ASI as a perfect, infallible ruler for humanity and quite an extreme American nationalist. The company, likewise, looks to be in ideological lockstep. I could see them, say, allowing or consciously creating runaway ASI they believed was ideologically aligned with them.OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
  • einrealist
    Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.
  • duffydotsvg
    Disagree with the popular conclusions that this is either calculated anti-marketing or politically-motivated axe grinding. Both theories might carry some weight, but they belie the bigger picture. If you believe AI will be a determinant of economic growth, defense capacity, scientific advancement, and geopolitical supremacy over the next few decades, then state supervision/control was always inevitable. There's already precedent in nuclear tech, chip tech, aerospace tech, etc. In theory, the stakes here are 100x higher. USA and China will do whatever they can to get a competitive edge over the other. Meaning this is probably just the first salvo in an ongoing series of similar events. At the end of the day, I'm not sure any of it will matter. All signs point to the models being basically impossible to contain.
  • hmokiguess
    My theory is that this is about setting up a precedent for control, the "foreign" framing is especially revealing in this direction imo. Lots of countries are discussing "Sovereignty AI strategies" right now. The weird part for me is the 30 days retention change, if this was a calculated theatre, then what part did that play? Wondering if that was also an ask from the govt just not disclosed by them.
  • zkmon
    > run a ton of agents in parallel most of the timeWhat makes you think everyone (and government) should play along and align with your way of dependency on AI? Not even 1% of the people use AI the way you do. Fable model is not a basic need. Government represents the average Joe. You could also say "I make a ton of nuke weapons and this government has stopped the public sharing of how to make them!".
  • 2gremlin181
  • agnosticmantis
    Counterintuitively, this is a huge win for misAnthropic and other closed labs in the US. They can nerf the models, ask for IDs from users and do what it takes to comply with whatever regulation they've been fighting for.Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
  • matt3210
    What a coincidence, Anthropic getting handicapped so xAI can try to catch up
  • Havoc
    >This was announced on 5:21 PM on a Friday. Sorta a suspicious time. Whenever someone does something intentionally on a Friday evening, my first thought is ‘o, the markets.’The insider trading kleptocrat has found a new toy
  • airport_barfly
    Everyone's focusing on marketing and market manipulation here, but the real consequences are more serious IMO.If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
  • tedggh
    With Anthropic history of using the news as their free marketing agency, I remain a bit skeptical. My guess is that something will be worked out in the next hours or days and Fable will be back.
  • smooc
    This should be a red herring for Europe (and others using US models).Every non-American company is now at a disadvantage against American companies. The implications can not be overstated.
  • JimsonYang
    I seriously feel like there's easier ways for OpenAI to catch up to anthropic and it would be a waste of political capital that the idea of Sam pulling strings for this to happen seems highly unlikely
  • emodendroket
    > As a brief aside, I am once again extremely disappointed in the myriad of Silicon Valley people who angrily argued that a Democratic led government would ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ are now completely silent or defending the actions of this admin. I cannot help but feel that that previous posturing was just a machiavellian play for power, which has just been the worst feeling in the world.I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
  • andai
    https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/trump-open-ai-altman-stake.h...Circumstantial, but... timing is odd.It got me wondering if this means all big models are US-only now? Are they gonna do the same with GPT-5.6, etc? Seems pretty unlikely to me. So I expect Fable to come back pretty soon.
  • fofoz
    You will miss the good old Europe that only regulated.
  • RamblingCTO
    Damn. I tried using it yesterday in a conversation about mixing my own carb drings and electrolytes (continuing from opus 4.6) but fable rejected it for whatever reason. Not sure how I could use fructose and maltodextrin for anything shady, but ok. And now it's gone and I couldn't even test it once! Dammit
  • FrustratedMonky
    Occam's Razor. This is more about a vindictive government, than the model capabilities.And, on other side of coin, it is more great publicity.
  • tilltheend
    The government is playing into the whole "oohh Mythos and Fable are too dangerous, and you, Mr. Investor should understand powerful, alright, very dangerous and powerful, now go give all your money to Dario and his cronies, thank you very much!"
  • andai
    >custom harnessMeans you pay full price per token right? (Which I think works out to roughly 10x more than using Claude Code?)Actually, for enterprise I think it doesn't make a difference anymore, since they switched to per-token billing.
  • Cider9986
  • rurban
    I just call it Flaky 5. Only works sometimes. Or not at all
  • woggy
    Any reason to think that open models will not catch up, given enough time?
  • pdantix
    with how the admin is talking about taking a stake in openai, it's so incredibly clear this is the government attempting to kneecap an openai competitor
  • pjmlp
    This is why we must diversify our technology stack back to the 80's style of computing heterogeneity.
  • MASNeo
    While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door. I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again.
  • jhylau
    trump doesn't like dario given what he has said in the past.
  • istvan0
    > So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm.> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can’t use it (technically, only if you’re not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:> We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)It does sound funny to hear this from Anthropic after they spent recent months with scaremongering about Mythos's capabilities, now they say it was a prank bro, you can actually achieve more or less the same with good old GPT-5.5.> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.What this has demonstrated: if you can't run the software on your own hardware, you should assume that it can be taken away at any moment.
  • tamimio
    It turned out Amazon are the snitchers on anthropic after allEdit: if anthropic couldn’t resolve this matter, they can do something reallllly funny right now and open source it to the public :)
  • CSMastermind
    > OpenAI did the same “too dangerous to release” song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.Wasn't that when Dario, et al were at the company. One way to view this is that OpenAI expelled the cultists and they went on to form their own organization that continued using the same tactics.Certainly some of the Anthropic press around Fable seems to me to be just marketing but I also think there's a core of people there who really believe it. I also think like all good advertising/lies there's some truth to the claims even if they're exaggerating.
  • megous
    Oh, so that's why. Well, at least it managed to finish most of the work on one of my pet projects yesterday. :)Looks like the weekly limits again reset prematurely during this change. Interesting how this works.
  • shevy-java
    But why depend and rely on AI?There are more and more posts coming up recently about AI being problematic. But people use it. It's strange. It's like hitting yourself with a hammer on the head, wondering why that hurts but you keep on doing it.
  • matheusmoreira
    I really hope it's just the USA punishing Anthropic for their insolence. If this is actually the beginning of AI regulation, we're probably heading towards dark times.
  • slopinthebag
    Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.If AI lived up to a tenth of the promises the American labs produce, the world would be drastically different today. It's not. I'm doubtful of future impact based on that.I'm happy we can utilise current OSS models to the extent we can now. They'll improve. The world will continue as usual. And hopefully we can put this bubble behind us.
  • throwaway132448
    If you find yourself cheering for one billionaire versus another, you’re the definition of pathetic.
  • anon
    undefined
  • vlad-asis
    [flagged]
  • shillyshilshlll
    [dead]
  • marsven_422
    [dead]
  • matt3210
    I guess current AI, IS the best it will ever be
  • ookblah
    lol if this is an attempt by the admin like the DoD thing to "knock them down a peg" it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.