All aboard the hype train!
On a lark, I asked Claude to compare AI to the wild west a while ago. It raised three points of similarity:
- Land-grab economics
- Lack of regulation
- Changing social and professional attitudes.
Whatever it is, it's a wild ride regardless.
ah, I see. so, Chinese models are getting banned soon.
Like gee, that was fast. If this had any bearing on reality, one would imagine the vetting process would take actual time and that there would be a real, material difference between what we knew then and what we know now.
The cartoon bullshit theater is exhausting.
I'm sure many teams couldn't do their best work because Claude Fable 5 was unavailable.
I wonder what their hiring pages look like now, are they starting to remove job postings?
I'm absolutely fascinated.
Now whether AI tech is in the same league as say Nuclear tech and therefore by any reasonable standard should be regulated is a different question.
We hit the slippery slope on a random day in June 2026 and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Any exec or manager that puts load bearing weight on top of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/AmericanCorp frontier model deserves the stress.
At $JOB I have warned higher ups we should try to keep our expenditure under control, educate people that document slinging doesn't require Fable every time and demo the capabilities of the cheaper models, and been snubbed for it. When Fable is available once again our bill is going to be eye watering, relative to what it should be.
So you use the frontier model, then when you can’t you accept things are less efficient. The alternative (right now) is to be less efficient all the time, I don’t see any advantage to that.
But, it is a big own goal, because once you invest in building evals for your internal use-case, 1) it’s easier to switch your model to whatever is cheapest, and 2) it’s way easier to fine-tune an oss model.
Evals are annoying to build and most companies were fine to rest on vibes. Now many companies have to do the work for insurance.
Nobody should be putting loadbearing weight on Amazon or Microsoft with their ruthless monopoly ambitions, yet here we are
Until it goes down, or Anthropic raises prices again.
Fable is already expensive to use compared to GLM and they want you to use the API as much as possible so you get a worse deal.
Yes 1000%, please, all my European competition please don't use mythos whatever you do it's total USA trash and the Chinese models work better anyway.
A week or so pause from seemingly legitimate cyber security concerns isn’t cause for panic. But it should be backed by laws that describe what that process should be. That would put the market at ease
The reality is this is world-ending technology and absolutely nobody knows what to do or can even agree that the problem exists.
Yes I can!
I think Europe and Canada are just happy not to be frozen out of AI access completely at this point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709670
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48721903
Of course Anthropic is still relevant, but people have realized they’re not special, and between this and the ID verification thing, they’ve given up a ton of their relevance vs a month ago.
Source: https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2072103733715194048?s=20
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June 30, 2026
Tom Brown Chief Compute Officer Anthropic 548 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94104
Dear Mr. Brown:
Since the issuance of my previous letters, dated June 12, 2026 and June 26, 2026, Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
In light of these actions and commitments, as well as the Bureau of Industry and Security's evaluation of the diversion risks now presented by Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, the controls in the June 12 letter are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.
Commerce reserves the right to reevaluate the decisions made in this letter and the necessity of reimposing a license requirement, should circumstances change or should Anthropic fail to adhere to its commitments.
If you have any questions about this letter, please contact me or the Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler, at (202) 255-1864.
Sincerely,
Howard W. Lutnick
------
In the end, we need actual laws that tell the market what kinds of models get paused / analyzed, how long that pause can be, etc.
Otherwise there’s no standard and it will be easily abused and prevent investment in US AI companies.
are export controls the right thing ? Probably not.
but the american economy is over-exposed on "A.I" - the capital expenditure, while the Chinese are proving you don't need to spend tons of capital to get close to the frontier.
the Chinese have better building capacity & cheaper energy. that means the market has to correct at some point.
"Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models" LOL, this was already happening.
This clown car administration just keeps making shit up and then backpedalling in a way that just leaves everything worse.
Opus 4.8, you did a lot of good work for me, but in the name of all things holy... I will not miss your communication style. So long and thanks for the fish.
It's nice that the restriction is going to get lifted but I hope this doesn't make anyone complacent that their coding work is going to be scrutinized by the US government, with AI, when using these models.
We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.
I don’t agree with this at all. IMO Anthropic has shown that that are willing to take even significant financial hits in order to stand up to their values and mitigate what they consider to be dangers and risks. Some people don’t like that or think it’s just marketing. But that’s exactly what Incorruptible is about: companies that are willing to take a stand, even in the face of overwhelming pressure from competitors, shareholders and naysayers.
>We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
>We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.
From Anthropic on Twitter
In past Empires kings bet their entire nations future on the words of soothsayers , people who said they could predict the future. It seems like Machine Learning engineers are the magicians of Empire of the modern age.
Depends on how economically useful AI turns out to be. It will be useful, but it needs to be VERY useful for the current valuations.
>In past Empires kings bet their entire nations future on the words of soothsayers
I think AI's rise is much closer to the story of factory machines and computers than to soothsayers and emperors.
Looks like Anthropic paid the Danegeld. Now they'll never get rid of the Dane.
The CEO is also not the addressee of shipments of urinal cakes.
There is a deep, deep ignorance of export controls on HN, and I fully expect it will play out as another 500 comment thread of snark and incorrecting each other while blaming the government and not understanding a word of it.
FWIW an Empowered Official is not the person who cleans the espresso machine.
Yes you use the right tool for the job.
But if the job requires the best intelligence you can get with an LLM, then you use that.
Taking as an assumption that the quality of your product is a function of the quality of the inference you are using: if you use an inferior model because "what if it gets export controlled again" and your competitors don't, then your competitors are likely to win.
If you don't need frontier models for you job then this is all moot, but the thread started with
> You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model
Which is silly. HN likes to roleplay bringing everythgin "business critical" in house because sometimes vendors mess up. Self host, don't use the cloud, run open models locally, built redundant supply chains in case of another covid, etc etc. Sometimes the risk is real, but most of the time the risk is rare and the cost of an interruption event is less than the cost of bringing everything in house or using lower quality vendors "just in case"
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
He likely does not have the domain knowledge nor is authorized to be the recipient of such a letter.
And that's ok. His role is to hire others competent in export matters. It's a learning experience for them.
I wouldn't personally pay API pricing for it for my personal projects, but I bet it's going to be absolutely slammed with usage for the next month+.
OTOH for most of my day to day work I've come to realize that faster ~ Opus 4.6 / GPT 5.3 level capabilities are the sweet spot as scaffolding has to be put in place right after clean specs and constant review anyways. The latest chinese models and GLM 5.2 in particular felt on-par on that front.
I work in AI / infrastructure and I have never seen as much honest interest towards investing into sovereignty by actual deciders. Thankfully, at this point I can't see any flip-flopping / change of messaging stopping that train.
In CA/EU over the last ~15 years, one used to be perceived as a bit of a "weird systems person" by just proposing alternatives to the big hyperscalers.
So the Trump administration, hands-down, has been the greatest ally here.
In tandem, I was hoping Anthropic would be keeping "dangerously capable" models banned from "evil Chinese distillers" for as long as possible.
The opportunities available for these people are rapidly, rapidly shrinking. I believe it's possible to be a developer today who's EXCEPTIONAL and never uses AI. Most opponents are not exceptional, though, and even these opportunities are shrinking.
Most exceptional developers in my org adopted AI in their workflows and went from 10x developers to 20x developers.
If you refuse to adapt, you're going to be out of a job complaining about the kids and their newfangled technology REAL quick. You have a few years remaining, maybe less.
https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/
I assume they did something to the model itself.
Either way, I do hope they lift those draconian bans. Using the model was a terrible experience because of the constant downgrades. I didn't manage to harden my own projects before Fable got banned.
https://archive.is/9k7qt#selection-2001.41-2001.49 https://archive.is/dybOE
When there isn't a zero-risk option, the question becomes which risk is smaller.
I think it’s excessively charitable to assume businesses are uber-competent ROI-chasers. The expense people are eventually going to win on AI too, this blip of unrestricted AI budgets will be gone soon.
I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because my Product Manager thinks changing fundamental premises of tasks I already spent two weeks on (mostly removing human blockers) is very simple. After all, when he asked Claude to update his prototype, it only took it 10 minutes.
I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because the company dedicated entire teams to write company-wide skills for everything. They suck, but if I don’t use them, I’m not following the new “golden path for engineering”, and I lose points in my performance review.
I can, however, turn 10x work into 20x work, or even much more than that, if AI actually did what it’s promising and eliminated most of my team, the product manager, and the middle managers. Or me. I could use a break.
I've stared at ugly LLM code, that I had just had generated, and worked well enough for my purposes. (generally, some quick recursion into a nested python dictionary in order to dig out some property -- especially for linting or quick data analysis).
And I wanted something better, sure, something a bit more readable ...but I just needed it to work well enough to recurse through a yaml file for config file linting, not be battle-hardened against every test case.
So to deal with the mess, I shoved it in a pure function, threw a few basic sanity unit tests around it, put a comment with a disclaimer of "#this is LLM generated code, it is lightly tested, do not use it for anything truly load-bearing without a lot more tests" and I moved on to something else.
Not everything has to be bulletproof.
People need to get to grips with that fast.
Distribution, relationships, processes, mindshare, marketing, and politics matter. Code is just ephemeral glue and implementation detail.