The US government has finally intervened in the AI regulation question, albeit in the kind of haphazard, incoherent, and possibly corrupt manner in which the Trump administration tends to wade in to anything related to the stock market, particularly on a Friday evening before it closes. The US Department of Commerce announced that Fable, Anthropic’s hardened version of the underlying model Mythos, was indeed far too dangerous to be released to the general public. Then they issued a blanket export control directive saying that no “foreign nationals” should be allowed to use the new product. So Anthropic, most of whose employees are foreign nationals, had no option but simply to turn Fable off. Then they demoted all its users who had been using the product to the lower level model, Opus, which may still end up destroying the world anyway.
If Anthropic’s models are viewed unfavourably by the government and could be banned at any time, this ruling makes the company an extremely risky bet for investors
Nobody quite knows how to think about these dramatic events. First, there are the usual suspects, the cynics, who make up approximately 50 per cent of people on earth and believe that the AI industry is little more than a giant con. They rightly point to the fact that generative AI marketing is almost entirely hype and extreme fear-mongering; something used to prop up the company’s valuation and justify the historically unprecedented amount of venture capital investment in chatbot technology. Doesn’t it sound right that this new Mythos/ Fable saga is yet another marketing “hack” to artificially restrict supply and drum up attention before their IPO? In the cut-throat competition between them and OpenAI, the weekend’s drama could be seen as a ploy to demonstrate that they have the most powerful model after all. It’s so powerful, in fact, that you, the hoi polloi, are no longer allowed to use it.
