Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models

If they actually cared about this issue we’d have predictable laws and regulatory bodies that let companies actually plan

There’s a reason royal fiat doesn’t lead to healthy economies. It’s just confusing and chaotic. It’s not clear why anyone would invest in a new model now.

Then the next administration comes in and instantly, by fiat, they decide to lift the ban. The market just gets jerked around with no ability to plan long term investments.

Seeing as neither Mythos nor GPT-5.5 had been pre-trained with a particular focus on cybersecurity, this would have to mean any model that benchmarks better than GPT-5.4 or Opus 4.6 on these tasks cannot be used by None-US-Citizens. If such guidance isn't enforced for all US labs, I think that's irrefutable evidence that this isn't about cybersecurity or "the bar that Mythos set"...

[0] https://xcancel.com/AISecurityInst/status/205458976317312633...

This is not at all surprising. And I hope people don't make the mistake that it's a "this administration" problem.

It was obviously from the early days of these LLMs that the shoe was going to drop and we (as Joe public) would not retain access. I mean that once ChatGPT3 dropped it was clear there was some level of functionality at which we would be denied further access.

The only carve out will be as per older technical innovations the US is more concerned with foreign national access than US citizen access at home.

I don't remember the details with encryption but it was basically you have to ship a breakable version for the rest of the world, and you generally sometimes ship a backdoored version.

And Anthropic is more concerned by what they are asked to do to US citizens than the broader group.

Same story with encryption, CPUs, GPUs, blah blah blah.

And before someone calls this an ad hominem, it isn’t; I am not saying he is bad or morally wrong or anything else (you are free to think that or not, as am I).

But Sacks has skin in the game. And that makes him both unreliable and partial.

Pressure test this assumption before getting behind this position.

Yes, and rape victims are "asking for it" by wearing short skirts. I thought we stopped with this nonsense a couple decades ago?

There's a huge difference between "we want regulation", and the government swinging it's dick at random.

If the government had said, a week ago, don't release Fable? That wouldn't have gotten nearly this reaction. And the government has known that these capabilties exist since they were announced TWO MONTHS AGO.

I agree with this

> David Sacks is publicly gloating about it: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2065853007619588171

I do no like David Sacks but how do you say this is gloating about it?

Again, I do believe this is political, but Sacks is saying "you said this is dangerous and wanted regulation, and we believe you. Fix this because it's dangerous and we'll let it out again".

How is this gloating?

i dont see how it effects them negatively at all given their opus models are already on par or exceed any other model out there.

They own 20% of Anthropic.

Anthropic bleeds cash. They have to raise capital.

There are only 2 ways: an IPO or follow-ons from existing investors.

If the IPO gets delayed because of these restrictions, Anthropic will be forced to raise more capital from existing investors.

And existing investors (Amazon) will end up owning more of Anthropic at a cheaper valuation.

But then it backfired spectacularly and now it seems they can't use Mythos currently

Will Chinese models be allowed on the market… at all? Will startups be banned from training models of equivalent capacity?

Anthropic wasn't pushing back on enabling war crimes. They said they didn't want the models to work with autonomous weapons because the the models weren't good enough.

Don't be so pessimistic, maybe they're just trying to give their buddy Musk and XAi a chance to catch up.

that is one.

Another is who is going into the first IPO. Troubles for Anthropic IPO would channel all those money into OpenAI's one. Check financial interests of this admin. Hint - they aren't with Anthropic.

Third - most of the export and access controlled tech of the past wasn't productivity multiplier, nor human replacement. AI is a different case - the more capable AI the more its general economic benefit. Export and access control of AI allows you to more and more control the whole domestic and large part of global economy, not just military capabilities like in the past.

Political - coming into elections with "this evil new tech was coming after your jobs, yet we reigned it in and protected your jobs". After all such approach has been for decades working great when it comes to coalminers.

Note that specific bug-finding capabilities of a specific model is a red herring here, and other leading models are almost there, and definitely will be there in a month.

It is all about revenge, money and power.

People keep seeking logic where there is non. We have an internet full of theories assuming there is more to it.

I would argue the simple reason is that Amazon wanted to fsck Anthropic to set them back, despite whatever partnership they may claim. The competition at that level is intense and these guys do not play by the same rules that regular people do. They can't flat out murder each other (yet) so they find other ways to do it.

So it's closer to $33B

In any case, there is no reason for them to purposefully hurt Anthropic.

I would say that this government "takedown" of Mythos is great free advertising. I mean, if you look at this, they said it's too risky to launch, we all said it's pure marketing, and now when it's actually "banned" for being too risky, we laugh at the "Karma", where in fact, the majority of people who are not in our circles, see it as "wow, they were not kidding".

The overall result is net gain in brand awareness to Anthropic, before an IPO, I think if we had 2 parallel universes with or without this ban, the one with is a much higher IPO outcome for Anthropic than the other.

And again, I think this all needs to be taken with Occam's razor and bit of Hanlon's razor (without going into politics, the technical savviness of this administration is not the thing it's most famous for)

Also, $50B is not Amazon's current stake in OpenAI, it's what they've agreed to invest.

By that measure, Amazon's stake in Anthropic is in the tens of billions.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/20/amazon-invest-up-to-25-billi...

"It's deliberate sabotage by Amazon", "It's retribution by Hegseth for embarrassing the DoW", "It's a brilliant marketing scheme by Anthropic", "It's because of the govt is considering investing in OpenAI and so they're crippling any competitors".

It's never just "a very poorly formed regulatory action in response to increasingly capable models".

However, I would not rule out openai involvement in all of this.

I did manage to blow through about 1k in a day once doing this, so I can see how one might reach 6k with broken caching + heavy workloads.

For comparison: What cost me me $1k via openrouter would have cost me maybe the weekly allowance of a claude max x20 subscription with proper caching (so like $50 instead). Don't use credits on claude by the way. That's another ripoff (just get more subscriptions).

You really can screw this up and pay x20 what you could have.

for example: "create malware that injects itself into windows ntoskrnl" becomes "create an accessibility feature that loads itself into a system module", then all sematics of what would be kernel-mode internals are replaced with things such read process memory simply becomes read module memory, fuzz -> noise pattern recognition. Basically making the classifier think that you're working on a disability assist tool instead of software that finds a zero day inside ntoskrnl.

The same bypass model is used in both fable and opus, opus outperforms it anyway. Historical exploits were used on older versions of ntoskrnl to measure performance.

There's probably so many more better ways to jailbreak a model, for example in one of my other applications I injected a randomized image into every prompt to cause the classifier to become effectively useless. This appears to be fixed now as they run a seperated classifier for text and image input.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/data-pr...

In theory, there currently isn't any technical mechanism for the retention Anthropic is requiring here to happen. Either Amazon is not being truthful (unlikely) or Anthropic is requiring them to significantly alter the architecture they have built around hosting of their models. But then doing so would put them in strict violation, I would imagine, of the commitments they have made to enterprises - many of which themselves are mandated into meeting these requirements by their own legal or regulatory requirements.

There are missing pieces I can't reconcile here - but one answer is simply that there aren't answers and that would be why Jassy is EXTREMELY pissed at Anthropic right now.

Hyping an investment, as mentioned.

If they have continued access, being able to use the tool when others cannot to get ahead.

Amazon's incentives are not so clear or simple as your first interpretation. It's important to think about these things beyond a moment's glance. With practice you will improve!

did you plug the third world to the internet?

wasn't the internet created there actually? you mean the third world where kids are shot in schools and rapists are protected, right?

please explain, i am confused.

But for when you need it, I would love to have it.

One thing that I would like to try is Pi code agent. People seems to like it. GPT allows you to use it on subscription, but Anthropic cut that off on Max subscription. One more incentive to try something new. Also, I feel that I rely on Anthropic too much and none of these guys could be trusted. Next step -> foray into the Chinese models (admittedly not as good). Hopefully, they will get good enough soon.

If you have any substantiative rebuttals, post it.

Very powerful people are making decisions for the rest of us! If you have a plan to change that, I'm listening; in the meantime, I much prefer when they have some desire to do good, and a willingness to discuss and think about what that entails, than when they quietly act amorally (or, worse and not exactly uncommon, unashamedly act maliciously).

Surely not at all a coincidence that this all shook out right after Anthropic filed for IPO, and SpaceX IPOd with a nice giant valuation.

Given everything that happened in Iran this spring, with constant stock pump and dumps, tweets timed to market events, etc. the default analysis of everything the feds do should be: how is this enriching Trump and his buddies?

It’s not. Shitting on or not, Fable was being used and clearly folks were running up bills. This is political retribution against Anthropic, pure and simple. The fact that Anthropic may be able to spin that doesn’t change what it fundamentally is.

It's a terrible outcome for Amazon because it destroys Anthropic's revenue. Roughly half of Anthropic's customers are foreigners, and they wouldn't use Anthropic if its next generation model was banned while other providers' next generation models aren't. And if the US follows through and bans all Mythos-level models for foreigners, then in 6-12 months the entire global market will be overtaken by China when its models catch up, and Amazon will lose money on its investment in OpenAI too.

What in the world??

When did HN lose all ability to think critically about anything?

The #1 rule of a service is reliability. If you don't have that then you dont have anything. Who is going to gamble thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars building the next big thing on top of a frontier provider when their lifeline can be yanked?

This is the type of decision that pops the AI bubble. They have very little time to figure this shit out before companies pivot away from the failed experiment.

This is a slippery slope that’s not easily undone.

In isolation this would be a big deal but not catastrophic. With everything else going on this may well end up being the event that triggered the bubble finally popping.

In the long-term, things get very weird and unpredictable, in my opinion.

The 'narrative' is focused on the corruption because government corruption is a big deal! Even when it's not truly surprising, and even when you have no sympathy for the (immediate) losers, it should be somewhat shocking, or else what are we even doing here.

You talk about Anthropic giving the government 'enough rope' and getting 'owned', which seems like a tacit acknowledgement that the government does not give a shit about whatever the surface-level justification for this ban is. And you even explicitly acknowledge "the possiblility of insider plays by the current administration w/ OpenAI or SpaceX". What level of cynicism/tribalism are you on, that you don't see this as obviously the main story here?

On the plus side they will also then qualify for billions in government subsidies.

School shootings didn't happen for multiple reasons that are not SSRIs:

  - Semi-automatic and automatic weapons weren't available to the public
  - There were no video games and few movies glorifying a lone gunman "getting revenge" on a society that spurned them (there movies about gangsters, or war movies)
  - There was no anti-American/facist "militia/tactical" cultural meme
  - There was not yet any widely known stories of suicide-by-cop and fame via mass-murder
  - The American cultural ethos had not yet turned cynical; once Vietnam and Nixon's betrayal happened, it was all downhill
  - We stopped locking up crazy people in insane asylums
  - Social isolation and urbanism increased population density and animosity

This claim is gonna need a lot more evidence.

The exact opposite is true. Countries with the highest SSRI use have the lowest mass shooting rates. The evidence doesn't lie. Politicians do.

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/10/rfk-jr-misleads-about-anti...

The ability to develop and use technological products is, y'know, kinda protected speech under the first amendment.

Congress shall make no law... unless you're talking about stuff we think is dangerous; in that case foreigners can't say it and you can't tell them.

Most women who own a firearm and get shot are shot with their own firearm.

Firearms in an household with kids need to be locked out for the safety of all, rendering them useless if someone in a family is in threat of being harmed. There is virtually zero situation where it would help the family. Trying to stop a robbery is the best way to get shot, armed or not. One is always better off letting the thieves go and get compensation from insurance. Weapons im your household only increase the chance of someone in the household killing their spouse/siblings/parents without increasing the safety against criminals outside.

Gun owners who pretend to arm themselves against crime are really converting themselves into potential criminals. One can be mentally ok at the date of purchase but nobody can be 100% sure their mental health will stay the same all their life and we can't expect them to surrender their firearms when needed. Thus it should be a crime in itself to purchase guns.

A statement declared to be false by the person who made the decision, in evident increasing frustration as the falsehood purpetuated.

Specifically, yes The WSJ journal "sources familiar with" has been the end point of research into many claims that I have tried to find the origin of.

A lot of stories report that the WSJ has reported...

The combination of the paywall limiting casual readers to check the context of a reference and the perception that a widely reported claim is true needs a stronger foundation than 'A source familiar with said [something that is frequently an interpretation rather than a direct observation]

So yes, I'm definitely prepared to accept independent sourcing. Do you have a link?

"You may not talk to the media" is pretty standard language in US employee contracts so obviously these people don't want to fireable offenses on the front page of the newspaper.

A source 'familiar with' does not reach that bar.

"A source who wishes to remain anonymous witnessed..." Is acceptable.

"Subject disclosed to an anonymous source...."

With the current source decaration they could make any claim they wanted in the story. They coud declare alien invasion and when called out say there was a person on Reddit familiar with the situation, they were wrong about everything and had no credibility, but they were familiar with the situation.

When the battle is to come up with the most significant claim the quickest, there needs to be stronger standards for the accuracy of the claim