Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

Institutions are not built around zero trust. Because when we assume attackers are identifiable, and there is some level of integrity, that makes things a lot simpler and cheaper.

I will not expect my pediatrician to want to kill my child and they certainly could, but it would be completely bonkers to try to guard against that.

The level of damage that a single really motivated, disgruntled person with a lot of power can do in most settings is intense. The cost inflicted if we tried to build guardrails against all of it is insane, and it probably would never work.

The US desires to show its own citizens and the world how painful it is not to submit to the US government. They're leveraging everything they've got.

The only rational response when faced with this sort of behavior is to reduce dependence on and exposure to the US as much as possible. Develop national technology. Dedollarize the economy. Invest in and use open weight models.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqoX9OIR-DI

The U.S. is either harming itself erratically, or systematically enforcing control on US based businesses in a way that is historically more synonymous with, say, China.

A lot of us worry it is the former. I wonder if it's better or worse if it is the latter. The US, having seen that Europe and the world seem to tolerate interference by CPC based on opinions expressed by Alibaba or Chinese car companies, may have decided that it's fair game.

For the most part no. The Administrative Procedures Act outlines a fairly robust process for rulemaking (ie regulations must go through a notice period, must be justified etc) and adjudication (ie per-person decisions must have notice, ability to have counsel, be appealable etc).

However there's also lots of authority given to the president (and executive office of the president) to which the APA doesn't apply. This includes powers the constitution gives to the president directly and (mostly emergency) powers congress gives to the president. Sadly political processes and supreme court cases have hugely increases what can be done with this*.

Moreover, it's been a frequent pattern (over many decades, but especially under Trump) for the president to simply nakedly overstep their authority. Sometimes there's no push back (see: 9/11); sometimes the damage is done even if it's eventually overruled. Never is there any consequences though, so the pattern repeats.

* E.g. The president's control of the military is supposed to be checked by congress deciding when to declare war. However the war powers act has in practice played out to allow the president to unilaterally start wars, especially as the supreme court has stepped in to make the war powers act less effective.

I think this can be said in many contexts these days.

https://abc7.com/post/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-stron...

Goverment: ...

Anthropic CEO: NO, NO, NO NOT LIKE THIS.

I'm sure it says something that you think makes this a slam-dunk rebuttal, but you should fix your link first.

Edit: Saw the link. I was right. Nothing in that link makes a difference.

Like where? How about Cuba? Where Guantanamo is, where we put terrorists because we don't want them to be subject to US laws (or more specifically, we don't want ourselves to be subject to those laws when we are dealing with said terrorists). How about no.

International law has only as much power as the biggest military willing to enforce it. Hiding on some little island is not at all a good strategy for trying to evade the US government.

It seems to me that in the case of AI (as with many other modern technologies), you rely on vendor/creator support and updates to stay relevant, so the ‘next’ model matters more than the current one, and we have no idea whose next model will be open (and whose won’t).

The latest open models are so good it’s worth the 6-8 months delayed capabilities. At least for coding

And you think China will not do the same thing if their models ever become genuinely frontier-level?

But in cases like this, the pretext shouldn't be taken too seriously. Because they would have just found another one. It isn't actually particularly important that it is plausible, it's more like a happy coincidence.

I don't understand why their marketing department/execs can't see the conflict between claiming AI is going to take all jobs, that the model is super dangerous and AI hate among the general public, increased governmental oversight.

Anthropic is guilty of the latter but the former applies to most of these AI companies.

Anthropic themselves refused to allow the Pentagon use of its models for any legal purpose - instead the wanted a subset picked by Anthropic. It's ironic that you're accusing the government of ignoring the law when Anthropic openly wishes to set it's own private laws.

They're not simply petty; instead, they're vindictive, retaliatory, and vengeful.

If the Trump admin is also willing to apply the same scrutiny to GPT-5.6 and other Fable-level models, I think it is a good thing. But given the admin's history with Anthropic (such as declaring it a supply chain risk while ignoring Chinese labs), there is some smell of targeting.

Now they want them back on?

AI for me and not for thee?

Or just another opportunity for a petulant administration to target Anthropic for not doing what they wanted the first time?

Based on the reasoning for blocking Fable, every current model should be blocked. GPT 5.5 is similarly strong and has fewer guardrails, for example.

This doesn't seem like an accurate description to me. I think something like "Amazon demonstrates a jailbreak of one class of Fable guardrails" would be a more accurate description.

It doesn't even really mess up your narrative to state it accurately, but your choice of a more hyperbolic statement brings into question the good faith of the narrative you're painting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552687

Amazon did not remove any "guardrails" from Fable. They created a fake, obviously insecure program. And apparently their prompt was exactly, "Fix this code." And Fable fixed the bugs.

This is something that even dinky local Chinese models running on a high-end gaming GPU can often do. Certainly Opus, GPT 5.5 and Gemini can all do this. And any high-end Chinese "near-frontier" model can do this, too.

But either (1) the administration is too clueless to know most models can do this, (2) Trump wants to be paid a bribe, (3) someone thinks Anthropic is "woke" and should therefore be destroyed by the power of the state, or possibly, if you're really cynical, (4) maybe the NSA SIGINT wants access to Mythos so they can break into everyone's computers, but they don't want you to have a model good enough to keep them out. Take your pick, I guess.

Anyway, apparently we don't do free markets or rule of law in the United States any more?

The story is: anthropic refuses to give the US give an abliterated version of Claude for their weapons system, the US gov retaliates.

You’re rooting for the mass murderers, good job