Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#521

Post by hector_vasquez » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

libraryofbabel wrote: post #450

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. 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…

If there was ever a time to sell all your stocks and buy gold, this is it. NVIDIA to zero. This will make COVID look like a market hiccup.

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#522

Post by edg5000 » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

rwc wrote: post #251

The timing (after 5pm ET on a Friday) is telling. Build a KYC module over the weekend and we’ll be back on Fable after uploading our ID Monday morning.

I'm from Europe, but I think this move can actually achieve America First, at least as a first-order effect. The model is incredibly strong; I've used it for a few days. It gives anybody with access a serious boost. If they also take Opus and GPT5.5 away from me it's going to really be a drop in productivity.

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#523

Post by mlinsey » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #130

I haven’t seen anyone commenting on the difference between what the Government actually demanded vs what they did. They said no foreign nationals (regardless of location or residency). They actually didn’t say they couldn’t allow Americans to use it. Now, we obviously know that without some kind of brand new ID check, such a thing would be impossible and thus they had to just shut it down. But this touches on the sam…

ID checks are possible for first-party harnesses...but they would also mean no more API access. Your wrapper could easily become a way for a foreign national to query Fable. Maybe a few large customers like Cursor would work with Anthropic to prove they had implemented ID checks themselves as well in their own products, but being able to just get an API key and have your product call frontier models may be over.

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#524

Post by libraryofbabel » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

holmesworcester wrote: post #488

I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. Export control is not an effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) so there was no good faith policy justification for imposing an export control. This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They a…

I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?

It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#525

Post by blhack » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

What is going on at Anthropic?

First, it comes out that on some specified subset of queries they will simply downgrade you to a different model. One example is if you are doing model research. Imagine OSX shutting down if it detects you’re working on software.

And now they’ve decided that they’ll just shut off access to the model completely as part of what seems to be a sort of marketing stunt or temper tantrum.

They’re a service provider. Can you imagine AWS just deciding you’re getting nullrouted over some unrelated fight they’re having with the DoD?

If they weren’t a supply chain risk before this, they’re sort of doing everything they can to become one.

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#526

Post by chvid » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

libraryofbabel wrote: post #450

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. 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…

I think the Chinese don’t share the “AGI-pilled” understanding of AI that you see in some US companies and part of government.

Thus they are far less likely to do something like this.

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#527

Post by dakolli » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

I see three possibilities.

1. Likely: This is a completely contrived marketing stunt. Release a spooky sounding model, market it as such, then use the narrative to regulate open source models and dig your regulatory moat. Notice the emphasis on "foreign nationals" here.

2. Likely: Dario has a meeting at the White House this next week (confirmed by Trump this week), and this is being used to get leverage over him.

3. Uncertain: Altman has closer connections to the Trump regime and is pulling in favors to level the playing field and slow down competition.

Regardless, This is a win for Anthropic and Dario.

1. This will jump start a more serious discussion of regulation around LLMs (which are ultimately useless, regulation is just there to make them more money).

2. They can then only serve these models at their high, usage based pricing and bleed less money while serving up tons of interest because people are going to want to pay more for the "spooking banned model".

3. This will probably come with the perks of verifying everyone's identity who uses it (to comply with no "foreign nationals rule). I'll leave that up to your imagination for how that's beneficial to all the powers that be, including Anthropic. I expect this to be used as an excuse for pushing ID requirements across the AI product landscape.

4. There will be a more serious discussion about sanctioning Chinese AI labs, expect that to start happening very soon.

Either way, its all dumb. Don't use an LLM to do your work for you and save your brain. Your brain is literally atrophying by using these models the way most of you guys do. You don't need them.

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#528

Post by photochemsyn » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:11 AM UTC

I’ve never used Claude. Why not? Because Claude’s free tier was even worse than Grok! DeepSeek’s free tier is much better. Also, the fact that Claude was hyped on HN like Rust and Go made me suspicious. Why the hard sell and the non-stop promotional effort? I’m mostly interested in scientific programming, the Python and C and C++ seems to work fine, and oh look, Julia!

And LLMs? I’m just going to run open source models on local hardware, it all seems like the 1980s with compilers. Why not just submit by prompts to a high quality model running on so-so-hardware overnight, like the devops cycle with compiling a big codebase? And oh look, nobody pays for compilers anymore, who compiles their code in the cloud?

The funniest part of all of this is that the very people hyping all this - they’re the ones that AI could most easily replace. They have zero specific detailed knowledge - they just orchestrate. Agents are great at orchestration, right? But then, who needs the shareholders, anyway.

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#529

Post by sneak » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

Next up: show us government ID to prove age citizenship to access the tools you need to be competitive at any complex task (including organized dissent).

Re: Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#530

Post by edg5000 » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:15 AM UTC

sreekanth850 wrote: post #447

This should be a lesson for other countries to invest in building frontier models, so that they dont depend on the mercy of one country.

As a European, we obviously want to, but are systemetically incompetent on every level. It permeates everything. Even if tides were to change rapidly, it would require decades of growth. The US has been consistently marinating themselves in their odd but productive culture for decades and it has paid off.

It arguably started after WW2 when the transistor was invented; appearantly it was also simultaneously invented in France, but just never got the kind of serious development that it got in the US.

Domestic AI means spinning up new fabs I think, and maybe power. Maybe an entirely new foundry could work. Or market dynamics and/or architectures change and it becomes 10x cheaper to run a 1T-class model.