Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#621

Post by digitaltrees » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

I am migrating my company to private open source AI and building custom tooling, orchestration, an IDE and harness around it. The commercial labs have show it’s far too risky to build on top of them.

With the labs moving into the app layer every interaction with the API related to product development or innovation is data they will steal and use to compete against you by adding those features to their everything apps. No one would hire a knowledge firm (law firm, accountants, management consultants) if they could steal your information and give it to your competitors. Their actions have remained me that we can’t tolerate that with AI systems.

With spaceX buying cursor and Google buying windsurf, and gathering all the developer interaction as training data, there is too much risk that development process itself will be rug pulled.

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#622

Post by zrn900 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

solenoid0937 wrote: post #291

nl wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jensen said the Huawei Ascend 950 is roughly comparable to the NVidia H200[1] The H200 was released Nov 2024. Even allowing for Jensen exaggerating the risk there is no way China is 7-10 years behind. Looking at manufacturing process nodes, SMIC N+3 is a a 5nm process. 5nm was introduced by Samsung and TSMC in 2020 so at most that is 6 years. But the chips they can produce on it are roughly comparable to "roughly lev…

2-4 years is enough to lock them out of the race.

It's hard to understand: Do you think that having to use chips that were 20% less performant would lock China out of anything? Are you not aware that with the low costs they have, they can just stack ten times or more datacenters and run workloads in parallel to make up for that performance difference - even if there was actually one that high?

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#623

Post by throwa356262 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

lukan wrote: post #364

xmprt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatives vs absolutes. America will spend $500B and because of leaky pipes that's effectively 100B going directly to what's needed. China gets a lot of bang for their buck so even if they're spending a fraction of the US, they make it worth their money.

I believe China has leaky pipes as well.

China has a big corruption problem.

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#624

Post by Matl » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:04 PM UTC

meowface wrote: post #607

Matl wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anthropic was correct in their assessment and early warning of Mythos's capabilities, and they did this rollout pretty well. They were not hype marketing. They were being genuinely cautious and honest. So what prevented them from putting in the sort of safeguards they ended up putting in without hyping it for months prior as being so good, it's too dangerous?

I'm not sure what you're saying. They spent ages adding guardrails to Mythos. Then they spent ages creating a whole new even more guardrailed version of Mythos called Fable. Then they added tons of classifiers so API requests to Fable would get rejected even if you ask a question like "what is a molecule". They put the thickest layer of bubble wrap around the model of any model in history. And then just today they ma…

I am saying they could have not said anything about it being too dangerous etc. and just released Fable as a new model once the safeguards were in place and Mythos to trusted orgs as they did.

Instead they choose to hype for months about having a model that's simply 'too dangerous to release'.

In other words, why hype it beforehand instead of just quietly add the safeguards they ended up with anyways and release then?

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#625

Post by SubiculumCode » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

squidbeak wrote: post #597

SubiculumCode wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Russia and the US and EU have long been under attack.

Russia's meddling is malign. But did Russia send the USA's Vice President to Hungary to campaign on behalf of Viktor Orban?

maybe, who knows. but the propaganda from russia has been pervasive...and its cause people live vance and trump to get elected.

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#626

Post by Matl » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

ahknight wrote: post #608

Matl wrote: post #447

Something I am not seeing discussed is why the sudden reversal? Could it be Antropic promised NSA direct access to everyone's queries or something? Maybe an opportunity for admin officials to get in early on their promised IPO? I am not a conspiracy theorist but this admin especially doesn't relent for free.

They made the guardrails tighter. Tight enough to capture more false positive requests, now. Yaaaaay.

Well, that's the publicly stated reason. Is that really enough? Maybe, but I am slightly suspicious something else was promised behind the scenes.

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#627

Post by zamadatix » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #157

villish wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little too later for export controls. Chinese models have made massive gains through legitimate research but also being trained on billions of tokens from Claude/GPT. The politicians have no idea how to stop that from happening so they pull the only lever they know.

Also, don't forget that we're only here because the clown-in-chief cut them off from GPUs - forcing them to make do with inferior hardware (and hence superior ideas). I have no doubt that any controls would only make China stronger.

> clown-in-chief

I'm extremely left leaning myself but I'd rather not be able to tell who won the last election cycle by looking at HN and seeing whether comments containing phrases like this for the president are upvoted or [dead]. The only thing it aids is convincing people the guidelines are for selective application. Everyone who doesn't like ${currentPresident} will be unchanged and those who do aren't going to be convinced by constant casual name calling across the site - probably the opposite.

I usually also expect to get called out as only saying this when ${currentParty} is in power or when it only benefits ${awfulThingsAboutCurrentParty}, regardless which that is and what those are at the moment. I've started including this note and the searchable token "reallynotpartyrelated" when commenting such things for later reference - this paragraph can otherwise be ignored :).

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#628

Post by throwup238 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

throwa356262 wrote: post #613

throwup238 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And China is now doing something on the hardware axis; which it may have never explored were it not for the sanctions. Gaining parity on the semiconductor fab front has been official government policy as part of their Five Year Plan for at least the last decade , straight from the Politburo. They were always going to go down this path, and with AI playing front and center on their upcoming plan, there’s even more p…

The difference is that this time the both the government and the (semi) private sector invested billions in this area. They have always been able to do this, but this time they did have the option to pass.

There’s an ambiguity here: what is “this area”? If we’re talking about the semiconductor industry, they’ve been investing billions since the early nineties. The really big push came with the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund in 2014 at which point they were plowing billions into the industry across the public and private front. That one fund alone has $100 billion in assets under management at this point, and there are many other funds involved.

They’ve also invested in AI separately (before LLMs) in that time period but I’m less familiar with that sector.

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#629

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

throwup238 wrote: post #628

throwa356262 wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that this time the both the government and the (semi) private sector invested billions in this area. They have always been able to do this, but this time they did have the option to pass.

There’s an ambiguity here: what is “this area”? If we’re talking about the semiconductor industry, they’ve been investing billions since the early nineties. The really big push came with the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund in 2014 at which point they were plowing billions into the industry across the public and private front. That one fund alone has $100 billion in assets under management at this po…

[deleted]

Re: Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

#630

Post by aspenmartin » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

zrn900 wrote: post #620

aspenmartin wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely hasn’t backfired. Exporting would have just sped up their progress. Instead they had to get clever and lean into the bottleneck which for them, now, is compute efficiency. This is temporary and they’ll figure out competitive chip design and production but not for several more years. It’s incredibly hard to match the quality of NVidia and TSMC, as China has found throughout years of trying.

Nope. If China were not banned from US-controlled chips, it would be importing chips at much higher prices, therefore getting less bang for its buck while strengthening competitors with its money in the process. Instead, the US banned China from chips and lithography machines, giving China the legal excuse to start producing them domestically without violating WTO rules. Now China produces cheap chips and uses them w…

> Nope. If China were not banned from US-controlled chips, it would be importing chips at much higher prices, therefore getting less bang for its buck while strengthening competitors with its money in the process.

Nowhere near the value of having access to chips, at any cost. They have extremely deep pockets. They already pay 6x the cost per FLOP.

> Instead, the US banned China from chips and lithography machines, giving China the legal excuse to start producing them domestically without violating WTO rules. Now China produces cheap chips and uses them with cheap electricity.

You think without export restrictions China wouldn't be doing the exact same thing? China needs absolutely zero legal excuse. I mean sure they have compute available on grey market / domestically but at 6x the cost per FLOP. Access to NVIDIA chips would make it dramatically cheaper for them. Yes you get chip income but that is not even close to what you lose. The strategy is doing what it was always supposed to do: slow them down, bleed their resources to force them to spin their wheels catching up. China is doing a great job with this but they are fundamentally constrained by these export controls.

You are right that this greases the wheels, they are further along than they would have been without export restrictions, but they are still delayed even with the reduced friction. The alternative is that they move slightly slower _while having the same compute infrastructure available_ and at dramatically lower energy costs. That is a far worse position for the US to be in.

> This was a dumb move by the US. Brought upon it by dumbf-ck aristocratic elites who grew up in isolated mansions and then received law degrees, with absolutely no understanding of technology and technology ecosystems. They thought they'd just make the rules and everybody would have to obey. It turns out in technology, they don't have to...

I think this is too cynical. Neither one of us is in the room to actually observe the real decision making, but export restrictions as a strategy are not some "dumbf-ck aristocratic elite" thing. They are perfectly rational from a strategic standpoint and arguably doing what they're supposed to do.