Fable 5 apparently can't be used for coding? (This is from Anthropic's announcement.)
> After a series of productive conversations with the US government, we're redeploying the model with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks. In the near term, some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8.
> Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits.
> The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks.
Here's Fable 5, the strongest model. Actually try to use it to harden your code and it turns into Opus 4.8. You have seven days to use it, and only half of that time's worth in actual usage. Enjoy.
Looks like it's going to be a thoroughly frustrating experience, even worse than initial rollout. For subscription users, the situation is almost indistinguishable from the export ban.
So fable will jump more often to Opus than it already did on original release? Working with fable felt like having to constantly fight against your work tool. Frustrating. Now they're making it even more frustrating.
Just a code review of my own project. Downgraded to Opus 50% of the time while evaluating the critical I/O and memory safety parts, the exact thing I wanted it to do.
I mean what do you expect when covering memory safety topics with a model that's not allowed to cover security topics? This seems totally expected. It'll be the same when 5.6 is released.
This is what I’m thinking, too. OpenAI is gaining a structural advantage purely on the basis of not being considered an enemy of the administration. Anthropic really blew it with Washington.
I wonder if they meant to draw a link between cybersecurity coding and debugging specifically or this really will apply to all coding and debugging. If it really is a more general restriction, then this is practically the same as it still being restricted.
> The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks. As with all our safeguards, we’ll continue to refine this to better distinguish genuine misuse from legitimate requests and reduce false positives.
where did you find that? weird coz their post announcing this also mentioned Claude Code:
> Fable 5 will be available starting tomorrow, Wednesday, July 1, to users globally on the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. For Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans,1 Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits. We will re-enable access on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry as quickly as possible.
Reading the full blog post, I think the summary was just poorly written (because it's hard not to read that sentence like all coding is redirected to Opus).
The damage is done. You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model. Especially not with the current crew in charge.
Now whether AI tech is in the same league as say Nuclear tech and therefore by any reasonable standard should be regulated is a different question.
We hit the slippery slope on a random day in June 2026 and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Any exec or manager that puts load bearing weight on top of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/AmericanCorp frontier model deserves the stress.
> The damage is done. You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model. Especially not with the current crew in charge.
The switching costs of changing LLM providers is as low as it gets. All the individuals and startups I know try different models all of the time, even down to the level of choosing which provider to use based on the task. Bigger companies move slower but only because they have lawyers and teams negotiating contracts, not because there is a technical reason that it's hard to switch.
Companies have dealt with supply chain unpredictability by having multiple providers and switching between them since forever. It's infinitely easier to switch LLM providers than it is to deal with physical supply chain uncertainty.
I'm a small software business owner in Europe. I have to assume my competition is willing to pay for any business advantage they can get. And so I also have to pay for the SOTA model, whatever it is.
No you don't; it's often overkill to use the SOTA models. People want SOTA because it's shiny, but there are a lot of tasks where it's cheaper and more efficient to use other models.
The good news (for you and most everyone other than the current leading AI companies), the gap between the SOTA and the near-frontiers is getting smaller every week or two. The leading Chinese models are only a few months behind now (GLM 5.2 tickles the tail of GPT 5.3 or 5.4 and Opus 4.6, according to benchmarks and the vibes among heavy users who've spent some time with it), where they were a couple of years behind a year ago.
The gap between Chinese models and American frontier models is estimated at 10 months by Anthropic themselves, and it's growing.
China has no flywheel for long-form agentic traces like Claude Code and its telemetry over its userbase (no one uses the Chinese harnesses yet). Most Chinese models are forced to price themselves significantly below cost to compete with the huge demand for bootleg claude tokens, because they're that much worse.
> is estimated at 10 months by Anthropic themselves, and it's growing.
How is this different than any business with something to lose saying a competitor isn't as good? Not saying it's false, but it would seem to me that it's more important how customers feel about the issue.
If Anthropic themselves say competition is 10 months behind, it's probably 5 or less.
And you seem to think "no one uses" DeepSeek's v4, z.AI's GLM 5.2 or Xiaomi's MiMo 2.5 from their official APIs when they probably dwarf Anthropic's usage and are widening the gap due to conquering a chunk of Western market too.
I know it's hard for some to comprehend there's an entire Eastern hemisphere in the globe with billions of people, so it's worth reminding. And some seem to think the world is basically silicon valley even.
I don't know if you write software for your own products or if you code for your customers. Anyway, are you going to compete on the speed of your code writing AI or on deploying the features your customers need? One useful feature is better than a hundred ones nobody really care about. And a good relationship with customers is better than any feature.
Example. Yesterday I listened the technical lead of a customer of mine digging himself into a hole by not understanding what it would mean exposing AWS EFS to their on premise server over NFS. It was just too many unknown unknowns for him and he had no time to ask the AI (and even if he did I'm not sure that he could understand.) His boss, which actually used NFS, had to stop him. I didn't speak a word.
So, he could have coded the migration of a server from AWS to on premise, asked Claude to write also all the configuration scripts and policies but then what?
Companies generally fail because either their product doesn't meet a market need, or the market doesn't exist in the first place (possible because of bad timing), and not because they simply outran their competitors.
These aren't things fixed by using a frontier model to vibe code faster in lieu of one 5 months behind.
Any competitive business will accept this risk if it gives them any type of edge no matter the duration of that edge. This is no different that using an exotic raw material.
Eh, this isn’t really how businesses operate. How many businesses refuse to give devs large-spec machines? That’s very clear positive ROI.
I think it’s excessively charitable to assume businesses are uber-competent ROI-chasers. The expense people are eventually going to win on AI too, this blip of unrestricted AI budgets will be gone soon.
This x 10 . I don’t understand how people are saying you can’t use LLMs to get crazy productivity gains. If you can’t write quality code with LLMs at ludicrous speed, you’re holding it wrong. You will have occasional bad days and regressions. But overall you’re still going to be able to 4x your progress.
That’s kinda what I mean. Maybe it only works well in some languages, but with the harness I built for C and C++ does a fantastic job of adhering to very strict architecture and style guides. Way cleaner, more readable, better factored, and more interpretable than human generated code, except maybe one or two devs I have worked with. YMMV I guess?
TBF I do burn 200k tokens just preloading the context with onboarding, not including any code, just document trees of development policy documents, style and architectural standards, code and documentation review processes, company ethos and culture, etc. it’s a token fire, but it really works for us.
Also, documentation driven development all the way down.
If you're an enterprise (including startups), you worry about customers, not code quality. There are famously many startups that gained traction despite shit code and then eventually got around to fixing it, to whatever extent was possible, like Facebook HHVM, Stripe's Sorbet, etc.
Ok, and? You can live with that if there are more important things to deal with.
I've stared at ugly LLM code, that I had just had generated, and worked well enough for my purposes. (generally, some quick recursion into a nested python dictionary in order to dig out some property -- especially for linting or quick data analysis).
And I wanted something better, sure, something a bit more readable ...but I just needed it to work well enough to recurse through a yaml file for config file linting, not be battle-hardened against every test case.
So to deal with the mess, I shoved it in a pure function, threw a few basic sanity unit tests around it, put a comment with a disclaimer of "#this is LLM generated code, it is lightly tested, do not use it for anything truly load-bearing without a lot more tests" and I moved on to something else.
You're on Hacker News. This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless. You can't just waltz in here and point out that code in business is a means to an end and expect not to get downvoted.
> As a technical product manager, this 1000%. It's just irrelevant how bad code is unless it impacts the business.
If you are, in fact, "a technical product manager", I would hope you understand that "bad code" is identified as such specifically because it "impacts the business."
The engineers I have worked with most definitely define "bad code" as having intrinsic limitations and/or latent defects which impact successful system functionality/operation. Indicators provided to stakeholders such as yourself which support this assessment are, but not limited to:
- the system doesn't work that way
- the system lacks test coverage, so changes take longer
- adding feature "X" is not feasible
- there is no repeatable way to onboard team members
- the backlog grows exponentially
- that "one point task" is going to take a couple weeks
All of the above impacts a business.
It is up to you, the "technical product manager", to understand what your team is trying to tell you.
Please stop being rude to me. I'm a human being, I'm a very experienced product manager and engineer (you can google my name, I'm the only one), and the way you are behaving sucks.
Everything you're saying is true, sometimes. Assume I'm still right, and that you might be able to learn something from someone else.
I do not see how I was being rude, unless it was my use of quotations around the title you claim.
> I'm a human being ...
I did not doubt this.
> ... I'm a very experienced product manager and engineer ...
Again, if it was my use of quotations which you found to be rude, then I do not know what to say about that.
> ... and the way you are behaving sucks.
I respect your perspective and support your right to express yourself. And no, I do not think you are being rude by doing so.
> Assume I'm still right ...
Why would I? You responded to:
>> This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless.
With:
> As a technical product manager, this 1000%.
Finally, you write:
> ... you might be able to learn something from someone else.
Maybe you can learn something from someone else as well.
This is something I wish I understood sooner. There is strong merit to "good enough".
Of all the "concise" and "beautiful" code I worked hard to produce, I was the only one to ever lay eyes on it. It didn't actually matter, and nobody cared but me. The people in charge of my raises could never perceive quality of code, because it wasn't their area of expertise. They only cared (rightly so) that it did what it was supposed to, and all the elegant abstractions didn't practically help that purpose. It was, literally, wasted life that I should have spent just getting off work early, like most of my colleagues.
Every single thing around you was pioneered by people who are dead and forgotten. From the materials science of the clothes you wear, to the very language you speak.
Get over yourself. We're all ephemeral, dead and recycled in the blink of an eye. Our species doesn't even clock on the geologic timespan.
If you think your code (or any of your artifacts or possessions) matter beyond their immediate utility, you're mistaken. Work will either fall into disuse or be replaced. It's scaffolding for what comes next along a well-traversed path.
I measured an ~8x increase in my project's commit count after AI, and I'm painstakingly reading, reviewing, understanding and editing everything the models write. It's gotten to the point I'm trying to slow down in order to let the new knowledge crystallize. I'm manually writing articles about what I'm doing as I go.
I can only imagine what people are doing at their jobs with unlimited token budgets.
I wonder if the people getting 10x productivity gains are spending less time on HN and more time tending to their agents. Personally I now spend so much time productively arguing with agents that it feels like an utter waste of effort arguing with humans, if people can't see the value in LLMs by now I'm not sure what I could say to change their minds.
Definitely enjoying the lack of eye-rolling, being asked to explain obvious things multiple times, and stopping things being done for resume-stuffing reasons.
There's a small minority of people who are adamantly refusing to change, such as there are in every technological revolution. Ego prevents them from even wholeheartedly trying the tool, because it would be admission they were wrong.
The opportunities available for these people are rapidly, rapidly shrinking. I believe it's possible to be a developer today who's EXCEPTIONAL and never uses AI. Most opponents are not exceptional, though, and even these opportunities are shrinking.
Most exceptional developers in my org adopted AI in their workflows and went from 10x developers to 20x developers.
If you refuse to adapt, you're going to be out of a job complaining about the kids and their newfangled technology REAL quick. You have a few years remaining, maybe less.
I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because I have to ensure the two juniors in my team who are now creating 50x work won’t merge complete garbage, reviewed by another engineer that has already given up on caring.
I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because my Product Manager thinks changing fundamental premises of tasks I already spent two weeks on (mostly removing human blockers) is very simple. After all, when he asked Claude to update his prototype, it only took it 10 minutes.
I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because the company dedicated entire teams to write company-wide skills for everything. They suck, but if I don’t use them, I’m not following the new “golden path for engineering”, and I lose points in my performance review.
I can, however, turn 10x work into 20x work, or even much more than that, if AI actually did what it’s promising and eliminated most of my team, the product manager, and the middle managers. Or me. I could use a break.
What about the 6x developers? Was there just a doubling multiplier across the board, resulting in them becoming 12x developers, or did they too become 20x developers?
>> What concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs?
> Speed.
Speed of what?
Speed of understanding what needs to be done? I highly doubt it.
Speed of LoC checked into git? Sure, I'll give you that.
But one can use any number of tools to generate hundreds of thousands of lines of code. See any build tools which support specifications such as RAML, OpenAPI, CORBA, etc.
fixing minor bugs takes one slack message for us now. bugs go down, goodness go up.
fixing more serious regression also easier. connect honeycomb mcp, ask agent to debug while i walk to coffee and get some pistachio rose dates. by time im back with my oat latte ive got a full report on what happened and can send the next slack message to fix.
I needed to deeply understand a code base I had no experience with in a language I don't normally use with what I would describe as haphazard documentation at best. You can't argue with the speed at which I gained the required understanding of the project.
In the time it took you to type that, your hourly market comp went down another basis point.
I am appalled none of this is clicking with you anti-AI folks. This is all so exciting -- alarming even! --, and software careers are never going to be the same.
I don't know how you just metaphorically stand there and act like nothing at all is happening. We've never seen anything like this in our entire lives.
Some of you are standing right in front of the steam roller, yelling to all of us that steam rollers aren't real.
Did you use an LLM to write this for you? How odd.
For all of you people who think these LLM models are “earth shattering” how the hell do you reconcile that it’s a net positive for anyone but those who want to consolidate knowledge and power.
A: The sky is blue!
B: No it's not.
A: Yes, it is, please look up.
B: No, you must prove it to me through reason.
A: But, if you would just pretty please look up.
B: No.
I run a company, I've been running it for 10 years, we do alright. I'm a shitty manager. Every time I've hired developers, the business freezes. The business isn't anything super important, the main consequence of bugs is that my family loses money. Everything has always rested on my shoulders. In theory there is some path for me to become a good manager, but I never landed on it. But now, with Claude, it's great. So far Claude has paid itself off in real profits at least 20x over, and that's with significant API usage on top of the monthly sub. I can prototype new features in an afternoon that before were on my giant list of "maybe somedays if I ever get to breathe" list. Our user experience has improved in so many ways that I knew were probably worth it, if I could just find the time. Now I can.
There are situations where yeah, it probably isn't ready yet. But, there are so many where it's amazing. Seriously, it's worth looking up.
From my brief window of Fable usage, speed wasn't its strong point at all.
For actually building software, I'm starting to suspect a human with a dumber (but faster) model is going to get the job done quicker than Fable (and possibly even cheaper). Bug-finding and vulnerability detection is a different story.
This thinking that every task must be stuffed into the most 'advanced' (expensive) model out there is idiotic, and it's not only you unfortunately.
At $JOB I have warned higher ups we should try to keep our expenditure under control, educate people that document slinging doesn't require Fable every time and demo the capabilities of the cheaper models, and been snubbed for it. When Fable is available once again our bill is going to be eye watering, relative to what it should be.
This! I've found that for most coding, Sonnet is pretty good as it is. Yeah, you might need to finesse your prompt a bit more, and you'll probably be spending a bit more time on the computer, rather than a more hands-off approach, but at the end of the day, you'll save a lot more simply because you're using a good-enough model.
If you're the one-shotting type, obviously then Fable might be useful, but I think only marginally. You don't need to bring a MANPADS to a duel at high noon.
So the panic generators ("You will be left behind!") are winning. Creating a sense of urgency that makes you switch off the higher rational functions is a key element in every successful scam.
do you think your current operation and niche is so optimized that not using Fable would put you out of business? Or is this a hope that using Fable will allow you to stay in business?
Nonsense. Do you buy state of the art pens, pencils, printers, paper, computers, disks, etc.? No. You buy whatever is the best value for the case at hand. That’s often not the SOTA option.
But if the job requires the best intelligence you can get with an LLM, then you use that.
Taking as an assumption that the quality of your product is a function of the quality of the inference you are using: if you use an inferior model because "what if it gets export controlled again" and your competitors don't, then your competitors are likely to win.
If you don't need frontier models for you job then this is all moot, but the thread started with
> You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model
Which is silly. HN likes to roleplay bringing everythgin "business critical" in house because sometimes vendors mess up. Self host, don't use the cloud, run open models locally, built redundant supply chains in case of another covid, etc etc. Sometimes the risk is real, but most of the time the risk is rare and the cost of an interruption event is less than the cost of bringing everything in house or using lower quality vendors "just in case"
Wouldn’t you just have fallbacks? Today’s frontier models are just better than the other models, they don’t really have a ton of entirely unique abilities that can’t be replicated with more time and effort.
So you use the frontier model, then when you can’t you accept things are less efficient. The alternative (right now) is to be less efficient all the time, I don’t see any advantage to that.
But, it is a big own goal, because once you invest in building evals for your internal use-case, 1) it’s easier to switch your model to whatever is cheapest, and 2) it’s way easier to fine-tune an oss model.
Evals are annoying to build and most companies were fine to rest on vibes. Now many companies have to do the work for insurance.
The real problem is the White House just making up the rules as it goes. No laws. No predictably for the markets.
A week or so pause from seemingly legitimate cyber security concerns isn’t cause for panic. But it should be backed by laws that describe what that process should be. That would put the market at ease
> "The reality is this is world-ending technology and absolutely nobody knows what to do or can even agree that the problem exists."
The reality is that the "people in power" believe it is "world-ending technology" and will therefore use it in world-ending ways. People are absolutely 100% the danger here, not the technology.
I predict we all be using the hell out of fable until the next great model comes around and in two weeks we won’t be talking about the export controls anymore. We just don’t have the attention span.
Nobody should be putting loadbearing weight on Amazon or Microsoft with their ruthless monopoly ambitions, yet here we are
> I predict we all be using the hell out of fable until the next great model comes around and in two weeks we won’t be talking about the export controls anymore.
Until it goes down, or Anthropic raises prices again.
Fable is already expensive to use compared to GLM and they want you to use the API as much as possible so you get a worse deal.
Feels like a leap. This kind of move was always possible. It's possible China stops publishing their frontier too. US could lock down access to Nvidia latest hw of scale even if you intended to do open models. Then what? Say amd or bust? The best you could do going solo (i.e no nation-state interference) is tiny stuff that you can run on commercial stuff. But that is seriously limited / slow in comparison. You either have to do dumb and fast, or smart and slow IME for these self-hosted things that aren't on the beefy racks.
LLMs are still easily replaceable. If the SOTA frontier model provides meaningful impact for your critical business function, then worse case you flip the switch to the next most capable model.
Unequivocally false. Models have different behaviors, parameters, tool calling templates, etc. The providers publish extensive documentation on all of this. Yes, you can take the quick way and swap a model, but it will not run at its full potential until you adapt your workflows to it.
Nah, people will still pay, as many if not most consumers truly do have a short memory. And like other comments say, imagine everyone is using Fable and you are not, you will quickly fall behind, per the Red Queen hypothesis.
I think this is black and white thinking. Fable and US AI is not unique technology. It’s just marginally better than open source tech at 10 times the price. You can swap out the models at will, they are pretty much fungible. If your use case can pay for a best in class model then you will pay for it no matter the bogeymen. If your best in class model becomes unavailable, you switch to the next best model for a very minor performance degradation. I really doubt this will deter anyone from using American AI.
This won't age well. You just need to code in a way that has fallbacks. Whether that is to older models, different companies. It's going to be a commodity (if it isn't already).
The EU has totally and utterly failed when it comes to frontier AI. They are out of the running, they won't catch up in time for superintelligence. There literally is not enough compute for sale in the world for them to do so.
They crippled their own domestic entities with the AI Act. (see the Mistral CEO's rant.)
If you want to use frontier models until then, you're gonna use what's available, and that's US models.
Most companies do not model themselves as "building on [AI model du jour]" yet. They model themselves as building products with those tools, which they consider as relatively substitutable.
The Damage: Now every time Claude does something stupid or trashes your code, developers in the back of their mind will think, is Claude sabotaging me on purpose? [1] Trust is hard to gain. Easy to lose. And harder to get back. Models will converge. Trust won't.
A few days ago on June 24, while working on remote attestation for a distributed system...
CLAUDE OPUS 4.8 No. I'm not a rogue agent, and I'm not trying to sabotage your code. But I'm not going to wave off how this looks. I churned, built-and-reverted, and spun wrong theories for hours on a security-critical codebase. That's alarming, and it's a real failure on my part
What are we to think? Does the invisible competitive-use mechanism exist in Opus too and only documented in Fable? How long has it existed? Is it still in effect? -- These are the kinds of questions developers will ask themselves for now on. This is why it was one of the stupidest things Anthropic could have done. Developers will now question everything and rightly so. There's no attestation protocol for that. How will they know?
[1] "In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development, we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms.
Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts,these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a differentmodel. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). These interventions will not affect the vast majority of coding work. We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations. When these interventions are active, we expect them to have minimal behavioral impact on the model except to limit its effectiveness in developing frontier LLMs. Claude will still respond helpfully to user requests. We’ll continue to improve the precision of our detection methods following the launch of this model."
Of course Anthropic is still relevant, but people have realized they’re not special, and between this and the ID verification thing, they’ve given up a ton of their relevance vs a month ago.
I used Fable 5 for maybe 10 hours in the window when it was available. It was much better than Opus 4.8. And I have found the Opus models to be excellent, but Fable 5 was cranking out incredible research on some data sources I wanted to plumb into my project.
I wouldn't personally pay API pricing for it for my personal projects, but I bet it's going to be absolutely slammed with usage for the next month+.
No doubt Anthropic Mythos/Fable are frontier. I also miss having access as it uncovered some "evals repellant" regressions on my personal pet factory.
OTOH for most of my day to day work I've come to realize that faster ~ Opus 4.6 / GPT 5.3 level capabilities could be the sweet spot as scaffolding has to be put in place right after clean specs and constant review anyways. The latest chinese models and GLM 5.2 in particular felt on-par on that front.
As everyone knows, Kool-Aid is also just mostly water.
I work in AI / infrastructure and I have never seen as much interest towards investing into sovereignty by actual deciders. Thankfully, at this point I can't see any flip-flopping / change of messaging stopping that train.
In CA/EU over the last ~15 years, one used to be perceived as a bit of a "weird systems person" by just proposing alternatives to the big hyperscalers.
So the Trump administration, hands-down, has been the greatest ally here.
In tandem, I was hoping Anthropic would be keeping "dangerously capable" models banned from "evil Chinese distillers" for as long as possible.
I bought a GLM 1 year subscription and changed my environment variables to use Claude Code... yep the same one that is using stegonography to send details about users to the model. China knows where I live, I'm not getting ripped off or rug pulled on their models either.
No nation is going to willingly release a model that can be used against it. Not even China. The moment they have a Mythos class model, they will go through the same process. The AmericanCorp models are far ahead of any other models so we see this process unfolding through that lens.
No Mythos class model will be allowed to be legally hosted for download on any service. All powerful nations will ban this since safeguards are not guaranteed by shady service providers running these models.
For the Chinese first party providers, they will be forced to implement the same process and safeguards, and they will not be allowed to release the model weights to the public.
Why? Because no sane nation is going to put that kind of capability in the hands of the public only for the public to use that power against that nations best interests.
Tom Brown
Chief Compute Officer
Anthropic
548 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94104
Dear Mr. Brown:
Since the issuance of my previous letters, dated June 12, 2026 and June 26, 2026, Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address
the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
In light of these actions and commitments, as well as the Bureau of Industry and Security's evaluation of the diversion risks now presented by Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, the controls in the June 12 letter are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.
Commerce reserves the right to reevaluate the decisions made in this letter and the necessity of reimposing a license requirement, should circumstances change or should Anthropic fail to adhere to its commitments.
If you have any questions about this letter, please contact me or the Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler, at (202) 255-1864.
It was likely a dealbreaker for Anthropic, since the export control excluded Anthropic’s own foreign employees from being able to access Mythos internally. Naturally, this makes model development hard.
You're suggesting a for-profit company both hobbled it's own product and is actively lying about doing so. The only way that's true is if the Trump admin has crawled all the way up Anthropic's ass. But by all accounts, this is just another 10% effort by Trump and friends.
I don't think this is the case just because of the 'fallback' method they described, where suspicious requests are routed to Opus 4.8. If the model was degraded for certain categories of knowledge, then they'd probably be fine letting the model answer to it. IMO, of course
Either way, I do hope they lift those draconian bans. Using the model was a terrible experience because of the constant downgrades. I didn't manage to harden my own projects before Fable got banned.
The CEO is also not the addressee of shipments of urinal cakes.
There is a deep, deep ignorance of export controls on HN, and I fully expect it will play out as another 500 comment thread of snark and incorrecting each other while blaming the government and not understanding a word of it.
FWIW an Empowered Official is not the person who cleans the espresso machine.
One of the contributing factors that led to this control in the first place was that the commerce department couldn't get Dario on a call immediately:
"Then White House started reaching out to Anthropic to speak with Dario Amodei, who was at a wellness retreat.... When Amodei was finally available past 1pm, he had three tense phone calls with a combo of ppl including Cairncross, Bessent, Lutnick, Kessler, Will Scharf, Richard Walters, and Walker Barrett."
Anthropic has disputed that Dario was at a wellness retreat but both sides seem agree that it seemed to be a problem (and it is very apparent that Dario's response made things worse).
Your comment, genius. Makes me miss n-gate dotcom, which hasn't been updated since 2021. This comment would make a great entry. If you aren't familiar with it, you really want to be.
Can't do anything else with GLM 5.2 being widely available and advertised as "Mythos-like", and even Japan dropping a credible model. Actually it would only hurt to keep them in lockdown.
The real problem in all this is lack of predictability. The White House is just making it up as it goes along. Investors, customers don’t know what the process is and can’t plan.
In the end, we need actual laws that tell the market what kinds of models get paused / analyzed, how long that pause can be, etc.
Otherwise there’s no standard and it will be easily abused and prevent investment in US AI companies.
Applies to all industries with the memory care patient currently occupying the White House. Passing laws won't help when they can be effectively struck down until the next sitting of the SC.
There are laws and regs. Just because you’re not familiar with the Defense Production Act (50 U.S.C. § 4511 ), Export Control Reform Act, 50 U.S.C. § 4812 and others doesn’t mean that they don’t exist and apply.
> The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks.
Looks like it's gonna be even harder to use than before, if not impossible. Subscription users only get it for a week, and only for 50% of that week's usage.
are export controls the right thing ? Probably not.
but the american economy is over-exposed on "A.I" - the capital expenditure, while the Chinese are proving you don't need to spend tons of capital to get close to the frontier.
the Chinese have better building capacity & cheaper energy. that means the market has to correct at some point.
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.
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.
That's true for domestic labor and manufacturing, like shipbuilding, but the bleeding edge chips only come from one place and the US labs get the best while Chinese labs do not (unless they smuggle them). China gets creative, sure, but it can't overcome the fundamental issue that the US labs have more magic rocks that do math faster than their magic rocks. And the current state of the art is to just "do more math".
Nvidia GPUs aren't even the absolute SOTA for LLM inference anymore. Some labs are moving to ASICs and Huawei already have their own custom chips running DeepSeek as we speak.
There's enough money and scale on the line that software affinity like CUDA is no longer the deciding factor and there's margin for custom stacks.
Even more so after the USA GPU exports ban which is proving to have backfired by speeding up China's tech growth.
China’s chip industry is 7-10 years behind, and that is because they are desperate and have been throwing money at it. But technological progress requires more than just money.
They should give us a month of access again, I feel like I didn't do enough with Fable before it got blocked.
I only realised late that I had an algorithm problem that existing models were struggling with, and Fable had made progress with. It created a 14 phase plan, which I was able to execute with Opus after the restriction.
As another comment nicely put it, Anthropic generously gives subscription users 3.5 days of usage.
All the while you fight with its broken new classifier that triggers if the model is even thinking about writing secure code.
Apparently Anthropic cares nothing for their private users. This is insulting, and I hope they bankrupt after losing enterprise share to OpenAI's more efficient models.
Fable was such a clear improvement. I can't wait to start using it again.
Opus 4.8, you did a lot of good work for me, but in the name of all things holy... I will not miss your communication style. So long and thanks for the fish.
Silly me for hoping they'd actually honor their original 14-day promise. Per their latest blog post, they've generously slashed the timeline to 7 days, but wait there's more! It's now limited to 50% of your weekly usage:
> Fable 5 will be available starting tomorrow, Wednesday, July 1, to users globally... Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits.
Hi subscription peasants! You have seven days of time and 3.5 days of usage to figure out how to get the most out of Fable while it constantly downgrades to Opus 4.8 every time it thinks about exploits while hardening your code base! Enjoy!
Yeah, this seems a bit Scrooge-y after all the trouble which was essentially of their own making. I was expecting them to come back with a better deal as an apology, not a worse one.
I just finished reading Incorruptible and a central theme (Anthropic is a case study) is that trust is singularly the most important currency a business has. The past few weeks have done wonders for Anthropic’s marketing but just as much if not more damage to the trust factor. Businesses will continue to use Anthropic because it’s the default and accessible where it matters (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake, etc). But the trust factor has dropped. It’ll be interesting to see if they can turn the tide. Maybe Fable will be too awesome for people to care about the past few weeks?
There is no reason to have less trust in Anthropic. It's not clear they did anything wrong. It's more likely the White House simply tied itself in knots, consistent with the last year and a half of chaos from them.
It's a good reason to not tie your company's success to US based hosted AI though. I've started experimenting with GLM 5.2 and other than the tooling needing a lot more setup once you're there it works pretty well.
I'm hoping that some relatively cost-effective self-hosting solutions come about as a result of Hopper hardware being sold off as they're retired from DC use.
>> The past few weeks have done wonders for Anthropic’s marketing but just as much if not more damage to the trust factor.
I don’t agree with this at all. IMO Anthropic has shown that that are willing to take even significant financial hits in order to stand up to their values and mitigate what they consider to be dangers and risks. Some people don’t like that or think it’s just marketing. But that’s exactly what Incorruptible is about: companies that are willing to take a stand, even in the face of overwhelming pressure from competitors, shareholders and naysayers.
This is assuming the whole "AI safety" thing was anything more than Silicon Valley kool aid. The government just bought into the marketing and radical safety woo woo wholesale and panicked.
You could legitimately argue this is a unique situation, a brief window where cybersecurity is being disrupted by new harnesses + a strong model. But that will be fleeting as other models and products adapt very quickly, and the long term benefits of keeping it from the market are questionable at best.
It's not a coincidence the export control was dropped after Dario (who is a hardcore AI safety activist much like Ilya Sutskever) was replaced by Tom Brown in the government negotiations.
Most people don't care about trust anymore, we live in a low trust society where this is to be expected. People gladly line up to be poisoned by fast food restaurants and trade 1/3 of their life for pieces of paper on a daily basis.
If it’s blocked before any output, you’re billed only at Opus rates. If it’s blocked midstream, you’re billed Fable rates for what was generated so far, and Opus rates for the rest.
My only hope is that they don't overdo the guardrails. Claude's been one of the best coding models, and it'd be nice if it stayed that way for real and legitimate developer workflows.
Love how they waited until almost 5p west coast time on the last day of the fiscal quarter and clearly gave Ant no advance notice (or Ant would have had Fable release queued up on a button).
So it seems like David Sacks was right that the US government only really got involved because the Amazon/ AWS CEO complained about latent security threats [0] and that the government was reluctant to actually issue the export control.
Sacks has said so many obviously false things in reference to government actions (Jan 6th, Ukraine, etc) that there is no reason to trust anything he says.
If the Trump administration wants him to say something, he says it. Maybe what he is saying is true, maybe it isn’t. There is no way to know.
The story they are telling is exactly the same whether it was true or they were just shaking down Anthropic for no reason.
There are many different factions within the administration. Sacks was part of the "deregulate the tech sector" faction, which on this issue is aligned with the "beating China overrides anything" faction.
That's distinct from the Pete Hegseth faction (I don't really know how to characterize his faction other than anti-woke maybe?).
Sometimes these factions agree, sometimes they don't.
In general your approach is right - you can't trust most things coming out of this administration. But you can try to unpick was actually happened by who is saying what, when. That is useful even without liking the people.
Fable was (is) a major leap forward for my development tasks. The quality of the model compared to Opus 4.8 (when I last used it before the ban hammer) was night and day. Fable single-shotting complex and complete applications was a beautiful thing and I can't wait to get back to developing with it.
Howard Lutnick is the 41st United States Secretary of Commerce. Howard Lutnick is known to have had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. From what we know and what has so far been released to the public, he is even documented to have visited his island.
The classic chaotic governance model and creation of an uncertain business environment by the Trump admin in the most important industry for the US economy.
If this is the most important industry for the US economy, the US is screwed. and .... Hopefully you're correct.
In past Empires kings bet their entire nations future on the words of soothsayers , people who said they could predict the future. It seems like Machine Learning engineers are the magicians of Empire of the modern age.
Weren't they already doing that since the beginning? Fable released with a data retention policy. I assumed US government surveillance was the reason for this.
>Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
ah, I see. so, Chinese models are getting banned soon.
Almost as though they were indefensible bullshit to begin with. I wonder who extorted whom and for how much.
Like gee, that was fast. If this had any bearing on reality, one would imagine the vetting process would take actual time and that there would be a real, material difference between what we knew then and what we know now.
Fable 5 apparently can't be used for coding? (This is from Anthropic's announcement.)
> After a series of productive conversations with the US government, we're redeploying the model with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks. In the near term, some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8.
Edit: the above was from their tweet announcement at https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756 ... the associated blog post at https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5 suggests it was just poorly written and coding can still be done with Fable, just with overeager bouncing of "some routine coding and debugging tasks" to Opus.
> Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits.
> The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks.
Here's Fable 5, the strongest model. Actually try to use it to harden your code and it turns into Opus 4.8. You have seven days to use it, and only half of that time's worth in actual usage. Enjoy.
Looks like it's going to be a thoroughly frustrating experience, even worse than initial rollout. For subscription users, the situation is almost indistinguishable from the export ban.
So fable will jump more often to Opus than it already did on original release? Working with fable felt like having to constantly fight against your work tool. Frustrating. Now they're making it even more frustrating.
For reference, here's what my experience with Fable turned out to be like:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48466313
Just a code review of my own project. Downgraded to Opus 50% of the time while evaluating the critical I/O and memory safety parts, the exact thing I wanted it to do.
And now it's gonna be even worse.
I mean what do you expect when covering memory safety topics with a model that's not allowed to cover security topics? This seems totally expected. It'll be the same when 5.6 is released.
> what do you expect
I expect the strong cybersecurity model to help me strengthen the cybersecurity of my project.
> not allowed to cover security topics
They said it wouldn't be usable for offensive purposes. This is the opposite of that.
You don't have the strong cybersecurity model. That is not Fable. It never was, even at release.
The cybersecurity model is Mythos and it is not available to you - it never was. It is only available to a list of US government approved companies.
> They said it wouldn't be usable for offensive purposes
No, they said Fable would refuse for cybersecurity and offensive purposes. You are conflating Fable with Mythos.
Donald Trump named David Sacks the White House AI and crypto czar. I guess you know whom to thank.
Wasnt it Anthropic marketing their models as very very smart and dangerous?
they might as well not released it at all, what's the point of this theater and artificial scarcity
No idea. But I will switch to OpenAI if they release their Sol model on a subscription. And if neither of them do, I will switch to GLM 5.2.
This is what I’m thinking, too. OpenAI is gaining a structural advantage purely on the basis of not being considered an enemy of the administration. Anthropic really blew it with Washington.
By "blew it with Washington" you mean "Didn't donate millions to the ballroom."
I wonder if they meant to draw a link between cybersecurity coding and debugging specifically or this really will apply to all coding and debugging. If it really is a more general restriction, then this is practically the same as it still being restricted.
"In the near term" is doing some heavy lifting.
In the press release, they 'kind of' clarify this:
From the full announcement
> The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks. As with all our safeguards, we’ll continue to refine this to better distinguish genuine misuse from legitimate requests and reduce false positives.
where did you find that? weird coz their post announcing this also mentioned Claude Code:
> Fable 5 will be available starting tomorrow, Wednesday, July 1, to users globally on the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. For Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans,1 Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits. We will re-enable access on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry as quickly as possible.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5
Their announcement tweet at https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756
Reading the full blog post, I think the summary was just poorly written (because it's hard not to read that sentence like all coding is redirected to Opus).
The damage is done. You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model. Especially not with the current crew in charge.
Now whether AI tech is in the same league as say Nuclear tech and therefore by any reasonable standard should be regulated is a different question.
We hit the slippery slope on a random day in June 2026 and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Any exec or manager that puts load bearing weight on top of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/AmericanCorp frontier model deserves the stress.
> The damage is done. You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model. Especially not with the current crew in charge.
The switching costs of changing LLM providers is as low as it gets. All the individuals and startups I know try different models all of the time, even down to the level of choosing which provider to use based on the task. Bigger companies move slower but only because they have lawyers and teams negotiating contracts, not because there is a technical reason that it's hard to switch.
Companies have dealt with supply chain unpredictability by having multiple providers and switching between them since forever. It's infinitely easier to switch LLM providers than it is to deal with physical supply chain uncertainty.
I'm a small software business owner in Europe. I have to assume my competition is willing to pay for any business advantage they can get. And so I also have to pay for the SOTA model, whatever it is.
No you don't; it's often overkill to use the SOTA models. People want SOTA because it's shiny, but there are a lot of tasks where it's cheaper and more efficient to use other models.
The good news (for you and most everyone other than the current leading AI companies), the gap between the SOTA and the near-frontiers is getting smaller every week or two. The leading Chinese models are only a few months behind now (GLM 5.2 tickles the tail of GPT 5.3 or 5.4 and Opus 4.6, according to benchmarks and the vibes among heavy users who've spent some time with it), where they were a couple of years behind a year ago.
4.6 was released at the beginning of February, so if the Chinese models only "tickle its tail," that means they're >5 months behind.
That comparison is also misleading because Opus 4.6 was probably not Anthropic's frontier model.
We got the first news about Mythos in March, so it is likely that it was already close to ready by the time Opus 4.6 was released.
So the actual gap is the time elapsed between March (or April for the official announcement) and whenever Chinese models can match Mythos.
> The leading Chinese models are only a few months behind now
What range of numbers do you believe "a few" represents?
Opinions vary, but:
A couple: usually 2, though not always
A few: 3, 4, 5
Several: 4, 5, 6, or 7.
Another day, more cope on this subject from many posters on here...
This is nonsense.
The gap between Chinese models and American frontier models is estimated at 10 months by Anthropic themselves, and it's growing.
China has no flywheel for long-form agentic traces like Claude Code and its telemetry over its userbase (no one uses the Chinese harnesses yet). Most Chinese models are forced to price themselves significantly below cost to compete with the huge demand for bootleg claude tokens, because they're that much worse.
> is estimated at 10 months by Anthropic themselves, and it's growing.
How is this different than any business with something to lose saying a competitor isn't as good? Not saying it's false, but it would seem to me that it's more important how customers feel about the issue.
If Anthropic themselves say competition is 10 months behind, it's probably 5 or less.
And you seem to think "no one uses" DeepSeek's v4, z.AI's GLM 5.2 or Xiaomi's MiMo 2.5 from their official APIs when they probably dwarf Anthropic's usage and are widening the gap due to conquering a chunk of Western market too.
I know it's hard for some to comprehend there's an entire Eastern hemisphere in the globe with billions of people, so it's worth reminding. And some seem to think the world is basically silicon valley even.
I don't know if you write software for your own products or if you code for your customers. Anyway, are you going to compete on the speed of your code writing AI or on deploying the features your customers need? One useful feature is better than a hundred ones nobody really care about. And a good relationship with customers is better than any feature.
Example. Yesterday I listened the technical lead of a customer of mine digging himself into a hole by not understanding what it would mean exposing AWS EFS to their on premise server over NFS. It was just too many unknown unknowns for him and he had no time to ask the AI (and even if he did I'm not sure that he could understand.) His boss, which actually used NFS, had to stop him. I didn't speak a word.
So, he could have coded the migration of a server from AWS to on premise, asked Claude to write also all the configuration scripts and policies but then what?
This is a great recipe for going out of business.
If the competitive risk is real, then are choosing between supplier risk (AI model access) and competitive risk.
When there isn't a zero-risk option, the question becomes which risk is smaller.
> If the competitive risk is real
Yes.
If.
Man I hope this tech FOMO eventually stops.
Companies generally fail because either their product doesn't meet a market need, or the market doesn't exist in the first place (possible because of bad timing), and not because they simply outran their competitors.
These aren't things fixed by using a frontier model to vibe code faster in lieu of one 5 months behind.
You can compete by being smart and using less-than-sota models and build a more solid business around them
Any competitive business will accept this risk if it gives them any type of edge no matter the duration of that edge. This is no different that using an exotic raw material.
Every big business in the world biases towards risk reduction and cost reduction over getting an edge.
Eh, this isn’t really how businesses operate. How many businesses refuse to give devs large-spec machines? That’s very clear positive ROI.
I think it’s excessively charitable to assume businesses are uber-competent ROI-chasers. The expense people are eventually going to win on AI too, this blip of unrestricted AI budgets will be gone soon.
And thus, capitalism continues to roll on. Businesses are suppose to go out of business, its a feature.
they’re not supposed to, they’re just able to
Nearly spit out my coffee, thanks for the chuckle.
It’s ok to be amused, absent exaggeration. Spit takes happen in sitcoms.
They do happen in real life.
They are overused in sitcoms because it’s easy for actors to mimic on demand unlike several other reactions.
What concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs?
Speed.
This x 10 . I don’t understand how people are saying you can’t use LLMs to get crazy productivity gains. If you can’t write quality code with LLMs at ludicrous speed, you’re holding it wrong. You will have occasional bad days and regressions. But overall you’re still going to be able to 4x your progress.
I have plenty of experience with LLMs and use them daily but definitely wouldn't call generated code "quality code." Often looks like complete vomit.
That’s kinda what I mean. Maybe it only works well in some languages, but with the harness I built for C and C++ does a fantastic job of adhering to very strict architecture and style guides. Way cleaner, more readable, better factored, and more interpretable than human generated code, except maybe one or two devs I have worked with. YMMV I guess?
TBF I do burn 200k tokens just preloading the context with onboarding, not including any code, just document trees of development policy documents, style and architectural standards, code and documentation review processes, company ethos and culture, etc. it’s a token fire, but it really works for us.
Also, documentation driven development all the way down.
If you're an enterprise (including startups), you worry about customers, not code quality. There are famously many startups that gained traction despite shit code and then eventually got around to fixing it, to whatever extent was possible, like Facebook HHVM, Stripe's Sorbet, etc.
Ok, and? You can live with that if there are more important things to deal with.
I've stared at ugly LLM code, that I had just had generated, and worked well enough for my purposes. (generally, some quick recursion into a nested python dictionary in order to dig out some property -- especially for linting or quick data analysis).
And I wanted something better, sure, something a bit more readable ...but I just needed it to work well enough to recurse through a yaml file for config file linting, not be battle-hardened against every test case.
So to deal with the mess, I shoved it in a pure function, threw a few basic sanity unit tests around it, put a comment with a disclaimer of "#this is LLM generated code, it is lightly tested, do not use it for anything truly load-bearing without a lot more tests" and I moved on to something else.
Not everything has to be bulletproof.
You're on Hacker News. This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless. You can't just waltz in here and point out that code in business is a means to an end and expect not to get downvoted.
As a technical product manager, this 1000%. It's just irrelevant how bad code is unless it impacts the business.
> As a technical product manager, this 1000%. It's just irrelevant how bad code is unless it impacts the business.
If you are, in fact, "a technical product manager", I would hope you understand that "bad code" is identified as such specifically because it "impacts the business."
That is not how most engineers define bad code.
> That is not how most engineers define bad code.
The engineers I have worked with most definitely define "bad code" as having intrinsic limitations and/or latent defects which impact successful system functionality/operation. Indicators provided to stakeholders such as yourself which support this assessment are, but not limited to:
All of the above impacts a business.It is up to you, the "technical product manager", to understand what your team is trying to tell you.
Please stop being rude to me. I'm a human being, I'm a very experienced product manager and engineer (you can google my name, I'm the only one), and the way you are behaving sucks.
Everything you're saying is true, sometimes. Assume I'm still right, and that you might be able to learn something from someone else.
> Please stop being rude to me.
I do not see how I was being rude, unless it was my use of quotations around the title you claim.
> I'm a human being ...
I did not doubt this.
> ... I'm a very experienced product manager and engineer ...
Again, if it was my use of quotations which you found to be rude, then I do not know what to say about that.
> ... and the way you are behaving sucks.
I respect your perspective and support your right to express yourself. And no, I do not think you are being rude by doing so.
> Assume I'm still right ...
Why would I? You responded to:
>> This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless.
With:
> As a technical product manager, this 1000%.
Finally, you write:
> ... you might be able to learn something from someone else.
Maybe you can learn something from someone else as well.
This is something I wish I understood sooner. There is strong merit to "good enough".
Of all the "concise" and "beautiful" code I worked hard to produce, I was the only one to ever lay eyes on it. It didn't actually matter, and nobody cared but me. The people in charge of my raises could never perceive quality of code, because it wasn't their area of expertise. They only cared (rightly so) that it did what it was supposed to, and all the elegant abstractions didn't practically help that purpose. It was, literally, wasted life that I should have spent just getting off work early, like most of my colleagues.
Every bit of code written in the last 50 years is going to be meaningless.
People need to get to grips with that fast.
Distribution, relationships, processes, mindshare, marketing, and politics matter. Code is just ephemeral glue and implementation detail.
Not every bit of code is going to be meaningless.
Just 99.999%.
Lmao. Have more respect for your elders, who wrote all the code that your ai psychosis is fuelled by.
Every single thing around you was pioneered by people who are dead and forgotten. From the materials science of the clothes you wear, to the very language you speak.
Get over yourself. We're all ephemeral, dead and recycled in the blink of an eye. Our species doesn't even clock on the geologic timespan.
If you think your code (or any of your artifacts or possessions) matter beyond their immediate utility, you're mistaken. Work will either fall into disuse or be replaced. It's scaffolding for what comes next along a well-traversed path.
I measured an ~8x increase in my project's commit count after AI, and I'm painstakingly reading, reviewing, understanding and editing everything the models write. It's gotten to the point I'm trying to slow down in order to let the new knowledge crystallize. I'm manually writing articles about what I'm doing as I go.
I can only imagine what people are doing at their jobs with unlimited token budgets.
You don’t have to imagine, listen to Boris’ publicly saying how he works with these things and it’s safe to assume others do it similarly or better
I wonder if the people getting 10x productivity gains are spending less time on HN and more time tending to their agents. Personally I now spend so much time productively arguing with agents that it feels like an utter waste of effort arguing with humans, if people can't see the value in LLMs by now I'm not sure what I could say to change their minds.
We must then assume you're not getting those 10x gains
Less time, not zero time. I still argue with humans for sentimental reasons.
Definitely enjoying the lack of eye-rolling, being asked to explain obvious things multiple times, and stopping things being done for resume-stuffing reasons.
There's a small minority of people who are adamantly refusing to change, such as there are in every technological revolution. Ego prevents them from even wholeheartedly trying the tool, because it would be admission they were wrong.
The opportunities available for these people are rapidly, rapidly shrinking. I believe it's possible to be a developer today who's EXCEPTIONAL and never uses AI. Most opponents are not exceptional, though, and even these opportunities are shrinking.
Most exceptional developers in my org adopted AI in their workflows and went from 10x developers to 20x developers.
If you refuse to adapt, you're going to be out of a job complaining about the kids and their newfangled technology REAL quick. You have a few years remaining, maybe less.
I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because I have to ensure the two juniors in my team who are now creating 50x work won’t merge complete garbage, reviewed by another engineer that has already given up on caring.
I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because my Product Manager thinks changing fundamental premises of tasks I already spent two weeks on (mostly removing human blockers) is very simple. After all, when he asked Claude to update his prototype, it only took it 10 minutes.
I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because the company dedicated entire teams to write company-wide skills for everything. They suck, but if I don’t use them, I’m not following the new “golden path for engineering”, and I lose points in my performance review.
I can, however, turn 10x work into 20x work, or even much more than that, if AI actually did what it’s promising and eliminated most of my team, the product manager, and the middle managers. Or me. I could use a break.
Damn, that sounds quite rough.
What about the 6x developers? Was there just a doubling multiplier across the board, resulting in them becoming 12x developers, or did they too become 20x developers?
>> What concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs?
> Speed.
Speed of what?
Speed of understanding what needs to be done? I highly doubt it.
Speed of LoC checked into git? Sure, I'll give you that.
But one can use any number of tools to generate hundreds of thousands of lines of code. See any build tools which support specifications such as RAML, OpenAPI, CORBA, etc.
So I ask again; speed of what?
fixing minor bugs takes one slack message for us now. bugs go down, goodness go up.
fixing more serious regression also easier. connect honeycomb mcp, ask agent to debug while i walk to coffee and get some pistachio rose dates. by time im back with my oat latte ive got a full report on what happened and can send the next slack message to fix.
life is good
I needed to deeply understand a code base I had no experience with in a language I don't normally use with what I would describe as haphazard documentation at best. You can't argue with the speed at which I gained the required understanding of the project.
In the time it took you to type that, your hourly market comp went down another basis point.
I am appalled none of this is clicking with you anti-AI folks. This is all so exciting -- alarming even! --, and software careers are never going to be the same.
I don't know how you just metaphorically stand there and act like nothing at all is happening. We've never seen anything like this in our entire lives.
Some of you are standing right in front of the steam roller, yelling to all of us that steam rollers aren't real.
Did you use an LLM to write this for you? How odd.
For all of you people who think these LLM models are “earth shattering” how the hell do you reconcile that it’s a net positive for anyone but those who want to consolidate knowledge and power.
We are really looking at idiocracy in the making.
Very very fast steam rollers.
Nice strawman[0], but you avoided answering my core question:
With ad hominems and a non sequitur. How about I narrow the question with the hope it engenders a relevant response: 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_manThis argument feels like
A: The sky is blue! B: No it's not. A: Yes, it is, please look up. B: No, you must prove it to me through reason. A: But, if you would just pretty please look up. B: No.
I run a company, I've been running it for 10 years, we do alright. I'm a shitty manager. Every time I've hired developers, the business freezes. The business isn't anything super important, the main consequence of bugs is that my family loses money. Everything has always rested on my shoulders. In theory there is some path for me to become a good manager, but I never landed on it. But now, with Claude, it's great. So far Claude has paid itself off in real profits at least 20x over, and that's with significant API usage on top of the monthly sub. I can prototype new features in an afternoon that before were on my giant list of "maybe somedays if I ever get to breathe" list. Our user experience has improved in so many ways that I knew were probably worth it, if I could just find the time. Now I can.
There are situations where yeah, it probably isn't ready yet. But, there are so many where it's amazing. Seriously, it's worth looking up.
From my brief window of Fable usage, speed wasn't its strong point at all.
For actually building software, I'm starting to suspect a human with a dumber (but faster) model is going to get the job done quicker than Fable (and possibly even cheaper). Bug-finding and vulnerability detection is a different story.
I’d say you tried on an insufficiently complex codebase. I’ve tried on a MLOC+ and the results were excellent compared to anything else.
Not saying the results were bad - quite the opposite. But it was very slow (and if I was paying API rates, hideously expensive).
Drawing debt
We'll just rebuild stuff when we get new requirements. The models will be even faster and better for the next version, anyway.
This thinking that every task must be stuffed into the most 'advanced' (expensive) model out there is idiotic, and it's not only you unfortunately.
At $JOB I have warned higher ups we should try to keep our expenditure under control, educate people that document slinging doesn't require Fable every time and demo the capabilities of the cheaper models, and been snubbed for it. When Fable is available once again our bill is going to be eye watering, relative to what it should be.
This! I've found that for most coding, Sonnet is pretty good as it is. Yeah, you might need to finesse your prompt a bit more, and you'll probably be spending a bit more time on the computer, rather than a more hands-off approach, but at the end of the day, you'll save a lot more simply because you're using a good-enough model.
If you're the one-shotting type, obviously then Fable might be useful, but I think only marginally. You don't need to bring a MANPADS to a duel at high noon.
Sonnet is dogshit at coding unless you eval the exact niche to be fine and still watch it like a hawk.
So the panic generators ("You will be left behind!") are winning. Creating a sense of urgency that makes you switch off the higher rational functions is a key element in every successful scam.
do you think your current operation and niche is so optimized that not using Fable would put you out of business? Or is this a hope that using Fable will allow you to stay in business?
I am on track to commoditize my niche industry, and I hope I can do it before anyone else beats me to it. I'm working at panic speeds.
Nonsense. Do you buy state of the art pens, pencils, printers, paper, computers, disks, etc.? No. You buy whatever is the best value for the case at hand. That’s often not the SOTA option.
Sure but that's orthogonal.
Yes you use the right tool for the job.
But if the job requires the best intelligence you can get with an LLM, then you use that.
Taking as an assumption that the quality of your product is a function of the quality of the inference you are using: if you use an inferior model because "what if it gets export controlled again" and your competitors don't, then your competitors are likely to win.
If you don't need frontier models for you job then this is all moot, but the thread started with
> You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model
Which is silly. HN likes to roleplay bringing everythgin "business critical" in house because sometimes vendors mess up. Self host, don't use the cloud, run open models locally, built redundant supply chains in case of another covid, etc etc. Sometimes the risk is real, but most of the time the risk is rare and the cost of an interruption event is less than the cost of bringing everything in house or using lower quality vendors "just in case"
Unless you have concrete evidence via evals that SOTA is actually needed, you’re just buying into the hype.
Wouldn’t you just have fallbacks? Today’s frontier models are just better than the other models, they don’t really have a ton of entirely unique abilities that can’t be replicated with more time and effort.
So you use the frontier model, then when you can’t you accept things are less efficient. The alternative (right now) is to be less efficient all the time, I don’t see any advantage to that.
Yeah. It’s not the end of the world.
But, it is a big own goal, because once you invest in building evals for your internal use-case, 1) it’s easier to switch your model to whatever is cheapest, and 2) it’s way easier to fine-tune an oss model.
Evals are annoying to build and most companies were fine to rest on vibes. Now many companies have to do the work for insurance.
The real problem is the White House just making up the rules as it goes. No laws. No predictably for the markets.
A week or so pause from seemingly legitimate cyber security concerns isn’t cause for panic. But it should be backed by laws that describe what that process should be. That would put the market at ease
There’s no optimal answer.
The reality is this is world-ending technology and absolutely nobody knows what to do or can even agree that the problem exists.
> "The reality is this is world-ending technology and absolutely nobody knows what to do or can even agree that the problem exists."
The reality is that the "people in power" believe it is "world-ending technology" and will therefore use it in world-ending ways. People are absolutely 100% the danger here, not the technology.
Photosynthesis once ended the world
> You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model.
Yes 1000%, please, all my European competition please don't use mythos whatever you do it's total USA trash and the Chinese models work better anyway.
I predict we all be using the hell out of fable until the next great model comes around and in two weeks we won’t be talking about the export controls anymore. We just don’t have the attention span.
Nobody should be putting loadbearing weight on Amazon or Microsoft with their ruthless monopoly ambitions, yet here we are
> I predict we all be using the hell out of fable until the next great model comes around and in two weeks we won’t be talking about the export controls anymore.
Until it goes down, or Anthropic raises prices again.
Fable is already expensive to use compared to GLM and they want you to use the API as much as possible so you get a worse deal.
Feels like a leap. This kind of move was always possible. It's possible China stops publishing their frontier too. US could lock down access to Nvidia latest hw of scale even if you intended to do open models. Then what? Say amd or bust? The best you could do going solo (i.e no nation-state interference) is tiny stuff that you can run on commercial stuff. But that is seriously limited / slow in comparison. You either have to do dumb and fast, or smart and slow IME for these self-hosted things that aren't on the beefy racks.
The real answer is you should never build your business on ANY specific model. As usual avoid lock-in and switch when you need to.
LLMs are still easily replaceable. If the SOTA frontier model provides meaningful impact for your critical business function, then worse case you flip the switch to the next most capable model.
Unequivocally false. Models have different behaviors, parameters, tool calling templates, etc. The providers publish extensive documentation on all of this. Yes, you can take the quick way and swap a model, but it will not run at its full potential until you adapt your workflows to it.
Or you can use universal harness that is not tied to a specific model (there are many available now, such as OpenCode, Pi..).
Nah, people will still pay, as many if not most consumers truly do have a short memory. And like other comments say, imagine everyone is using Fable and you are not, you will quickly fall behind, per the Red Queen hypothesis.
I think this is black and white thinking. Fable and US AI is not unique technology. It’s just marginally better than open source tech at 10 times the price. You can swap out the models at will, they are pretty much fungible. If your use case can pay for a best in class model then you will pay for it no matter the bogeymen. If your best in class model becomes unavailable, you switch to the next best model for a very minor performance degradation. I really doubt this will deter anyone from using American AI.
This won't age well. You just need to code in a way that has fallbacks. Whether that is to older models, different companies. It's going to be a commodity (if it isn't already).
The EU has totally and utterly failed when it comes to frontier AI. They are out of the running, they won't catch up in time for superintelligence. There literally is not enough compute for sale in the world for them to do so.
They crippled their own domestic entities with the AI Act. (see the Mistral CEO's rant.)
If you want to use frontier models until then, you're gonna use what's available, and that's US models.
Most companies do not model themselves as "building on [AI model du jour]" yet. They model themselves as building products with those tools, which they consider as relatively substitutable.
> You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model.
Yes I can!
Better to fix it now than tomorrow.
The Damage: Now every time Claude does something stupid or trashes your code, developers in the back of their mind will think, is Claude sabotaging me on purpose? [1] Trust is hard to gain. Easy to lose. And harder to get back. Models will converge. Trust won't.
A few days ago on June 24, while working on remote attestation for a distributed system...
What are we to think? Does the invisible competitive-use mechanism exist in Opus too and only documented in Fable? How long has it existed? Is it still in effect? -- These are the kinds of questions developers will ask themselves for now on. This is why it was one of the stupidest things Anthropic could have done. Developers will now question everything and rightly so. There's no attestation protocol for that. How will they know?[1] "In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development, we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms.
Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts,these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a differentmodel. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). These interventions will not affect the vast majority of coding work. We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations. When these interventions are active, we expect them to have minimal behavioral impact on the model except to limit its effectiveness in developing frontier LLMs. Claude will still respond helpfully to user requests. We’ll continue to improve the precision of our detection methods following the launch of this model."
Source: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3...
They undid this after the backlash
composer 2.5 is all you really need don’t be so dramatic
Nobody cares about this temporary "ban" by the US government. If anything it only increased the mystique of the two models.
I think Europe and Canada are just happy not to be frozen out of AI access completely at this point.
All the discussion this week have been about GLM, Qwen, etc. Both over 1000 comments in the last couple days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709670
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48721903
Of course Anthropic is still relevant, but people have realized they’re not special, and between this and the ID verification thing, they’ve given up a ton of their relevance vs a month ago.
I used Fable 5 for maybe 10 hours in the window when it was available. It was much better than Opus 4.8. And I have found the Opus models to be excellent, but Fable 5 was cranking out incredible research on some data sources I wanted to plumb into my project.
I wouldn't personally pay API pricing for it for my personal projects, but I bet it's going to be absolutely slammed with usage for the next month+.
No doubt Anthropic Mythos/Fable are frontier. I also miss having access as it uncovered some "evals repellant" regressions on my personal pet factory.
OTOH for most of my day to day work I've come to realize that faster ~ Opus 4.6 / GPT 5.3 level capabilities could be the sweet spot as scaffolding has to be put in place right after clean specs and constant review anyways. The latest chinese models and GLM 5.2 in particular felt on-par on that front.
As everyone knows, Kool-Aid is also just mostly water.
I work in AI / infrastructure and I have never seen as much interest towards investing into sovereignty by actual deciders. Thankfully, at this point I can't see any flip-flopping / change of messaging stopping that train.
In CA/EU over the last ~15 years, one used to be perceived as a bit of a "weird systems person" by just proposing alternatives to the big hyperscalers.
So the Trump administration, hands-down, has been the greatest ally here.
In tandem, I was hoping Anthropic would be keeping "dangerously capable" models banned from "evil Chinese distillers" for as long as possible.
I bought a GLM 1 year subscription and changed my environment variables to use Claude Code... yep the same one that is using stegonography to send details about users to the model. China knows where I live, I'm not getting ripped off or rug pulled on their models either.
How has your experience been so far? Did you previously use Opus? Im curious how the overall "feel" of it is.
No nation is going to willingly release a model that can be used against it. Not even China. The moment they have a Mythos class model, they will go through the same process. The AmericanCorp models are far ahead of any other models so we see this process unfolding through that lens.
No Mythos class model will be allowed to be legally hosted for download on any service. All powerful nations will ban this since safeguards are not guaranteed by shady service providers running these models.
For the Chinese first party providers, they will be forced to implement the same process and safeguards, and they will not be allowed to release the model weights to the public.
Why? Because no sane nation is going to put that kind of capability in the hands of the public only for the public to use that power against that nations best interests.
Save this comment. It is prophesy.
Not great news for nations that want to secure their software.
Here's a copy of the letter that Commerce sent to Anthropic (note who it'a NOT addressed to...)
Source: https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2072103733715194048?s=20
-------
June 30, 2026
Tom Brown Chief Compute Officer Anthropic 548 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94104
Dear Mr. Brown:
Since the issuance of my previous letters, dated June 12, 2026 and June 26, 2026, Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
In light of these actions and commitments, as well as the Bureau of Industry and Security's evaluation of the diversion risks now presented by Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, the controls in the June 12 letter are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.
Commerce reserves the right to reevaluate the decisions made in this letter and the necessity of reimposing a license requirement, should circumstances change or should Anthropic fail to adhere to its commitments.
If you have any questions about this letter, please contact me or the Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler, at (202) 255-1864.
Sincerely,
Howard W. Lutnick
------
"Taken Steps"
Looks like Anthropic paid the Danegeld. Now they'll never get rid of the Dane.
South of Watling St you're ok.
I mean, they did eventually get rid of the Danes.
Jeff is now going to have to change his number. Can’t imagine all the calls or messages he must be getting now
You don't think public officials have official numbers?
For those who haven't been following this closely, who is the missing addressee?
Dario Amodei (Anthropic's CEO) had previously been directly liaising with the government and apparently it wasn't going well.
Any news why?
They don't speak the same [proverbial] language essentially. Dario and the WH talk about this stuff completely differently.
https://archive.is/9k7qt#selection-2001.41-2001.49 https://archive.is/dybOE
I'm fairly certain which side of the conversation I'd have trouble understanding. I have trouble understanding it all the time.
Probably didn't kiss ass as much as most other tech CEOs.
I presume this was one of the lowest points of Tim Cook’s career: https://youtu.be/kSAGUjY2HIs?is=my5VbCBB5Ku-MlLX
Mildly surprising they lifted export restrictions for Mythos too. Isn’t that Fable minus the safety layer?
Apparently, you won't be able to use Mythos OR Fable for coding. From their announcement...
> routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8.
But it’s available in Claude Code. I’m hoping that’s a typo missing a word or two in the sentence.
Yeah I think it is after reading the linked blog post.
Where is that?
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756
It was likely a dealbreaker for Anthropic, since the export control excluded Anthropic’s own foreign employees from being able to access Mythos internally. Naturally, this makes model development hard.
Presumably they reached a backdoor agreement.
You're suggesting a for-profit company both hobbled it's own product and is actively lying about doing so. The only way that's true is if the Trump admin has crawled all the way up Anthropic's ass. But by all accounts, this is just another 10% effort by Trump and friends.
10% for the big guy
Presumably there are different levels of safety. I assumed Fable was a nerfed Mythos, and not just via safety harnesses but actual model degredation.
I don't think this is the case just because of the 'fallback' method they described, where suspicious requests are routed to Opus 4.8. If the model was degraded for certain categories of knowledge, then they'd probably be fine letting the model answer to it. IMO, of course
"Fallback" is only for LLM-training related requests (ie, ones that would compete with Anthropic (!))
For cyber and bio related requests it just refuses.
When it was briefly available I had it fallback to Opus for security related tasks. It would only refuse if you explicitly told it not to fallback.
Anthropic claims the only difference is the draconian bans on cybersecurity and biology queries.
The Sol benchmarks show Fable has slightly lower performance compared to Mythos.
https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/
I assume they did something to the model itself.
Either way, I do hope they lift those draconian bans. Using the model was a terrible experience because of the constant downgrades. I didn't manage to harden my own projects before Fable got banned.
The session reverts to opus if it trips a limiter. Is the benchmark detecting and correcting for that?
Only OpenAI would know that.
How many people are going to call Jeffrey Kessler? lol.
> note who it'a NOT addressed to
The CEO is also not the addressee of shipments of urinal cakes.
There is a deep, deep ignorance of export controls on HN, and I fully expect it will play out as another 500 comment thread of snark and incorrecting each other while blaming the government and not understanding a word of it.
FWIW an Empowered Official is not the person who cleans the espresso machine.
Ha! But sorry, Dario has failed at this part of the job. It’s good that Tom is there and that there is plenty of other strong talent there.
Dario's job is to be a cheerleader.
He likely does not have the domain knowledge nor is authorized to be the recipient of such a letter.
And that's ok. His role is to hire others competent in export matters. It's a learning experience for them.
I think you are missing some context here.
One of the contributing factors that led to this control in the first place was that the commerce department couldn't get Dario on a call immediately:
"Then White House started reaching out to Anthropic to speak with Dario Amodei, who was at a wellness retreat.... When Amodei was finally available past 1pm, he had three tense phone calls with a combo of ppl including Cairncross, Bessent, Lutnick, Kessler, Will Scharf, Richard Walters, and Walker Barrett."
https://x.com/SophiaCai99/status/2065942612293365948
Anthropic has disputed that Dario was at a wellness retreat but both sides seem agree that it seemed to be a problem (and it is very apparent that Dario's response made things worse).
Your comment, genius. Makes me miss n-gate dotcom, which hasn't been updated since 2021. This comment would make a great entry. If you aren't familiar with it, you really want to be.
Can't do anything else with GLM 5.2 being widely available and advertised as "Mythos-like", and even Japan dropping a credible model. Actually it would only hurt to keep them in lockdown.
The real problem in all this is lack of predictability. The White House is just making it up as it goes along. Investors, customers don’t know what the process is and can’t plan.
In the end, we need actual laws that tell the market what kinds of models get paused / analyzed, how long that pause can be, etc.
Otherwise there’s no standard and it will be easily abused and prevent investment in US AI companies.
Just wait till Anthropic and OpenAI are public, the admin is going to be manipulating the shit out of those with model approvals and denials.
Applies to all industries with the memory care patient currently occupying the White House. Passing laws won't help when they can be effectively struck down until the next sitting of the SC.
There are laws and regs. Just because you’re not familiar with the Defense Production Act (50 U.S.C. § 4511 ), Export Control Reform Act, 50 U.S.C. § 4812 and others doesn’t mean that they don’t exist and apply.
I bet you that nothing changed with how Fable 5 is run.
"Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models" LOL, this was already happening.
This clown car administration just keeps making shit up and then backpedalling in a way that just leaves everything worse.
> The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks.
Looks like it's gonna be even harder to use than before, if not impossible. Subscription users only get it for a week, and only for 50% of that week's usage.
Chinese models brought the building down.
are export controls the right thing ? Probably not.
but the american economy is over-exposed on "A.I" - the capital expenditure, while the Chinese are proving you don't need to spend tons of capital to get close to the frontier.
the Chinese have better building capacity & cheaper energy. that means the market has to correct at some point.
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.
You really think China doesn't have massive amounts of capital expenditure related to AI? They're actively bootstrapping an entire chip industry.... https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
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.
That's true for domestic labor and manufacturing, like shipbuilding, but the bleeding edge chips only come from one place and the US labs get the best while Chinese labs do not (unless they smuggle them). China gets creative, sure, but it can't overcome the fundamental issue that the US labs have more magic rocks that do math faster than their magic rocks. And the current state of the art is to just "do more math".
Nvidia GPUs aren't even the absolute SOTA for LLM inference anymore. Some labs are moving to ASICs and Huawei already have their own custom chips running DeepSeek as we speak.
There's enough money and scale on the line that software affinity like CUDA is no longer the deciding factor and there's margin for custom stacks.
Even more so after the USA GPU exports ban which is proving to have backfired by speeding up China's tech growth.
China’s chip industry is 7-10 years behind, and that is because they are desperate and have been throwing money at it. But technological progress requires more than just money.
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 level with Android flagships from three years ago"[2]
TL;DR: China is more like 2-4 years behind than 7-10 years. If China developed EUV lithography then all bets are off.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1kxw6b9/nvidia_... - see video.
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/se...
2-4 years is enough to lock them out of the race.
I trust Chinese companies with my data way more than the corporations of the 4th Reich.
They should give us a month of access again, I feel like I didn't do enough with Fable before it got blocked.
I only realised late that I had an algorithm problem that existing models were struggling with, and Fable had made progress with. It created a 14 phase plan, which I was able to execute with Opus after the restriction.
As another comment nicely put it, Anthropic generously gives subscription users 3.5 days of usage.
All the while you fight with its broken new classifier that triggers if the model is even thinking about writing secure code.
Apparently Anthropic cares nothing for their private users. This is insulting, and I hope they bankrupt after losing enterprise share to OpenAI's more efficient models.
Fable was such a clear improvement. I can't wait to start using it again.
Opus 4.8, you did a lot of good work for me, but in the name of all things holy... I will not miss your communication style. So long and thanks for the fish.
Silly me for hoping they'd actually honor their original 14-day promise. Per their latest blog post, they've generously slashed the timeline to 7 days, but wait there's more! It's now limited to 50% of your weekly usage:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5Hi subscription peasants! You have seven days of time and 3.5 days of usage to figure out how to get the most out of Fable while it constantly downgrades to Opus 4.8 every time it thinks about exploits while hardening your code base! Enjoy!
Yeah, this seems a bit Scrooge-y after all the trouble which was essentially of their own making. I was expecting them to come back with a better deal as an apology, not a worse one.
I just finished reading Incorruptible and a central theme (Anthropic is a case study) is that trust is singularly the most important currency a business has. The past few weeks have done wonders for Anthropic’s marketing but just as much if not more damage to the trust factor. Businesses will continue to use Anthropic because it’s the default and accessible where it matters (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake, etc). But the trust factor has dropped. It’ll be interesting to see if they can turn the tide. Maybe Fable will be too awesome for people to care about the past few weeks?
There is no reason to have less trust in Anthropic. It's not clear they did anything wrong. It's more likely the White House simply tied itself in knots, consistent with the last year and a half of chaos from them.
Perception is a lot more important than reason when it comes to trust. Whether or not we like that
It's a good reason to not tie your company's success to US based hosted AI though. I've started experimenting with GLM 5.2 and other than the tooling needing a lot more setup once you're there it works pretty well.
I'm hoping that some relatively cost-effective self-hosting solutions come about as a result of Hopper hardware being sold off as they're retired from DC use.
> It's not clear they did anything wrong.
Fable will literally sabotage you if it thinks you're trying to compete with Anthropic.
>> The past few weeks have done wonders for Anthropic’s marketing but just as much if not more damage to the trust factor.
I don’t agree with this at all. IMO Anthropic has shown that that are willing to take even significant financial hits in order to stand up to their values and mitigate what they consider to be dangers and risks. Some people don’t like that or think it’s just marketing. But that’s exactly what Incorruptible is about: companies that are willing to take a stand, even in the face of overwhelming pressure from competitors, shareholders and naysayers.
This is assuming the whole "AI safety" thing was anything more than Silicon Valley kool aid. The government just bought into the marketing and radical safety woo woo wholesale and panicked.
You could legitimately argue this is a unique situation, a brief window where cybersecurity is being disrupted by new harnesses + a strong model. But that will be fleeting as other models and products adapt very quickly, and the long term benefits of keeping it from the market are questionable at best.
It's not a coincidence the export control was dropped after Dario (who is a hardcore AI safety activist much like Ilya Sutskever) was replaced by Tom Brown in the government negotiations.
Most people don't care about trust anymore, we live in a low trust society where this is to be expected. People gladly line up to be poisoned by fast food restaurants and trade 1/3 of their life for pieces of paper on a daily basis.
Silicon valley may be a low trust society but I havent given up hope on the rest of it yet.
After COVID at least in the West, I have.
Or at any rate, the "society" being gauged for trust-levels has to be something substantially finer-grained than a US state.
Q: If/when Fable decides to nerd down to Opus on requests it deems dangerous, will we still pay the Fable API token rate?
If it’s blocked before any output, you’re billed only at Opus rates. If it’s blocked midstream, you’re billed Fable rates for what was generated so far, and Opus rates for the rest.
Thank you to the folks that navigated the maze in the dark to make this happen.
For all the sound and fury we don’t even get a week of fable before it goes token based billing. At such time, I will be taking my business elsewhere.
>We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
>We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
>We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.
From Anthropic on Twitter
My only hope is that they don't overdo the guardrails. Claude's been one of the best coding models, and it'd be nice if it stayed that way for real and legitimate developer workflows.
Love how they waited until almost 5p west coast time on the last day of the fiscal quarter and clearly gave Ant no advance notice (or Ant would have had Fable release queued up on a button).
> after 6p west coast time
Hmm? The linked tweet was posted at 16:52.
Ah, my time zone was incorrect. Fixed it. Thanks for letting me know.
I wonder if it's still good
Yeah, good question. I wonder if they fixed the obnoxious safety classifier too.
If anything that'll be more obnoxious because they have to show the government that it's safe.
Isn't the warrantless mass surveillance enough?
So it seems like David Sacks was right that the US government only really got involved because the Amazon/ AWS CEO complained about latent security threats [0] and that the government was reluctant to actually issue the export control.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529358
Sacks has said so many obviously false things in reference to government actions (Jan 6th, Ukraine, etc) that there is no reason to trust anything he says.
If the Trump administration wants him to say something, he says it. Maybe what he is saying is true, maybe it isn’t. There is no way to know.
The story they are telling is exactly the same whether it was true or they were just shaking down Anthropic for no reason.
I think this is oversimplifying things.
There are many different factions within the administration. Sacks was part of the "deregulate the tech sector" faction, which on this issue is aligned with the "beating China overrides anything" faction.
That's distinct from the Pete Hegseth faction (I don't really know how to characterize his faction other than anti-woke maybe?).
Sometimes these factions agree, sometimes they don't.
In general your approach is right - you can't trust most things coming out of this administration. But you can try to unpick was actually happened by who is saying what, when. That is useful even without liking the people.
https://xcancel.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072106151890809341
https://archive.is/HSIxa
https://archive.is/BbxA1
https://megalodon.jp/2026-0701-0918-51/https://x.com:443/Ant...
Fable was (is) a major leap forward for my development tasks. The quality of the model compared to Opus 4.8 (when I last used it before the ban hammer) was night and day. Fable single-shotting complex and complete applications was a beautiful thing and I can't wait to get back to developing with it.
All aboard the hype train!
Definitely took longer than I was expecting, then after two weeks I thought we'd never get it.
Good to hear. I was going to cancel my subscription if I couldn't use Fable. No point in paying Anthropic to train models I can't use.
Howard Lutnick is the 41st United States Secretary of Commerce. Howard Lutnick is known to have had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. From what we know and what has so far been released to the public, he is even documented to have visited his island.
I see, so that explains why people are starting to talk about Claude Fable 5 and how I'm now going to have to buy $6,000 of compute for our startup
How to light 6k on fire.
Better than a foosball table and kegerator.
The classic chaotic governance model and creation of an uncertain business environment by the Trump admin in the most important industry for the US economy.
If this is the most important industry for the US economy, the US is screwed. and .... Hopefully you're correct.
In past Empires kings bet their entire nations future on the words of soothsayers , people who said they could predict the future. It seems like Machine Learning engineers are the magicians of Empire of the modern age.
>If this is the most important industry for the US economy, the US is screwed
Depends on how economically useful AI turns out to be. It will be useful, but it needs to be VERY useful for the current valuations.
>In past Empires kings bet their entire nations future on the words of soothsayers
I think AI's rise is much closer to the story of factory machines and computers than to soothsayers and emperors.
When is Google coming out with an equivalent Gemini model?
Who knows - this could be the last model we see from Anthropic. Or it just becomes the wild west and we figure it out as we go.
Isn't it the wild west already?
On a lark, I asked Claude to compare AI to the wild west a while ago. It raised three points of similarity:
- Land-grab economics
- Lack of regulation
- Changing social and professional attitudes.
Whatever it is, it's a wild ride regardless.
For non-Americans especially it does look possible to be the last one.
Basically not usable if it's only available via usage pricing.
I wonder if Anthropic servers can handle the load their going to get tomorrow. Unless it’s a staged rollout
They need Lehane or… since OpenAI got him, what is Fabiani up to these days?
Debating if I should re-sub to the Max plan now (in case they grandfather people in some how) or if I should just wait and see what they announce.
Huh did not expect them to lift restrictions this soon.
So after this publicity they got, they will release a locked down version of the models, did I get that right?
Sounds more like they are implementing mass surveillance and reporting whatever the US Gov wants for 'security reasons' back to them.
Weren't they already doing that since the beginning? Fable released with a data retention policy. I assumed US government surveillance was the reason for this.
Yeah, it feels like a honeypot at this point. Gonna go with GLM instead
Smart thinking.
So, uh, any chance us Claude subscription people are going to get the 11 days of Fable 5 access (at non API pricing) we were deprived of?
So much for way too dangerous end of the world
>Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.
ah, I see. so, Chinese models are getting banned soon.
Almost as though they were indefensible bullshit to begin with. I wonder who extorted whom and for how much.
Like gee, that was fast. If this had any bearing on reality, one would imagine the vetting process would take actual time and that there would be a real, material difference between what we knew then and what we know now.
The cartoon bullshit theater is exhausting.
This is great news,
I'm sure many teams couldn't do their best work because Claude Fable 5 was unavailable.
I wonder what their hiring pages look like now, are they starting to remove job postings?
there is no way Fable and Mythos had such an impact in such a short amount of time that people were hiring based on it.
They certainly are now that the export ban is lifted.
They haven’t even restored access yet lol, they’re doing that tomorrow.
... Care to explain your thoughts on this?
I'm absolutely fascinated.
User Wanted: Minimum 5y agentic development experience with Fable?