The BIG one got dropped this week.
Fable 5, the safeguarded AI model based on Mythos, was released on Tuesday. For those unfamiliar with the saga, Mythos is an LLM so powerful at coding that it was able to breach many cybersecurity protections. This didn’t mean that your local bank or the Pentagon could be hacked, but millions of businesses with much lower protections could be exposed.
Fable 5 was meant to give users the power of this tool, while restricting nefarious activities. Of course, that dream was always going to coming crashing down at some point, and today was the day.
The US Government, in their endless wisdom, required that Anthropic, the parent company of Claude and thus Fable, restrict access to all non-US Citizens, including those within the US right now. That includes me.
This would be impossible to do (even with Fable helping you solve the problem), so they have done the only they could have; by removing access to everyone.
It is the first time we have seen real, significant government reach in this sector. Yes, in China they have HARD preferences for their own models, and the same is true for the West (we have a company ban on using all Chinese models, although I have used them for personal projects myself, they are VERY cheap).
But this is new.
There is zero chance that the AI industry is going to move from America. As I wrote about a few months ago, a country needs three things to be an AI superpower: the people, the processors, and the power. There are only three countries that have them, China (of course), America (of course), and perhaps a little surprisingly, France. Their nuclear power capabilities and exceptional universities have made them the third player in this space, albeit a distant third.
Hopefully this will all be forgotten about by Monday, but we will see more and more of this as time goes on.
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