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

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

I still remember when Netscape had outdated ssl for a few years because more advanced cryptography was classified by the US gov as armaments or something. Basically used export restrictions to prevent better security technology from being adopted into commercial products.

I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government. ... We saw some of this behavior in the last administration too.

So it's silly behavior, as typified by the last decade of American governance? Is there "serious" American leadership we should be expecting to see soon, e.g. 2029 AOC elected on a platform of unlimited 10GW datacenters and universal basic Mythos 8 models?

It may seem subjectively silly to you, but e.g. getting executed for refusing to point at a deer and call it a horse is pretty silly stuff as well, at least for those not living in the Qin Dynasty.

US voters deserve better.

Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

> This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't

This seems to be an administration that is dead set on antagonizing every single part of the world. Either enemy or ally.

GEO blocking is not the same as blocking based on nationality. I'd like(?) to think someone in this decision chain realized "restricting to US nationals" meant effectively restricting it to all and chose this route knowing Antrophic would need to just pull the model (so engaging in censorship without calling it that, possibly less susceptible to court challenges).

We need to stop making light of these things. Governments don’t do ‘silly’ things. When you wield that kind of power over people’s lives, everything you do is deadly serious.

It's also possible that they literally are too dumb to realize they asked for something infeasible. For example, the same main character who apparently gave up a career as an extra in made-for-TV WWII German movies to become a very high ranking government official.

I don't see your point why export control is a silly tool. There's a difference between a VPN which I can prop up on my home server or a $5 VPS, vs a Mythos-scale closed source model running on millions of dollars of hardware

VPNs won't work when they do document (passport) verification.

"effective tool for controlling a consumer facing technology developers everywhere want to use (see:VPNs) "

No - it's extremely effective.

Do you realize the difference between a 'few people using VPNs + fake IDs at 2-person companies ... vs companies all companies globally not allowed to use tech?

If 'Bank of Montreal' were caught using export controlled technology it could be devastating - so they're not going to be using it along with any little mom and pop shop.

We don't know what the Administration is doing other than 'This is Extremely Heavy Handed' and will have devastating consequences if it goes on.

I think this is also overly naive. We live in a world of hardware attestation and passkeys, the baseline requirements to use new models can increase to cryptocurrency-levels of KYC. If this becomes the new norm (which it easily could), then the best models will impose increasingly restrictive requirements.

Silly or not, precedent matters and labeling it silly is rhetorical. The impact is going to be critically important.

Agreed. This is no different from the US government attempting to control SSH, or restrict the sale of the Apple Power Mac.

10 years from now we’ll look back and laugh at how silly it all was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

Yes! I mean everyone is speaking about this in a boxed manner.

For all we know there are might be several reasons for that ban e.g.

1) There is an actual security threat and its just simple as that.

2) Someone wants Anthropic to be valued way higher and the companies that have invested in Anthropic already... This ban only validates this product and will move the market in higher valuation of Anthropic due to their model being "so good gov had to ban"

3) Someone doesn't like Anthropic and just wants to shut down its current edge (highly unlikely, if there was no IPO filing in place it could be possible but now the valuation just goes up, same as the 2 As that have invested in them)

4) Someone freaked out that we'll be left out of jobs soon so wants to slow down progress, tbh using fable so far I can tell that a lot of jobs can be made redundant cause of that...

For me the most likely for now is 2, then 1 and then maybe 4.

On June 22 Chatgpt will most likely come out with their new model too, which as I understand will be an answer to mythos. Lets see if the US gov goes the same route.

This is signaling to non-US companies that Anthropic cannot provide reliable access to their models.

Most valuably, they have a plausible excuse for hitting a financial brick wall before failing to deliver on years of over-promising on real-world business utility.

> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.

What? Anthropic is not a TikTok sensation. It's a business tool. Businesses need to know their tools work reliably.

When you are situated in a banana republic and the chief banana is out to get you (and demonstrates that they can and will on a whim and, according to Anthropic, without good reason) that is not great hype. That's a potential death sentence for the provider of something business critical.

You are one degree away from becoming forever branded as unusable. (Theoretically until people trust that a sane administration is in control, but that might as well be forever on current AI timelines)

I see what you mean, though ITAR restricted software has been around for decades. It classifies some software as "munitions" :)

It's only rewarding hype if the ban gets dropped. If "foreign Anthropic employees that live in the US can't use Fable/Mythos" stays it harms them, if they don't drop the ban and Fable/Mythos stay limited to "every single person who uses the model must individually provide their ID to prove American-ness" it harms them.

It’s a marketing stunt, I’m calling it and Anthropic will “fix” it very soon

> Anthropic got the most rewarding hype ever in the history of mankind.

Nah, SpaceX just IPO'd.

“Banned in Boston”

Disappointingly, it still works.

They used this type of language with GPT-2. Le sigh, yawn.

I wonder what will happen to Chinese employees of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google Gemini? Given the ubiquitous Chinese names in AI papers there must be quite a few.

They probably have gotten their PR or in the process, but naturalization requires five years after that, so there must be some still not citizen yet.

Do you have sources? I would like to read more about that.

that is to avoid having them arrested by the US under "US national security concerns".

You may be right, and I actually agree with you: I think that in this case the most likely outcome is that Fable becomes available again at some point, albeit possibly only to a restricted set of users within the US.

But I think my larger points stands: even if we do see Fable access again, this is the beginning of government restriction of LLMs and we are going to see more and more of it. In fact, I would be very surprised if we ever see an open weight model with Mythos capabilities. Chinese labs have been consistently releasing open models 6-12 months behind the frontier. In 6 months we may see them go dark.

Similarly, in the US I think we can expect more and more government restrictions on the strongest LLMs, in ways that may go beyond flimsy checks like uploading a valid US passport. It may not happen this year but I think it will happen eventually.

It still surprises me sometimes that LLMs are just available for _anyone_ to use. Isn't it odd that it turned out this way? When I grew up reading sci-fi I thought AI, if I ever saw it in my lifetime, would be something locked up behind the walls of big corporations and governments. But instead we have all been able to use it for an infinity of banal purposes for $100 a month. This is a strange situation but we have got used to it. But it may not continue that way.

I think some of the commenters are naive to think government intervention is silly and TACO.

No, Dario said himself AI is national state weapon, then the government will not cease control.

What would happen is that we will have a more lobotomized and even more neurotic safeguards put in place in order to comply, and your data will be boardly sharing with the government.

Moving forward, above certain parameter size of model, it will require your self-identification in order to be used.

Perhaps a little tinfoil hat, but I don't think there's a legitimate concern here to address. An empowered populace is antithetical to the current political paradigm, which is what I suspect the actual grievance to be.

And before either 'aisle' piles on - I'm pretty sure the concern is bipartisan.

I feel like a very minor tweak to comply specifically with whatever the issue the directive stated and release it under a new name (since the directive specifically names Fable and Mythos, not Opus or Sonnet) while the courts sort it out is reasonable.

I would agree if it wasn't for the fact that extracting that volume of data from a properly secured corporate network should be hard. It should raise some flags if a such a high volume of data is downloaded to a user's local machine from the training or production environments.

It's highly unlikely that actors have access to model weights etc..

What is likely is that 'understanding of techniques' could be leaked.

Often, it's just well enough to know 'the approach' being used.

They just received a massive PR opportunity on a silver platter: our model is so good the government forced us to shut it down.

> Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge.

There is no way to enforce access of one and not the other, not with the state of tech in the US (and most countries without a great firewall). Bypassing such controls is as easy as a pilfered credit card (or some other american-looking payment method) and a vpn - both trivial to come by.

> the more people you have using your models, the more training and fine-tuning data you're accumulating, so the faster you can develop the next frontier model

I’ve wondered this but then wouldn’t a large amount of input now just be AI output from a previous PR/client email/spec document/chat. Training of that would be an issue leading to distillation?

And just imagine the true capability of AI if Fable and Mythos are the models known publicly. We can only imagine what is behind closed doors.

Working on my codebase (~100KLoC across multiple Python modules) I felt that Fable was head and shoulders above 4.x series. It was just relentless and always hell bent on testing and proving its own work. It just tore through problems like an animal. I never seen that behaviour in 4.5-4.8. I can't speak for OpenAI models as I don't use them but Fable was in a different league. Especially when tasked with long horizon goals that involved reasoning at a high and low level to solve the task.

i know someone who works on nuclear power plants that uses codex

obviously you need to review it

I don't understand the point you're making.

It can be both the most powerful LLM on the market, and have no adoption in critical infrastructure.

> it’s just a useful tool for non-critical areas. That’s all it is.

Okay. Let's say I agreed with you.

If you look at all technology and break down the total market for Critical Workloads vs non-critical workloads, what do you think that works out too, percentage wise? 12% critical? 18%? What if it was 30%! That would still mean 70% of the world's software could possibly be handled by an LLM. If that happens, the 30% of the Critical Workloads stuff is gonna get very, very competitive.

No. It doesn't.

Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them and treat AI like nuclear weapons. They would not be attempting to IPO and they for sure would not sell their weapon-like thing to the general public.

“OpenAI's CEO says he's scared of GPT-5”

https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/op...

Marketing or actual fear? We’ve got 5 and 5.5 out now… he compared 5 to the Manhattan project. AI may one day be an economic Manhattan project but GPT 5 wasn’t it.

It’s a meme because they overdo it.

People don't get that big labs actively want government regulation, not because they are genuinely concerned about AI misalignment. But because it is the 101 in how to achieve and crystalize oligopoly. What they want is "only the government and the big guys can work on AI", for the rest of us it would be illegal.

Look into the history of Sam Altman and his ventures. He sincerely only believes in lying about his companies to investors like he did with Loopt.

He is not even a researcher or an engineer.

And Dario broke up with OpenAI and founded Anthropic because he didn't like Sam's and OpenAI's vision.

"founded by people who believe..." is doing a lot of work and it is hard to believe that in ernest given the sketchy past of the same people.

Most original higher up people who cared about safety and allignment in OpenAI have left.

> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

They don't. LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence and everyone working on LLMs knows this (with a few eccentric exceptions).

Of all the frontier labs, Anthropic has been the most creative in its marketing. I really, really don't put it beyond them for this to be one big crazy stunt.

Besides, when has the US government been known to do things like this proactively? The phone call came from inside the house.

OpenAI was, but didn't all those people then leave for Anthropic?

> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.

I'd say their pecuniary interest is a reason one might plausibly doubt their sincerity, as are their continued efforts to build and sell access to the tools.

> OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence

Why would they sell there services to Palantir and/or to the military then?

Not at all. The writing is on the wall, and they want you to be locked into paying absurd subscription rates for neutered models while they internally use all of that money to run the unrestricted models to clone all of our businesses and swallow the economy. It really does not take a genius to see the long term play by Anthropic. They're a scummy company and have done everything in their power to lead to a scenario like this, but this isn't the exact scenario they bargained for because it affects their own employees and big foreign buyers. Instead, they'd rather have all of the decision making power themselves.

> The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.

> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

This is not a contradiction.

These things can all be true:

1. That they were afraid of ASI

2. That they continue to be afraid of ASI

3. That they recognize that LLMs aren't in fact a path to ASI

4. That the current models aren't the existential danger they'd have us believe

5. That they're claiming they are because it makes for good marketing

> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

Ironic then, that both companies are in an out-of-control race to create a superintelligence.

> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere

GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.

We can argue about sincerity, but I don't think we can argue about utter historical incompetence in assessing the risks. It's one or the other.

Either way the evidence seems to indicate we should not listen to AI companies about the risks of AI. Which is not to say that there aren't risks, just that the dealer is the least credible review.

No reason except what comes from a bit of critical thinking.

What do they stand to gain by fearmongering their models as powerful threats? Clout, funding, fanfare, discussion, limelight, funding, funding, stronger IPO, valuation, funding.

What cybersecurity threshold was crossed by mythos that wasn't already crossed by 4.8/5.5? Crickets from 99% of those who have had access.

Have they pulled the same stunts multiple times before with previous models? Check.

You're blind if you dont think that greed and marketing are behind most things you see and hear about when gigantic corporations are involved.

I don't think anthropic or OAI are evil, but its clear both have contracts/connections with Dod and/or Palantir. Both are powered largely by greed still. If you actually want an example of these sincere founders you think OAI/anthropic are run by... look at Ilya at SSI or something. Please open your eyes and stop spreading your opinions on things you clearly have no clue about.

> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence

this means nothing

> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.

If you want to be taken seriously, provide data, proof, so that any outside observer can independently come to the same conclusion instead of taking your word for it. Asking people to trust you for [reasons?] and that you somehow for some reason are right and the other is wrong regardless of if they agree or not. This is the imposition of a viewpoint instead of winning your case, which is not a sensible point of view, and definitely not how you influence opinions.

I wish I were this naive.

How do you know what the founders sincerely believe?

what a profoundly unaware comment

they are more than happy to build the things for themselves

it is all two-faced behavior of the exact kind of manipulators that crave power

Sincerity does not determine whether an individual is scaremongering.

Yes we do. Dario said GPT2 is too dangerous to release. He’s dishonest since that’s obviously not true. This theater is about holding onto power and control. And about limiting competition.

The clear historical record seems to indicate we've got a bunch of pathological liars trying to automate pathological lying.

It can be both.

The amount of self-confidence and belief it takes to get a company through the funding rounds and burn through borrowed money to rise to the top requires an absurd amount of self-delusion.

It's not. I got articles this year in my feed citing heads of OpenAI and Anthropic about the threat of AI and how they're addressing it.

You're saying "this is normal" without making an argument that it's sensible.

yes, yes, and Apple forbids sideloading because they're worried about grannies installing malware.

>> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

Oh please. Do people really believe this or shit like "Don't do evil". Companies get founded by all kind of people and ideals. They all go out the window quickly.

Why are they both rushing to IPO now then?

> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere

Why? Because they said it a few times? Then if they know the risk, why do they still making it? Comes out the "some one will do it eventually, better be us 'good' people to do it first" talking point?

See? It is a marketing strategy after all. These all talks, it's all to fit themselves into the "'good' people" narrative. It's a centuries old strategy to shield it's user from responsibilities while luring the support from the stupid.

However, the most harmful damage, which is mass layoffs, is already partially done. This could really kill, a massive genocide even, by making people jobless and potentially incomeless. And it is shown that these tech CEOs, they don't care any bit of that beyond the point "I've already told you so".

I mean this earnestly: is this copy?

There is a huge difference between the company founder saying something like that and the us government saying so.

"Our product is so good the US had to make it illegal for foreigners" is a hell of a marketing slogan.

This just made any closed LLM a huge supply chain risk. Everybody was aware of this possibility, but now it actually happened. It's like having nuclear weapons vs. firing a nuclear weapon.

Especially outside the US customers are going to be very hesitant to keep adopting LLMs from US companies.

They've already been labeled a "supply chain risk". Probably not a good idea to upset the regulators more. Maybe tomorrow Opus will be declared too dangerous for the public.

It mainly shows that this is another US companies that cannot be trusted by anyone outside of the US because of the US government.

Cratering their user base outside of the US is hardly going to be good for their IPO.

Incorrect. Heavy government regulation means it is limited how they can sell this model and to whom.

It would be if it was rationally tied to the strength of the model. More likely, it’s simply the government deciding who can compete.

It also signals that Anthropic is a bad choice if you need stable access to their product outside the US.

it may be really good pr, but it's really bad for their IPO. If their market for future models is usa only, their potential revenue is cut by 50% at least. (and it's even worse because it means Europe, India, and China will all have companies making their own models that anthropic needs to stay ahead of)

Indeed, this affects way more than just Anthropic.

And they don't have to actually serve expensive model compute and this all goes away once they contribute to the right charitable organizations and patriotic causes funneling money to the right people.

This is quite clearly corporate capture of the white house by a competitor influencing policy, but it's hard to imagine something that plays more into anthropic's hand. They now own the model that was so good the US government made them shut it off.

I think it's the opposite. Who would want to buy shares in a company that's been flagged as a supply chain risk?

"Our models are so good the government decides whether or you get access -- so you better not depend on them!"

“Not a commodity”

It appears to affect only the companies that Trump decides it should affect.

>everyone using this technology loses

As someone not using the technology, I'm fine with that :) Intellectual property laundering was never a good thing. Glad we can begone with it.

> It's a game of thrones and everyone using this technology loses

Everyone? There's worlds outside of the United States government overreach.

Anthropic's marketing is playing 5D chess. 4D was telling everyone it is dangerous, they knew the government would take the bait and shut it down.

Or maybe Anthropic isn't playing chess at all - these models sell themselves they are so useful and the Reddit/HN crowd is just full of larping tech bros commenting conspiracy theories non stop.

It's Anthropic facing consequences for their years long marketing plays. They're so greedy and narcissistic as a company and culture they believed they were special enough to be excluded from sanction internally, and that their behavior would only affect their competitors or would lead to outcomes positive for themselves: ergo, they get to hold the keys to the castle. Like Dario said in his negotiations with the DoW, he wants a seat at the big boys table. It's all about power for him.

Unfortunately though, they're not smart enough to realize the long term damage to the industry that they're doing without any hint of remorse will negatively affect them and will have the opposite effect: Highlighting how imperative it is we all switch to open-source and remove our reliance entirely from them.

So not only are they going to take the whole industry down out of their own greed and stupidity and ruin it for everyone in the short term, but they're going to put themselves and the other labs out of business in the long term. Well done Anthropic. Well done Dario. You played yourself. 5d chess.

> the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models

Is this Dario leveraging it into a ban on open models?

Anthropic is almost solely responsible for the fear narrative around AI at this point. It has been their culture since the beginning, strongly pushing this into the zeitgeist at every opportunity, releasing bogus papers to frame things as highly dangerous and that their AI is a conscious sentient being.

Step 1: "OMG, the AI hacked a researcher eating a sandwhich in the park!"

Step 2: Journalists use that great clickbait to generate profit, which generates publicity for Anthropic

Step 3: Rinse repeat

If the threat of LLMs was treated relative to the actual capabilities of them, and we weren't all being lied to by Anthropic and their army of millions of social media bots and backing media companies and mouthpieces, we'd be going in a much healthier direction. Working out the kinks/supply chain risks and developing sound, long-term countermeasures to the ACTUAL risks.

The only threat to the world is if progress is not open-sourced, democratized and in lockstep with capability. The moment it becomes a scenario of: Only a small group get access to frontier intelligence, is when it gives that small group power over everyone else in the world, and wildly increases the risk of a nuclear level event that WILL be exploited eventually - as the divide between the haves and the have nots accelerates in an exponential fashion. Bad AI is countered with an abundance of good AI that has been used to stay ahead of bad AI. The moment your bad AI outpowers the army of good AI it is game over for humanity. The strength of open-source and open-access AI is the difference between humanities permanent enslavement or extinction versus a prosperous future.

It doesn't help that most of the employees at Anthropic have willingly sold their souls out of short term greed and gaslight themselves into thinking that they're actually doing the right thing to justify their own greed to themselves, while building up an echo-chamber and culture of feel good lies within the company so they can sleep at night, and pat each other on the back. They go along with this because they get paid massive chunks of money from Anthropic, and their shares will be worth more money if Anthropic can swallow the worlds economy at the expense and enslavement of everyone else. What good is that money when you have to sell out humanity in the progress though. You, at Anthropic, is that the legacy you want to leave?

People need to start calling this out before it's far too late. If you work at Anthropic - time to start talking to your colleagues in an honest manner.

That’s a safe assumption, considering they tried it a few months back too.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5742548/anthropic-penta...

The difference between OpenAI & Anthropic is that OpenAI didn't do multiple big media pushes about how their models are so scary and dangerous.

OpenAI's models are very good, they have refusals + a government ID verification story for cyber access (I don't think they prevent non-US nationals, but I don't know this). What they don't have is Project Glasswing and all the hand wringing about how they're going to end the world in public.

I hope Anthropic pulls their head out of their ass and just starts acting like a normal company.

I did not see that?

It's way more _proactive_ than the old models, sometimes in ways it shouldn't really be proactive. But it produces _more_ slop than 4.8, and I have not seen any real breakthroughs from it.

Edit: to give an example, I'm working on integrating a self-hosting auth provider into our app. So I gave it a prompt to create a "bootstrap" script that would create pre-configured settings for the local installation.

Fable did it. And then proceeded (unprompted) to test it by killing the running server, removing the database, re-initializing and (trying) to verify that the bootstrap produced identical results.

Well, yeah. Great. I can see how this "bias for action" works for security research and one-shot projects, not so sure about regular development.

I just tried that with Opus, and it produced a similar bootstrap script but did not start the test by itself.

It's a huge jump across the board. I was really impressed with its ability to test usability in Claude for Chrome. Very opinionated but in a good way. It was good while it lasted.

Was WWII a marketing ploy to inflate the value of German and Japanese stocks?

They're enjoying the schadenfreude of Dario "AI is so dangerous, we really need to ban and regulate everyone" Amodej getting his models banned by the US government.

Is there any reason they couldn't also apply export-control to older models, just to screw with Anthropic?

Every. There is no reason the government will let go the power it has obtained, that is never how it works

There won't be any new generation of models more powerful than Fable since the argument against Fable would apply even more. Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 is the best we'll ever see from this point forward. Soon low cost Chinese models will catch up to those thereby destroying Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing power which will mark the beginning of the end for them too.

Anthropic and US Government, there can be only one right in this situation.

I think David Sacks is right, if you are saying you are building nuclear bombs, then prepared to be regulated like one.

There is no eating it while having it

Yeah, LLMs are a national security issue on par with spellcheck.

Can you share any of these serious thinkers?

Right now it's basically this easy: 1. apex domain 2. ???? 3. critical PII exposure

There is /so/ much stuff on the internet that just needed someone to spend enough time on it.

Nobody with even a modicum of understanding of how LLMs work believes any of this. These 'serious thinkers' are just grifters preying on the feeble minded.

> They ultimately got what they wanted.

No, it's not what they wanted. As it says in your quote, they wanted "a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles."

This is nonsense. What Anthropic have been campaigning for, since the beginning, is a principled rule-based audit of model releases.

Now we are getting reactive, arbitrary and capricious enforcement; rules rushed out the door; classified evals. The worst of both worlds.

Yep and they also want to only exempt models below some level of compute or capability from this process. In other words, if an open model ends up being competitive, they’ll use regulations to ban it.

> They ultimately got what they wanted.

They got what they claim they wanted for PR purposes. Like when a billionaire says they should be taxed more, or when Sam Altman says the public should get some of that AI wealth.

But they never thought it would actually happen.

Oops.

Which, to be clear, does not mean they are actually honest.

Note that the US military is almost the only customer that Fable and Mythos could safely be sold to while complying with this directive.

Maybe revenge, but it's a common play to fire a shot across the bow to create leverage in other areas.

No way the US is going to nationalize a tech company regardless of what happens. The exodus of capital would be unimaginable.