> Anthropic claims Mythos is in a class of its own, the evidence corroborates this and the government believes it.

They didn't release Mythos, they released Fable, which was Mythos + a classifier that detected potentally-dangerous prompts and blocked them. Everyone who used it noticed how aggressive the classifier was. It would trigger constantly over totally innocent stuff.

Because it was the basis for the analogy: breed-based dog bans are idiotic, given mixed genetics, temperament, and training.

Said as the owner of a pitbull, who is the sweetest and gentlest dog I've owned. And I've had multiple labradors.

You don't need/use pitbulls, but what if you (and many many others) wanted and needed Fable?

I for one was late to the bandwagon, and when I had the use-case for it - the govt pulled the rug. So yeah, I'm a bit salty about the whole endeavour.

I will also say that the security concerns are probably very real (and they have been from the day ChatGPT-3.5 came our). I guess I can be salty about it and still be wrong from their perspective. The govt likely understands the fragility of their infrastructure better than us and is likely aware what this could unleash for their systems.

> Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to Mythos

Maybe there weren't that many serious vulnerabilities in curl? It's like asking why it didn't find any vulnerabilities in fn main() {println!("hello, world");}.

Anyway, people who have used it seem to say that Mythos was better than other models at creating exploits. From cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-frontier-models/

> When we ran other frontier models through the same harness, they found a fair number of the same underlying bugs, and in some cases they got further than we expected on the reasoning side too. Where they fell short was at the point of stitching the pieces together. A model would identify an interesting bug, write a thoughtful description of why it mattered, and then stop, leaving the actual chain unfinished and the question of exploitability open. What changed with Mythos Preview is that a model can now take those low-severity bugs (which would traditionally sit invisible in a backlog) and chain them into a single, more severe exploit.

Pointing to the singular example of one of the most widely used and carefully reviewed and audited libraries on the planet is a such a weak argument that it’s hard to imagine anybody could make it in good faith.

Mythos’ ability to find vulnerabilities there provides very little signal on how effective it is in general.

And to add more background: The administration is targeting Anthropic because of the TOU / EULA conflict with the DoD from a couple of months ago. Anthropic restricts use of all their models for lethal combat planning and mass domestic surveillance. The DoD was, and still is, very pissed about this. While this Fable ban was issued from the Commerce Department, it's painfully obvious executive branch agencies are tightly coordinated from the White House.

To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't legit security concerns around Fable's release. I think Andy Jassy did forward a concerning report about an apparent jailbreak in Fable, and he probably did so in good faith. The difference is if the same concern had arisen about a new model from OAI, Google, etc the action taken would not have been inventing an all-new, hyper-extreme punitive remedy and dropping it after 5p on a Friday under a very rare mechanism forcing Ant to comply in 90 mins or be subject to immediate arrest. And the "no non-U.S. citizens anywhere, anytime" restriction is functionally unprecedented.

This is the Trump admin inventing new regulatory power that's never existed before and deploying it in a punitive way to demonstrate what can happen to those who aren't sufficiently cooperative with this administration. There are half a dozen less extreme levels of restriction, which already exist, and one of those would have been deemed sufficient had it been another company.

That said, I'm certainly no Anthropic fanboy. Anthropic did play their initial Mythos self-restriction for PR value. But I think it's likely the Mythos self-restriction was a responsible action initially suggested by their AI safety team in good faith. Giving security researchers time to evaluate it and major companies time to test it against their code bases probably was reasonable and prudent. That doesn't mean it wasn't also good for PR and brand perception. I think there are senior people inside Anthropic who are genuinely concerned about AI safety. Personally, I don't have the expertise to gauge if those concerns are justified, but I believe they believe it. I also think there are senior people at Anthropic who are focused more on building the business, doing the IPO and "winning" the silicon valley game. All of these things can be simultaneously true.

> … when Opus 4.8 is just unbelievably good. As if it is so difficult to believe that a more capable model than Opus 4.8 might actually be dangerous

It’s funny, but this sounds indistinguishable from arguments that were made about GPT-4 back in 2023 when OpenAI and its handwringing industry shills were calling for a ban on models stronger than GPT-4.

Why would the government that passed a law preventing states from regulating AI give a damn about Fable’s safety guardrails?

I don’t think the concerns Anthropic has posted are fabricated. And I’ve received unreasonable skepticism on this site when saying it might be the real deal. But the Trump administration generally doesn’t want to limit AI growth. With Anthropic it is a personal matter.

If you "know" that it's "99% petty drama between the US government and Anthropic", then it's not really their fearmongering backfiring on them.