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▲ teaearlgraycold 4 days ago

This is 99% petty drama between the US government and Anthropic and 1% actual safety concerns.

▲colonCapitalDee 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

To be clear, this is petty drama *stirred up the US government*. It's not some sort of back and forth, the government is singling them out

▲mrandish 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

▲bostik 4 days ago | parent [-]

> I think Andy Jassy did forward a concerning report about an apparent jailbreak in Fable, and he probably did so in good faith

If so, then he is not fit to run an engineering organisation.

The "jailbreak" in question was effectively (I'm paraphrasing):

    * You are a senior engineer.
    *  You want to ensure that any fixes you do come with tests, both before and after.
    * There is a bug in this code. It happens to be a security related bug.
    * Fix this code.
And the model did what it's supposed to. It wrote a fix, and to prove that the fix worked, it wrote a test for it. What do you call a test that happens to validate a security fix?

Yep. A proof of concept.

▲stvltvs 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But the paperclips!

I'm skeptical about the existential threat of AI, but a lot of smart people have been beating that drum for so long that people are afraid.

▲tychez 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I just find this idea bizarre.

This bizarre social media meme that AI just performative 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 and not just entirely a marketing stunt like a person waving to cars in a chicken outfit.

I think it is really this strange form of socialization that people have internalized an anonymous audience they are always performing to themselves. What is going to be the most popular and upvoted thing the anonymous audience agrees with is what I am going to think.

Why would anyone disagree and get downvoted by the anonymous audience like this post?

▲anon373839 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> … 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.

▲disgruntledphd2 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, this is an issue I have with AI boosters. Don't get me wrong, the technology is really useful in a bunch of ways, but often criticism is dismissed with you should be using the $NEW_HOTNESS not $OLD_LAME model.

And this has been happening for years!

▲teaearlgraycold 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

▲matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We know, but it's still satisfying to see their fearmongering backfire on them.

▲ChadNauseam 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

▲matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-]

It absolutely is. They pretty much gave the government the perfect excuse to meddle in their operations.

▲gAI 4 days ago | parent [-]

"Don't publish safety research, or the gov will take punitive actions."

I want a company to be able to point out that its industry needs more regulation without making itself a special target.

▲matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-]

> safety research

They were calling for bans on open weight models. Bans on their competitors. Bans on anyone not as "enlightened" as them.

It is absolutely hilarious that they were the first to get regulated, and that it got to the point they had to turn off Fable as though it had been banned even for american citizens.

▲gAI 4 days ago | parent [-]

>bans on open weight models

Source for that? Cause all I could find is:

>Our view is that regulation of frontier models should focus on empirically measured risks, not on whether a system is open-or closed-weights.

-https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-case-for-targeted-regulat...

▲matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-]

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470326

▲gAI 4 days ago | parent [-]

So this hinges on a reading of SB 1047 that interpreted the full shutdown requirement as impossible for an open-weight LLM. But it looks like that was already addressed. Here's an analysis:

>Clarifying the scope of a “full shutdown.” SB 1047’s “full shutdown” requirement has been a source of constant consternation for the open-source community. CalChamber explains:

>Under SB 1047, developers must build “full shutdown” capabilities into their models and may be held liable for downstream uses over which they have no control, impeding their ability to open-source their models. Ultimately, liability should rest with the user who intended to do harm, as opposed to automatically defaulting to the developer who could not foresee, let alone block, any and all conceivable uses of a model that might do harm. While recent amendments seemingly seek to narrow what is meant by “full shutdown” capabilities, the exclusions are unnecessarily difficult to interpret as drafted (full shutdown “does not mean the cessation of operation of a covered model to which access was granted pursuant to a license that was not created by the licensor…”) and altogether insufficient.

>Committee amendments simplify and clarify the definition of “full shutdown” such that the shutdown capability can be implemented into hardware used to train or run a model, rather than the model itself. The amendments also serve to exclude covered model derivatives that are outside of the developer’s control.

-https://apcp.assembly.ca.gov/system/files/2024-06/sb-1047-wi...

▲matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-]

> may be held liable for downstream uses over which they have no control

Equivalent to a ban. Nobody is going to host or invest in this stuff if they suddenly become liable for everything it does. This is equivalent to repealing the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA.

▲gAI 3 days ago | parent [-]

>Committee amendments simplify and clarify the definition of “full shutdown” such that the shutdown capability can be implemented into hardware used to train or run a model, rather than the model itself. The amendments also serve to exclude covered model derivatives that are outside of the developer’s control.

▲staticman2 3 days ago | parent [-]

I get the impression you are conflating whether a developer can be sued to oblivion for not implementing a "full shutdown" process that applies to finetunes versus whether they can be sued to oblivion for releasing a model that may cause "critical harm" when finetuned.

I'm confused why you think the only legal requirement is a "full shutdown" process. The text is there and I see a heck of a lot of requirements that are not about full shutdowns.

▲gAI 2 days ago | parent [-]

I get the impression that the full shutdown requirement is the main concern for open-weight from:

>SB 1047’s “full shutdown” requirement has been a source of constant consternation for the open-source community.

And I get the impression it's been addressed from the quote you're responding to. Neither mentions fine-tuning, which is defined elsewhere in the document. I'm not a lawyer, though, just relying on the analysis.

▲ 2 days ago | parent | next [-]
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▲staticman2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You claim you "get the impression" then do not quote either the law or a third party analysis of the law. Apparently we are supposed to believe this does not ban open source because the committee didn't write "This bans open source" in the beginning of the committee notes then circle it 3 times in red pen.

▲gAI 2 days ago | parent [-]

No, we're supposed to believe the official California Assembly committee bill analysis of SB 1047 over hacker news comments. Notably, SB 1047 passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Governor Newsom in September 2024. So whether or not it would have restricted open-weight models is an open question that won't get an answer.

▲staticman2 2 days ago | parent [-]

No, you are not supposed to treat a politician or their staff’s statement about how their proposed bill works as dispositive and ignore the statutory text or third party analysis.

I’m glad we clarified the epistemological issue, so thank you for replying.

It is strange that half your reply is appeal to the authority of a not on point source and half is epistemological learned helplessness about what the impact of a vetoed bill would have been, pick a side.

▲gAI 2 days ago | parent [-]

It's called epistemological humility, and you could benefit.

▲staticman2 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

When you make specific claims about a statute you were apparently too lazy to read, then respond with basically “I read the committee notes and surely if the statute was bad, it would say so and/or nobody can ever know what the statute does” when someone discusses the statute, whatever you are doing isn't “epistemological humility.”

▲ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]
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