The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.

Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.

So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.

I installed Mistral Vibe last week and I've been experimenting with offloading work to it. I won't pretend that Mistral-medium is close to state of the art. It isn't. It still writes incorrect tool calls.

From the last week about 50% of my LLM tasks actually reduced to "take this work and write about it" and Mistral excels there -- it definitely beats Opus at writing. Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate.

There's another say 30% of tasks that's writing queries against a data warehouse. I updated my semantic layer MCPs and Vibe uses them, but it struggles with ambiguity here. It's not a replacement, it's maybe where Opus was a year ago.

The rest of my work involves writing code. That's going to be harder to replace for now. My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models. I can't decide if I was ever actually happy with Opus's work on this front though -- the understanding tradeoffs when you trust LLMs with decisions stack non-linearly and negatively. I did like Fable on these tasks, I won't lie, I will miss it, but not by any choice of my own.

Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April. Wayback Machine if you don’t believe me: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old. LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls. These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.

I also think this makes OpenAI and Anthropic even less viable. They're tens of billions in debt, losing money every month, have data center commitments in the hundreds of billions, and now they're reducing their market to the US? The only way this can work is with substantial government subsidies.

> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.

Note the big cut in token prices from China.

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.

> Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.

Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really hard to justify giving Anthropic any more money. I'm very tempted to switch to GLM 5.2.

They clearly specify that they accept IDs from most countries. This likely means that they've reached a deal (or hope that they'll reach one) with the US government that lets them share Fable with foreigners, but only as long as they know exactly who it is being shared with.

This is off-putting to the HN demographic, but won't change anything in practice. 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.

The government mandate forcing them to restrict access of new models to American has really cut their legs under them.

This identity verification is a best effort to kinda stay afloat: they can now offer bleeding edge models to US nationals, but not to the other 95% of the world. Their influence is gonna tank quite seriously if the previous mandate is not reversed.

Realistically, their choices are to either implement this, or restrict access to new models entirely, which is a sure way to fall into complete irrelevance.

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true.

I don't really disagree with the rest of your post but I very strongly doubt that Opus 4.8 will be the best American LLM you'll have access to this year.

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.

Your overall argument makes some sense, but I would bet any money this simply is not true. Even if the US maintains some of the restrictions on export (which is in no way a given with how fickle this administration is, let alone the next administration), as LLMs advance, Fable will eventually be considered a lower tier model, and is likely to have restrictions lifted.

Have you tried one of the Kimi K2 models or the latest GLM models by z.ai? The general consensus is that they're at least at par with Claude's class.

> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market

The issue is that there is no "international LLM market." America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge. I routinely use Qwen and GPT-OSS (locally) for things I don't want to share with Anthropic, but they are clearly inferior to SOTA cloud models.

Please do yourself a favour and check out GLM-5.2, Qwen-3.7-Max, MiMo-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro.

And then for stuff that you already said you were able to use Mistral for... Qwen-3.6 (option to run locally), MiMo-2.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, or... many, many other models to choose from too.

This strikes me as bluster. You use Anthropic because they offer the best model, if China offered a better model you would use them. You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model but the truth is as long as Anthropic continue to serve a better model than China, you will use it.

Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.

Hopefully Persona is a non-starter for many. At this point I'm done with Anthropic, I'll be a non-paying subscriber to any of the US based "Frontier" providers. I've been finding far more value in how the models are used vs leaning only on the brute force of a SotA model. Between the Fable / Mythos FUD and scare mongering that Anthropic continues to prance around with I can't take them even remotely seriously anymore. Just like with early iterations of ChatGPT these founders have acted like they're sitting on AGI. But just like with those earlier versions of ChatGPT we'll look at frontier models a year from now and laugh at how off base Dario has been, again as he's been very off base for the last couple of years. I'm still waiting for half of white collar jobs to be replaced next week...

> As a non-US citizen

...

> My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models

May I suggest using Cortecs.ai then? OpenRouter is US-based as well and since you have been bitten by this already perhaps it's really time to change course? :)

The entire internet will be real id verified soon. You won't even be able to send packets without a hardware digital signature linked to a real id. Might as well get used to it.

> I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access

That is very well put.

I’ve been using GLM-5.2 on openrouter with pi and, while I’ve only been playing with it for a couple days, seems stronger than Opus 4.8, nearly on the level of Fable for coding/architecture tasks.

I don't know what was the hype about Fable. It was crap. This more looks like PR stunt by the US government to prop up the failing product.

Now everyone talks about Fable and wants Fable.

Having used it for limited time when it was available, I don't miss it at all.

You underestimate how large the US market is.

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to

No, we are all just waiting for Dario to get scheduled for an Oval Office press conference where he can present a gold trophy to Liberace Hitler and extoll his praises for all the amazing winning he is doing like no one has ever seen before.

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.

Codex-5.5 > Opus 4.8, so that's not true.

If you haven’t already, check out omnigent for building workflows across multiple harnesses: https://omnigent.ai/

(Disclaimer: I work for Databricks, but do not work on omnigent - though I have submitted some QOL PRs as a community member)

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

That’s totally unclear. Things are changing fast. No statement from god or potus has come down about the future of LLMs and who can access what. And for what it’s worth, I’m not able to access fable and I’m a US citizen.