The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't. That's probably 90% of the story.
Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).
Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout of their next model that plans for capricious ad-hoc regulation.
What did they think was going to happen when they were actively doomsday fearmongering around the release of their own model? I assume somehow they thought this would lead to a moat with them being left safely inside the castle, but this response, and Reagan's 9 Words, were always infinitely more likely. It was a demonstration of a child-like level understanding of how regulatory capture works.
The PR from the US frontier labs has been poor to terrible from the beginning.
Among other things, "we have stolen the collected works of your culture, now help us grow so that you can all lose your livelihoods and become our serfs" has to be one of the absolute worst marketing approaches in history.
>They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).
Option C: they could "get hacked and the models exfiltrated" plausibly. Then the horses will be out and there would be no more point for the USGov's barn door.
The government seems like it's in a rough spot. If they let Mythos out, they seem worried people could use it to mass-hack the internet. China seems to not care so much about this and they're right behind. I don't really know what the answer is.
I wonder how much of it is fears over "mass-hacking the internet", and how much of it is fears over the model discovering various NSA/CIA/etc "tailored access operations", and other deliberate side-channels / vulnerabilities / etc?
(Or perhaps vulns that NSA/etc discovered and has been keeping it private; as they're known to do).
I feel there's a lot that's unaccounted for, and the whole "AWS team reports a 'jailbreak' that is just 'review this codebase'" story doesn't add up.
I wonder if there were some parallel construction going on, and if at the same time, the NSA started losing the exploits they had because it was getting patched.
I think the latter is likely their primary concern. Certain models making hackers more effective doesn’t change that black hat hacking will still be illegal and that’s always been the prime deterrent against capable hackers.
While there is some fallout likely with much more effective hacking being easily accessible, I’m sure govt analysts (unless they were let go) have their own prediction models telling them it’s inevitable that this technology eventually makes it to everyone they don’t want having it, what with China seemingly releasing every progress they make openly. Which makes me think that they’re preparing for that inevitability by hardening the govt systems currently in place and/or by burying the secrets they want to keep hidden deeper underground.
Given the history of the US and this particular administration, I feel burying things deeper is a greater priority.
China uses the strategy of letting dangerous technologies loose which causes disruption in the short term but makes people do the right thing like secure their software. The US by comparison gives me the impression of wanting to leave the internet vulnerable by not making Mythos public so that only the US government can use Mythos to gain access to whatever system they like, which is the same thing the pegasus software does
The government isn't in a rough spot, they're just idiots. Chinese models already match Mythos in red-teaming. Anyone can use Chinese models any time they want. By holding people back from Mythos they're pushing people to Chinese models. And it worked: Chinese models now make up 70% of OpenRouter tokens (complete inversion from a year ago). Even if Chinese models weren't that great, anyone can fine-tune an open weight model specifically for red-teaming and it'll outperform any other model. So this was always going to happen.
A government staffed by logical, sane people would have figured out how not to encourage this, like mobilizing the IT and security industries to secure their products faster, while also cracking down on the "our AI is the most dangerous tool in the world" rhetoric bandied about by the frontier companies. But we don't have that, we have a government of Loony Tunes characters. When you put extremists in office you get extremist behavior.
Whether or not the government chooses to regulate the space, capricious after-the-fact regulation is the worst of all possible worlds. The ~equivalent models from OpenAI did not get the same treatment (favoritism?), and it's not clear the government has produced even rough guidelines about how to be compliant going forward.
Model prep costs far too much money to operate under this kind of regulatory regime.
They tweaked Fable to appease the USG, but it clearly refuses/downshifts more requests than e.g. Opus 5. (I have run into Fable refusals even doing really normal stuff like fixing bugs reported by static security scanners like Brakeman. Not downshifts, outright refusals.)
So the net result is they put "Fable" back on the market, but it was perceived to be a worse overall experience, at much higher cost. (Remember all this happened before most users had really even had a chance to put Fable through its paces.)
That's where we are today: Mythos is locked, Fable is neutered. They probably can't fix this until they are ready to release something that's not called Fable, or that they can say has some key architectural differences to Fable. The sword of capricious regulation is always going to be hanging over Fable.
Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).
Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout of their next model that plans for capricious ad-hoc regulation.