Are you certain? Trump admin is hand-picking GPT 5.6 winners

The Government's position is that Anthropic/OpenAI are forbidden from allowing non-US citizens use the models. This is impossible in reality because how can Anthropic know that the person sitting behind a Claude code session or API key is at any given moment a US citizen? You can check their ID on signup but how can they know that they didn't give their credentials to someone else to use? They can't.

Given the impossibility of compliance, what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is working with the government to release it to certain organizations with the government's blessing.

If this were about missiles and not AI models, nobody would question this turn of events. If the government said that nobody can export this missile or allow non-citizens access to the missile, and then they started giving permission for certain organizations to handle the missile, that would be normal, not picking winners.

The only reason people are questioning it in this case is because they believe that these models are not dangerous enough to deserve these kinds of export controls. Personally I'd agree that in my 3 days of using Fable I didn't observe any superpowers. Unfortunately however, Anthropic undermined that argument by claiming that Mythos is highly dangerous, which set them up for any jailbreak of Fable to be considered a national security risk. Who is a court going to believe? Someone who used a model for 3 days? Or the government and the people who made that model?

Comparing AI models with missiles is a far fetch as long as citizenship is the single qualifier used to decide who’s allowed to be a customer. This is not a security related policy, it’s about strategically controlled economic power.

This is just not how it works even if we really, really want it to work that way. US government can do it, and has done it before. At some point strong encryption was considered “munitions” and export controlled. If SSL can be “munition”, LLMs can be slapped on a label just like that. SSL/TLS stopped being qualified as such eventually so some sanity was restored. But as the legal and regulatory framework, it’s certainly there and has and is being used in that capacity.

This has a long history and the US government are not completely stupid. They understand that some cornerstone technologies are high leverage even if they are not per se directly militarily relevant.

Some classic examples of this, on which the US places severe export controls, was advanced materials science and inertial navigation technology. Neither of these are weapons but advanced technology in these domains greatly enables the development of advanced weapons. Any work in these areas is automatically subject to the full export control regime. In extreme cases they may be nationalized and classified.

AI tech is becoming just another tech domain subject to the same level of scrutiny. I’m not making a moral judgement. This was always going to be the reality and a lot of people could see it coming.

Another one is thermal vision cameras. Anything above 9fps (I guess an arbitrary cutoff to do with night-vision goggles) is export controlled. This is despite the technology being very valuable for many industrial and hobby applications.

If that was a guesstimate on frame rate it's likely off.

Regardless of US controls, I can from Australia buy a high quality 50 fps thermal scope with built in 1000m (or ~ 1000 yard) laser range finder from Hangzhou, China.

ie. Why lock the stable at 9 fps when out on the open plain 50 fps is already running free.

The US government obviously has no control over what China sends to Australia, so it this case the cat is out of the bag. However I can assure you the limit is still real for US companies: https://oem.flir.com/support/support-center/knowledge-base/a...

Cheers for the follow-up .. and that's certainly interesting.

Chinese 50 fps thermal cameras and scopes have been about for a while now, they've been supplying the industrial specialist market even longer than the general consumer goods market.

I note the US export control is limited by licence .. which likely means the US high frame rate thermal gear is equally as available in AU as (say) TI DSP chips were when they first iterated that family (ie. restricted by licence but easy to purchase in allied countries if you just sign a form stating you're not supplying them to countries in the Chinese sphere of influence, etc.)

Now that China is also making them I wouldn't be surprised if they drop this. But FLIR has been doing milspec thermal cameras for over 20 years and I think the regulation certainly slowed down proliferation of this equipment in the early days.

> This is not a security related policy, it’s about strategically controlled economic power.

It is both. The US and China are locked in an AI arms race with economics and security intertwined, given the perceived power of the trajectory of frontier AI models.

I don't think this is what happened. Anthropic could have absolutely complied with the government order, even in the most minimal fashion possible. Instead they chose to block everybody, and then give a link blaming the government.

I think it's most likely that they felt that this would drive wide antagonism towards the government which would help put them in a more favorable situation for future negotiations to establish a more 'commercially favorable regulation regime.' In other words, build me a moat, now! The government responded by super-screwing them, but is doing so in a way that can help keep the corporate class relatively content while this plays out.

"Our models are so good they are banned by the government"

I don't see any way how releasing an incrementally better model could get even close to the positive PR. For every Mythos token not sold because of this they'll sell dozens of Fable, Opus and so on. Perhaps the ban did not origin at Anthropic, as a PR stunt, but genuinely at some government desk. Entirely possible. But Anthropic would be foolish to not pick up that ball and drag it out a little.

Yeah but that's not what happened at all. The government said limit access to US citizens. Anthropic could have chosen compliance or even malicious compliance (are you a US citizen - please tick yes or no). And such a response from Anthropic would have required the government to try to crack down even harder which would have made them look even worse, and Anthropic even better. Instead Anthropic chose to over-comply and looks just as bad the government here, especially with somewhat transparent ulterior motives driving their behavior.

In addition to what you're saying, Trump admin is also hand-picking which customers gain access to GPT 5.6 during this period. This is widely reported on.

That's why I raised skepticism that Anthropic has not been subject to that.

> I guess a US business with non-citizen employees could work.

No. Only if those employees have a green card and the company must not only take on that responsibility but ensure other employees are denied access. Otherwise the company would be subject to millions in fines.

US export laws are no fuckin' joke like everyone here seems to think they are.

It's really frustrating to read pages of comments rooted in emotion and no understanding of the existing laws.

> It's really frustrating to read pages of comments rooted in emotion and no understanding of the existing laws.

I read your frustration. Try to let go of the fact that there are many smart people who aren't experts in legal affairs. Cite eCFR if they're wrong, and move on. As much as they don't know the rules, you don't know their situation.

For all you know, the subscriber may be a US Citizen + Delaware C Corp owner.

At some point it becomes willful ignorance of history.

I remember a time not very long ago when everyday crypto like 128-bit SSL was restricted under US export law. The old web browsers came in separate, "exportable" versions. [1]

Phil Zimmermann was in big trouble for releasing PGP. That was the mid-90s. Clinton was President so this stuff transcends politics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape_Navigator_1.1_fo...

Yes, because US CIA and NSA was hacking half of the World. You can learn about this in Cybersecurity books.

This is different situation. Cybersecurity specialists (at least those I found and read) don't consider Mythos as something really powerful. Good tool but not groundbreaking.

Anthropic was playing terror game and burned by it

Good, so it might not be over, considering everyone around the world can use PGP and browsers?

Sounds about the mechanisms they'd use to prevent consumers from having edge inference. Their final moats.

That was in reference to whether anyone outside of Anthropic might be able to have standing to sue at all, not the merits of the case.

> Anthropic themselves argued that the technology is dangerous

They said Mythos was dangerous, not Fable which is what got banned.

"Mythos-class models" were banned, which includes both Fable and Mythos itself.

Fable = Mythos + guardrails

Fable + jailbreak = Mythos

> Technically the US government is allowing Anthropic to serve the models to any US citizen, and it's Anthropic who decided that's impossible to comply with

It is technically impossible. Many of the researchers working on the models aren't US citizens. That's not just within Anthropic. It'd make things 100% worse.

Lockheed Martin is able to restrict access of their product details to only us citizens.

It's not impossible, it's just hard.

> Lockheed Martin is able to restrict access of their product details to only us citizens.

The US government has stated that the US is very behind in manufacturing of military equipment vs e.g. China (in terms of scale and speed).

So if your example is gimp it then sure it's possible.

Not every government law is wise or good. But it's still the law.

For just this reason, dialing back ITAR export restrictions has been on the agenda for nearly a decade.

> https://calibremag.ca/trump-preparing-to-roll-back-itar-expo...

It hasn't yet happened. And, as things stand right now, nobody in their right mind wants to work in a business beholden to ITAR. Strong export controls will kill American AI.

There are tens of thousands of defense contractors that not only work with export-controlled stuff, but even top-secret and other higher levels.

Getting just a secret clearance takes up to a year, and expecting to do this for all employees, in this AI market? Not going to happen, things move way too fast.

People complain about the US approach, but almost every high end manufacturing is being export controlled, from ASML machines to high end optic used in missiles.

>Anthropic themselves argued that the technology is dangerous.

They never released mythos 5 to the general public. And they never will.

Never is a long time. When open models catch up in 4-12 months, they might change their minds.