It seems more likely that the logical conclusion is the executive branch is mad at Anthropic, and lashing out at them with any convenient tool that they have.

I suspect if OpenAI or Grok was operating at the same level they wouldn’t find themselves on the sharp end of the government stick

I wouldn't say so. Once upon a time, a PlayStation 2 was too powerful to export: https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...

ChatGPT 2 was once too powerful to release.

AI has been moving faster than culture and thinking around it. Once we've adapted to what these models can do we'll relax a little, and then a new stepwise improvement will start it all over again. It always goes this way.

> So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?

95% odds this gets reversed by Monday morning is why

I predict in future the best frontier models will be gatekept solely to the wealthy.

For the sake of argument, assume everyone is working on good faith and at least believes and means the things they're saying.

The US government believes that Fable/Mythos is a weapon that needs to be export-controlled, and limited to only US customers. Presumably OpenAI/xAI/Google would face the same constraints, for the same reasons.

OS/foreign models are unaffected - OS because they cannot control who runs them, and foreign because they are not controlled by the US government. We could assume that China will implement the same policy controls, but they see the world differently so might not.

So US AI companies are then limited to the US market, effectively, after about six months (the lag between the current frontier models and the OS models). They have much less incentive to push the envelope to create better models, because the US govt might also ban those completely.

The investor froth around the race to AGI dies, so valuations shrink (the current IPOs may be affected), and presumably the bubble bursts. None of the AI companies can afford to continue building data centres, so that all dies immediately. US GDP drops by ~5% because of that alone.

In a year's time, the US is in a major recession because it gambled so hard on AI. Europe less so, only because it was such a distant follower in that race. China is more-or-less unaffected. The best models are now OS/foreign, and AI is moving forward more slowly, but still moving forward.

Any other scenarios?

The logical conclusion is that someone "forgot" to pay the right bribe to somebody in the admin, or make the right contributions to the GOP.

Same as the new bridge between Windsor and Detroit can't open until some palms are greased.

Chaos is a ladder, gotta keep climbing

This is a good point. If I were an investor, there is no way I'm investing into frontier labs after this announcement. Is this how the bubble pops?

>> if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus

What an unbelievable claim. Especially since the vast majority of publicly available benchmarks disagree.

We definitely reached the available capability plateau. You are 100% correct IMHO.

There may be a temporary plateau. And it could have fascinating macroeconomic impacts.

Efficiency will become the next thing to focus on. It was already emerging, but accelerating the focus on efficiency will lead to a ton of excess capacity and even some investments in data centers to go belly up. And ultimately the AI bubble bursting will look a lot like the dot com, with its surplus fiber.

Oh, and this will put gas on the fire that fighting AI and big tech is the next political rally cry. Along with “eat the rich” as they are seen as taking both jobs and money.

Curious to see where it’s all headed and how Trump’s call will impact it.

Eh, not any different than the performative encryption restrictions from decades past.

I don't know, I've been using Mythos this week quite sceptically and I found it to be incredibly dumb. For instance gave it a dialogue between 3 people and it was constantly mixing up who said what to whom, which looked like early Gemini behaviour. But latest Opus does that too. It would also make nonsensical inference about given papers and only correct itself when pointed out what it said wrong. If that is what US government fears... maybe the fear is that someone follows the dumb things the model suggests.