alt Hacker NewsThere is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing
Comments
OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card.
But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.
The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.
> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
Nice summary. Reading this reminds me about the strong encryption discussion.
> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.
He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.
The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse.
The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.
Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.
AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.
I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.
It stinks to high heaven, especially considering how over-the-top security protocols were introduced with Fable. The US government is asserting its influence on the economy and showing Anthropic that their IPO will depend on bending the knee.
I've really come around to trusting OpenAI a lot more than Anthropic the past few months. Reading between the lines of his own output, Dario Amodei comes off as both a dogmatic believer in ASI as a perfect, infallible ruler for humanity and quite an extreme American nationalist. The company, likewise, looks to be in ideological lockstep. I could see them, say, allowing or consciously creating runaway ASI they believed was ideologically aligned with them.
OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
It turned out Amazon are the snitchers on anthropic after all
Edit: if anthropic couldn’t resolve this matter, they can do something reallllly funny right now and open source it to the public :)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/trump-open-ai-altman-stake.h...
Circumstantial, but... timing is odd.
It got me wondering if this means all big models are US-only now? Are they gonna do the same with GPT-5.6, etc? Seems pretty unlikely to me. So I expect Fable to come back pretty soon.
This should be a red herring for Europe (and others using US models).
Every non-American company is now at a disadvantage against American companies. The implications can not be overstated.
Everyone's focusing on marketing and market manipulation here, but the real consequences are more serious IMO.
If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
>custom harness
Means you pay full price per token right? (Which I think works out to roughly 10x more than using Claude Code?)
Actually, for enterprise I think it doesn't make a difference anymore, since they switched to per-token billing.
Counterintuitively, this is a huge win for misAnthropic and other closed labs in the US. They can nerf the models, ask for IDs from users and do what it takes to comply with whatever regulation they've been fighting for.
Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.
We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
What a coincidence, Anthropic getting handicapped so xAI can try to catch up
You will miss the good old Europe that only regulated.
This is why we must diversify our technology stack back to the 80's style of computing heterogeneity.
Damn. I tried using it yesterday in a conversation about mixing my own carb drings and electrolytes (continuing from opus 4.6) but fable rejected it for whatever reason. Not sure how I could use fructose and maltodextrin for anything shady, but ok. And now it's gone and I couldn't even test it once! Dammit
The government is playing into the whole "oohh Mythos and Fable are too dangerous, and you, Mr. Investor should understand powerful, alright, very dangerous and powerful, now go give all your money to Dario and his cronies, thank you very much!"
Potentially relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361050
I seriously feel like there's easier ways for OpenAI to catch up to anthropic and it would be a waste of political capital that the idea of Sam pulling strings for this to happen seems highly unlikely
> As a brief aside, I am once again extremely disappointed in the myriad of Silicon Valley people who angrily argued that a Democratic led government would ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ are now completely silent or defending the actions of this admin. I cannot help but feel that that previous posturing was just a machiavellian play for power, which has just been the worst feeling in the world.
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
> OpenAI did the same “too dangerous to release” song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.
Wasn't that when Dario, et al were at the company. One way to view this is that OpenAI expelled the cultists and they went on to form their own organization that continued using the same tactics.
Certainly some of the Anthropic press around Fable seems to me to be just marketing but I also think there's a core of people there who really believe it. I also think like all good advertising/lies there's some truth to the claims even if they're exaggerating.
Any reason to think that open models will not catch up, given enough time?
with how the admin is talking about taking a stake in openai, it's so incredibly clear this is the government attempting to kneecap an openai competitor
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door. I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again.
trump doesn't like dario given what he has said in the past.
> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm.
> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can’t use it (technically, only if you’re not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.
I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:
> We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)
It does sound funny to hear this from Anthropic after they spent recent months with scaremongering about Mythos's capabilities, now they say it was a prank bro, you can actually achieve more or less the same with good old GPT-5.5.
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
What this has demonstrated: if you can't run the software on your own hardware, you should assume that it can be taken away at any moment.
I really hope it's just the USA punishing Anthropic for their insolence. If this is actually the beginning of AI regulation, we're probably heading towards dark times.
Meanwhile the world keeps spinning and most people don't even know what Anthropic is, much less anything about Fable.
If AI lived up to a tenth of the promises the American labs produce, the world would be drastically different today. It's not. I'm doubtful of future impact based on that.
I'm happy we can utilise current OSS models to the extent we can now. They'll improve. The world will continue as usual. And hopefully we can put this bubble behind us.
If you find yourself cheering for one billionaire versus another, you’re the definition of pathetic.
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I guess current AI, IS the best it will ever be
lol if this is an attempt by the admin like the DoD thing to "knock them down a peg" it actually has the opposite effect for me, showing that anthropic is that far ahead you have to resort to dirty tricks.
> But this government [...]
I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.