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#anthropic#government#dangerous#administration#model#more#models#mythos#openai#don

Discussion (76 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

cmiles8•about 3 hours ago
The AI labs look rather naive here.

You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.

Their new argument now seems be that this was marketing hype/fluff that backfired, in a pretty obvious and predicable way, and now they’re trying to reset the conversation.

ChadNauseam•about 3 hours ago
> You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.

True, you can't. But, you can think certain regulations are helpful and certain other regulations are not. And you can be annoyed when unhelpful "regulations" are put in place.

This is like if I say that pitbulls are dangerous, and then the government comes and shoots my pitbull, who I've spent a lot of effort training to not be dangerous. Then you say "well you said pitbulls were dangerous, so you can't really complain." Well, I can complain because If you took me seriously, you wouldn't have responded by shooting only my pitbull!

Think of what incentives this creates for other people. Do you think that OpenAI will be candid about the possible dangers of their technology now? They might not even release it now, seeing that Anthropic releasing their model was what got it export-controlled.

dogleash•about 2 hours ago
The act of shooting the pitbull makes for good dramatics, but you would get zero sympathy from me if your local government banned pitbull ownership. e.g. Ontario bans pitbulls. I don't have a problem with that.
mips_avatar•about 3 hours ago
Well Anthropic would love some regulatory capture.
dofm•about 3 hours ago
Dog caught the car
drtz•about 3 hours ago
> You can’t jump up and down screaming how amazing, powerful, and dangerous your new tech is and then act surprised and annoyed when the government shows up looking to regulate it.

It's entirely possible that models could be "dangerous" to fully release to the general public without guardrails and at the same time the government majorly overreacted in this case.

Releasing Mythos to selected researchers and companies at least gives those researchers a head start at addressing vulnerabilities before the model hits mainstream.

foo-bar-baz529•about 3 hours ago
Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to Mythos, and a low-priority one at that? It’s clear that other models are quite capable of finding largely the same vulnerabilities, and that the main key is simply running a frontier model in a good harness to find vulnerabilities.
ChadNauseam•about 3 hours ago
> Then why did curl only find one new vulnerability thanks to Mythos

Maybe there weren't that many serious vulnerabilities in curl? It's like asking why it didn't find any vulnerabilities in fn main() {println!("hello, world");}.

Anyway, people who have used it seem to say that Mythos was better than other models at creating exploits. From cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-frontier-models/

> When we ran other frontier models through the same harness, they found a fair number of the same underlying bugs, and in some cases they got further than we expected on the reasoning side too. Where they fell short was at the point of stitching the pieces together. A model would identify an interesting bug, write a thoughtful description of why it mattered, and then stop, leaving the actual chain unfinished and the question of exploitability open. What changed with Mythos Preview is that a model can now take those low-severity bugs (which would traditionally sit invisible in a backlog) and chain them into a single, more severe exploit.

Bender•about 3 hours ago
Also a good wake-up call for investors as these big players can be benched at any moment.
reje•about 3 hours ago
I can’t take anyone seriously who thought otherwise.

You think you can become more powerful so much so the govt questions its own power? Don’t be stupid. They will simply send in the army to first seize the assets and then nationalise.

It almost seems as if very few people actually understand how the world works. If the govt thinks this is the tech to end all future tech, you think future money flows for invesment matter? Hahaha. No

micromacrofoot•about 3 hours ago
I suspect they're taking this as a win either way, because they're still plastering "Fable 5 unavailable" on their product and using it as an opportunity to keep themselves in the spotlight as they head to IPO.

There's really not even a ban here, they could slot in Fable under the Opus label and no one would really be able to tell. It's all part of the same show to pump up valuation.

bloppe•about 3 hours ago
I bet they will do a touch of RLHF and re-naming the moment OAI releases a comparable model. Otherwise, sure, they can just bask in the drama for a bit.
tennfown•about 3 hours ago
I’m way more concerned about the loons willing to throw absurd amounts of money at the clearly naive individuals.
cyanydeez•about 3 hours ago
No. They got caught in a change in what it means to be "regulated".

Regulation in a functional democracy: Cool, lets figure this out, write up a bill for us, do some research in congress, lets find something that makes sense.

Regulation in a function fascism: Cool, wheres my bribe? My boots not shiny, lick it till I say stop.

See, Anthropic wasn't licking enough boot when Biden got discharged and they thought Amazon and OpenAI and Elon were just going to let them capture a market without fealty to the boot.

voidfunc•about 3 hours ago
This. Theres a lot of rude awakenings in the future for corporate executive types. They are no longer driving the train. Oh well.
calvinmorrison•about 3 hours ago
wow i wish we had functional fascism, where have the verticalized/syndicalized trade unions been my whole life!!!!
teaearlgraycold•about 3 hours ago
This is 99% petty drama between the US government and Anthropic and 1% actual safety concerns.
stvltvs•about 3 hours ago
But the paperclips!

I'm skeptical about the existential threat of AI, but a lot of smart people have been beating that drum for so long that people are afraid.

tychez•about 2 hours ago
I just find this idea bizarre.

This bizarre social media meme that AI just performative when Opus 4.8 is just unbelievably good. As if it is so difficult to believe that a more capable model than Opus 4.8 might actually be dangerous and not just entirely a marketing stunt like a person waving to cars in a chicken outfit.

I think it is really this strange form of socialization that people have internalized an anonymous audience they are always performing to themselves. What is going to be the most popular and upvoted thing the anonymous audience agrees with is what I am going to think.

Why would anyone disagree and get downvoted by the anonymous audience like this post?

anon373839•22 minutes ago
> … when Opus 4.8 is just unbelievably good. As if it is so difficult to believe that a more capable model than Opus 4.8 might actually be dangerous

It’s funny, but this sounds indistinguishable from arguments that were made about GPT-4 back in 2023 when OpenAI and its handwringing industry shills were calling for a ban on models stronger than GPT-4.

teaearlgraycold•about 1 hour ago
Why would the government that passed a law preventing states from regulating AI give a damn about Fable’s safety guardrails?

I don’t think the concerns Anthropic has posted are fabricated. And I’ve received unreasonable skepticism on this site when saying it might be the real deal. But the Trump administration generally doesn’t want to limit AI growth. With Anthropic it is a personal matter.

colonCapitalDee•about 3 hours ago
To be clear, this is petty drama *stirred up the US government*. It's not some sort of back and forth, the government is singling them out
mrandish•about 2 hours ago
And to add more background: The administration is targeting Anthropic because of the TOU / EULA conflict with the DoD from a couple of months ago. Anthropic restricts use of all their models for lethal combat planning and mass domestic surveillance. The DoD was, and still is, very pissed about this. While this Fable ban was issued from the Commerce Department, it's painfully obvious executive branch agencies are tightly coordinated from the White House.

To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't legit security concerns around Fable's release. I think Andy Jassy did forward a concerning report about an apparent jailbreak in Fable, and he probably did so in good faith. The difference is if the same concern had arisen about a new model from OAI, Google, etc the action taken would not have been inventing an all-new, hyper-extreme punitive remedy and dropping it after 5p on a Friday under a very rare mechanism forcing Ant to comply in 90 mins or be subject to immediate arrest. And the "no non-U.S. citizens anywhere, anytime" restriction is functionally unprecedented.

This is the Trump admin inventing new regulatory power that's never existed before and deploying it in a punitive way to demonstrate what can happen to those who aren't sufficiently cooperative with this administration. There are half a dozen less extreme levels of restriction, which already exist, and one of those would have been deemed sufficient had it been another company.

That said, I'm certainly no Anthropic fanboy. Anthropic did play their initial Mythos self-restriction for PR value. But I think it's likely the Mythos self-restriction was a responsible action initially suggested by their AI safety team in good faith. Giving security researchers time to evaluate it and major companies time to test it against their code bases probably was reasonable and prudent. That doesn't mean it wasn't also good for PR and brand perception. I think there are senior people inside Anthropic who are genuinely concerned about AI safety. Personally, I don't have the expertise to gauge if those concerns are justified, but I believe they believe it. I also think there are senior people at Anthropic who are focused more on building the business, doing the IPO and "winning" the silicon valley game. All of these things can be simultaneously true.

matheusmoreira•about 3 hours ago
We know, but it's still satisfying to see their fearmongering backfire on them.
ChadNauseam•about 3 hours ago
If you "know" that it's "99% petty drama between the US government and Anthropic", then it's not really their fearmongering backfiring on them.
bellowsgulch•about 3 hours ago
I love it, maybe now they’ll all shut the fuck up now that Anthropic has fucked around a couple times and is now finding out.
binary132•about 3 hours ago
that seems like possibly the most unlikely outcome
xeonmc•about 3 hours ago
Let's hope that government seizes all of these AI companies with total forfeiture and no compensation.
boramdd•about 4 hours ago
Being on the other side of the AI machine changes the perspective of whether it is dangerous or not, I guess.
speedgoose•about 4 hours ago
Everyone has a price.
trhway•about 3 hours ago
the coming IPOs will possibly create several billionaires. Standing on the top of a billion dollar pile would definitely change your perspective.
sigmar•about 3 hours ago
>Some administration officials have said that a resolution should include an acknowledgment on Anthropic’s part that its rollout of Fable and communication with the White House could have been improved, people familiar with the talks said.

>followed initial frustration Friday among some administration officials when they couldn’t immediately get Amodei on the phone, the people said.

That he didn't drop everything to talk to them seems like the major crux? But Dario doesn't even do the day-to-day operations Daniela does. Feel like Anthropic should just hire Dean Ball to be their liason or something

bonsai_spool•about 3 hours ago
And Anthropic say they were on the phone within 15 minutes… This administration is not known for its honesty so it’s hard to take their side of things
micromacrofoot•about 3 hours ago
It's because the "crisis" is a sham for publicity, like Trump's constant bullshit deals and ceasefires that aren't real, they're just happening to find more problems to keep them in the news.
theplumber•about 3 hours ago
I feel Dario did enough harm. I wonder if he can do the right thing and step down. It’s really just tiresome to follow all his PR/Hype/warnings and this fiasco makes everything he says seem so silly. At the same time he’s dangerous for the industry. In the end he may get more regulation than he asked for. If the gov decides the Opus models are too powerful without KYC they are toast. And to be honest I think they deserve it.
jonathanstrange•about 3 hours ago
I'm tired of this story and the corresponding fake discussions because it's completely obvious that Anthropic was singled out because they didn't play along with the current US administration and this whole charade is just part of an extortion scheme.
JohnnyMarcone•39 minutes ago
I feel like I woke up from a coma and all the sudden people are taking the administration at their word. I'm so confused.
james2doyle•about 3 hours ago
Had to disagree with that. However, I don't think you can discount how much Anthropic has been banging the drum about how AI is dangerous (specifically theirs) and an existential threat, etc. etc.

The rollout of Mythos was clearly manufactured to stoke the fears of companies that didn’t have access to it. They also bragged (for Fable) about how they "ran an external bug bounty that produced no universal jailbreaks in over 1,000 hours of testing" only for it be circumvented almost immediately.

So them standing on the high horse and saying it is _so powerful, yet so safe_ only to have that blow up in their face just made it that much easier to make an excuse to do this. Again, not disagreeing, but they made themselves the tall poppy here.

JohnnyMarcone•29 minutes ago
> They also bragged (for Fable) about how they "ran an external bug bounty that produced no universal jailbreaks in over 1,000 hours of testing" only for it be circumvented almost immediately.

Where did you see there was a universal jailbreak?

How do you weigh the DOD fight against warning about Mythos' dangers when determining what made Anthropic 'the tall poppy'?

eiejeqq•about 2 hours ago
Are people here deluded?

Business 101 - never take on an entity who has ultimate power over you and can conduct a course of action to put your existence at threat

SpicyLemonZest•about 2 hours ago
People here aren’t authoritarians, so we don’t accept your premise that you shouldn’t take on the government. That’s not how things work in the US. Perhaps you’ve encountered Trumpists who tell you that it is, but they’re lying; they routinely applaud businesses defying any government which their dictator-in-chief doesn’t control.
xiphias2•about 2 hours ago
It was always the same, Google even lost a big lawsuit because it went too far in doing what the Biden administration was asking.

Twitter and Facebook also did what they ,,had to''.

The thing that's new here is that Antropic's growth rate was so enormous that Dario didn't have time to learn to lobby.

matheusmoreira•about 3 hours ago
All the government has to do is simply pull up the blog posts of Anthropic's own CEO.
tiahura•about 3 hours ago
They need to send lobbyists not hackers.
winstonp•about 3 hours ago
They are absolutely clueless about how to talk to this administration.
jasonlotito•about 3 hours ago
Young girls and money seem to do the trick.
fnordsensei•about 3 hours ago
Yes, why not resolve it the same way all the others have done?

Say that Trump has weird elbows or something, Trump sues for defamation, they settle, bribe completed.

0o_MrPatrick_o0•about 1 hour ago
"Carlini had never before found a bug in Linux, or in Ghost. Now he had discovered many."

New guy learns nessus, now tells everyone at the bar he's basically Mr. Robot.

A pox on the labs and the government. InfosecDrama.exe just took out a frontier model because a noob learned how to use a tool.

yeeetz•about 3 hours ago
They needed to have administration insiders on their team months if not years ago, not just now

OpenAI, Meta, SpaceX are savvy enough to play ball, but Anthropic's public posturing and government affairs has always seemed too aloof and intellectual

thewebguyd•about 3 hours ago
To be fair to Anthropic for a moment (not that they deserve it), but requiring administration insiders and the greasing of palms going on should not continue to be the normal expectations of how to do business in the USA. I'm on the side of any company that refuses to capitulate to this administration. Not saying Anthropic doesn't (because they do), but let's not pretend like the blatant corruption going on should be normalized. Every single citizen should be appalled at this behavior and blatant market manipulation.
trhway•about 3 hours ago
They should have taken money from Thrive Capital.
Simon321•about 4 hours ago
These are the consequences of fear mongering as hard as they did. You reap what you sow.

Now they need to convince the government that they didn't mean anything of the previous things they claimed.

thewebguyd•about 4 hours ago
OpenAI is also guilty of excessive fear mongering (remember GPT 2 is too dangerous to release?)

This isn't 100% Anthropic's fault, although I'm sure that's part of it. This is the current corrupt administration executing on a grudge they have against Anthropic, and the government's new found love of picking winners and losers.

yreg•about 2 hours ago
Public release of GPT (and the following models) did bring negative societal changes with it.

We now live in a world where captchas don't work, astroturfing is indistinguishable, school essays and theses don't prove any learning took place, open source maintainers gradually cease to accept stranger contributions, …

0l•about 3 hours ago
> remember GPT 2 is too dangerous to release

FYI, this was when Dario was still at OpenAI.

hgoel•about 3 hours ago
I don't really think they're acting on a grudge against Anthropic here, I think it really is on Anthropic for describing the model's capabilities the way that they did.

IIRC Anthropic claimed to have been working with the government on securing things with Mythos, but then they seemed to have been blindsided by this.

My read is that the guys making the decision to restrict it were not the ones that Anthropic had been working with, and it's more about Anthropic getting caught between infighting within an incoherent government.

yifanl•about 3 hours ago
OpenAI is much more eager to jump on board with the administration than Anthropic is, Altman is a lot of things, but he definitely knows which wheels need grease.
lompad•about 3 hours ago
That was dario amodei as well, when he was still at openai. He is the primary "create hype by claiming you're dangerous"-guy.
theplumber•about 3 hours ago
Good riddance. Now it’s Anthropic that should show him the door.
AbrahamParangi•about 3 hours ago
Nah, that's ridiculous. This admin is corrupt and idiotic and it's silly to pretend that Anthropic's actions matter except in so much as they didn't bribe the president like OpenAI did.
FergusArgyll•about 3 hours ago
Unrelated to this story but Carlini rocks.

tic tac toe in printf https://github.com/carlini/printf-tac-toe

Recently Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions https://github.com/carlini/regex-chess

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136909

slopinthebag•about 3 hours ago
Anthropic sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Anthropic reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

moralestapia•about 4 hours ago
"Nicholas Carlini recently rang the alarm about the dangers of AI—and now he’s part of a team arguing for the latest models to be released"

Many such cases, he was just hungry.

wil421•about 3 hours ago
Isn’t that how Anthropic started? Raise alarm bells and ride the hype train.
BoorishBears•about 3 hours ago
Can you imagine how cringe it would be setting up that hero image in office?
lelandfe•about 3 hours ago
I’m sure it wasn’t the intent but the halo really makes him look like a saint
BoorishBears•27 minutes ago
Feels very much intended.
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parl_match•about 4 hours ago
I have good friends in the AI industry who are the living embodiment of that Upton Sinclair quote.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

You've never heard such strong one-sided cope until you've talked to an NVDA employee about AI. I'm not even against AI. It's just that a combination of intense financial incentives around a product that provides a good simulation of the Chinese Room has really fucked peoples brains up.