Anthropic flies staff to D.C. to clean up White House fight

ddstala 2 days ago 69 commentsRead Article on axios.com

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Discussion (69 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

bushido•2 days ago

Anecdotally, I think this is a much bigger cleanup than just talking to the administration.

I think there's a wider damage done which there is no coming back from. And this is for the USA, not Anthropic.

The chance that sovereignty and rules such as this could be applied to AI was a concern that a lot of people had, but the risk was unknown.

Speaking for myself, I had guessed this would happen at some point of time. I was expecting/hoping it'd be years away.

However given the events in the last few days it greatly increases my concern with building any product which can depend on an on an API which could go away for a number of my customers.

I've been experimenting with other open weight models hosted in favorable sovereign countries for a few months, but this accelerates something which was an experiment to now being a must-have.

I don't think it is going to be easy for any of the parties to repair this easily.

general1465•2 days ago

I see it exactly the same, self hosted LLM will be the future. They may not be SOTA, but it is better to have a Trabant in your garage than being denied use of shared Ferrari, because somebody outside of your control had hissy fit.

fragmede•1 day ago

I like a good car analogy, but it doesn't hold up in this case. What am I going to do with a Ferrari that's durable and makes me money, the same way that Mythos/Fable can output me better code than Opus 4.x? I mean I guess I could take a picture of me in a Ferrari, and then when I show off that picture but can't produce the Ferrari, I look dumb, but Mythos generated code/artifacts are still downloadable and runnable, if you got far enough before the cut off. Judging from the quality/availability of the few days we had it, it's a shared resource anyway. The usage limits were too low to give everything to Fable to do.

tmaly•2 days ago

Back when encryption and PGP was the hot topic, similar things happened with sovereigns.

daft_pink•1 day ago

I think they’re going to have problems, because I’m sure they have a lot of foreign employees and it’s insane to think they now have to block them all from using their best models.

ed_mercer•2 days ago

https://archive.md/KJK8v

gregoriol•2 days ago

They should fly staff to EU instead

chasil•2 days ago

As I understand it, ITAR regulations for export controls have just been applied to any form of Mythos.

These are overseen by U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, and forbid foreign nationals from access to any form of Mythos, either within or outside the U.S.

Only U.S. citizens and immigrants that are holders of a "green card" may now access Mythos.

It appears that Anthropic does not have internal controls to implement these restrictions in any form, so the only option was to shut Mythos down.

Penalties for ITAR violation can reach ten years in prison and a million dollars per violation. (I can post a link to those details if there is any interest.)

As long as Anthropic is a U.S. company, there is no escaping this.

https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/how-a-warning-from-amazon-led...

benjiro29•2 days ago

> Only U.S. citizens and immigrants that are holders of a "green card" may now access Mythos.

It was my understanding that not even green card holders may access Mythos. Normally when restrictions like this are put in place, you need a exemption as a green card holder. A geen card is just a permit to live and work in the US. Its not the same as citizenship.

> Security Clearance: Green Card holders are generally prohibited from jobs that require high-level security clearances or sensitive government/military roles reserved exclusively for U.S. citizens.

stult•2 days ago

That's not true. ITAR and security clearance are entirely separate regulatory regimes. For ITAR purposes, being a permanent resident is good enough. I used to work for a defense contractor, and we hired plenty of green card holders. They were not in general assigned to work that required a clearance, but plenty of defense-sensitive, ITAR-controlled work is done by green card holders.

felipeerias•2 days ago

Were those ITAR export controls chosen because they really are the most appropriate tool for this particular case, or because they could be deployed at a very short notice?

chasil•2 days ago

Mythos was advertised as being able to do massive damage to IT systems over government and the private sector.

How could restriction not be appropriate.

bel8•2 days ago

So Anthropic can't even move to Europe now since that would be considered a crime against national security?

Like trying to move a missile industry from USA to EU.

chasil•2 days ago

Individuals can leave, but the company cannot transfer restricted intellectual property.

Europe has extradition treaties, so the U.S. can force anyone in Europe back to the U.S. for criminal indictment who demonstrates inappropriate possession of this technology.

throw1234567891•2 days ago

And what would they be doing there?

kordlessagain•2 days ago

...and take their cluster of twelve M1 Max's with them.

root-parent•2 days ago

No need, the EU will just order more AI light bulbs, when everything is sorted: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dUPJuSZF1Is

sofixa•2 days ago

It's not "AI light bulbs", the point is to use smart meters for load shedding and load rearranging. Why wouldn't you want for people and companies to be able to use cheaper electricity in off-peak hours?

santiagobasulto•2 days ago

> Senior technical Anthropic staff

doesn't seem to be a political meeting, but rather a technical one. Maybe they'll review the jailbreaks and demonstrate that can be replicated in any model out there?

weird-eye-issue•2 days ago

How could it not be both?

vb-8448•2 days ago

I hope no, otherwise also Claude and GPT will be banned XD

OkWing99•2 days ago

Wouldn't it be funny if US Gov takes a 10% stake in Anthropic.

DaSHacka•2 days ago

Donald Trump, if you can hear me...

ryandvm•2 days ago

None of this would have happened if Anthropic had just bought a few million dollars worth of Trumpcoin :melting_face:

Surac•2 days ago

I hope they are good at cage fighting. Thats what Trump is all about

MrBuddyCasino•2 days ago

Anthropic: "Our new models are so mighty and dangerous, we'll limit access."

US admin: "Thanks for the warning, we'll do the same then"

This was an epic (and deserved) own-goal.

(btw heres what most likely happened, they refused to fix a jailbreak: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2065853007619588171)

DaSHacka•2 days ago

Yep, hard to feel bad when the whole reason they're in this mess is because they tried to introduce FYD about their own product as an argument why open models need to be banned.

anuramat•1 day ago

> what most likely happened

sounds super biased

UPD just look up "anthropic david sacks"

> epic

are you unironically happy about what is happening right now?

khalic•2 days ago

What a dumb take, life isn’t a meme

This is retaliation by the us gov for not unlocking Claude to use on their weapon. Not good for anybody

comrade1234•2 days ago

After seeing headlines about the ufc fight on the White House lawn and seeing headlines about how Japanese World Cup fans clean up trash after the match I had an image of programmers doing lawn care at the White House...

4ggr0•2 days ago

i 100% thought this article was going to be about cleaning up the idiocracy festival from the past weekend. didn't even question the fact that people from anthropic would be there to help, seemed like a fitting asskiss.

tmaly•2 days ago

I only saw a contrast of Japanese World Cup vs NY Knicks

flohofwoe•2 days ago

That was seriously what I thought the headline is about. Anthropic flying in their employees to clean up the trash after Trumps birthday party for free to demonstrate their obedience with a good show of licking the Dear Leader's boots.

Extremely silly of course, but entirely in line with all the other news currently coming out of the US ;)

mustardo•2 days ago

Mighty fine AI you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it...

eurekin•2 days ago

Also, supposedly biggest MMA event Rogan doesn't want to be on.

Something is up

throw1234567891•2 days ago

Rogan is a tool.

kakacik•2 days ago

Interesting statement with various meanings :)

I just can't get his popularity, he isn't smart, he isn't a great speaker, his opinions on actually important stuff is often... just sad to hear, hyping up a 'bro effect and thats about it. Its like listening to that old buddy from primary school who struggled to get through high school, and now as an adult gathered some interesting opinions about the world, politics and humans that you really are not interested in.

Tons of better folks online, if somebody really has nothing better going in their short lives to listen to blahs for 3 hours, repeatedly. I guess there are worse ways to spend time though

conorcleary•1 day ago

'cause he's sponsored by perplexity

letmetweakit•2 days ago

Nothing a few million dollars here and there can't fix ...

dang•1 day ago

Please don't post unsubstantive comments.

pera•2 days ago

Kissing the ring also helps - I won't be surprised if Anthropic's next model goes full MAGA

brookst•2 days ago

Cheaper and less harmful to long-term and international prospects to just make a gold-plated “AI Peace Prize” award and gift it in some ceremony. Couple of hundred thousand dollars, works great. Ask Tim Apple.

khalic•2 days ago

I don’t know, for all the bad people say about Amodei, everybody seem convinced he’d rather burn his company than let something like that happen