Ludwig Wittgenstein on the illusion of a hidden essence in language:

Maybe: the safety panic, just like the fear of the internet in the early days, is a response to the monolithic, brittle nature of the technologies involved. Think Yahoo vs Google. Once the ecologically fit technology arrives, much of the fear subsides, and risk gets tackled.

with the early internet: abundant information scarcity of relevant information Google comes in with the technology that catalyzes the paradigm, aligns producers and consumers of web content, sets incentives for intelligence we still wait for an analogous player

This is a *way* bigger deal than it seems... Frontier AI companies will *never* own the frontier again I kid you not... I've been waiting for someone to show this result for like 4 years... this is a huge deal. The short reason: combinations of models will *always* outperform individual models The long reason: this is the gateway to a million times more data... and huge leaps in compute efficiency. The AI scaling laws always win. More in article below 👇

"Per Axios, the government contacted Anthropic and asked to "pause releasing the... models but was unsuccessful" - i.e., Anthropic told the government to pound sand." It's safe to assume that, if GPT-5.6 is near Mythos / Fable level, the USG has asked OpenAI to pause the release of GPT-5.6 until it can harden the national security apparatus. Possibly the same situation for Gemini 3.5 Pro. There were rumors that all 3 models would be released last week, yet Fable is the only one that came. The real tin-foil hat theory is that this was Anthropic's plan. Anthropic recently stated that there could be need for a pause on AI development. Could Anthropic telling the government to pound sand have been their gambit to force a pause? It's a theory.

New York must become the technological epicenter of the world.

Creating context for the capability stall. Very clever.

Assuming Anthropic is able to restore Fable in the next few days, there's literally zero point doing any meaningful work until it is back. What can be done in 100 hours with Opus can be done in 1 with Fable. Hopefully this is figured out quickly.

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.