New drama just dropped: The US government has forced Anthropic to block access to Fable and Mythic for non-US nationals, so they've blocked it for everyone.

They're claiming they believe it's because someone has managed to find a "minor" vulnerability, but if that were the case, the directive specified non-US restrictions, which makes little sense for an actual security exploit.

My assumption is this is part of the hasty xenophobic and protectionist policy the US is particularly fond of right now, but the government has failed to account for the multinational nature of the companies using them. I anticipate this restriction will be partly amended to accommodate that issue after they try to extract a pound of flesh from Anthropic.

I question how robust Anthropic's geoblocking and data residency infrastructure even is. Their data residency info is littered with caveats that would make an EU market regulator shudder.

The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic's "it's too powerful" narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don't think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.

I think it's more likely Altman is behind this as part of their IPO strategy. There was other murmuring this weekend about OpenAI considering drastic price cuts to compete. It's an IPO race to the bottom.

It looks like AI use is quickly becoming what I assumed it would be, a weapon of the rich. The question for me is whether that weapon is a footgun, or has a much larger blast radius.