The Problem With Restricting Access to Frontier AI

The situation going on with Anthropic and the US government is crazy. I usually don't like to post about political situations, but this situation absolutely warrants a post.

Thoughts

The US government's decision to restrict customer access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5 is a major disappointment. Instead of allowing access to these models under Anthropic's already strict guardrails, this creates a situation where the people most motivated to obtain them may be bad actors willing to target Anthropic's systems.

The whole situation almost lampoons the idea that restricting access automatically makes everyone safer. If anything, it may increase the incentive to leak or steal access to the models, because the value of unauthorized access becomes dramatically higher. And if the models do end up in the wrong hands, especially if only one party gains access, that party could gain an enormous advantage.

In my opinion, Anthropic is a more trustworthy entity when it comes to AI safety than the government. This situation also comes after the earlier conflict between the US government and Anthropic over military use of AI, where Anthropic was trying to maintain safeguards around dangerous use cases like fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.

There's a lot more to analyze here, especially around the political implications of this move by the US government, and what its real intention was. I urge people to think seriously about the incentives this creates, the precedent it sets, and whether restricting access to frontier AI actually reduces risk or simply makes unauthorized access more valuable.

Anthropic's Statement + Technicality

Note that technically the model's usage wasn't banned for everyone. The US government framed it as a national security measure by only mandating that foreign nationals' access is restricted. This is essentially the same thing, because Anthropic has no way of knowing a user's nationality.

Read Anthropic's statement here: Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5