Over the last two weeks, both the U.S. Government and Anthropic took significant actions that demonstrated their power to control access to AI by restricting what others can do with frontier models. This has been one of those moments that, once seen, will be hard to unsee, and it is significantly accelerating many businesses’ and nation states’ efforts to ensure reliable access to AI that no one else can terminate.
Anthropic first released Claude Fable 5, a version of its Mythos model with additional guardrails, including some restrictions that seem well justified on safety grounds (such as limitations on applying it to hacking, bioweapons, and so forth). However, it also restricted developers’ ability to use it to build competing LLM technology. This move was concerning, given that the whole AI community, including Anthropic, has benefitted tremendously from open research — indeed, the AI revolution was kicked off by my former team (Google Brain) freely publishing the Transformers paper!
Imagine if Microsoft’s terms of use barred anyone from using their tools to build competitive software, or if Google barred using it to search for information to work on competing search…
LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.
Why it matters
Terms of use and undisclosed model-quality interventions are a live dependency risk: what you may build on a frontier model, and how well it performs, can change without notice.
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