What does this question mean? Of course they are state-of-the-art. After all, they are the most recent and most advanced models out of Anthropic. If/when they release a new version of their models, Mythos/Fable will cease to be state-of-the-art, as the new ones become it.
Arguably, it was Anthropic's decision to abide by their Government's orders. They could have not done so, but that would likely have consequences they weren't willing to face.
I choose to follow the law, but it’s an obligation not a decision. Framing it like this just misses the big picture entirely. A few words from a tech CEO is all it takes for this government to take extreme measures like this.
Viewing it as an obligation means you are weak. There are consequences to disobeying the law - a successful person will view them through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, not of dogma.
At the end of the day it's not really a decision at all, the government has a lot of men with guns, Anthropic has (presumably) low numbers to zero of men with guns.
You don't really have a choice if the government decides to play hardball
There are other things that can happen. For example, Anthropic could secretly transfer a copy of the model to a Chinese company in exchange for a large sum of yuan at a Chinese bank. Both parts of the transaction would be invisible to US authorities. I don't think this is a likely occurrence but if you think it's impossible then you need to think outside the box more.
Interestingly, the people who try to separate themselves from "the government" also seem to be the kind of people who want to "spread our model of democracy to the rest of the world".
How they can even reconcile being such a great democracy that the world needs to ~copy~ be force-fed with having an adversary government I don't know. The cognitive dissonance is so great that it's hard to fathom.
Why wouldn't they? It keeps strengthening their position. It's an incredible source of soft power if they're seen as the place to look for good AI, and what's more, you can self-host it or hire a local provider if you're worried about data sovereignty.
I guess it's a possibility, but I don't have that kind of expectations from major world powers. It's not like the CCP is a beacon of human rights either.
‘Why wouldn’t anyone give away frontier AI?’ sounds like ‘why wouldn’t anyone give away uranium enrichment?’
i.e. I can’t comprehend the state of mind and the world model of anyone asking a question like that, which is apparently quite a few folks here on HN!
They already are, to an extent. If we believe Amodei's nutjob take that Mythos/Fable are the end of the world in the wrong hands, we should have an open source Chinese model within 6-12 months that's already end-of-world level, so the cat is going to be way out of the bag long before the US labs go out of business.
> should have an open source Chinese model within 6-12 months that's already end-of-world level
that's the exact thing I'm talking about. I don't see why is half the people around here so sure that China will continue to release anything at all. they are releasing non-frontier models on a 6-month lag, yes, but the reasons why to release them are overshadowed by reasons to not do that for mythos-class models. IOW why would they give away a dual use technology just like that?
> the reasons why to release them are overshadowed by reasons to not do that for mythos-class models
Why? What are those reasons? How come they don't already exist for DeepSeek V4 or GLM-5.2?
By the way, I'm not going to entertain the "mythos-class" phrasing because I really don't think it's important. I don't believe Anthropic's take on it being the threshold towards the end of the world that their marketing insists it is.
I’ve been piloting frontier LLMs for as long as anyone outside of the labs and I just disagree. It is a tier above for some tasks (especially in my usage) and not a downgrade on anything I tried it on. This is enough for me to rank it higher; ymmv.
I've only briefly tried it and it did seem quite capable for what I was doing, but not that much better than the Chinese models I've been mostly using.
In any case, this [0] seems to paint a more reasonable picture than "it's much better than anything else at everything".
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