It's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice.
The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own. So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues, etc. Of course, there will be US-based actors willing to resell access, just like there are US-based actors willing to re-ship export-controlled hardware to Iran. And they will probably keep getting arrested every now and then.
The thing that's silly about this situation isn't that export controls on technology can't work, it's that it's overhyped technology and that Anthropic painted themselves into that corner by pretending it's as dangerous as nukes. Add to this a mercurial and petty administration and you have a pretty predictable outcome.
Agreed that you can export-control the closed source models pretty well (although I think the administration is gravely underestimating the long-term damage that will do to the US economy).
The bigger problem will be if someone (such as a Chinese AI lab) releases a Fable/Mythos-class open weight model. That you can't really export control successfully. Sure, you could class it under EAR or ITAR, but that's just going to make using it difficult for American companies, not everyone else. It would be a stupid protectionist measure that would only hurt the US - so I fully anticipate the admin would try it.
> Mythos is a service you buy from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own
weren't chinese labs training on US Ai outputs? a looot of ai power is in correct data to train for - that's pretty much like inviting workers to your factories, they won't take machines with them, but will see and consume all the processes
I doubt that it has ever been possible to obtain enough output tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic to be useful for training other LLMs.
In any case, had that been possible in the beginning, it stopped being possible long ago, because any suspicious accounts would be banned and the cost would be prohibitive even if they were not banned.
On the other hand, anyone can train new LLMs using the open weights Chinese LLMs, or the much fewer open weights LLMs with other origins, like the NVIDIA LLMs.
So in reality it is much more plausible for a US company to use Chinese LLMs for training, than vice versa.
There's no way US can keep that export control as it is for the frontier models in the long term.
This would blow huge damage to the US financial markets first, the insane CAPEX spending propping up gdp, but also US competitivity in the long run.
Sure, the US is the most important tech market on the planet, but according to Anthropic 80% of their revenue comes from outside of the US.
Let alone the fact that these research labs desperately need the top talent they can get globally, not just MIT-bred Leetcode ninjas.
The only way US can have a lead is by competing globally as it always had in the tech sector (albeit it resorted to export controls to assert its dominance over China), not by changing the rules of the game and with protectionism.
The exceptions are very notable, but it's a bad thing to bet on happening. They seem to have more problems due to protecting them too much than for the alternative extreme.
> Mythos is a service you buy from a US company ... So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues
Do you think AWS or Microsoft would be so dominant in cloud services and office productivity if the previous administrations had banned them for non-us firms?
In my opinion no, and all across the world we would be using non-us tech.
Precisely because it's a service, the US have the interest make the rest of the world continue to send their data to them.
OK, but that's tangential to what the article is about. The article says "export controls can't work", not "export controls are not in our best interest".
There's no effective way of enforcing export controls on local software like PGP etc. Whatever they say someone will leak it.
It is possible to shutdown access to hosted services, as happened with Fable, but it can't really be done selectively. The US government wanted to allow it for US nationals only but Anthropic couldn't do that and so shut it down for everyone. Even if they did tie Claude accounts to nationality some people would set up "proxy servers" to allow access (either for montetary gain or because they don't agree with the restrictions)
How do you make it work without breaking every website? I've tried it once and pretty much nothing loaded since like 99.9% of the web uses js for basic functionality.
You either whitelist them or stop using them. Whitelist is by script domain, so the ads usually still don't load. Until you have to whitelist *.cloudfront.net
We must be visiting different websites. I've had JS off for years now, no major issues. You whitelist what you absolutely must, enjoy 90% of the rest, while rejecting the 10% remainder with prejudice. Works great, especially for security, performance, and battery life.
The vast, vast majority of websites have no business of using so much JS, especially in critical paths, anyways.
Brutal own goaling by the USA. I'm glad it happened, but the USA had a golden opportunity to subsidize domestic providers for 10 years and lease to China to discourage competition and side innovation.
DeepSeek and Qwen would have been neat parlor tricks, never developed further because the US subsidized mega models would have been too cheap and reliable to make them necessary.
Nope! USA played its hand and forced the world to have to account for its USA exposure risk and deversify. A serious one time use strategic advantage pissed away.
Doesnt really bother me personally per se; but armchair quarterbacking the USA's decisions seem
Suboptimal...
The article and most HN comments here understandably talk about failed export control when the target audience is individual users. But export controls are actually fairly successful when their target is employees within a company. Go to an AI hardware company like Nvidia (or even Google which builds TPUs), and you’ll find that specific internal projects involve export controlled knowledge and can only be staffed by U.S. citizens, not foreigners. And employees naturally take this seriously without circumvention attempts because their job is on the line. This is the kind of quiet export control that stopped plenty of people successfully, but it’s just not visible to the world.
Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance.
Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung and SK Hynix, but their next generation 950 series (fabbed by SMIC) will use memory (fabbed by CXMT), not using the HBM standard, but by necessity their own HiBL and HiZQ standards.
HBM depends on ever wider memory bus widths to increase bandwidth, which in turn depends on SOTA TSMC manufacturing nodes for bus density. Huawei found a different way, using their LinqQu interconnect/switching tech to aggregate the bandwidth of individually slower memory chips resulting in an aggregate 4TB/sec bandwidth on par with HBM3e.
Trump has blocked Fable for export, but China (Ziphu) already has GLM-5.2 knocking on the door of the US frontier models, despite being developed with one hand tied behind their back. GLM-5.1 had only scored 18% on DeepSWE, but GLM-5.2 coming 11 weeks later, scores 48%, about on par with GPT 5.5. What's next ?!
>> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance.
This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That is why China brings them up at every meeting and asks for them to be relaxed. It's really hurting them domestically - they have to rely on smuggled SOTA chips for any meaningful advancements while they wait for their domestic capabilities to ramp up (which will take years).
I think the question we need to be asking, in order to measure success, is whether export controls on China have encouraged China to invest more money than they would have otherwise invested in these technologies and whether those investments will materially change China's long term trajectory in relation to the United States.
I don't have the answer, but I can understand the viewpoint that China's temporary kneecapping may actually lead to long term supremacy, as their in-country solutions become capable of competing with the state of the art. That will leave America more vulnerable in relation to China, because we will still be relying on access to technology from a wide range of countries (Netherlands, Taiwan, South Korea) in order to compete. That gives China additional leverage over the United States, as we will remain reliant on international cooperation.
And this analysis doesn't even address the ramifications of China exporting this technology, increasing their export dominance and potentially overtaking America's tech dominance at the software and design level of the stack.
I don't know what the right answer is to the problem, but it doesn't take much effort to imagine our current efforts as being the wrong answer, which is a little troubling.
Both things can be true simultaneously - China would no doubt prefer to have access to things like NVIDIA chips and ASML EUV machines, but at the same time having to do without they are accelerating their independence from US-controlled supply chain.
It's hard to say that any US AI companies have benefited from these sanctions (or that this was the goal). Who has benefited, and how? US companies are still having to compete with them, with no restriction on Chinese AI being used in the US (e.g. GLM available via Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, Fireworks AI, etc). NVIDIA is losing sales and CUDA lock-in. Other supply chain vendors losing sales too.
This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage?
I mean, I remember listening to the Biden people back in 2022 talking how they were going to cripple China's semis and therefore AI industry and keep them 5+ years behind the curve as Team America accelerates ahead. That was the pitch.
You've now got Huawei Ascend 950, GLM-5.2 at Opus 4.8 levels, China dominating OSS models, and Z.ai saying they'll have a Fable-level model by EOY. I would say the export controls have utterly, utterly failed.
Exept PGP could run on freely available hardware. What makes Mythos vulnerable is the centralization and scale of compute required and its proprietary nature.
History shows that export controls fail on knowledge, but are damn effective on commercial products.
> Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also reportedly alerted the administration after Amazon’s own researchers, he said, found a way around Fable 5’s safeguards. Anthropic disputes the “jailbreak” label
Doing god’s work there, Andy, thanks /s
Wonder what Anthropic internal messages look like about his move. Does Anthropic have a meme slack channel?
I think "jailbreaking" fable to match opus 4.8 capabilities is not noteworthy. Fable from my experience is not as eager to find vulnerabilities compared to what they describe in their mythos research.
Wonder if context size would matter. Find and fix “bugs” in Linux kernel or find and fix “bugs” in this short snippet of code. I would try a file by file approach first.
I don’t know how much we want to believe the “reports”. But there are probably a few other tricks they didn’t expose. If these are pre/post processing guardrails I could see something like “fix bugs” actually working.
It's a very brief history: it consists of three examples, only one of which isn't in the title. And the middle one is arguably a success story because the government did stop a bunch of spyware vendors it particularly disliked. That they turn a blind eye to some others is not really a policy failure, it's a deliberate political choice.
The obvious difference between PGP and Mythos is that Mythos is a service you buy from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own. So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues, etc. Of course, there will be US-based actors willing to resell access, just like there are US-based actors willing to re-ship export-controlled hardware to Iran. And they will probably keep getting arrested every now and then.
The thing that's silly about this situation isn't that export controls on technology can't work, it's that it's overhyped technology and that Anthropic painted themselves into that corner by pretending it's as dangerous as nukes. Add to this a mercurial and petty administration and you have a pretty predictable outcome.
Agreed that you can export-control the closed source models pretty well (although I think the administration is gravely underestimating the long-term damage that will do to the US economy).
The bigger problem will be if someone (such as a Chinese AI lab) releases a Fable/Mythos-class open weight model. That you can't really export control successfully. Sure, you could class it under EAR or ITAR, but that's just going to make using it difficult for American companies, not everyone else. It would be a stupid protectionist measure that would only hurt the US - so I fully anticipate the admin would try it.
Isn't GLM5.2 already Mythos class?
How do you qualify what makes a model "Mythos class", and how do you reliably test for it?
> Mythos is a service you buy from a US company, not source code you can procure from anywhere and compile on your own
weren't chinese labs training on US Ai outputs? a looot of ai power is in correct data to train for - that's pretty much like inviting workers to your factories, they won't take machines with them, but will see and consume all the processes
I doubt that it has ever been possible to obtain enough output tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic to be useful for training other LLMs.
In any case, had that been possible in the beginning, it stopped being possible long ago, because any suspicious accounts would be banned and the cost would be prohibitive even if they were not banned.
On the other hand, anyone can train new LLMs using the open weights Chinese LLMs, or the much fewer open weights LLMs with other origins, like the NVIDIA LLMs.
So in reality it is much more plausible for a US company to use Chinese LLMs for training, than vice versa.
There's no way US can keep that export control as it is for the frontier models in the long term.
This would blow huge damage to the US financial markets first, the insane CAPEX spending propping up gdp, but also US competitivity in the long run.
Sure, the US is the most important tech market on the planet, but according to Anthropic 80% of their revenue comes from outside of the US.
Let alone the fact that these research labs desperately need the top talent they can get globally, not just MIT-bred Leetcode ninjas.
The only way US can have a lead is by competing globally as it always had in the tech sector (albeit it resorted to export controls to assert its dominance over China), not by changing the rules of the game and with protectionism.
When has the USA ever shied away from destroying its own financial markets?
Honestly, a large majority of the time.
The exceptions are very notable, but it's a bad thing to bet on happening. They seem to have more problems due to protecting them too much than for the alternative extreme.
> Mythos is a service you buy from a US company ... So this can be enforced better without running into thorny speech issues
Do you think AWS or Microsoft would be so dominant in cloud services and office productivity if the previous administrations had banned them for non-us firms?
In my opinion no, and all across the world we would be using non-us tech.
Precisely because it's a service, the US have the interest make the rest of the world continue to send their data to them.
OK, but that's tangential to what the article is about. The article says "export controls can't work", not "export controls are not in our best interest".
There's no effective way of enforcing export controls on local software like PGP etc. Whatever they say someone will leak it.
It is possible to shutdown access to hosted services, as happened with Fable, but it can't really be done selectively. The US government wanted to allow it for US nationals only but Anthropic couldn't do that and so shut it down for everyone. Even if they did tie Claude accounts to nationality some people would set up "proxy servers" to allow access (either for montetary gain or because they don't agree with the restrictions)
> Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker on TechCrunch
No, that actually means something went well - my adblocker saved me from being blasted by distracting, deceitful, dangerous content.
Pro tip: reader mode bypasses this aggressive “go away” banner.
NoScript is a layer that makes my experience on the internet so much better.
How do you make it work without breaking every website? I've tried it once and pretty much nothing loaded since like 99.9% of the web uses js for basic functionality.
You either whitelist them or stop using them. Whitelist is by script domain, so the ads usually still don't load. Until you have to whitelist *.cloudfront.net
We must be visiting different websites. I've had JS off for years now, no major issues. You whitelist what you absolutely must, enjoy 90% of the rest, while rejecting the 10% remainder with prejudice. Works great, especially for security, performance, and battery life.
The vast, vast majority of websites have no business of using so much JS, especially in critical paths, anyways.
Brutal own goaling by the USA. I'm glad it happened, but the USA had a golden opportunity to subsidize domestic providers for 10 years and lease to China to discourage competition and side innovation.
DeepSeek and Qwen would have been neat parlor tricks, never developed further because the US subsidized mega models would have been too cheap and reliable to make them necessary.
Nope! USA played its hand and forced the world to have to account for its USA exposure risk and deversify. A serious one time use strategic advantage pissed away.
Doesnt really bother me personally per se; but armchair quarterbacking the USA's decisions seem Suboptimal...
The article and most HN comments here understandably talk about failed export control when the target audience is individual users. But export controls are actually fairly successful when their target is employees within a company. Go to an AI hardware company like Nvidia (or even Google which builds TPUs), and you’ll find that specific internal projects involve export controlled knowledge and can only be staffed by U.S. citizens, not foreigners. And employees naturally take this seriously without circumvention attempts because their job is on the line. This is the kind of quiet export control that stopped plenty of people successfully, but it’s just not visible to the world.
Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance.
Huawei is a good case in point, about to have a 100% domestic replacement for NVIDIA chips (& CUDA stack), not reliant on TSMC, ASML, Samsung, SK Hynix... Initially Huawei's Ascend AI chips had used HBM memory from Samsung and SK Hynix, but their next generation 950 series (fabbed by SMIC) will use memory (fabbed by CXMT), not using the HBM standard, but by necessity their own HiBL and HiZQ standards.
HBM depends on ever wider memory bus widths to increase bandwidth, which in turn depends on SOTA TSMC manufacturing nodes for bus density. Huawei found a different way, using their LinqQu interconnect/switching tech to aggregate the bandwidth of individually slower memory chips resulting in an aggregate 4TB/sec bandwidth on par with HBM3e.
Trump has blocked Fable for export, but China (Ziphu) already has GLM-5.2 knocking on the door of the US frontier models, despite being developed with one hand tied behind their back. GLM-5.1 had only scored 18% on DeepSWE, but GLM-5.2 coming 11 weeks later, scores 48%, about on par with GPT 5.5. What's next ?!
Aren't the controls meant to funnel money to his bank or crypto accounts?
>> Trump's export controls to China seem to be having the exact opposite effect as intended, and are (as a less befuddled mind might have anticipated!) actually accelerating their technical advance.
This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes. That is why China brings them up at every meeting and asks for them to be relaxed. It's really hurting them domestically - they have to rely on smuggled SOTA chips for any meaningful advancements while they wait for their domestic capabilities to ramp up (which will take years).
I think the question we need to be asking, in order to measure success, is whether export controls on China have encouraged China to invest more money than they would have otherwise invested in these technologies and whether those investments will materially change China's long term trajectory in relation to the United States.
I don't have the answer, but I can understand the viewpoint that China's temporary kneecapping may actually lead to long term supremacy, as their in-country solutions become capable of competing with the state of the art. That will leave America more vulnerable in relation to China, because we will still be relying on access to technology from a wide range of countries (Netherlands, Taiwan, South Korea) in order to compete. That gives China additional leverage over the United States, as we will remain reliant on international cooperation.
And this analysis doesn't even address the ramifications of China exporting this technology, increasing their export dominance and potentially overtaking America's tech dominance at the software and design level of the stack.
I don't know what the right answer is to the problem, but it doesn't take much effort to imagine our current efforts as being the wrong answer, which is a little troubling.
Both things can be true simultaneously - China would no doubt prefer to have access to things like NVIDIA chips and ASML EUV machines, but at the same time having to do without they are accelerating their independence from US-controlled supply chain.
It's hard to say that any US AI companies have benefited from these sanctions (or that this was the goal). Who has benefited, and how? US companies are still having to compete with them, with no restriction on Chinese AI being used in the US (e.g. GLM available via Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, Fireworks AI, etc). NVIDIA is losing sales and CUDA lock-in. Other supply chain vendors losing sales too.
This was never the question. The question was, will the export controls slow them down in the short/medium term to the point where it will give US companies an advantage?
I mean, I remember listening to the Biden people back in 2022 talking how they were going to cripple China's semis and therefore AI industry and keep them 5+ years behind the curve as Team America accelerates ahead. That was the pitch.
You've now got Huawei Ascend 950, GLM-5.2 at Opus 4.8 levels, China dominating OSS models, and Z.ai saying they'll have a Fable-level model by EOY. I would say the export controls have utterly, utterly failed.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/understanding-biden-administra...
Exept PGP could run on freely available hardware. What makes Mythos vulnerable is the centralization and scale of compute required and its proprietary nature.
History shows that export controls fail on knowledge, but are damn effective on commercial products.
How so? 80% of Anthropic's revenue comes from outside the United States.
There's no way to justify high capex, and US-personnel only research labs and pretend to keep the lead in AI at the same time.
You either compete square and fair, or you're gonna stay behind.
Well, tech companies have long successful history of finding out ways to not compete fairly
Before countries worry about tech they need to address fresh water, homelessness, and filth. Look at India and china, for example.
These controls are impossible to enforce. Users find ways around, compliant businesses lose.
> Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also reportedly alerted the administration after Amazon’s own researchers, he said, found a way around Fable 5’s safeguards. Anthropic disputes the “jailbreak” label
Doing god’s work there, Andy, thanks /s
Wonder what Anthropic internal messages look like about his move. Does Anthropic have a meme slack channel?
I think "jailbreaking" fable to match opus 4.8 capabilities is not noteworthy. Fable from my experience is not as eager to find vulnerabilities compared to what they describe in their mythos research.
Wonder if context size would matter. Find and fix “bugs” in Linux kernel or find and fix “bugs” in this short snippet of code. I would try a file by file approach first.
I don’t know how much we want to believe the “reports”. But there are probably a few other tricks they didn’t expose. If these are pre/post processing guardrails I could see something like “fix bugs” actually working.