If US companies have a large unfair advantage such that domestic competitors are no longer able to compete, then wouldn't it make sense for governments around the world to ban or tariff US products and services?

If I was responsible for national economic policy, I would place this at the top of my non-emergency agenda. The world needs to act quick before their industries fail.

Thus, it really is an export control issue, but it has nothing to do with offensive capabilities. Offensive capabilities always exist, but pervasive defensibility would upset the asymmetric advantage that attackers, especially the USA, currently have.

There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.

LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative.

Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.

But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.

The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.

why is the commerce secretary making this decision

But would another company who is not on the trusted partner list and has less to lose taking on the admin have standing to sue here? On the basis of the export control being illegal and this putting their business at a disadvantage vs. competitors with access

Who are those 100 companies? Clearly they can't compete on merit and have rubbed some hands to be picked as winners...at least for now.

Are Google going to end up in a situation where the people working on their models cannot use the models after launch?

They’re in effect saying “nothing else is as powerful as what Anthropic put out”. Even though that might not really be the case it’s what it sounds like.

The US might remove access next month in a fit of pique.

The Chinese models look increasingly more reliable and safer.

They just got their market cut to a fraction. Investing in new tech is now very risky because even if things work out you might not be able to sell anything.

There were already serious doubts about ROI for the frontier labs. If they can only sell to 100 or so entities it's over business wise.

What's the endgame here?

So much wasted potential.

And why would I pay Anthropic or OpenAI once consumer hardware gets powerful enough to run an open weight Chinese version of Opus 4.8? Even more so when mobile phones are able to run similar LLMs.

Their financial growth looks doomed. It looks like they will be heavily regulated just like the next missile factory. This is antagonist to VC led turbo growth startup regime.

The spirit is to provide effective tools for the people to resist federal military tyranny, and Mythos seems like it would be a good tool to defend against that, for so many reasons.

As an EU company I think I now basically have to consider US AI as hostile and avoid it.

10 days for an appeal is too long. Company is a startup, so no team/enterprise support.

It's like the epidemic of scam nvidia cards being resold without gpu or memory - where do you think those are going?

I assume "trusted partners" means, "companies that have bribed Trump an appropriate amount". A few million for the inauguration, a few million for the ballroom, a few million on a movie about Melania, the don wants a taste.

In the mass-marketing world it's less about who's right or wrong but who is perceived by the population to be pulling the leavers on the front page again.

Asterisk the size of a Mac truck.

Also this administration having say over who gets access to what AI is just so much more grift corruption and picking your favorites / destroying others, for these incdecent undemocratic in American grifters who've seized our state.

All these dangers were known and predicted.

There's an uncanny parallel with the climate crisis.

Fatalistic somnambulism.

Does it mean US is allowing accessing to governments' exclusive list?

I know it’s a bold statement but look at this timing and their valuations going south.

edit: > Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (lol)

Fable was out for 3 days, not really long enough for us to properly evaluate it, but the "Sorry we had to remove Fable. Read more. (because it's too powerful btw)" is loudly shown every chance they get for weeks. It creates a halo.

Reminiscent of the 1999 Apple G4 commercial where they displayed it next to military tanks. "For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government."

These words don’t mean what they use to anymore. Newspeak is in full swing. Words still sound the same and are written in the same way but now mean something completely different. If Mao and Stalin were alive, they would be nodding approvingly.

"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed." ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Let's hope this creates a bit more fire under the asses of other countries

Or may they'll decide to be a little more quiet and less end-of-the-world-is-nigh-if-you-use-our-services?

Play stupid games win stupid prizes.