This is marketing.
1. Release fable, highly nerfed and limited 2. See the compute capacity limiter pegged day after day 3. Lobby to the government, claiming ai is super unsafe and not aligned and they must do something 4. Government "forces" anth to turn off 5. Anth takes the pressure off of compute capacity, and gets to blame it on the govt
Like you're telling me fable is somehow an order of magnitude better than GPT 5.5 to the point where it compromises national security, despite evals and anecdotes saying otherwise? Nah.
You're saying a company's marketing department can casually get the United States Government to issue a national security passage, preventing sale or distribution of their product?
Was their ongoing designation as a "supply chain risk", which they are suing to overturn in court, also a marketing stunt?
Seems like a really strange thing to use that sort of power for - why not just get all your competition declared persona non-grata and seize monopoly power?
I mean, it's literally what they've been asking for from day one.
Oh, cool, then surely you can point me towards the posts where they're celebrating this, or even actively advocating "please ban our product on a Friday with no notice or due process"?
Sure, from the horse's mouth: https://x.com/darioamodei/status/2064781775247950326?s=46
In interviews, this week alone, Dario has gone on record repeatedly about wanting to slow AI progress.
Anthropic silently degraded AI-research queries to Fable (they changed course on this, but they still thought it was a good idea)
And now that the government is taking them at their word, they're trying to drag GPT-5.5 and OpenAI down with them
Yes, the administration is being heavy-handed, but unfortunatley it's the logical end of telling everyone you built a "nuke" and that it's possible for people to use it against us
Yes, it's marketing straight out of the Big Tobacco playbook. Convince everyone your product is dangerous, get government to ban it, and then... uh... pivot into adjacent market segments?