I just finished reading Incorruptible and a central theme (Anthropic is a case study) is that trust is singularly the most important currency a business has. The past few weeks have done wonders for Anthropic’s marketing but just as much if not more damage to the trust factor. Businesses will continue to use Anthropic because it’s the default and accessible where it matters (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake, etc). But the trust factor has dropped. It’ll be interesting to see if they can turn the tide. Maybe Fable will be too awesome for people to care about the past few weeks?
To be honest, given the overwhelming (and unfair, and unreasonable) pressure against them from the Leviathan, which the other companies do not have to deal with, they’re doing pretty damn good. In my mind the trust has actually increased that they can handle bad times and still push forward.
There is no reason to have less trust in Anthropic. It's not clear they did anything wrong. It's more likely the White House simply tied itself in knots, consistent with the last year and a half of chaos from them.
It’s the thousand cuts problem. Look at the stories over the past couple of weeks: silent downgrades that they then walked back, billing errors with claude code, highly sensitive classifiers that made it impossible to do simple things (I asked a few botany questions and my very long chat got lobotomized), and several more. The ban is only part of it. It’s the whole rollout and the fact that it won’t be available in subscriptions in a week or two.
> It's not clear they did anything wrong.
Fable will literally sabotage you if it thinks you're trying to compete with Anthropic.
It's a good reason to not tie your company's success to US based hosted AI though. I've started experimenting with GLM 5.2 and other than the tooling needing a lot more setup once you're there it works pretty well.
I'm hoping that some relatively cost-effective self-hosting solutions come about as a result of Hopper hardware being sold off as they're retired from DC use.
Perception is a lot more important than reason when it comes to trust. Whether or not we like that
it’s still significantly far ahead of openai. gpt 5.6 looks like “better 5.5”. fable does not feel like better opus 4.8.
We have no idea what GPT 5.6 is going to be.
And 5.5 still ranks higher than Opus 4.8.
Most people don't care about trust anymore, we live in a low trust society where this is to be expected. People gladly line up to be poisoned by fast food restaurants and trade 1/3 of their life for pieces of paper on a daily basis.
Silicon valley may be a low trust society but I havent given up hope on the rest of it yet.
After COVID at least in the West, I have.
Or at any rate, the "society" being gauged for trust-levels has to be something substantially finer-grained than a US state.
>> The past few weeks have done wonders for Anthropic’s marketing but just as much if not more damage to the trust factor.
I don’t agree with this at all. IMO Anthropic has shown that that are willing to take even significant financial hits in order to stand up to their values and mitigate what they consider to be dangers and risks. Some people don’t like that or think it’s just marketing. But that’s exactly what Incorruptible is about: companies that are willing to take a stand, even in the face of overwhelming pressure from competitors, shareholders and naysayers.
This is assuming the whole "AI safety" thing was anything more than Silicon Valley kool aid. The government just bought into the marketing and radical safety woo woo wholesale and panicked.
You could legitimately argue this is a unique situation, a brief window where cybersecurity is being disrupted by new harnesses + a strong model. But that will be fleeting as other models and products adapt very quickly, and the long term benefits of keeping it from the market are questionable at best.
It's not a coincidence the export control was dropped after Dario (who is a hardcore AI safety activist much like Ilya Sutskever) was replaced by Tom Brown in the government negotiations.