The Korean telecom giant at the center of Anthropic's Mythos controversy
88 points
11 hours ago
| 9 comments
| wired.com
| HN
https://web.archive.org/web/20260618100028/https://www.wired...
wood_spirit
3 hours ago
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The articles and discussion around this and the Amazon story all seem to me to be an earnest tech press and community searching for a genuine reason for the administration blocking Anthropic’s models.

However, thinking back to the spat with the DoD and more generally how the administration is much more supportive - and supported by - OpenAI and XAI and it’s easy to imagine this is just another escalation in the fight between a “liberal leaning” company and its competitors and the administration.

There might have been something said by someone at Amazon or something but I’d guess Occam’s razor the administration just leapt at the chance after their supplier sanctions fell flat?

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tristanj
2 hours ago
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Anthropic is going through the classic Ideological Resistance phase where they fight with the government on principles, that every major tech company also went through. Google, Facebook, Apple, Reddit, Microsoft (especially Microsoft) all had this phase.

Then the companies realize fighting the US government is a lot of effort, expensive and creates a lot of drama, and it's easier to reach a mutual understanding.

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Danox
1 hour ago
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They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.

Have a legal department trained to be the buffer between you and the government any contact any questions goes through them and since you’re paying them a ton of money, they are the only people the politicians should get to know, oh, and again and again do not volunteer anything.

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CamperBob2
3 minutes ago
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They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.

That was always Microsoft's modus operandi, and it almost cost them their company. You can ignore politicians, but politicians won't ignore you.

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dylan604
42 minutes ago
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> keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can

this is the antithesis of a tech company whether it is VC funded or not, but especially if it is. you don't attract new users by laying low. you don't attract investors by laying low. laying low isn't even in a tech company's vocab.

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andrewchambers
39 minutes ago
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I think they meant keep a low profile from the government, not customers. Anthropic is doing the opposite by loudly asking for regulation.
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dylan604
13 minutes ago
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If the company is "hot" attracting a lot of users, then of course the gov't is going to come knocking too. They're going to want access to all of that user data even if it's not a service they could use directly. Sure, you don't have to go courting government contracts, but it's not like government employees are not going to see the same PR civilian users see.
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khalic
44 minutes ago
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You're talking like it's business as usual. None of these companies had anything similar to this retaliation
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tristanj
23 minutes ago
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Microsoft had it worse. Bill Gates was openly hostile and dismissive of the US government during Microsoft's anti-trust investigation, he believed anti-trust law was illegitimate and shouldn't apply to tech companies. He did not take the investigation seriously and repeatedly argued with investigators in his court deposition. In response, Microsoft got raked over the coals by the government, the company was almost broken up, and Gates stepped down as CEO after the debacle.

Now Microsoft stopped fighting the government, and is one of the US government's biggest partners, with massive DoD Azure cloud contracts.

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wahnfrieden
3 minutes ago
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Are you sure it’s about principles and not primarily the bribery involved? OAI leadership has bribed the administration.

It may be due to principles and the principled stand Anthropic has taken has caused trouble, but they have also not delivered a bribery as far as we can see.

When there is a protection money racket in play, it’s hard for me to take other factors as seriously.

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anonym29
22 minutes ago
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>(especially Microsoft)

Are you joking? When was this? Remember, Microsoft was the very first partner to deliver working warrantless surveillance capabilities (against their customers) to the NSA as part of the unconstitutional PRISM program, and this was back in 2007, nearly two decades ago.

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tehjoker
31 minutes ago
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The fighting these companies had with the government was very nominal.

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ (2014)

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cmrdporcupine
18 minutes ago
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Nah, with Google etc it was more realizing their own interests aligned with the interests of the new administration.

By which I mean, they are both interested in being filthy rich, making hay while the sun shines, and stopping centrist forces from adding wealth taxes or anti-monopoly regulations.

Biden and Harris were getting too uppity about such things for their tastes.

Have you seen who Sergey Brin is budding around with these days, and what he -- a formerly very "left liberal" person involved in very vocal anti-Trump protestations inside and outside of Google -- is saying these days? Third richest dude in the world is terrified of wealth taxes being put in place by his former friends, and dating a MAGA "gut-health" influencer.

A gentleman's agreement was brokered between SV and the GOP involving some mutual backscratching.

Which Dario and crew aren't a part of. Yet.

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mentalgear
1 hour ago
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Indeed, the diff: These previous big tech companies where fighting their neo-liberal agenda against a liberal government, now there's an autocratic fascist one fighting a liberal company.
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jeremyjh
2 hours ago
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They are searching for a headline that will attract clicks. Everyone knows nothing this administration does is genuine, but pretending there is a controversy related to whether or not it could be has been a money pump for the last decade.
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jcgrillo
2 hours ago
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It smells an awful lot like the government is trying to pick a winner. Or, at least, a loser.
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OsrsNeedsf2P
3 hours ago
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> SK Telecom has poured capital into Anthropic several times, including a $100 million investment in 2023 that coincided with the formation of a commercial partnership to develop an AI model tailored to the telecommunications industry.

> the White House asked Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom’s access to Mythos, according to a person close to the AI lab. The company immediately complied,

Lesson learned - don't invest in US companies

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Aurornis
2 hours ago
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Their investment in the company and their ability to use the services are orthogonal.

I'm sure they're not happy about losing access to the model, but the amount of money they're going to make from their investment will more than make up for it.

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notnullorvoid
2 hours ago
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The company having it's product market restricted will negatively impact their financial investment.

Also if you have an agreement with a company for them to provide you with a service, and investing in them is part of that deal, reneging on the service part still isn't okay.

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Aurornis
1 hour ago
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> The company having it's product market restricted will negatively impact their financial investment.

Anthropic's services keep bumping into capacity limits even with Fable disabled.

Revenue is not a problem. This controversy has been good publicity for them: So powerful the government tried to block it!

> Also if you have an agreement with a company for them to provide you with a service, and investing in them is part of that deal, reneging on the service part still isn't okay.

Reneging on the deal implies Anthropic decided not to offer it. That wasn't the case. The government has temporarily restricted it.

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basisword
1 hour ago
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>> the amount of money they're going to make from their investment will more than make up for it

Not if the USG locks models down to US citizens. The market will be too small and the model companies have already pumped in far too much money to limit their market to US citizens. Given that most big companies have a global presence they're going to need models that all of their employees can use. They're not going to deploy different products to different employees.

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tlavoie
1 hour ago
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Not if the company implodes...
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echelon
3 hours ago
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> Lesson learned - don't invest in US companies

That's not the lesson. There's a tremendous amount of money to make on US investments.

The lesson is to not depend on US AI models. It's to invest in and build competing foundation models, possibly open weights and open weights infrastructure.

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embedding-shape
3 hours ago
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> That's not the lesson. There's a tremendous amount of money to make on US investments.

Sure, but also, now suddenly you got cut from something and need to fight that fire, meanwhile you surely have other fires you'd much rather spend more effort on. That's not free either, and who knows how much they valued their use of Mythos.

The lesson is quite literally to avoid anything US until it has stabilized again, which will probably take a while, sadly.

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luma
22 minutes ago
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What does that have to do with investment? OP didn't say "don't integrate American tech company products into your workflow".

Say what one will about the current state of America, it's still a solid place to dump money in hopes of returns.

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embedding-shape
18 minutes ago
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Yeah, countries ruled at whim by unstable governments tends to not be great for "dump money in hopes of return" but who am I to stop anyone, make your own informed decision.
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Danox
1 hour ago
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Lesson learned become more knowledgeable and learn more about the open source models and start getting busy and learn how to use them, also collaborate with any European solution, forget about the US.
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jr3592
11 minutes ago
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Why can't we use it in the US then?
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easygenes
4 hours ago
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The Wired headline reframes the issue in a way that’s misleading. SK Telecom was a previously resolved issue (as in prior to Fable launch).

It may have been a contributing factor, but the crux of the shutdown was the industry reporting of Fable jailbreaks (reportedly spearheaded by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy). The more interesting and honest angle is that the industry which has taken the seriousness of Glasswing at face value felt blindsided by Fable release and totally exposed by the residual risk, when they know they still have a months-long bugfixing backlog exposed by Glasswing and are desperate to buy more time.

This misleading looks deliberate on Wired’s part, to appear as though they’re getting a scoop when they’re really just being dishonest. Shameful.

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trunnell
3 hours ago
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> honest angle is that the industry [felt] exposed by the residual risk [and] have a months-long bugfixing backlog exposed by Glasswing

Two problems with this theory.

1. Amazon complaining to the White House wouldn't have been the opening salvo. Amazon and Anthropic would find it much easier to talk to each other than go through the White House. We'd need evidence that Amazon (and probably others) already asked Anthropic to not release a Mythos-class model but Anthropic released it anyway. Are they on record saying this?

2. The jailbreak Amazon found needs to be real. Maybe the White House staffers are not AI experts and they don't really understand what a jailbreak is... but it's much harder to make that claim about Andy Jassy. For the jailbreak to be the real reason for the export control order, the jailbreak would need to be significant and cause material harm to Amazon. Then Jassy might pass it along to the White House assuming he already was refused by Dario.

But there is no evidence the jailbreak was real. There is one story that it amounted to a request, "fix this code." In any case, Anthropic is on record saying the so-called jailbreak didn't enable any vulnerability work that couldn't already be done by other models.

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meowface
4 hours ago
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Wired has been NY Post-tier (of the inverse polarity) for several years, now.
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embedding-shape
3 hours ago
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Is there any serious journalistic magazines/papers left nowadays? Felt like ultimately every single one of them succumbed to the chase of the clickbait in the end.
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AgentME
2 hours ago
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Is there any interpretation where Amazon is involved but for a reason besides trying to screw over Anthropic? I don't see why Amazon would act against Anthropic when they have a deal to offer Anthropic models on AWS.
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dmix
3 hours ago
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Most headlines seem to be misleading these days. Social media broke journalism.
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htx80nerd
2 hours ago
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actually been like that for ages but people notice it a lot now and have a way to talk about it openly. mid 2000s CNN was really bad about this kind of thing. headline sounds shocking but once you got to paragraph 4 or so the story starts to change. then when you get to the bottom paragraphs the truth starts to come out - in stark contrast to the headline. not sure how they are these days.
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nailer
3 hours ago
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Yep - the "company at the center" of this is Amazon. But they're not alone, I was able to jailbreak Fable accidentally last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576628
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Cupprum
3 hours ago
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Is that called jailbreak?
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theplumber
3 hours ago
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Yeah ! You should close your eyes on dangerous source code nowadays. Think about a kind of DRM for programming. Perhaps the future is a prompt terminal with no access to the source code. Of course the code should be deployed only on a “secure” anthropic platform.
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nailer
3 hours ago
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Yes. The biology/infosec fallback to Opus is the jail. Promoting to get around it (in my case accidentally) and have Fabre find exploits is the jailbreak.
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davidklemke
1 hour ago
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jazz9k
49 seconds ago
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Over a decade ago, I was going to a tech group with a supposed security leader (that ended up getting a huge buyout from Cisco a few years ago).

A student wanted to create a project that bypassed the GF of China. He basically told him he was an idiot, it was impossible, and discouraged the student from even trying. This was a hacker (the security leader) at one point in his life, that claimed to support the freedom of speech and expression.

The actual reason he said this to the student is because he supports the government in China. Many other comments I heard after this proved to me that this is true. My guess is that his startup even received funding from the Chinese government.

It's really disappointing that tech leaders can publicly support murderous regimes like the Chinese government for decades with no blow back. They are far worse than Putin/the Russian government and have 100X the money and technology.

If he supported Russia, he would probably get cancelled and never be able to be involved in the tech industry again.

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tristanj
4 hours ago
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This whole Fable 5 controversy will look quite silly once China releases a comparable model in six months.
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FergusArgyll
1 hour ago
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Google can't do it, OpenAI didn't do it, Meta didn't do it etc etc.

Why do you think China will?

I am quite certain the gap will only grow

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danieltanfh95
17 minutes ago
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That's a skill issue, not a technology issue.
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sigmar
2 hours ago
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Fable/mythos are the first models from anthropic that hide 100% of reasoning tokens. So it seems to me like we're about to get a lot more data about to what extent Chinese model progress has been a consequence of distillation techniques.
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tristanj
2 hours ago
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This isn't correct, Claude hasn't displayed the raw chain of thought for any of the Claude 4 series models, which were released in May 2025. Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.8 only display a summarized chain of thought, which is produced by a secondary model. Fable displays its summarized chain of thought in the same manner.

The thinking traces disappeared because Anthropic changed them to be hidden by default. The rationale for hiding it was that most people don't look at the thinking traces https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 . You can reenable thinking traces in Claude code settings with the flag showThinkingSummaries: true.

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sigmar
1 hour ago
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Qualified it with "100%" because claude4 models show the first few lines of the chain of thought:

>On Claude 4 models, the first few lines of thinking output are more verbose, providing detailed reasoning that's particularly helpful for prompt engineering purposes. Claude Mythos Preview summarizes from the first token, so its thinking blocks do not show this verbose preamble. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/extend...

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suggala
4 hours ago
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It would take less than 1 month if not for the restrictions. One of the reason is they might be using distilling to achieve the parity.
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cyanydeez
3 hours ago
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oh, do you not pay attention to the hardware they're allowed to buy from nvidia? At this point, it's more just being nerfed than being able to do the magical training stuff.
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zuzululu
1 hour ago
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its very real, chinese capital is being intertwined/injected into all facet of south korean society through its own domestic companies and politicians.
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kittikitti
3 hours ago
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Many of us know coders and cybersecurity professionals who are even better than Claude Fable or Mythos. It's outstanding how much praise and careful consideration it gets. At the same time, humans with even more expertise are discarded and fired.
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trunnell
3 hours ago
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Sure they exist but they're rare, difficult to identify and hire, and take years to train. Mythos/Fable is available on tap.
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claytonjy
2 hours ago
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I can also use the models anytime, and for a lot of time, until i’m anywhere close to salary for an engineer like that
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ShinyLeftPad
1 hour ago
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sure. and when you do have that money then you magically become altruistic and decide to pay that salary even though it costs you more
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theplumber
3 hours ago
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You seem to ignore the fact that this kind of praise and attention is not accidental. It’s a direct result of massive PR by Anthropic. AGI and skynet is their marketing. Dario is the supreme hyper on that. Make no mistake this is a trillion dollar company not your average startup so it has the money and potentially the power to influence policy (I.e ban competitors)
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