The Korean telecom giant at the center of Anthropic's Mythos controversy

44 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by dstala
(wired.com)

22 Comments

OsrsNeedsf2P

40 minutes ago

> 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

Aurornis

14 minutes ago

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.

echelon

38 minutes ago

> 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.

embedding-shape

31 minutes ago

> 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.

wood_spirit

18 minutes ago

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?

easygenes

2 hours ago

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.

trunnell

30 minutes ago

> 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.

dmix

21 minutes ago

Most headlines seem to be misleading these days. Social media broke journalism.

meowface

an hour ago

Wired has been NY Post-tier (of the inverse polarity) for several years, now.

embedding-shape

24 minutes ago

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.

nailer

an hour ago

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

Cupprum

40 minutes ago

Is that called jailbreak?

theplumber

36 minutes ago

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.

nailer

27 minutes ago

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.

tristanj

2 hours ago

This whole Fable 5 controversy will look quite silly once China releases a comparable model in six months.

sigmar

16 minutes ago

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.

tristanj

5 minutes ago

This isn't correct, Claude hasn't displayed the raw chain of thought for any of the Claude 4 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. You can reenable thinking traces in the Claude code settings with the flag showThinkingSummaries: true.

suggala

2 hours ago

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.

cyanydeez

an hour ago

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.

kittikitti

an hour ago

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.

trunnell

43 minutes ago

Sure they exist but they're rare, difficult to identify and hire, and take years to train. Mythos/Fable is available on tap.

theplumber

33 minutes ago

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)