So I wrote my bachelor thesis in history on Manifest Destiny and the US-Mexican war, and I genuinely cannot stop seeing the parallel here, so bear with me a second. Friday the US government told Anthropic to pull Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Export control, national security. To comply they had to switch both off for everyone, worldwide. The reason, as far as anyone can actually tell, is a “jailbreak” that basically comes down to asking the model to read some code and find the bugs in it. Anthropic looked at it themselves and said it surfaced a few minor, already-known vulnerabilities that other free models find too. The government’s evidence was verbal. No specifics handed over. Here is what it reminds me of. In 1763 Britain had just won a war, the whole continent lay open in front of them, and the colonists who had fought and bled for it looked west. Then London drew a line along the Appalachians and told them they could not cross it. The official reason was order and stability. The real reason was control. A settler who can expand freely is a settler who does not really need the Crown anymore. Now swap the frontier. It is not land this time, it is knowledge. What a regular person, handed these tools, can suddenly understand and do for themselves. And the same exact move happens. A power that spent years pushing this technology forward, the very moment it starts handing real capability to ordinary people, draws a line and says this far, and no further. I am not saying Anthropic are heroes here, they complied within hours, a company is one address you can switch off. And I am not saying the government is cartoon-evil either. I am saying the SHAPE of it is old, and history has shown us a few times where this particular shape tends to lead. In my thesis I boiled the whole thing down to a dumb little formula: A + X = B. A is the real underlying force (back then, Manifest Destiny). X is the loud excuse they point at (a border skirmish). B is the outcome (war, expansion). Run it again on Friday. A = American AI supremacy doctrine. X = a narrow jailbreak. B = two frontier models switched off for the planet. Anyways. Curious if anyone else reads it this way, or if I am completely reaching. Twelve years after the Proclamation of 1763 there was a revolution. What is even the equivalent move this time, if there is one at all? Every frontier gets closed eventually. The question is whether it stays open long enough to change something first. That is the part that worries me. submitted by /u/Hjemmelegen
Originally posted by u/Hjemmelegen on r/ArtificialInteligence