In early June, Dario Amodei published an essay, “Policy on the AI Exponential”, arguing that frontier AI should be regulated like aircraft or drugs: governments should be able to test the most powerful models and block or reverse a release if it fails safety standards. A lot of people, including me, thought that was a reasonable position. Then the same month happened. Anthropic shipped Fable 5 to the public with safety guardrails, and kept the unguarded version, Mythos 5, for a small group of vetted partners. US officials concluded there was a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails, judged the model could meaningfully accelerate cyberattacks, and issued an export-control directive ordering Anthropic to suspend both models for every foreign national on Earth, including Anthropic’s own non-citizen employees. Anthropic complied within hours. So the company that argued the state should hold a kill switch for dangerous AI became the first to have that switch used on it. What I keep turning over: Is this Amodei being proven right, the system working exactly as he asked? Or a cautionary tale about who ends up holding the off switch once you build it? Where is the line between safety regulation and regulatory capture that quietly locks frontier capability to a few approved players? The directive caught allies too, since “any foreign national” includes UK, EU, Japanese and Korean businesses. Does a national-security framing on frontier models inevitably hit allied companies, not just adversaries? If a model’s own guardrails can be bypassed, is an external, government-held off switch the only control that actually works? And are we comfortable with who holds it? Genuinely interested in where people land, especially on the principle-versus-capture question, because I can argue it both ways. I wrote up the full sequence and what it means for businesses that depend on US models here: https://www.theprofessor.info/insights/frontier-ai-geopolitical-dependency submitted by /u/Existing_Scallion_66
Originally posted by u/Existing_Scallion_66 on r/ArtificialInteligence