> The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees
There's no way they have the authority to actually order this and not just request this right? If crypto is speech... LLMs definitely are...
They do have the authority to do this, Anthropic has the ability to appeal it in court, up to the SCOTUS. Lord only knows what our crazy ass judges in that court will do though.
The US tried to ban it. djb challenged it on first amendment grounds and the result was that the US government gave up trying to enforce any ban.
AI is different though because these models are private, so they cannot really be considered to be "speech". Although if it were an open model it would likely be protected speech to release it.
You have to squint to see the output of an LLM to be speech. The input is clearly speech but the government is not preventing anyone from writing or publishing prompts, only from running those prompts through the model.
In the case of the crypto export ban, the government was attempting to suppress the release of cryptographic research. For example, if a cryptographic researcher wrote a paper on a cipher and they included a definition of that cipher in the paper, that was an "export" of cryptography. This is very clearly a restraint on speech that violates the first amendment and after much legal wrangling the government agreed and the issue evaporated.
Doesn’t really matter - the government is given wide latitude by the judiciary in matters of national security. I also expect Anthropic will fight this in court if it lasts very long.
There's no way they have the authority to actually order this and not just request this right? If crypto is speech... LLMs definitely are...