AI has granted America vast new powers
Its government is now the gatekeeper to frontier models – and most compute.
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The American government can decide who may use the world’s most important technology.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Economist
The news is full of how an ignominious peace deal with Iran exemplifies a decline in American power. That conclusion could hardly be more wrong. On June 12 the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block foreigners from Fable and Mythos, its latest and most capable frontier artificial intelligence models. In an instant, everyone learned that the American government can decide who may use the world’s most important technology. You don’t get much more powerful than that.
The administration was responding to a supposed jailbreak for Fable, meaning a prompt that circumvents defences against uses such as hacking computers or making bioweapons. The chances are that it wanted Anthropic to switch off the models for everyone, and that targeting foreigners was a means to an end.
