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The Korean telecom giant at the center of Anthropic's Mythos controversy
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The 5-second version
- The Trump administration imposed export controls on Anthropic's Claude Mythos and Fable 5 models after concerns about SK Telecom's alleged China ties and Amazon-reported vulnerabilities in Fable 5.
- Anthropic chose to disable all access to Mythos and Fable 5 entirely rather than implement nationality-based gating that would compromise privacy.
- SK Telecom, despite having minimal direct China revenue ($1.9M in 2024, 7 employees), has historical ties to China through a 2004 joint venture with state-owned China Unicom and a former $1B investment.
- The US government's formal demand letter to Anthropic restricting model access to US nationals only did not explicitly reference SK Telecom or China, suggesting separate technical and geopolitical concerns.
- Anthropic's Project Glasswing, which provided early Mythos access to ~150 trusted organizations including Samsung and Korean government agencies, has been effectively halted for foreign nationals.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
> The company having it's product market restricted will negatively impact their financial investment. Anthropic's services keep bumping into capacity limits even with Fable disabled. Revenue is not a problem. This controversy has been good publicity for them: So powerful the government tried to block it! > Also if you have an agreement with a company for them to provide you with a service, and investing in them is part of that deal, reneging on the service part still isn't okay. Reneging on…Read on HN ↗
If the company is "hot" attracting a lot of users, then of course the gov't is going to come knocking too. They're going to want access to all of that user data even if it's not a service they could use directly. Sure, you don't have to go courting government contracts, but it's not like government employees are not going to see the same PR civilian users see.Read on HN ↗
Nah, with Google etc it was more realizing their own interests aligned with the interests of the new administration. By which I mean, they are both interested in being filthy rich, making hay while the sun shines, and stopping centrist forces from adding wealth taxes or anti-monopoly regulations. Biden and Harris were getting too uppity about such things for their tastes. Have you seen who Sergey Brin is budding around with these days, and what he -- a formerly very "left liberal" person invo…Read on HN ↗
Dario (of Mythos): "Companies we gave it to said – this is a super weapon. you should have to own a gun license to use it. please don't release this" Mythos is clearly dual use (and automatically subject to export controls), even if Anthropic didn’t understand what that means. Yes this administration can be capricious and hyperpartisan. This isn’t one of those cases.Read on HN ↗