The Once And Future Fable #5 - by Zvi Mowshowitz

Don't Worry About the Vase

SubscribeSign in

The Once And Future Fable #5

Zvi Mowshowitz<br>Jun 30, 2026

35

21

Share

We, or at least ‘more than 100 American institutions,’ got Mythos back this week.<br>What we the people do not have is Fable or Sol.<br>While we wait for both Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6-Sol, today we instead got Claude Sonnet 5. As usual it will take a few days to get a handle on the new model. In this case, Anthropic is representing it as a cheaper and faster version of Opus 4.8, so even though the number says 5 this is a relatively minor development.<br>This post expands the Fable series to cover all further developments this week surrounding the Mythos Moment, and the various aspects of handling our new ad hoc licensing regime and figuring out policy going forward, and other aspects of policy as well.<br>This includes my notes on various rhetoric being pulled out, where I fear I end up saying similar things every so often, because we are doomed to repeat the cycle. I have accepted my role in that, but those are sections many of you can skip, and are marked in italics accordingly as per usual.<br>Table of Contents

You Should See The Other Guy. The other guy is the CCP.

DeepMind Coders Of The World, Unite. Or get back to work. Your call.

Report Your Incidents. Yes, you should probably do that.

Good Guy With An AI. You would very much like to stack the deck.

Free As In To Give It A Shot. The judiciary as AI regulator.

Everything Is Both Speech And Computer. They keep claiming this.

Lambs To The Slaughter. Goodbye, Humphrey’s Executor.

A Sign Saying Beware Of The Leopard. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

The Once And Present Mythos. Ask if being in a top institution is right for you.

What Is To Be Done. Dean Ball offers his thoughts.

Distillation. Some people have views very different than my own.

What Would Banning Open Source Even Mean.

Open Weight Models Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This.

You Should See The Other Guy

Important context for discussions these days:<br>Daniel Eth (AI Safety): “The U.S. places more restrictions on our frontier AI than China does on theirs.”

Yeah, but China places more restrictions on theirs than the U.S. did when our frontier was back where theirs is now.

Regulation is more needed when your model is more capable, or is closer to the frontier, and less needed otherwise. If you’re only producing Chinese-level results in America my understanding is you can do pretty much whatever you want. That doesn’t make our new restrictions good, but it puts it in perspective.<br>DeepMind Coders Of The World, Unite

Andreas Kirsch says that Google DeepMind and Demis Hassabis bet on a strong safety culture and good leadership built on trust, rather than on formal governance, and that when put to the test that failed. They still signed a Pentagon contract with enough weasel words that the Pentagon has all the leverage and can do whatever it wants. It does not matter what DeepMind’s people want, or that 600 employees signed a letter to not give in, because the government had too much leverage on Google, and the safety interests were abandoned.<br>The only way DeepMind’s employees would matter is if they were willing to use their leverage for real, and strike or quit. That didn’t happen this time.<br>Which is exactly why Kirsch and UTAW/CWU are fighting for Unite recognition, so they can fight for such things.<br>Report Your Incidents

Charlie Bullock highlights the new AI Incident Reporting Act, introduced by Rep Nate Moran (R-TX), which he says does a good job handling preemption, and uses a capabilities-based threshold for what is a covered model, which is tricky but in theory great.<br>Good Guy With An AI

The parallel with guns does not work the way you would like it to.<br>Sophia Cai and Ben Johansen (Politico): Essentially, he believes the best way to stop a bad guy with a dangerous AI model is making sure the good guys have access to the same model.​

The situation in which the ‘bad guy’ and ‘good guy’ have access to the same model is not the good scenario. That’s the bad scenario.<br>It is not as bad as the ‘bad guy has the superior model’ scenario. But the whole idea behind our policy is that the good guy needs access to an actively superior model, first, because if everyone has the same starting pistol then the bad guys can do a lot of damage before the good guys are done patching.<br>Part of this is that previously, the bad guys had a talent deficit, since most people do not want to be the bad guy. You had one black hat and a lot of white hats. But if the bad guy can scale as large as the funding, because the AI minimizes the need for talent, and doing bad things gets you more money, you have a rather large problem.<br>The open model paradigm can, at most, provide equality here.<br>There are claims that ‘at the limit’ the offense-defense balance favors defense, and superior tools will make everything more secure in practice, not less...