You seem to assume rational actors. Bezos et. al. are definitely not that.

> the technical savviness of this administration is not the thing it's most famous for

you cast aspersions here but honestly name one in the last 50 years that is more tech literate

There's even more to this - because among the possible outcomes is one where Fable is only made available to enterprises that have gone through Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, and perhaps only to verified users of those companies, and perhaps requiring biometrics and attribution so government can know who was using that account.

Now, say you don't want to sign a pre-committed enterprise contract with Anthropic. But oh, you already have such a contract with AWS, and they'll let you use any model you want, and they've implemented KYC and will graciously connect you with a solutions partner who can help you with the IAM systems integrations for key tracking and attribution.

Oh, and all these enterprise contracts will bill by token. We're not talking a small stake in a company selling subscriptions, we're talking immediate revenue at four-figure-per-user levels, and pushing more and more companies to see that as "just part of their AWS bill."

This is worth a significant amount of money to AWS. So the question is: does Hanlon's Razor apply when a $2.5 trillion company is putting its best minds into how to engineer strategic outcomes?

The regulatory capture angle here is, if anything, an implementation detail.

> I would say that this government "takedown" of Mythos is great free advertising

This only works if you are American and think only about Americans and American companies. Which may or not be the case for Anthropic, and for sure is the case for the US government.

Because from across the pond, this is indeed free marketing... For Mistral and the Chinese open weight models and all the companies that sell them / fine tune and sell them. Who would ever trust their developer productivity / business process automation / support chatbot / whatever on models and providers that can be yanked with no notice?

The morale of the story is, you'd be dumb to rely on any LLM you don't run yourself in your own environnement. Reliability and predictability (including of costs) matter more than quality and features, especially when you can compensate for the quality with fine tuning.

> I would say that this government "takedown" of Mythos is great free advertising.

Apple did the same thing with the PowerMac G4 when it was temporarily afoul of export control laws as it surpassed 1 gigaflop, ran an ad "for the first time in history a personal computer has been classified as a weapon" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb7EhYy-2RE)