The Bitterroot Mountains do not care about your feelings and neither does mid-June in Montana, which arrives like a seasonal declaration of indifference and promptly gets on with the business of being cold and beautiful and utterly without opinion about anything happening in Washington DC. I am sitting on the side of one of these mountains with a dark roast coffee and a lululemon mother of five wedged between me and the view, and I am trying to work up the appropriate outrage about the federal government deciding that Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, represents some kind of existential threat requiring adult supervision from the same institutional apparatus that brought you the TSA, the F-35 cost overrun, and the immortal decision to classify the existence of stealth aircraft while selling them on coffee mugs at the Air Force Museum gift shop.
Infamous lasts longer than famous and correct outlives winning every single time, which is the only reason I keep saying the thing nobody in the room wants to hear.
I have clearances in my past. I have sat in rooms where serious people with serious titles made serious decisions that were, without exception, deeply unserious when you got close enough to smell them. I testified before Congress about election interference while half the room was checking their phones and the other half was waiting to say something they had already written down before I arrived. I ran security programs inside agencies whose names you know and I watched the machinery of government regulation crank itself into motion and I am here to tell you from direct and unambiguous experience that the machinery does not know what it is regulating. It never has. It is not designed to know. It is designed to move and to be seen moving and to generate documents that reference other documents that were generated in response to a mandate that nobody remembers passing.
So now they want to regulate Fable 5.
Let me be precise about my politics for a moment because I find that people assume things. I am not a Republican. The Republican party’s current relationship with science, evidence, and basic factual coherence makes it impossible for me to park my PhD there without feeling like I am committing some kind of credential fraud. But I am also not a Democrat in any way that would make a Democrat comfortable, because I spent too many years watching government work to believe that government intervention is the thing that happens when markets fail. Government intervention is the thing that happens when someone with a budget and a mandate and a mid-level position at an agency decides that this is the week they make their mark. These are not the same thing.
The libertarian in me, which is the part that grew up on a sailboat in Puget Sound and spent formative years in places where the nearest federal employee was a long drive away, that part watches the frontier model designation process getting built inside the national security apparatus and hears the specific sound of a chokepoint being constructed. I know that sound. I helped build some of them. The process is always the same. First you establish the category. Then you define what falls inside it using criteria that are classified so nobody can argue with them. Then you make the initial participation voluntary because you are not a tyrant, you are just creating infrastructure. Then you wait.
The dolphin problem, which Douglas Adams understood better than any policy analyst I have ever read, is that the smarter party in any given situation keeps trying to communicate something important and the less smart party keeps interpreting it as entertainment. The AI companies have been trying to tell Washington for three years that they do not understand what they are looking at. Washington has been interpreting this as an invitation to schedule more hearings.
Fable 5 is a language model. A very good one. It can do things that matter to me professionally and things that matter to me personally and it can do them faster and with more nuance than its predecessors. It also has safety classifiers that already route my security-related work to an older model because the federal government’s influence on Anthropic’s product decisions is not theoretical, it is already woven into the architecture and has been for a while. The house is already somewhat occupied. What we are now debating is whether to give the occupant a key or just cut a hole in the wall.
The argument for government action on frontier models runs roughly like this: the models are dangerous, private companies cannot be trusted to self-regulate dangerous things, therefore government must act. I have no argument with the first premise and considerable argument with the second and third. Private companies cannot be trusted to self-regulate dangerous things is a statement that sounds like a complete thought but is not, because it requires you to believe that governments can be trusted to regulate dangerous things better than private companies can regulate themselves. I have now worked for private companies and for the federal government and for state government and for tribal government and I am telling you that the regulatory apparatus is not a group of people who are smarter than the people running the companies. It is a group of people who are operating under different incentives in a different institutional environment with access to less current information and more lawyers.
This does not mean Fable 5 should be unregulated. It means the question of what regulation actually accomplishes here is one that nobody in the relevant congressional hearings appears to be asking. The question they are asking is how to establish the framework, which is the wrong question. The right question is whether the framework will work, which requires understanding what the framework is trying to do, which requires understanding the technology, which is the step that keeps getting skipped because it is hard and the hearing is in forty-five minutes.
The cold mountain air is doing its job and the lululemon mother of five has moved on and I have finished enough of the dark roast to say clearly what I actually think. I think Fable 5 being pulled or constrained by government action would be a mistake made by people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing and genuinely do not know enough to do it. I think the intent is not cynical. I think the execution would be. I think the national security apparatus will build the access infrastructure because that is what it does and I think the voluntary designation process will become something else over time because voluntary frameworks always do, and I think none of the people making these decisions have spent enough time actually using the thing they are deciding about to have an informed opinion.
The mountains have no opinion. The coffee is gone. Congress will hold a hearing.
Nothing will be fine.
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