ET Graphics: Sorry, your passport decides your AI privileges

The US government has suspended Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos model access to any foreign national, whether inside or outside the country, including Anthropic’s own employees. This is probably the first time that ethnicities have become part of geopolitical strategy, in a way that determines who can access critical technologies, and that could have far-reaching implications for R&D, hiring, funding and global collaboration.

In fact, nation-states may soon start needing citizenship or security clearances to work on the next state-of-the-art models the way they do for defence, space and nuclear tech. Netizens noted that even Andrej Karpathy, the founding member of OpenAI, and currently a member of Anthropic’s pretraining team, may not have access to the models. The Slovak-Canadian immigrant currently holds an EB-1 visa status. Himanshi Lohchab & Mannat Dora list some of Anthropic’s top leaders who were born outside the US.