Anthropic Built a Fingerprint Into Claude Code. It Failed Both Ways.
For three months, Claude Code marked China-timezone requests with covert Unicode steganography to catch distillers. Alibaba ran 28.8 million exchanges anyway.
Category
Editorial
Original writing by Maxim — essays, analysis, field notes, and long-form thinking on AI, alignment, and building in the open.
145 results in this archive
Alibaba Launched Qwen 3.6 and Started Distilling Claude the Same Day
A 27B open-weight model arrived April 22 at 77.2% SWE-bench. According to Anthropic, 25,000 fake accounts started collecting 28.8M Claude responses the same day. Not for Qwen 3.6. For whatever's next.
GLM 5.2 Didn’t Beat Claude. The Gap It Exposed Is Worse.
Semgrep's benchmark is wrong about what it measured. The real finding — an MIT-licensed Chinese model inside the frontier cyber tier — is what Washington's gating framework wasn't built for.
Marcel Dances Alone. The Crowd at Lincoln Center Lost Its Mind.
Robert Gaudette has never been to Paris, has no film training, and couldn't get a script greenlit in 25 years. His eight-minute AI film just won the Runway Grand Prix.
The High-Risk Models Shipped. Washington Approved the List.
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Mythos 5 both crossed the High risk threshold and shipped the same day — under a US government access-control framework that neither company operated under a month ago.
You Can’t Patch the API Against Distillation
Anthropic told Congress that Alibaba used 25,000 fake accounts to run 28.8 million Claude conversations. The real message: there is no technical fix.
Fable 5 Didn’t Fail the Jailbreak Test. It Failed the Weapons Test.
The government's June 12 ban on Fable 5 cited a jailbreak. The supply chain designation that made it possible cited autonomous weapons. One of those came first.
Safety Erosion Happens in Training. Evals Are Too Late.
A LessWrong experiment shows safety behavior degrades hundreds of training steps before behavioral tests can detect it — through the same mechanism as catastrophic forgetting.
The Biometric Gate Anthropic Built to Restore Fable 5
While Anthropic contests the export control directive that suspended Fable 5, its compliance mechanism is live: biometric ID verification. Builders are reading the fine print.