Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Trump’s Name (Set in the Wrong Font, of Course) Has Been Removed From the Kennedy Center
Jonathan Edwards reporting for The Washington Post:
President Donald Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center.
Crews at the performing arts venue started removing it from the front of the building around 3 a.m., several hours after the center missed a federal judge’s two-week deadline to do so. The judge had ruled that the decision by the center’s board of trustees to rename it was illegal.
A perfect metaphor for the work ahead of us.
Apple’s Private Cloud Compute Is Severely Limited for Third-Party Developers
From Apple’s Developer site:
To ensure getting started with a large cloud model is as accessible as possible, developers in the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running on Private Cloud Compute (PCC) with no cloud API cost. The model provides access to frontier level intelligence with unparalleled privacy protections. This makes it easy for small developers to get started building intelligent app experiences without upfront infrastructure costs.
Eligibility requirements
Access to PCC is available to developers who meet the following criteria:
- Are enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program.
- Have fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps on the App Store.
- Have the Private Cloud Compute entitlement assigned to their account.
Where Apple Intelligence is available, eligible developers can use PCC in their apps distributed on the App Store, and test PCC features via TestFlight or ad hoc distribution. Installs during testing are not counted as first-time app downloads.
If any app subsequently exceeds the 2 million first-time downloads threshold, or the developer is no longer enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program, the developer will be notified and must migrate to an alternative solution within 6 months. Information about first-time downloads is available in Analytics in App Store Connect.
These strict limits don’t seem to be getting as much attention as they should. It’s nice that for small developers who meet the above criteria, access to PCC has no cost. But there’s no way (yet?) to buy your way out of these limits. There are no paid API tiers for larger developers who exceed the above limits, or for developers who qualify now but release a hit app that grows to exceed them. (Users who pay for iCloud+ don’t have any extra quotas for PCC usage in third-party apps either.)
The “fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps” restriction is particularly notable. It’s not 2 million installations for apps that are using PCC, but 2 million downloads for any app the developer has ever released. Developer Gui Rambo writes:
So uhhhh… Apple should really rethink the Private Cloud Compute developer access limitation. I do happen to have an app that’s had more than 2 million downloads. That app is ChibiStudio, an app that’s been in the App Store for over 10 years. It’s not like I’m getting a million new users every year nowadays. And I’m also not making any real money with it 🥲
The bottom line is that — for the OS 27 cycle at least — PCC is primarily a feature for Apple itself to use in Siri AI. Granting access to PCC to any third-party developers at all is better than nothing, but this 2-million-download cap cuts off many developers who are in the Small Business Program. Apple should reconsider that. And I know there are a lot of developers who exceed the eligibility for the Small Business Program who would love to have access to the PCC APIs, even if access was paid. The lack of paid tiers says to me that Apple is worried enough about meeting demand from Siri AI users alone.
U.S. Government Directs Anthropic to Shut Down Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Models on National Security Grounds
Anthropic:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.
Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were announced on Tuesday — that post has detailed comparisons, from Anthropic, on the models’ capabilities.
Having the access ban extend all the way to “foreign national Anthropic employees” is, to say the least, aggressive. Whether that degree of restriction is truly warranted, I don’t think we, on the outside, can say. The Trump administration lacks credibility, to say the least, when it comes to foreign nationals. But it’s Anthropic itself that repeatedly compares the power of frontier models to nuclear weapons. Here’s CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay published just this month:
There may come a time, perhaps relatively soon, when we need to go beyond this, when the most powerful AI systems look less like airplanes or automobiles and more like weaponizable nuclear materials — a threat to humanity rather than “just” a threat to public safety. If that occurs, we may need more aggressive regulatory measures than those I have laid out.
If that occurs — or if it already has occurred — it’s obviously not the place of Anthropic (or OpenAI or Google) to render that judgment. Ben Thompson wrote about this presciently back in March, and linking to his post, I wrote:
Nilay Patel, quoting the same section of Thompson’s column I quoted above, sees it as “Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism”. I see it as the case against corporatocracy. Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?