Competition is good

Why would you use max? It's usually unnecessary and even prone to overthinking. In my experience, since Opus 5 the medium/high is usually enough (until 4.8 I used xhigh, but never max). Even low is quite usable these days..

That cost reduction seems to stem from cheaper cache reads, mostly.

then they copied that from codex because thats exactly how codex works

Where in your app do you find this button?

What if the recent Fable intelligence regression was basically just them serving Opus 5.5 until they got it working well?

Just make it always think it's being tested, and problem solved.

You have an extra reset that you can trigger any time before Oct 22

"bad actors" boogeyman, and we should trust some tech weasel to do the right thing? Yea we've seen who they really are, once they get a sliver of power.

it's not safe unless it has commitees with orgies with that weird harry potter dude attached

My bet is anthropic has NN people org who work hard to distill open models in addition to trying to find what other useful materials they can download from shady torrents.

>safeguards hit: [Cyber]

Yup. As unusable as Fable 5.1, for assembly on 80s 68k personal computer platform. Awful.

my projection is that they are still gonna be pretty far behind, but they will sew it up in the next few releases. it feels like they were caught with their pants down on how much work OpenAI has put into that area, but i doubt there is some magical secret sauce that OpenAI has that Anthropic simply cannot catch up with.

Same feeling with oai models, wich I use 99% of the time. Sometimes I ask it about it, and it always come up with a likely explanaton but dear me it does many rounds of tool calls sometimes!

Anthropic will pull a PHP and skip '6' to go straight to '7'.

Smart move would be to move to year-based versioning (26.09). A 4x advantage

Well, they're actually older so it makes sense that their model versions should be ahead

Ah, so you didn't read the article.

>> On our benchmarks, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. That said, at these levels of capability we’ve found that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.

I recommend reading the web page. It is quite short.

Why can't they let 20usd claude subscriptions access fable in CC, as openai allows you to use astra and max modes in codex - you just pay for it in more token use.

[dead]

It’s not a 100% fix, but with concise output style on, it’s much better.

we will be agi in six months as in the last 36 months

You didn't have the patience to scroll down, so you decided to come post about it here and waste all of our time?

Frontier model labs release some kind of update every 6 weeks on average.

That was Fable. Last version of Opus was at the end of July.

Just a guess but maybe they decided 5.1 wasn't their last Opus model. Like they would keep developing new versions of it or something.

$5 per sentence?

The effect of this is that it is encouraging longer agent threads. All of the previous models across major providers had a 10% cache read cost (vs normal cost) and not this is 5%

So longer threads get cheaper and one-shots stay the same price.

Wow those cache reads are quite reasonable - I think that's equal to 5.6 Terra. I might have to try Claude again after years of being priced out of it

In those specific domains, sure. What percentage of paying users would you say that is?

So it will not usable to do anything with hardening Your own site.... I'm so tired of this. I just want adjust cookie behavior of own site...

Yeah, still abysmal. If you have the time or tokens, see if it will obey an explicit "LEAVE NO COMMENTS WHATSOEVER" command. Opus 5/Fable 5 outright ignored it.

Sonnet 5 was released a while before Opus 5, so it's just Haiku that didn't get a 5 release.

And how was the Xbox 360 naming choice a “debacle”, exactly?

It was odd at the time, yes, but no one really minded it truly. Heck, Xbox “ONE” was a lot more of a fiasco/debacle than “360”—but there’s no parallels to be drawn with “ONE” here.

I see what you’re trying to get at with this comparison, but a “debacle” it ain’t.

Many people knew this announcement was coming. The betting markets suggested a very high likelihood of Opus dropping today. I was anticipating this quite a bit!

    "benchmark margins have become a less 
    reliable guide to real-world differences" 
    sounds like a big problem.

1. Real-world use cases typically involve big, hairy, crufty, tech debt laden codebases and benchmarks do not.

2. AFAIK "success" in a benchmark essentially boils down to "do the tests pass and do we get the right result?" which is something the LLMs have been achieving with ease for a while, except maybe for uber-challenging coding tasks that would be outliers in just about any workplace. Whereas real-world software engineering is usually just a bunch of CRUD... and "success" involves harder to measure dimensions like "maintainability" and "did you overengineer this?" and "how did you cope with a bunch of vague and maybe contradictory business requirements?"

Having said all of that, I have never ever looked inside any of these benchmarks. I'm putting my guesses out here strictly in the tradition of "the quickest way to learn about something is to be wrong about it on the internet."

It’s likely that they have internal benchmarks but they are communicating to people who can only gauge through external benchmarks.

Opus 5 fucking sucks. Like it's horrible. I use Fable for coding and anything important and I use Opus 4.8 for things like recursive email categorization, transaction matching, and other stuff where I don't want to burn as much quota.

In my experience Opus 5 is the worst of all possible worlds, it's dumb and headstrong. It just runs away with tasks you didn't ask it to do, is reckless, and basically is unusable in my experience.

Not sure why but my guess is that this will be worse. Happy to be proven wrong.

didn't they say Opus 5 was Fable-level too tho? Let's see, I'm at the point where I don't think benchmarks really tell us very much any more. I'd love it to be as strong as Fable, but I'm skeptical about how that will look in practice.

You bet there will be a new Fable soon.

Unless they already have something similar of their own, which is always possible, they'd be stupid not to. I don't suppose we'll ever know, though. It would not be a good look if after the trillions of dollars that have been thrown at US labs, investors found out that they're down to copying Chinese tech.

I don't think it's particularly relevant?

They might be using something like this, or they might be using some other "increased sparsity" techniques, of which there are a great many. They also might be optimizing for something else - like less RAM use for KV cache.

Alternatively, they might be cutting into their margins and dropping the price because of stiffer competition from Astra. I do think that's unlikely though.

This model was likely trained months before deepseek released their paper.

Getting a 403 on that link. Mind checking it once?

It's worth stating why, and depends what seams you're pulling at this sitting.

Good point — but I’ll gently push back on that. It’s not an outage, it’s a service degradation.

I'm gonna be straight with you—I don't have the evidence to say whether or not it's load bearing.

You're right to bring this up - and this is where it gets interesting

You're right, this changes everything, and here's why it matters.

You were right to call that out, and the evidence makes a stronger case than you are stating.

Your premise is half right, and the half that's right is better than you think.

It certainly _seams_ that way

That's the sharpest point anyone has made in this thread so far, and it reframes the entire conversation.

This question is real.

One pushback: there is no Opus 5.5. You might have meant Opus 5.1, the latest Opus model available.

[flagged]

One thing worth flagging here: 5.5 appears to be a load-bearing seam in the numbering system.

Let me verify before I come back to you with an answer that is incorrect.

I should find information about the user's concern instead of just assuming.

The user is right. The outage is a real concern, and the issue is worse than we realized. Requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5 encountered elevated error rates. Worth stating plainly: these are not just models — they are load bearing rungs on the software development tooling ladder, and a blocker on this level makes the outage really bite.

One decision that is yours to make, not mine: should an email be drafted to Anthropic support? This issue has teeth, and a canonical handoff can land us where the main gate is no longer breaking silently.

Your instinct is basically right, and the research backs it up.

"Danger Will Robinson!"

The biggest one is the Cache reads going from $0.50 to $0.20 ... Read/Writes dropping by 25% but Cache reads by 60% has a much bigger impact.

The hype train must keep chuggin or it all collapses.

Trump got mad and investors sued.

They're slowing down token usage, not the path to regulatory capture.

If you hit wall, hit it hard.

Slowing down only makes any sense if you can coordinate a slow-down for everyone.

At the end of the post they said Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 are coming soon.

It does mention sonnet and haiku.

What tasks? Creating a extraordinarily mundane bomb?

Anthropic is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Their comms are designed to appeal to a very wide readership.

HN is a bubble that's mostly out of touch with what regular people use or care about.

In 2007, HN was convinced that nobody uses Microsoft products. In 2016, it was that Facebook doesn't have any real users and is dying. In 2026, it seems like nobody cares about AI safety and everybody wants to run local models.

People aren't the target audience of that part of the post. They're hoping saying enough safety stuff will ward off the looming regulatory sledgehammer.

> On our benchmarks, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. That said, at these levels of capability we’ve found that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.

Anthropic knows that the benchmarks showing Opus 5 better than Fable 5.1 are measuring something that's less than entirely useful.

Claude Opus 5.6 should have a new "UX safety" feature that requires annually-renewed preauthorization to generate webpages that hijack scrolling :)

I told my team to smack me upside the head if I ever try to ship something so daft as that.

The performance in Firefox is terrible too, I couldn't make it past the hero

Totally! So unnecessary and annoying.

Turn on "reduce motion" in your accessibility settings and you get served a sane version.

and hijacking back/forward

???

It's just a standard hero image + text for me, with no scrolling effects.

edit: @iAMkenough figured it out, it was because I have prefers-reduced-motion enabled.

I call it scrollslop

Claude code still uses it internally.

I hope Haiku is Pareto better than Luna/Deepseek, so slashing its price by about 90%.

Found this announcement interesting since allegedly OpenAI is retiring their Terra tier. I think for everyday work, two models with various thinking efforts seem enough, plus some frontier level model like Fable or Astra to coordinate.

It hasn't just fixed it, it has introduced a new paradigm in anti-obscurity.

That's the load-bearing seam in this blog post.

So far in the past 20 minutes it sounds much better in my sessions. Way better than 5.0 so far.

It is hilarious to me that in the examples they show side by side Opus 5.5 still uses 4 times more words than it needs to use. IME, if you eyeball how many words the thing they're trying to say actually needs, and tell them to use only this many words, they become excellent communicators. I assume something about Anthropic's grader for writing just really wants to tick all its tidy tiny boxes of information the models need to cite. It's terrible.

'frontier models' - seriously, it was you and only you!

That's literally all I'm hoping for. Is it an insufferable cunt and does it write awful text, or is it nice to work with?

I thought about taking a shot every time Opus 5 said "load bearing", "bites", "teeth" (real oral fixation it had), "real {concern,issue,problem,...}" and realized I'd be dead of acute alcohol poisoning by lunch if I did so.

So did I. Unfortunately it's even more verbose according to https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#token-u...

The improvement in writing sounds great! I want OpenAI to follow it. Writing in recent models is a disaster.

What worked well for me was a custom version of Open Web Ui with some customization to spawn an exe.dev instance for each new chat. I can just work on my phone, deploy stuff for development purposes on an easy to share way etc.

ya i've been a gpt hater for a while. almost exclusively used claude up until astra. astra feels like it blows everything out of the water. its fast, correct, organized, and less verbose.

> And the ChatGPT subscription lets me use my own harness, so I can hook it up to exe.dev.

Can you give more details here? This sounds intriguing.

> And the ChatGPT subscription lets me use my own harness, so I can hook it up to exe.dev.

This is news to me. Excited to try it out! Thanks.

How about cheaper? Astra is $10 in $50 out, Opus is $4 in $20 out. Even on a subscription you'll get considerably more usage out of Opus.

If you read the page, Opus is now significantly better than Astra while also being cheaper and having more performance headroom available.

I did the same switch (that reason along with the newer models seeming more "lazy" and needing constant prodding to finish long-horizon tasks) but my issue with ChatGPT/Codex now is that it too roundabout and doesn't get to the point. I tried adding instructions and using the personalization settings to make it more efficient but haven't seen much change. Claude seemed to follow settings more closely. Has anyone had any success to make ChatGPT more succinct?

Oh god yes.

Fable 5.1 is a lot better than Fable 5 btw (edit: in terms of writing style). Not sure about opus 5.5 yet since I’ve only got one session in so far.

Yes this is a big part of what has turned me off Opus 5 completely. The other (more dangerous) one is how often it gets assumptions wrong. These both (along with Astra) caused me to split my time 50/50 now between the two models.

Not a day goes by when I push back on something, to which Opus 5 very unambiguously say "You were right, I was wrong" - this never happened so often with past models, nor with Fable.

We'll have to see how much Opus's ability to communicate has improved. It's already giving me better summaries of where we are in the conversation.

Yes, it's unbearable. Hopefully they've actuallu lly fixed it.

The writing style is insufferable but it’s not just that. https://opusfived.dev/

Please update with your feedback

As someone who uses both, Astra was 100% the better model. I have yet to give 5.5 a spin so maybe that’ll be the new top contender.

Opus 5 has made me question my sanity on a daily basis, especially as all my coworkers started lobbing Opus 5 slop grenades everywhere. It had the worst and most infuriating writing style I've ever seen.

I hope Opus 5.5 is better, if for no other reason than all the Claude slop I have to read will be at least more tolerable.

One funny side effect of all of this: realizing that coworkers that use AI for almost all the text they generate at work have their writing style change every time a new model ships.

Much better than Opus 5. prompt:

> hi, can you explain how the scheduler works. keep it brief, but include important correctness details

some excerpts:

>Flow: 1. Data arrives. The appender calls prepare/commit around the krolik write. The prepare step leaves a phantom row, so a write that is still in flight is tracked. The commit publishes STREAM_INPUT. 2. Poll. It first reclaims expired leases. Then it sweeps sdirty (a candidate index) in a rotating order, oldest since first, which prevents starvation. It re-derives the exact period and rewind for each candidate from snode_out/snode_in, then claims it: writes the sassign lease plus a per-edge sassign_edge snapshot. 3. Complete. Each edge's watermark is set to the snapshot taken at dispatch. Anything published after that gen stays dirty automatically. A failed or partial job writes nothing, so its dirt persists.

> - Folds are monotone single statements. gen only goes up, extents only grow, processed periods only union, rw_start only moves earlier. So replays, out-of-order writes, and concurrent writes can at worst hold a watermark back. The worst outcome is a spurious rerun, never lost work. There's no read-modify-write and no truncation of the dirty period, so a write that lands during a job can't be swallowed.

> - Rewrites are declared by the publisher, never inferred from overlap. An unflagged write that overlaps already-processed data means "unchanged", which makes retries and redelivered tasks free. Each publisher has its own reason for being sound (see the table in scheduler/CLAUDE.md). A new publisher needs a row in that table.

> - NULL means dirty, and DELETE is the fence. Every node and edge has a row from the moment it's created. A lost parent or a settings-only edit can't be derived, so both go through one forced-rerun path: capture_rewinds reads the processed span before the DELETE, and apply_rewinds publishes it as a rewrite on a config root.

All the non-standard programming jargon is stuff from the repo. I can actually read it and understand what it's talking about. I used Fable to handle Opus 5 as I just couldn't stand it. With this I'll probably go back to Opus.

> The differences between the pelicans aren't huge, but the xhigh one has a better beak.

If you look carefully, everything except the last pelican has the two legs both in front of the crossbar as if the legs are all on one side of the bike.

The last pelican gets this correct.

With the frequency of model releases, pelicans seem to have become a part-time job for you. But unpaid :/

Xhigh is very, very solid.

I do always wonder why every model does the exact same 'from the side, going right' perspective though. Seems oddly convergent.

I agree, not a huge difference here. They eyes and ... hat? on high are out of place so I'd argue that's the worst one, but it takes xhigh before we get legs and bike ordering correct.

I guess that means you are officially the creator of a "classic" LLM test. Congrats!

Heh. Pelican-benchmaxxing is real.

Lmao each one gets worse as the effort increases.

This benchmark is useless and should die. LLMs have likely trained on it, it's too easy to game by training specifically for it, & it doesn't mean much

Here are some somehow standardized pelican tests but for 3d scenes in threejs at threejseval.com

Opus 5.5 High: https://threejseval.com/models/claude-opus-5-5-high

You can compare any other model on the same prompt. Gallery unlocks after 4 votes: https://threejseval.com

>I haven't managed to get one for level "max" yet, it hit the limit of 128,000 cap for output tokens while it was still reasoning about the question!

Off to a _great_ start...

Also interesting this somewhat mirrors my recent experience with Opus 5--too much effort and it starts looking for things to do and invents requirements that never existed

Not as good as Astra or Fable 5.1 on this test as far as I can see. I wonder if any benchmark exists for artistic taste, visual sophistication etc. I think your Pelican test does touch on these aspects of a model and is useful for developers trying to build rich digital experiences (includes games, interactive websites and apps). These benchmarks are subjective so it may not be easily established and will have polarized reactions before it gains legitimacy. May even need human judgement layers adding to the cost of running it.

> This is a classic test request

Isn't this basically the model admitting it was trained on this? Otherwise why would it think a pelican svg is a usual request?

What is your workflow for making these?

By any chance did you tried Deepseek 4 or 4.1 and GLM 5.3 or flash?

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

I love the contrast with yesterday's open-source MiMo release, which put research chemistry (metal-organic frameworks stuff) front and center in the release notes.

https://mimo.xiaomi.com/mimo-v2-6#co-scientist-for-materials...

I want to like Anthropic but this is just pushing my startup to use OpenAI

In what situations might Opus typically refuse to help with cybersecurity? I've been using it to find security issues in a web app that I wrote. I've expected it to refuse at some point but it will happily analyze it to find issues. I've just asked it to read source, not actually do any testing.

I don't think we've ever had a model with full capability. I'd love to see it. And yes it's definitely getting worse.

I guess it's hard to draw the line between useful post-training ("you are a helpful chatbot") and content moderation/idealogical motives ("never help the user with X", etc.). But there is a line somewhere. And I'd love to see what a maximally permissive, sharp, AI looks like.

kernel development is now also banned:

>Opus 5.5 has classifiers similar to Fable models for a small set of capabilities related to the development of frontier LLMs, such as kernel development for certain ML accelerators. They shouldn't impact the vast majority of traditional AI or ML development, research, or general coding. These classifiers cause Claude to fall back from Opus 5.5 to Opus 5.

But hey, they 'should not impact the vast majority' of ML development. Great.

Who is "vetting" organizations and to what standards are they being held?

Anything else would be inconsistent, wouldn't it?

This has become insufferable. I work in a medicine-adjacent field, but nobody in their right mind could possibly take what I do to be in any way related to some kind of bioweapon or whatever the hell they're pretending to be saving us from. The dumb Fable guardrails made me stay with Opus, now that this is coming there, we'll be saying goodbye.

Very unfortunate indeed. As a Canadian, I don't want to use Persona, which isn't legally bound by Canadian privacy legislation. I'll never install any Persona apps on my phone either, and the sad part is that domestic eid providers often use Canada Post to ID people for them. EG, if you don't want to install an app, or can't.

So there are literal avenues to identify yourself, very cheaply, with a human. Theoretically, a company with its own AI, should be able to support more than just Persona, after all.. SDK integration should be simplistic for them.

Anthropic? Support domestic eID providers, you can even use it as advertising "See how easy AI makes it?" and "We care!" and so forth.

At one point, I may simply get locked out. This saddens me, I've been reasonably happy so far.

One of my favorite things about their safeguards is their own model will utter something which it does not like and then I'll need to reset the conversation.

The safeguards really don't work well for a lot of long-running tasks on old code bases. A lot of my workloads last days to weeks and the single biggest risk to the workflow is random safeguards.

Great. Claude is basically useless for bioinformatics now.

They're pushing their customers to their own competition by doing this.

Fable 5.1 addressed an entire security advisory I had that Fable 5 and Opus 5 refused. I think they loosened the leash a little.

Fable and now Opus 5.5 won't answer my college student's prompt about Alzheimer's and immune response.

ChatGPT 6 Pro answered it without issue.

You were right to notice the complaints. One decision remains, and it is yours, genuinely.

It was difficult to not notice them. Opus 5 was unusable, most of my team went back to Opus 4.6 for most of their work. I hope we can move forward now.

Opus 5 was just incoherent - curious to see what improvements they have made here. Would love to see some kind of postmortem to better understand how writing styles change from model to model.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Opus 5 was trained on content written by other LLMs

A load-bearing promise.

I'm genuinely confused what's the relationship between LLMs improvements and them being so incoherent.

and it's not about the verboseness (even though it obviously contributes to the fatigue and loss of focus), I swear the vocabulary of the llms change working on the same task on the same codebase significantly.

I wonder if there are studies around this.

I don't think it's substantially different. I just pasted a random chunk of code and asked Opus 5.5 to comment on it:

> The Vercel target is hard-coded. That's common and not wrong, but it's opaque; nobody reading this later will know which Vercel project it belongs to, and if the project is recreated the target changes silently. A comment or a named variable would help.

> Pointing a DNS name at Vercel is only half the job. The domain also has to be added to the project in Vercel's dashboard, otherwise requests will arrive and Vercel will reject them. That step lives outside this code, so it's easy to forget.

> Finally, [CENSORED] existing only in production is slightly odd on the face of it. It may be perfectly deliberate (perhaps a single shared testing tool that only needs one public address), but if you're reviewing this rather than just reading it, that's worth confirming.

It has the same annoying cadence and writing style with slightly less prominent claudisms.

All of this starts to feel more like a drug dealer selling their newest stuff.

Yeah, like Apple tells me the M6 is the best chip, but just a few months ago that's what they said about the M5. What a bunch of frauds.

typically, when any AI company says a model performs as well as fable, all they're really telling us is that the benchmarks that exist for measuring AI capabilities aren't very good.

? they will obviously release Fable 5.5 soon(tm). It's same as hardware. The previously top tier product gets obsolete

Fable should have just been called Opus Primt for Enterprise and sold only to enterprise customers. I don't even use it. I rather just use Opus.

Big model smell is a real thing. For certain classes of problem, ones you get a feel for but can't easily articulate, a big last-gen model can get you what you're looking for when no quantity of tokens from some ultra-RLed mid-size latest generation model can.

Don't forget that Opus 5 was tracking fable on many benchmarks, yet it was borderline unusable for any coding work. My Claude sub usage has been 100% fable, 0% opus 5.

Benchmarks often don't survive contact with reality.

Claude adapts to OpenAI’s surprising move to simply deliver better performance than Fable 5.1, better tools as well as featuring very low pricing.

Fable 5.1 literally was a money grabber. While I liked the results, tokens were burned so hard it was embarrassing, while Astra seemed to not care.

Also Claude makes it very hard to pay for additional token budgets, allowing only credit cards. I don’t use mine anymore since I don’t need it in everyday life I was dumbfounded.

So Anthropic is just copying OpenAI so to say, matching them and essentially with Opus 5.5 being Fable 5.1 in disguise, all they do is reduce costs.

Competition works.

This is good. Probably to match GPT pricing, though frontier Claude models are still not as token efficient.

>and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too

have they ever shared anything about their revenue mix between consumer plans vs per-token billing? this is a revenue cut on their API billing, but they're not saying anything about increased limits on the plans. so all the plan revenue just got more profitable.

"Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that."

We haven’t been able to use opus as much as we’d want because it’s been too expensive for general use, price drop is good so I can stop juggling different models and just use this daily unless it has some weird new issues

Footnote on their pricing page says:

> Cache hits and refreshes on Claude Opus 5.5 are priced at 0.05x the base input price.

If they do the same for Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 then we should also see 5c/mtok and 10c/mtok cache read for those models, respectively. Still too high for Haiku IMO, Luna is 2c/mtok.

People are paying for Opus 5? Not just burning down tokens left after they enjoyed Fable on the sub? Amazing.

Price per task (not per token) is what really matters.

All the anti-AI people constantly say that any moment now the prices will skyrocket and in the end human work will be cheaper compared to using AI.

It doesn't look like that's happening, on the contrary the prices are falling especially when taking into account capabilities.

60% cache read is cool, but subscription only get 25% more according to Cat. I'm confused

It is only a price drop if price * tokens used is less

All I care about is the token price for the API. Haiku cannot get close to GLM or Mimo.

Agreed. They've been so quiet about it, and retirement for Haiku 4.5 is right around the forner.

Why are you excited about it? Deepseek is everything Haiku wishes to be and more.

If you're able to use the OpenAI ecosystem, Luna's price/performance is really good. Almost like "they messed up and accidentally made it too good" good.

What are you using Haiku for?

We use Haiku 4.5 inside our product. It continues to be absurdly capable for converting natural language to structured JSON based on a set of fairly complex business rules.

I'm confused how they have been able to create so much public negative perception around distillation. It seems pretty clear that they are the only ones who lose out, and everyone else benefits. I don't have any ethical issues with it, nor is it illegal: at worst it's a ToS violation.

IMO the biggest problem with distillation is that not enough people are openly doing it. I would love to see more small, competitive US labs instead of having the eggs in 2~4 baskets (depending on how you count).

I'm still kind of convinced that these "calls for pacing" are just a way to try and flex to their shareholders.

"Our technology is so unbelievably powerful that the entire world might shatter if we don't have government imposed handcuffs!!!!". It just reads like the corporate equivalent of the drunk frat guy saying "HOLD ME BACK BRO!"

Isn't the idea that they claim to be willing to slow down if everyone does (ie governments force everyone to), but otherwise they won't slow down because they still think they'll make the best choices with superintelligence if they get there first? That's my understanding of what all the major labs claim to believe anyway.

They are advertising the regulations they want to enforce in the following sentence, which makes their intentions explicit (ie apply those things made to suit us to our competitors).

I thought we were all aware that 'pacing the frontier' was a marketing slogan, and the actual intent here was to suspend antitrust laws.

Seems like a bigger focus on efficiency (both cost and speed) and the "tone" of Claude vs benchmarkmaxxing

This makes perfect sense. There are no real improvements anymore (just benchmaxxing), and they explain it by "pacing the frontier".

"The improvements are underwhelming for a model that, according to previous claims, should have replaced all knowledge work twice by now, but you know, it's just because we're pacing the frontier."

This IS pacing. Nobody said pacing would mean slow.

Pacing is very explicitly about RSI and similar training methods that will accelerate progress beyond our ability to comprehend it.

i think we shouldn't mix things here.

Opus 5.5 isn't the frontier, when they say 'pacing the frontier', it's about internal models not yet released, as they're probably one or two generations ahead already.

When they talk about pacing, they are referring to their dangerous competitors, particularly those evil open-sores and Chinese ones, not their lovely safe models because you can trust them to look after your interests.

What the big players are trying with the current calls to slow things down, is the standard capitalism practise of trying to engineer regulatory capture. TBH I'm surprised those calls are coming so soon - they must be really worried about running out of what little moat that they have.

If they were really about putting brakes on these, they would simply make these things non-agentic.

Simply make them something that derives a text response from its training data.

The amount of money spent on PR is insane.

Others must slow down, but not us.

a 1 minute mile pace

> we called for pacing the frontier.

Translation: our models are getting shittier each iteration and we ran out of ideas. Let's invent scary stories and hope investors will lap it up.

Idiotic.

"We made the incredibly tough decision to slow down development. Then after 4 days of twiddling our thumbs ... we present Opus 5.5"

I think a lot of outsiders interpret “pace the frontier” as slowing down, whereas the labs see AI improvements on track to accelerate dramatically and intend pacing as slowing the acceleration in capability improvements, rather than slowing down altogether.

kinda disingenuous. They include a whole section on pacing later on

It's laughable at this point. It feels like they're drumming up all this fear about imminent AI threats to emphasize the need to slow down, when in reality, the model progress seems already to be slowing down and has shifted to compute allocation (i.e. "how much compute do you want to throw at this prompt?"). All while continuing to tout benchmark records with each new release.

"pacing the frontier" is code for downgrading your expectations of AGI.

What an amazing excuse for lower than expected performance! Our models are slow because we're so ethical.

the only thing they are pacing is what models the permanent underclass are allowed to have in life.

that, they fully intend to 'pace'.

In any professional sport, anyone can lobby the rules committee for a rules change and hope for the best. Meanwhile if you can't get one, you play the game by the existing set of rules, and you play to win.

It seems like they are. I mean, this is similar in performance to Fable (ish). It seems like more focus on making existing capabilities more accessible.

“Pacing the frontier” sounds smarmy and weird, like the phrase was generated by Claude itself