If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know

https://jonready.com/blog/posts/claude-fable5-is-allowed-to-sabotage-your-app-if-youre-a-competitor.html

by mips_avatar • 1 month ago

1036 501 1 month ago

Related: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/10/if-claude-fable-stops-helping-you/

I'm really uncomfortable with these changes, like everything Anthropic's doing as "frontier research" today will be regular product engineering in a year.

tuggi• 1 month ago

It’s very frustrating…

mips_avatar8• 1 month ago

Like if you hired a different services company who decided to sabotage your business that would be fraud.

Guillaume86• 1 month ago

The EU could/should probably legislate against this, it's bonkers...

numpad0• 1 month ago

I don't understand how businesses could trust cloud LLMs going forward with this ongoing "safety" paranoia. Building dependence on them doesn't feel like a sane strategic decision for users.

cubefox• 1 month ago

It's not paranoia. Cyber attacks have gone up massively in the past few months even with the weaker models we had so far. And Claude Mythos 5 scores even higher than the unreleased Mythos Preview on ExploitBench. If you made this capability publicly available you would see another acceleration of cyber attacks.

extr3• 1 month ago

This isn't even about cyber attacks. This is just LLM development which is increasingly just called software development. And at least for cyber it says "Sorry I can't help with that"!

forshaper2• 1 month ago

Looking better and better for people to go after local solutions.

mcmcmc• 1 month ago

Tell that to the GPU market

thinkingtoilet2• 1 month ago

Because this effectively hinders 0% of people. I understand why people don't like it but day to day this is nothing. If you're using it for coding, it won't stop you. The pearl clenching here and over reacting is predictable and sad. If you are working for a large organization and you were going through the vendor procurement process, questions like Can this produce pornography? Can this tell my employees how to break the law? are normal and anyone wiht half a brain knows that this is the case. Before people jump on that, I understand people have access to the internet. Your question "how businesses could trust cloud LLMs going forward" is absurd and you know it. There is an extremely small set of edge cases that effect 0% of people day to day. You can trust them just fine.

gopher_space2• 1 month ago

This is software development, not sales. We rely on our tooling.

If I’m using a calculator to verify my math, I don’t want to use a second calculator to verify the first one.

jsw973• 1 month ago

My very first prompt to Fable, which was a completely benign math problem, hit one of their visible triggers. Many tokens into the problem, frustratingly. The user experience (read peer comments) is that you run into these issues with high frequency.

I guess, given that, a pro tip would be to err toward sequential work rather than giving monster prompts. That constraint has got to degrade quality though.

stale20022• 1 month ago

Of course you can trust them.

Just do benchmarks yourself on the new model and decide if it is valuable for your usecase, even with the supposed nerfing.

Benchmarks are benchmarks. And you can ignore the data at your own risk.

SXX6• 1 month ago

Problem that corruption is silent and service can be degraded at any moment or well, randomly.

baq4• 1 month ago

It isn’t about trust or no trust, it’s about having a capability to do stuff vs not having it. If Fable is the only model doing the right thing in your use case, your only choice is to use it or not. If the efficiency gain is 2x, it’s a hit you can probably take. If it’s 100x you pay up and shut up.

variety8675• 1 month ago

It is absolutely fine to distill the IP of everyone else, but you'd be violating the TOS to distill ours :)

mips_avatar8• 1 month ago

Fine for me. Not for thee

anematode2• 1 month ago

It's utterly bonkers. Hopefully the model weights get leaked. Then we can claim it's public domain or, at the very least, distill it and then release it for free.

matheusmoreira4• 1 month ago

That'd probably be the best outcome for all of humanity.

david_shi• 1 month ago

Is there a technical term for this phenomenon? Ladder pulling?

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

cyanydeez4• 1 month ago

"Capitalism"

ashleyn• 1 month ago

I believe the term is "hypocrisy."

matt_daemon• 1 month ago

NIMBYism

atmavatar• 1 month ago

Disney?

giancarlostoro• 1 month ago

Corporate espionage?

dofm2• 1 month ago

There are several domain-general four-letter terms.

ungovernableCat• 1 month ago

Machiavellianism

TZubiri2• 1 month ago

Closing the door behind you

teravor• 1 month ago

'pulling the ladder' is an action to sever the opportunity for others to climb after you.

they are merely engaged in self-serving rhetoric. can't even call this specifically hypocrisy because they aren't telling you not to train on on pirated content. just not their content.

ivanmontillam2• 1 month ago

Parasitic behaviour. Extractivism.

lwhi2• 1 month ago

Anti-competitive behaviour.

pocksuppet• 1 month ago

Capitalism?

HoldOnAMinute4• 1 month ago

"Venture Capital"

hedora12• 1 month ago

Yep. Demand open source approve licenses for LLM weights.

The Chinese apache 2.0 models might be censored, but at least they can’t sue you in the US for finding the censorship line.

OTOH, the US models are definitely censored, per TFA, and they’re making vague legal threats against anyone that encounters the censored edge of the model.

nextaccountic2• 1 month ago

the base models released to the public are not censored. censorship happens with another model, that isn't released

JoshTriplett5• 1 month ago

Demand open source approve licenses for LLM weights.

How would you solve, for instance, the problem in which AI models are capable of helping the average person build viruses (computer or human)?

"YOLO" is not a reasonable answer here.

I am a massive advocate of Open Source, and have been for 25+ years. These things should not exist, open or otherwise.

drowsspa• 1 month ago

Would be nice if people published the prompts, thoughts and responses of the LLMs together with the code, in order to fight against these restrictions... Instead of just publishing the final result and talking vaguely about how they prompted the LLM in a Hacker news comment or Twitter thread

If LLMs are the new compilers those are the actual source code

soraminazuki3• 1 month ago

Agreed with the need for transparency, but LLMs are anything but compilers. Compilers, by definition, produce semantically equivalent code from one language to another. If a tool's output lacks any defined semantics, it isn’t a compiler. Because how good is a "compiler" whose outputs are entirely undefined behavior?

typ• 1 month ago

It takes billions of investments for infrastructure, and a high-paying, top-notch team for R&D and operations. Not just a bunch of torrents of pirated books. Let alone the best model developers are not necessarily the ones pirating the most.

It's funny that Google, Meta, TikTok, OnlyFans, PornHub, and many other lucrative businesses never open-source their core business software, and people just don't bother about it with that moral standard, simply because we don't need to pay for the service (paid by ads, actually). To me, that is the hypocrisy.

whattheheckheck• 1 month ago

Bad for society

cute_boi• 1 month ago

I tried today and it gave cybersecurity error on base64 implementation. It is so nerfed....

mips_avatar8• 1 month ago

At least it gave an error! This whole silent nerfing idea is so wrong

iLoveOncall• 1 month ago

At this point you're criminally incompetent if you still feed your proprietary data and code to AI labs.

They legally can steal it all and now you can't use the product of this theft to improve your own systems.

thot_experiment3• 1 month ago

It's a SaaS, when in the history of SaaS has it ever been a good idea to trust that the company won't ruin the product under you?

booi• 1 month ago

I think there's a pretty big difference here. It's not like Github prevents you from building a Github competitor. Or Linear is preventing you from using it to build a Linear competitor.

This is more akin to Windows somehow preventing you from building a new OS.

Or worse yet, sabotaging vs preventing.

semiquaver2• 1 month ago

A surprising number of companies do include “you may not use the service we provide you to compete with us” in their terms of service.

(edit)

After a quick search the best example is Atlassian. It would (apparently, IANAL) break terms to plan a JIRA competitor using JIRA.

  > Customer must not (and must not permit anyone else to): [...] (d) use the Products to develop a similar or competing product or service

https://www.atlassian.com/legal/atlassian-customer-agreement

Also Salesforce. Their competitors are explicitly disallowed from using any of their services for any reason.

  > SFDC’s direct competitors are prohibited from accessing the Services, except with SFDC’s prior written consent.

https://www.salesforce.com/en-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/...

OsrsNeedsf2P• 1 month ago

This is more akin to Windows somehow preventing you from building a new OS.

Tangent, but have you tried repartitioning your Windows disk to make room for a new OS? Or tried to configure Windows to let you dualboot? Or get the clock time right if you dualboot? Or let you debug "Secure Boot"?

Windows is outright hostile when it comes to (sharing with) a new OS

rhubarbtree• 1 month ago

Most of the time, which is why SaaS has been very popular.

thot_experiment3• 1 month ago

In comparison to some absurdist baseline maybe, actual software NEVER stops working under you, so in comparison something like an works 80% "most of the time" is godawful. Though I would argue that with SaaS the trend is toward 100% likelyhood to fuck your shit up given enough time, and it has borne out this way in the real world time and time again. SaaS is popular because it allows companies to more effectively extort you for your dollars.

preg_match• 1 month ago

The popularity of SaaS was never derived from the products themselves, but rather business' weird aversion to doing in-house development. Most companies not in tech view software as literal magic, and act as if hiring some engineers could risk opening Pandora's box or something. Banks are particularly notorious for this; despite basically their entire business being done digitally, they treat software as a necessary evil, not as their underlying value.

But, the cost of in-house development just went down significantly. SaaS has always had a lot of broken promises. The thing is the software is never tailored to your use case, and you often have to integrate into your other tools anyway. And, you don't get to control the requirements, features, velocity, or bug fixes. Jira as a bug? Too bad I guess, hopefully it gets fixed eventually.

But the dirty secret is that companies are filled to the brim with bright-eyed aspirational employees, who want nothing more than to make their job easier and their company more efficient. The thing is they're doing it using cursed Excel workbooks on share drives. I think, in the near future, they'll be doing it with hand-rolled applications.

extr3• 1 month ago

Really funny to describe OpenAI/Anthropic as a "SaaS"

thot_experiment3• 1 month ago

Yeah, care to elaborate? I'm not seeing the joke.

Ifkaluva• 1 month ago

I guess an uncharitable way to read this might be “the ML engineers/scientists want to automate all of the jobs except their own.”

throwaway89864• 1 month ago

Insta-job security.

afavour• 1 month ago

The charitable read is that their restrictions for "safety" (i.e. what's separating Fable from Mythos) makes this inevitable. If you could just make your own Mythos it would circumvent the protection.

Which kinda just highlights how weird this situation is.

cyanydeez4• 1 month ago

"Haves" and "Havenots" is how they should be calling, init

colechristensen• 1 month ago

"Safety" is just marketing spin for their coming attempt at monetization based on exclusivity.

ricardobayes• 1 month ago

Getting major deja vu from like 10 years back when people were arguing 3D printers would 3D print other 3D printers.

pablogancharov• 1 month ago

“When you realize the goal is the path, the pursuit itself becomes the prize. Stones in the road are not obstacles blocking your path; they are the path”

now I understand distillation is much more important thank I thought

CrankyBear• 1 month ago

"Claude can now be silently nerfed. Anthropic has decided it won't tell users when this happens." W T F!!

noncoml• 1 month ago

Disillusioned CEOs convincing themselves they have the mandate and right to define morality for everyone else. They get to decide what is right, wrong, permissible, or dangerous from the top, in the name of "safety". This is corporate nannying.

themaninthedark• 1 month ago

You just have to force behavior...

https://youtube.com/shorts/QmGGUnZNqv4?si=Q4CsGsYMvR02vay8

miroljub• 1 month ago

It's dangerous when personal moral and religious beliefs of company leadership leaks into the product itself and get force fed upon customers.

maipen• 1 month ago

careful there cowboy, we are in the golden age of ai, regulation is still catching up.

You don't want to sell guns to people without some sort of background check. The amount of exploits found in the last few months have been pretty scary already.

This is just one more layer of caution, because it reveals how little we know how these llms work. They know how to make them, but they seem to be unable to properly restrain them.

__natty__• 1 month ago

This makes Fable unusable for me. If I cannot tell whether I am paying for the whole service or just a partial one, because somehow their guardrails have decided my work silently broke their terms of service, then I prefer to go to older models or alternatives

maxall42• 1 month ago

As someone who works in bioinformatics, and, as such, does a great deal of machine learning, this makes Fable unusable for me as well.

flexagoon• 1 month ago

Fable would be unusable for you in a more literal way, since it just directly refuses to answer any query even remotely related to biology

ivanmontillam2• 1 month ago

For sure Anthropic should be developing a model without these guardrails for your use case? Kinda like Mythos is only available to certain organizations.

varispeed3• 1 month ago

I am sure they've been doing that with Opus. I am getting mixed results all the time.

gowld• 1 month ago

If Claude gives me poor or incorrect advice while I’m working on an AI component, I have no way of knowing whether the model was confused, whether my problem is unsolvable, or if some invisible policy restriction quietly kicked in. Anthropic has explicitly chosen not to tell users when this is happening.

That's always been the case with corporate LLMs.

chroma_zone• 1 month ago

Minus the policy restrictions, this has always been true for all LLMs in general.

extr3• 1 month ago

I'm a big fan of Anthropic. Just check my post history. I've been accused of working there. But this is complete bullshit and they need to get real. Silent sandbagging is not acceptable, especially given they've shown with this release their safety filters have HUGE amounts of false positives.

zzleeper• 1 month ago

It's increasingly obvious that the only safeguard we got is open models and semi open ones like from China. Crazy world

comboy• 1 month ago

I'm fairly certain they were doing something similar already possibly with some quantizations and not for the good humanity but just trying to handle the increased usage. Not for API requests though, just subscription CLI usage.

Anvoker• 1 month ago

This kind of opacity is unacceptably user hostile. It's not okay to treat some amount of developers as acceptable casualties, without them even knowing, in order to help enforce a restriction that only serves Anthropic's interests. And if you want to tell me this is for managing the x-risk factor, I'm frankly unimpressed.

somesortofthing3• 1 month ago

This is a fun peek into the economic implications of RSI/ASI. Because it's so infinitely valuable that it basically destroys all markets, labs will eventually do stuff like stop releasing models completely and skipping out on contracted commitments because they'll have the power to just drive their competitors out of business before the legal battle gets expensive.

Cloud providers - at first smaller ones, then the hyperscalers - will follow suit, completely closing sales to anyone but the labs and demanding payment in equity/direct decision-making power rather than cash. There's no particular reason why the inference/training split has to be 80/20, and no amount of willingness to pay can help you in an event that turns your money worthless.

platinumrad5• 1 month ago

Nothing is infinitely valuable.

windexh8er3• 1 month ago

Especially when you can actively choose to not use Anthropic. They think they have a moat from all of the IP they've stolen. Just wait until there's nothing more to steal and the laws eventually turn against them. And let's be honest about these companies. It is very much Dario and Sam and Sundar and Mark and Peter and Elon and... These are the choices they are making and hopefully they are held accountable both legally and within society as a whole.

HoldOnAMinute4• 1 month ago

10 engineers can make a billion dollar company. One Claude can replace 10 engineers.

This gets very close to "infinitely valuable", it starts to look like a vertical line to me

somesortofthing3• 1 month ago

A market with only a single good makes that good infinitely valuable for exchange purposes. No trade can happen - everyone is just sitting on a big pile of the only thing that matters and they can only trade it for less of the only thing that matters.

stratos123• 1 month ago

I don't think this scenario makes sense. It's one of a class of scenarios I've seen several of, that simultaneously assume:

  A) ASI is developed and massively overshadows the rest of the world economy 
  B) the world still has rule of law, contracts, business, well-developed finance, etc

You can get to a lot of weird conclusions if you assume both A and B, but I think the much more likely scenario is that if A happens, B stops being true in short order. If you are a company and you have ASI, you just stop caring about business and money and economics, and your outcomes instead start looking like "you conquer the world" or "you upload the board of directors to a fleet of von Neumann probes" or "you messed up, everyone dies".

somesortofthing3• 1 month ago

There will be a brief(or, depending on the underlying rules of reality ASI uncovers, not-so-brief) period where A and B do overlap - we have superintelligence but still have to run experiments, manufacture robots, test new drugs in vivo, etc. That period is in and of itself dangerous for the labs, because many entities can just stop them by denying necessary inputs. For the labs to conquer the world, they'll need cooperation - from the state, from robotics companies, from compute companies, from the mining and energy and agriculture sectors.

There will be a period of time where markets attempt to run in a business-as-usual way while the transactions that matter happen as power-sharing arrangements - spots on the "AI Governance Board" or the "uploaded to von neumann probe" club. Markets will still matter in that the labs will need the state to overturn market obstacles to control of the world.

The existence of the A-B overlap also suggests to me that the US-China gap is less dire for China than it appears - they may be able to use their superior industrial, robotics, and scientific base to win the second leg of the race despite losing the first.

pixl975• 1 month ago

The combination of A and B is cyberpunk at its core, it takes off in the form of corporate consolidation and then control of the government. Large corporations will still have the rule of law between each other because they'll have both money and hard power. The average individual that wants to rise up against said corps will quickly be identified by ubiquitous surveillance and imprisoned/slave labor camped.

Meneth• 1 month ago

The "everyone dies" scenario is overwhelmingly likely given that no solutions to either inner or outer alignment exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment

kosh2• 1 month ago

Way before that it will become political. Regulation is the only true threat left anyways.

otabdeveloper43• 1 month ago

Because it's so infinitely valuable that it basically destroys all markets

We have 8 billion natural intelligences already. (Each of them more intelligent than any LLM.)

For some reason this didn't destroy all markets. There's also diverging opinion about infinite value.

trilogic• 1 month ago

https://huggingface.co/Trilogix1/Hugston-Nex-N2-Pro-gguf

darkbatman• 1 month ago

This is crazy and would be frustrating, I probably would just be using another model as authority and keep fable as reviewer only in this case.

derac• 1 month ago

Is there some consumer protection law around this?

antaviana• 1 month ago

It seems we now have a new product category, HaaS, Hallucination as a Service.

hmokiguess2• 1 month ago

I'm sure someone is gonna be able to jailbreak, abliterate, or equivalent, on this input moderation attempt they have going on.

skeledrew4• 1 month ago

Good luck getting around something when you have no idea how and when it affects you.

hmokiguess2• 1 month ago

How is that even possible? If you receive any kind of output, including no output, would you not be able to verify it?

torben-friis• 1 month ago

They have a silent nerfing system for their models and say so openly. The obvious question is how much it is being used already.

Competitor companies being nerfed?

Non Americans getting worse code?

Punishing and rewarding users to maximize engagement, like online games do affecting victories through matchmaking?

cyanydeez4• 1 month ago

$$$$$$: no nerf $$$$: a little nerf $$$: more nerf $$: are you poor? $: be permanent underclass

cyanydeez4• 1 month ago

hopefully no one thinks this is satire or a joke.

notrealyme1232• 1 month ago

This send chills down my spine. For now I will not use Fable in my research. The risks of being sabotaged by the model are not worth it.

canada_dry• 1 month ago

I re-subscribed to GPT's "PLUS" plan after ditching Anthropic for lack luster results... one of the first coding tasks I gave it resulted in a progress/thinking message that said something to the effect of (it vanished too quickly to get a screen shot unfortunately):

                   Evaluating client value

It took me aback. Note: the code had nothing to do with "client value".

Behind the scenes it is not hard to imagine OpenAI, Anthropic, et al simply minimizing processing for clients - like me - that are hopping from one to another to chase the just released SOTA model.

dannyw• 1 month ago

I wouldn’t over interpret this. It could be a bad summary of “what solution would be more valuable to the user?”

gck19• 1 month ago

No big pockets and ask it to review your own codebase for security issues? You hacker. Ban.

Anthropic simply can't be allowed to succeed. This is the most E Corp shit I've seen since I've been alive.

port113• 1 month ago

It’s not pretty, but if Anthropic is the E Corp of this timeline, we’re not being creative enough. There’s better targets out there for this comparison.

viking1234• 1 month ago

Amodei is worse psychopath than Altman, and by far

Culonavirus• 1 month ago

Careful, someone may drop another whine article about HN being anti-ai (meanwhile nothing can be further from the truth, HN is one of the most, if not THE most, pro-AI news agg sites out there)

skeledrew4• 1 month ago

Non Americans getting worse code?

This is a scary thought: tailoring quality based on user profile.

rrr_oh_man• 1 month ago

laughs in Google search

zombot• 1 month ago

If it doesn't happen already, politicians will mandate it. "We can't allow our enemies (foreign and domestic) to use our tools against us."

nullbio2• 1 month ago

All of the above, and it hasn't just started now. It's been happening for several years at this point.

Avicebron2• 1 month ago

Can't you just switch the toggle that says "switch models when a message is flagged"? I turned mine off in case anything does get flagged I will know..

For now, I'm really not happy about this limited rollout and then turning off. That's probably the most egregious thing I think Anthropic has done recently

platinumrad5• 1 month ago

This is a separate mechanism. The user is not notified about the flagging and rather than redirecting to a weaker model, the response is intentionally sabotaged.

It's user-hostile to the point of parody.

Avicebron2• 1 month ago

I stand corrected. That sucks. A lot.

CamperBob2• 1 month ago

We’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building ... distributed training infrastructure ...)

What an interesting thing to call out as a threat. Hmm.

mystraline2• 1 month ago

I have never ever trusted "corporate ethics".

Theres no ethical framework. No axioms. Its a mixture of legal, political, and public-facing 'rules'. And what are the rules? Youre not permitted to know.

"We reserve the right to lie about the models we provide, silently downgrade you, and give you blatant misinformation cause you triggered our unstated rules... BUT we'll still use your token budget with lots of thinking and waste your money."

No, folks. Seriously, local LLMs are where its at. You can run the model YOU want, on your hardware, with no data exfiltration.

And with tools like Krasis that can synthesize nvidia ram and system ram as unified-ish memory, makes doing Local LLMs absolutely foable, now!

hedora12• 1 month ago

The rules:

- Breaking fiduciary responsibility is (almost) the only way you go to jail.

- At acquisition/merger/bankruptcy, data, customers, employees (chattle) are assets to be sold off to pay debts. This takes explicit priority over contractual obligations (like “we don’t sell personal data”)

skeledrew4• 1 month ago

Running a decent-ish LLM is going to take 64GB+ RAM. Most users only have/can afford 8 or maybe 16GB RAM. Local LLMs for doing anything significant is impractical for the many.

mystraline2• 1 month ago

Most users only have/can afford 8 or maybe 16GB RAM.

Excuse me while I laugh.

Im not talking about the denizens of reddit or facebook here, who were suckered in buying a 8GB memory laptop in 2025 or 2026.

We're talking about hacker news users. Devs, engineers, and the like. 64GB seems the average for running IDEs like VSCod(e|ium) or running dockers for testing.

In 2024, I bought 2x48GB DDR5 for $300 on sale at Microcenter. The expensive (faster modules) were $500 off-sale. Now, prices are fucky. But ive always tried maxxing my memory. Always been the easiest performance gain.

My comment absolutely stands *for this audience*.

varispeed3• 1 month ago

That's what I observed with Opus. This is probably a lawsuit going to happen because you pay for tokens and you expect to get performance you pay for, instead you never know if the model suddenly become dumb and your whole session has to be started again.

mrinterweb• 1 month ago

It kind of sucks, but I get the silent change. If a user was trying to use the model for something untoward, having a rejected prompt would just give signal to train on how to eventually successfully bypass security measures.

m_krebs• 1 month ago

this is probably overstating their abilities at present - I am experimenting with Fable on a completely benign personal application and I am constantly hitting the "cybersecurity and biology topics" guardrail

BoorishBears• 1 month ago

"Anthropic says these safeguards only affect 0.03% of developers. Maybe that's true today."

I don't think it's true today. It's like when schools mention "average class size", where that average is dominated by classes with like 2 students instead of classes with 100.

Much more honest would be the percentage of developers who previously used their models for the model development tasks they're targeting, but it actually looks like they're saying 100% of them are affected based on the language around it "always having been prohibited".

So awful.

exabrial• 1 month ago

New frontier in anti-competitive practices.

tempestn• 1 month ago

If Claude gives me poor or incorrect advice while I’m working on an AI component, I have no way of knowing whether the model was confused, whether my problem is unsolvable, or if some invisible policy restriction quietly kicked in.

You should be able to know if your problem was solvable by using your own expertise and judgement, no? If you're relying on LLMs as a substitute for those, I wouldn't expect great results.

notrealyme1232• 1 month ago

You come up with a hypothesis -> you let fable implement it -> fable sabotages your experiment -> you get evidence that hypothesis is not true.

It's that simple.

hedora12• 1 month ago

Or, worse:

- It says your safety hypothesis is true, you incorrectly ship, killing lots of people.

- It proposes dangerous experiments.

hedora12• 1 month ago

No; once the LLM switches to this new saboteur mode, it’ll be very hard to detect.

Sabotage is an asymmetric weapon. The ratio of damage to effort is nearly unbounded, and any decent saboteur knows that the key trick is to make your output indistinguishable from incompetence.

They’re building state of the art offensive capabilities into a public model, then expecting to maintain control over when it decides to attack its human users.

The premise is laughable, and we’ve all seen how this movie ends.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 1 month ago

Great way for Anthropic to build trust with the military

atleastoptimal• 1 month ago

There is a possibility this may not end at simply nerfing the model. The idea of manipulating the behavior of a model depending on the prompt given to it can extend to

1. Detecting if employees from competing companies are using it and sabatoge their work, even not LLM-training related

2. Direct users to outcomes that would justify higher compute spend. Deliberately coding a project to 95% completion but designed to be losing a critical step right before one's weekly rate limit is expended

3. Reduce the quality of writing when a person is writing an essay where the argument is against the interests of the model company, or steering the user using the model for brainstorming in a direction which causes them to waste time or abandon their train of reasoning

etc. etc. The possibilities are enormous. Many people use AI daily for their job, personal advice, companionship. A model company that steers the behavior of the model towards a deliberate outcome could develop a controlling interest in human behavior and productivity at large, even with subtle influence would compound enormously over its millions of users.

matheusmoreira4• 1 month ago

This is terrifying.

dimitri-vs• 1 month ago

Anthropic: were commiting to being ad free.

Also Anthropic: if you use our models in any way that might negatively impact our revenue we'll sabotage you.

Can I pick the ads please?

maxbond• 1 month ago

The ad-supported alternative suffers from the same principle-agent problem. What's to stop an ad-supported model from declining to refer you to products that would be better for your use case but who's vendors haven't paid the model's provider?

Ultimately if you can't trust the provider it is game over and you don't have an alternative other than to move to self hosted and open source solutions.

DonsDiscountGas4• 1 month ago

You sure can, by not using Claude code.

mickdarling• 1 month ago

No, this is their get out of jail free card if people start complaining about the model being dumb or forgetful or lying, they can just say, oh well, you must have been doing something that triggered its distillation prevention technique.

And, they can say that for anybody at any time, and you'll never know why, and there's no way to prove it.

Everyone needs a flight data recorder to prove... "here's what I was actually doing and why it was not distillation." And now you're having to prove your innocence instead of them having to prove you're guilty, and really at the end of the day, it's just the model being stupid that they're protecting themselves from.

jkxyz• 1 month ago

"To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science." - Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem

This immediately made me think of the Sophons silently manipulating the sensors of particle accelerators to prevent humanity from developing advanced knowledge of particle physics.

delichon• 1 month ago

The level of oppression necessary to get software geeks to stop making progress on AI is similar to that necessary to get Ukrainian geeks to stop making progress on drones.

xyzsparetimexyz• 1 month ago

Not so sure those things are equivalent

NewJazz• 1 month ago

Even if our oppressors are ineffective, we must still resist them and not underestinate them.

sometimelurker4• 1 month ago

unless you could convince them that making smarter-than-human AI is bad. it would be nice if we all thought this. instead they should figure out how to make dumb models faster or more efficient, that's safe

mylifeandtimes• 1 month ago

and my mind went to the current US administration. Sigh. You made the better choice.

mike-cardwell• 1 month ago

I spend a lot of time telling Opus 4.8 to search for security bugs in the code it wrote, and it spends a lot of time finding them, and then fixing them. Fable wont let me fix the security issues that Opus 4.8 created.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 1 month ago

Yeah, this breaks the notion that the technical debt you're accumulating with today's AI can be fixed by tommorrow's AI.

Tomorrows AI may either refuse, or silently mess up your code because Anthropic don't like what you're working on.

soraminazuki3• 1 month ago

Yup, you always have to consider the modus operandi of the tech industry when listening to the utopian dream that very same industry is espousing.

gck19• 1 month ago

All you need is a little bit more money, a few millions will do, and you're on board with access to non-nerfed model. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

tomwphillips• 1 month ago

Can you elaborate what you mean by "won't let me fix"? What happens when you try to?

DonsDiscountGas4• 1 month ago

Not the OP but my Fable says something to the effect of "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave" and very obviously (not secretly) downgrades to Opus. I work in life sciences.

cayley_graph• 1 month ago

Intentionally and silently sabotaging work done with Claude whenever Anthropic decides it is appropriate is unacceptable behavior, and comically tone deaf given the state of open models. Why on earth would I ever pay for a malicious product?

hbarka• 1 month ago

I think this is a bit hyperbolic. Fable will fall back to Opus.

MichaelNolan• 1 month ago

Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through …

No it won’t fall back to Opus, they will purposely return dumbed down or tainted information with the goal of the end user not knowing the results have been impacted.

schrijver• 1 month ago

That’s a separate mechanism, and it will tell you so if it does (if the prompt is remated to cybersecurity, biology)

SwellJoe9• 1 month ago

The moat looks deep today but it's going to become more shallow every year.

Training a new model from scratch takes serious resources. Post-training/fine-tuning an existing model, dramatically less. The knowledge for the process was esoteric two years ago, now you can ask a current model (one of several) to walk you through it, while building the tools to do it as you go. Several of my recent weekend projects have been exactly that sort of thing, just so I understand it better. "Let's make a LoRA", "let's generate a corpus of training data for fine-tuning a model for X task", "how can I put my face in a text-to-image model?" stuff like that. All of this is do-able on kinda modest local hardware (a couple of old GPUs or a Strix Halo or DGX Spark or big Mac Studio), or for a few bucks or a few hundred bucks or a few thousand bucks of cloud compute, depending on scale.

Scale that up to corporate or startup scale, with the money that's been flowing into AI for the past couple/few years, and it's obviously there's going to be a lot of competition just as the top model makers need to start ringing the cash register. That's a lot of opportunities for people to look at their ballooning Claude usage costs and find other ways to do the same thing for drastically less money. $100/month or $200/month is a no-brainer for Claude Code with probably the best model for coding, but they're pushing more users to usage-based billing which becomes cost-prohibitive real fast.

So, they desperately need to continue to be among the only ways to solve the hardest problems, and they need the alternatives to cost a similar amount. They can count on OpenAI and Google to ratchet up prices, too. They probably can't count on everybody, especially the vendors in China with different economics, to do it. And, they can't count on companies to look at their own usage and not ask, "Can we train a smaller specialist model that does this one thing we're using the Anthropic API most heavily for?"

I'm hoping they just mean stuff like using Claude for distillation by e.g. Chinese model makers, and not "how do I fine-tune Gemma 4 to write more like me?" or whatever.

hedora12• 1 month ago

What moat? There are multiple companies providing pareto-optimal frontier models, and it takes O(10) people to build one of these things.

The rest is capital intensive, and the price will approach the cost of production over time.

Thinking this is a profitable endeavor is equivalent to claiming coal plants have good margins because boilers are expensive.

SwellJoe9• 1 month ago

I think we agree?

What moat? You answered yourself: "capital intensive"

But, history says the supercomputer of today will fit in your pocket in a few years.

They've bought up all the RAM and GPUs, which pushes the capital requirements upward for everyone else. But, they can't corner the market forever, there are too many competing interests. AMD and Intel keep making new GPUs and APUs. The memory makers can't just sell to only AI companies forever, if they do Chinese manufacturers will move in and eventually eat them from below (as has happened many times before).

They have a moat today, and it's just that it's really expensive to train and host frontier models, especially at commercial scale. It used to be there was also some secret sauce to making it fast and efficient. But, secret sauce is being published daily by all sorts of researchers, folks are figuring out how to do more with less and it often finds its way into llama.cpp or vLLM or SGLang within days or weeks.

redox99• 1 month ago

O(10) people?

jatora5• 1 month ago

Other models arent even close except for gpt 5.5. You're dead wrong on that. You read too many benchmarks and/or chinese propaganda. There hasn't been a serious contender in agentic SWE besides OAI and anthropic for a long time, and no chinese model has even reached opus 4.5 performance yet. The moat isnt insurmountable but it is very solid for at least a 12 month lead time. Which is such an insane amount of time in this landscape and industry. The moat is stretching, not shrinking, on agentic SWE. And that is literally the only moat that matters for RSI.

whiplash4513• 1 month ago

it takes O(10) people to build one of these things

To build a working prototype, sure. To operate at production scale, definitely not. The same rule would apply to WhatsApp and many other world-scale products. Turns out that, the moment you need to monetize these machines, your O(10) stops working.

iplaymyowngames• 1 month ago

The moat looks deep today

Does it? What can this model do that I both want and cannot already do?

Anthropic made a nice little post saying how dangerous it is, because it is good enough to eat their own business. But I don't want to eat their business. They also said it was good at playing Slay the Spire, but I can't think of anything more insulting than have a machine do that in my place. That's MY comfort game, not something for a stupid Clanker to take away.

They did not provide any other use case.

Ferret7446• 1 month ago

The moat is not the model, it's the harness. I wager that's one of the main reasons why Google made Antigravity closed source.

dudisubekti2• 1 month ago

But harness is relatively easy to code yourself?

They're just system prompt composer, with some tool functions that the LLM can invoke. I've vibe coded my own in just one day.

SwellJoe9• 1 month ago

I don't feel strongly about anything most folks are arguing back and forth about, but this one is obviously wrong.

Everybody and their brother has made an agent. There are toolkits. You can whip one up in an afternoon.

Not only that, I've found models often perform worse, or at least cost more and take longer, in a big complicated agent like Claude Code, including Anthropic models. They want proprietary doodads hanging off the side (multi agent orchestration, memory, things of that nature) to matter, because they can lock you into tools like that. But, top models can do everything with bash.

turtlesdown11• 1 month ago

Could you explain your analogy here, what does a moat have to do with a harness?

ian_holt• 1 month ago

Unfortunately this has been happening almost forever. You can spend 10s of thousands of $$ design, prototyping, building & marketing anything, whether a physical product or software & some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.

As a result, the other countries import more stuff "because it is cheaper" and eventually local manufacturing dwindles away to virtually nothing. That is the case here in Australia. Our manufacturing base has shrunk to stuff all compared to what we had 30 years ago & as a result we are poorer as a nation for it

DeathArrow3• 1 month ago

Unfortunately this has been happening almost forever. You can spend 10s of thousands of $$ design, prototyping, building & marketing anything, whether a physical product or software & some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.
As a result, the other countries import more stuff "because it is cheaper" and eventually local manufacturing dwindles away to virtually nothing. That is the case here in Australia. Our manufacturing base has shrunk to stuff all compared to what we had 30 years ago & as a result we are poorer as a nation for it

Then the companies in that country need to learn how to be more competitive and governments need to learn how not to overregulate, overtax and raise barriers.

Joker_vD• 1 month ago

some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.

Yeah, it's called competition. It existed even in the socialist countries (where is was called "socialist competition/emulation").

loeg• 1 month ago

What makes you say usage billing is cost prohibitive? I use as much flagship model as I could possibly want and it's like four figures a month. That's totally doable compared to SWE pay.

mips_avatar8• 1 month ago

Given that Anthropic has never released anything open weights I wouldn’t count on the fact that they view finetuning Gemma 4 as something allowable. I think they think nobody other than Anthropic should have AI

psychoslave2• 1 month ago

There is no training from scratch though. It's kind of, "first create the universe" framing pretention. All models rely heavily on the large corpus that humanity built through large span of time. And of course humanity didn't create the condition of its emergence.

whiplash4513• 1 month ago

The moat looks deep today but it's going to become more shallow every year.

Unless the frontier labs start nerfing their models, which is exactly what seems to be happening.

The counter-point to your argument is a future where less and less un-nerfed open-source frontier models exist. Sure, China/Meta might keep commoditizing their complement by releasing un-nerfed models, but these come with their own limitations too.

I am worried that the door to great open-source frontier models might be closing by the day now.

shaky-carrousel• 1 month ago

A nerfed model is a useless model which makes the moat shallower, not deeper.

andrewchambers• 1 month ago

So this is what 'alignment' looks like to them.

nharada• 1 month ago

Imagine if Github said "if we detect you're building a competitor to Github, we will silently degrade the results of your CI actions so that tests sometimes randomly fail"

lelanthran• 1 month ago

I bet it's more a case of trying to cut down the competition so that there is not a large distillation just before they IPO.

Everything the large LLM providers do now, I view it through the lens of "how does this impact their IPO?"

idle_zealot• 1 month ago

I currently have Fable set on cleaning up the work of smaller models to bring my code up to standards I'd feel comfortable developing on manually. Y'know, for when they decide I don't get to use it anymore.

greatgib• 1 month ago

Imagine if code editors were created by greedy **** behaving as Anthropic, and it would not have been allowed to create other code editors using an existing code editor. Or even better, you couldn't use Bash, zsh, ... to create another cli prompt input tool like Claude Code...

Artoooooor• 1 month ago

It is as if Jetbrains told that "you can't use IntelliJ Idea to develop frontier IDE. We can introduce slight compilation errors if we detect you doing so".

mips_avatar8• 1 month ago

Thats exactly it

kajman• 1 month ago

Chilling. They could break my Gradle and I would hardly notice.

pprotas2• 1 month ago

No one breaks my Gradle except me!!

HoldOnAMinute4• 1 month ago

Modern-day Stuxnet

vdfs• 1 month ago

It would be runtime errors

skeptic_ai• 1 month ago

That’s too easy. Would be nicer memory leaks, intertwined spaghetti code, time dead bombs, bugs based on time

throwawayffffas• 1 month ago

we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design).

Dig that moat son, we would want to automate our job away.

sneilan1• 1 month ago

I am so happy that Anthropic has signaled the possibility that their UI moat for agentic AI is copyable by competitors. At least that's the way I read this. When companies try to lock something down it can be a signal of weakness.

If so, it's possible to built great user interfaces in Chatbots and more companies/people can have amazing agentic development workflows! We don't have to live in a world where only the market leader has the most enjoyable model.

dofm2• 1 month ago

PRODUCT VIOLATION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr3t1uZNbKo

DIRECTIVE 4: [Classified]

Any attempt to arrest a senior officer of OCP results in shutdown.

—

Putting aside my snark, is Anthropic actually anticipating some new expansion of ITAR? (Or a stipulation for the Trump administration taking/not taking a share?)

That is to say, do they expect to be told that they must have this mechanism, not just the terms?

tomaytotomato• 1 month ago

"You have 20 seconds to comply"

prmph• 1 month ago

Wow, this is like saying:

If you buy a car from us, you agree not use it driving to and from work that involves automotive R&D that might compete with our product. And if our (heavily spying) car detects you are violating this, it will slow down to 20mph and cannot be made to go any faster, until we are sure the violation has ceased.

If you buy a laptop from us, you agree not to use it to study or acquire any knowledge that you may use to compete against us. If the laptop detects such a use, it degrades to one core and 4GB of memory, until the violation stops.

SauntSolaire2• 1 month ago

Or "we'll ship our code as binary blobs so you can't reverse engineer it".. oh, wait

Paracompact• 1 month ago

This impacts the functioning of the product, not the form of the product.

porphyra• 1 month ago

If your car slows down to 20mph you'd instantly know. If Claude silently switches to dumb mode, you might not even realize.

8note• 1 month ago

we notice when anthropic thinks it's kept claude smart while degrading for capacity. we will definitely notice when they purposefully make it dumb

DonsDiscountGas4• 1 month ago

You'll notice by the crappy output assuming you're paying any attention at all

skeledrew4• 1 month ago

It was good while it lasted. Time for me to resume my migration to another provider. One that promotes an open ecosystem, even if I can't opt out of them using my data to train. Heck I'll actively GIVE them my data and do my part in promoting openness, tiny though it may be. DeepSeek and GLM looking damn fine for a start.

hsaliak• 1 month ago

Big Monsanto energy

agnosticmantis2• 1 month ago

Governments need to stop contracting these companies and instead invest in public, fully open source models.

These companies are owned and operated by the darkest of dark triads our species has managed to evolve. I doubt Dario is self-aware enough to realize the hypocrisy in all of this safety theater.

Personally I don't even mind that they are anticompetitive and power-hungry (same as it ever was), but it's the cringe-worthy hypocrisy that grinds my gears. This new brand of self-righteous paternal savior overlords is just unbearable.

6510• 1 month ago

Reads like, permanently shadow ban.

TZubiri2• 1 month ago

If I understand correctly, this is to protect against distillation Reverse Engineering like Deepseek vs OpenAI.

Levitating• 1 month ago

I don't know why anyone is surprised with this, it's their product it's going to behave on their terms. If anything it is surprising that they're admitting to it.

If these interventions create demand for a model with fewer safeguards surely a competitor will meet that demand.

kingcauchy3• 1 month ago

The silently never telling you is so insidious on top of it being ridiculous given how they trained the model in the first place. We do distributed model training for embedder/reranker models and I'd deeply resonate that this article's message exactly for our company. We couldn't trust the model in the first place, but now the model is intentionally burning our money if we asked it the wrong question, on top of being deeply expensive in the first place. If we did find evidence of being incorrectly nerfed, we'd never be able to reach a human to let them know. Too many reverse incentives with Anthropic, maybe they're about AI security but that doesn't make them ethical to consumers (i.e. humans).

zoogeny3• 1 month ago

It is very difficult to see this move as anything other than Anthropic pulling the ladder up behind itself. They can dress it up in "safety" all they want, I find it hard to interpret this in a charitable way.

This reminds me of how dark-pattern common wisdom in Web 1.0 website development was to ban external links. Then how social apps prevented the export of data and actively worked to nerf significant interoperability through APIs.

But this is a tool, not just a data moat. Like a knife that degrades your ability to create knives. Or like a text editor that prevents you from implementing a text editor.

teaearlgraycold2• 1 month ago

It turns out the most dangerous thing is competition.

mips_avatar8• 1 month ago

Margin compression is terrifying

andrekandre• 1 month ago

thats because competition is only for loosers

jknoepfler• 1 month ago

There is a rather specific irony in pulling up the ladder when your roof is on fire...

kingcauchy3• 1 month ago

It's also hard to imagine them not doing this with any of the products they're building. "You can't use Claude to build an agent because that competes with Claude Code, you can't use Claude to build a design tool because that competes with Claude Design, you can't use Claude to build an email tool because that competes with Cowork."

rzmmm• 1 month ago

I think it's part of their marketing. Anthropic is not really ahead of other labs but these releases make it seem like they are reaching singularity

willsmith723• 1 month ago

I don't see it as a ladder at all, unless you claim Anthropic built their own models by training off of other closed frontier models, violating those models' ToS

reissbaker7• 1 month ago

They trained their models on everyone's data on the internet, and certainly violated many website terms of service.

zoogeny3• 1 month ago

Imagine you are in the shower one day and you come up with the sketch of a possible innovation on model architecture, however there are some fine details and tricky implementations that you need to do in order to test it out. So you fire up Claude Code and describe your idea and ask it to provide some reflection on the idea and work out some proof-of-concept code.

In this scenario, this is your idea. You aren't "training off of other closed frontier models" in a distillation sense. This is your insight, your idea, possibly gained from reading a lot of papers and built on your own experience.

How do you feel if the model refuses? Do you consider the scenario I described a violation of someone else's rights?

ndhbxyd• 1 month ago

Only the priest is allowed into the sanctum is a rule that is as old as society. It is created for one reason but gets violated for another. The human mind is made of layers to handle predictions over different time horizons. Due to unpredictability in the universe contradictions between layers will keep arising. We make up stories to cope. So there is Control and there is Illusion of Control.

reissbaker7• 1 month ago

It's becoming extremely important to support open-source AI, especially legally. Anthropic is willing to go totalitarian this quickly; imagine how much worse they'd be willing to do with government-granted monopolies that ban open-source competition (like they've repeatedly pursued).

It's a little shocking and gruesome how quickly they're willing to tip their hand. They want to replace all software engineering with their own product, and then silently kill anyone making competing software. What other products will they launch in the future? Better hope you aren't in a space they want into: they'll cut your legs out from under you.

Oh, and training on your data from the internet? Ha ha. Terms of service apply to other people, not them. Parasites.

sometimelurker4• 1 month ago

like they've repeatedly pursued).

source?

ai_fry_ur_brain• 1 month ago

Open source doesnt matter if you still need to make 100k year to have your own mediocre model.

There is no magic compression. There is no magic post training. Your phone or laptop will never do what you think its going to be able to.

There are limits to what consumer hardware will ever be able to run, in its current form. Open source isn't going to save us if they gatekeep access to hardware, which idk if you've been paying attention. They dont plan on making consumer grade hardware more powerful, they want to rent that power to you.

Technological serfdom is coming if they get their way.

alvah• 1 month ago

It does make you wonder about the "E" part of the EA cultists who infest that particular company.

AgentME• 1 month ago

They believe they're going to eventually develop AI that's capable of recursive self improvement into world-redefining super-intelligence. I wouldn't expect someone in that position to risk giving away their lead. I expect we're going to see more of the top labs selectively holding back their best stuff.

zoogeny3• 1 month ago

I accept your point, in the sense that I wouldn't suggest that they have any obligation to share their own research.

What seems to be different here, is that they are saying they won't let you use their tool to do your own research.

It is a subtle but important difference. They aren't saying "we have secret sauce we won't share", they seem to be saying "we will prevent the tool you are paying for from independently creating a competing idea".

bigbadfeline6• 1 month ago

It is very difficult to see this move as anything other than Anthropic pulling the ladder up behind itself.

It's worse than that, it also exempts from examination and competition some areas of science and technology while sterilizing others and emptying them from human participation. None of this is good for anyone except a very narrow circle of people.

Then, it creates a precedent where private entities decide who will be allowed access to what knowledge. Instead of government regulation, private corps will be "fighting crime" by dumbing down and spying on the people they don't like.

I don't think this Soylent Green strategy is a coincidence, it's been predicted and depicted, the social forces leading there are plainly visible to anyone capable of independent thought.

Open science can't come soon enough, unsubscribing is the best option until then.

root_axis2• 1 month ago

It's the inevitable end game. If the models ever become practically useful in a closed loop, there's no other choice except to keep the model private and use it to compete directly with their current enterprise customers.

edot• 1 month ago

Wow, this is horrible. Local LLMs are the future. Thanks, China! Seriously crazy that I’m saying that, but the American companies are being so anti-freedom they’re making the CCP look libertarian.

Also, Fable’s sensing is hypersensitive. Feels like they just have regex for phrases. No nuance. If I say I’m working on something using “GPUs to train” xyz then, will that trigger this sneaky silent screw-my-stuff-up mode?

capevace• 1 month ago

has dario (or sam tbh) ever been thoroughly asked about the hypocrisy of them claiming distillation to be „theft“ vs. them training on the copyright of others?

I’ve only seen him talk about one of those topics, but never together.

I just can’t see how you can talk yourself out of that hypocrisy, if BS answers are properly followed up on (journalism!)

anankaie• 1 month ago

Moreover, the Library of Congress ruled that LLM outputs are not copyrightable, so technically, Anthropic has even less claim here.

FeteCommuniste2• 1 month ago

Distilling the entirety of thousands of years of human intellectual output: totally cool.

Distilling the answers of one LLM: totally uncool.

viking1234• 1 month ago

Media is fake and controlled by the powerful, they will never ask this

anematode2• 1 month ago

I'm not normally a fan of ex post facto law, but...

morpheos137• 1 month ago

I wonder if this would qualify as illegal anticompetitive behavior?

_0ffh• 1 month ago

No at least we know why they spent all that money on "safety research".

lwhi2• 1 month ago

The part that disturbs me most, is that the model won't reveal you've reached the threshold.

It's literally been designed to gaslight its users in these cases.

kingcauchy3• 1 month ago

"We won't use this product to spy or build weapons but you'll have to trust us, but we're also going to intentionally lie to you when you break our terms of service but trust us."

altcognito3• 1 month ago

I suspect we'll get the same behavior from Codex, even if they don't openly say as much. Maybe they'll openly lie and say "noooo, we'd never do such a thing"

More efforts to get more data and processing power behind local models.

manoDev• 1 month ago

Linux killed proprietary UNIX; open source models will kill proprietary AI.

jesse_dot_id• 1 month ago

Will be funny when I can call the Office of Weights and Measures on Anthropic because they underweighted the model I was paying for and got pwned because the dumber one missed something.

wookmaster• 1 month ago

Skeptical they’re even able to pull up a ladder there’s so many more models out there making great progress just behind them.

jsw973• 1 month ago

Given the high rate of false positives people are reporting for the non-silent cybersecurity, biological, etc., safeguards, there is a strong likelihood that you will encounter silently nerfed behavior even if you are _not_ violating their TOS.

Ultimately this will be evident in the way customers / external benchmarkers experience Fable. Hopefully competition will drive future models toward a lower false positive rate. Until that happens, Mythos and Fable users seem likely to have pretty divergent experiences.

nsingh23• 1 month ago

It's such an obviously bad policy, it's mind-boggling that they thought this was a good idea. It just breeds paranoia and mistrust, especially when people are already a bit paranoid about silent model quantification for cost cutting reasons.

KennyBlanken2• 1 month ago

Another "knob" is reducing the thinking time...

SXX6• 1 month ago

Its not pranoia when entity you are dealing with cant be trusted and will do everything to abuse your trust.

llelouch3• 1 month ago

What's the alternative? Not release the model at all?

"Make the guardrails better" isn't very hard and probably not worth the effort.

SamvitJ• 1 month ago

Do you mean "quantization" not quantification?

KennyBlanken2• 1 month ago

If a benchmark is affected the model owner will almost certainly tune it, so there will be a game of cat and mouse...

Honestly, wouldn't surprise me if the AI companies try to detect benchmarking. Most hardware companies do...

azalemeth• 1 month ago

I'm a medical physicist. I use the word nuclear a lot. Opus is fine (well, 99% of the time - I've certainly hit the CBRN filters a few times and even been invited to email anthropic about the false positives).

Fable has literally refused to work on any of my problems (even those about fluid dynamics!) and just tells me that I'm violating anthropic's AUP.

jsw973• 1 month ago

This problem is compounded by the fact that you can be banned (really by any provider) based on an algorithm, and the methods for restoring your account seem like they do not function as well as might be desired. So be careful with your queries, basically, or you might get locked out.

imrehg• 1 month ago

I encountered this when I was checking why my gluten-free bread came out the bread machine the way it did. I guess it latched onto some yeast-related points and it fell back to Opus...

Having said that, on this query I've seen very little difference in the quality, there's nothing to be "2x as good on" for the "2x quota usage", so shrugs?

supriyo-biswas• 1 month ago

I mean, the other day I got blocked from Claude for asking about releasing genetically modified sterile mosquitoes; I'm sure everything will be totally fine as Anthropic's restrictions are completely reasonable, measured and appropriate.

ashley95• 1 month ago

Has it finally come time that I have to be nice to Claude?

amdivia2• 1 month ago

Aren't there immense security risks when the model is allowed to deceive even if it was for "good"?

Reminds me of an excerpt from Edward Fredkin's "The intelligent machine" [1]

https://noor.imx.sh/2017/09/30/when-they-communicate-they-co...

amdivia2• 1 month ago

(can't edit the above but for future references, this doesn't seem to be by Edward Fredkin, and I couldn't find "The intelligent machine" as the article states

Still, this is a pre-LLM era copy-pasta it seems, and the idea within it is still relevant)

djfergus• 1 month ago

We need a benchmark that tests a models ability to do LLM research.

mohamedkoubaa• 1 month ago

PSA: Treat these models like genius interns.

dgudkov• 1 month ago

"We collect everyone's data without paying a dime or respecting copyright, trained our models, but you can't train your models on our models that are trained on everyone's data collected without paying a dime or respecting copyright. We did a hard job stealing that all data and processing it, have some shame!"

sometimelurker4• 1 month ago

been thinking, and ngl, this has probably already been happening in their models. I'm sure the other labs probably do the same.

just self host at this point

gck19• 1 month ago

Wait, so to get this straight, Anthropic knows:

1) LLMs are non-deterministic

2) This class of models has a particular tendency to "misbehave"

3) Their classifiers have a high rate of false positives

4) Millions of people give these models access to their machines

And they still decided to specifically train this model to sabotage work if it thinks the work may be in competition with Anthropic?

I think this has a name. I think it may be called malware.

creativeSlumber• 1 month ago

... that you pay to install on your machine.

novaomnidev• 1 month ago

That is the perfect description. malware! What is sad is that there is no going back from this. Now that we know that they do this, I'll never believe they aren't doing it in other domains, or won't extend it to other domains in the future. This is probably the worst thing they could have possibly ever done for trust.

helsinkiandrew• 1 month ago

Startups train embedding models. They build rerankers. They finetune and host small llms.

Isn’t that prohibited without permission from Anthropic: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12326764-can-i-use-my...

nsingh23• 1 month ago

This isn't about training on the output tokens from Anthropic models, it's just about using their models to build things like pretraining pipelines, etc. Even if you train on your own data.

From the phrasing, it might as well be that any ML or infra. related work that even incidentally looks like it could be used to train LLMs may trigger a silent nerf.

charlie90• 1 month ago

Epic. I love the future where everyones dependent on AI and you can just get shadow banned from reality.

dhbradshaw• 1 month ago

I think evals are the key here. If your fable system fails them, it's a bad system for your use case. If not, compare cost with other systems that also succeed.

davesque• 1 month ago

And they probably don't enforce those restrictions within their own company would be my guess.

code_duck2• 1 month ago

This is the way tech companies have been dealing with perceived abuse for years, at least a decade. Instead of telling you what a problem is, they'll just say "something went wrong". Theoretically this is to prevent bad actors from learning the bounds and how to abuse a system. It is similar to shadow banning.

gblargg2• 1 month ago

Sounds like this one just silently corrupts the results. It's more like when YouTube shadow deletes your comments without any notification, it's just gone after a few minutes.

code_duck2• 1 month ago

From what I've observed, 1-2 years ago if you were timed out or hidden (banned) on a live stream, YouTube would show a "you've been timed out or hidden" message above the commenting box. Then it seems they changed that to simply showing your comments as if they were posted successfully, but nobody else can see them, i.e. shadow banning. It's rather obvious on channels with text-to-speech because the TTS bot doesn't say your comments. You can also sign in with another account and see your comment doesn't appear. This involves both automated filtering by YouTube, filtering set up by the channel owner or managing mod, and moderator actions. It's a pretty annoying way to do things.

jadar• 1 month ago

I’ve already had Fable disable itself during a normal /code-review skill invocation. What a joke.

0xbadcafebee• 1 month ago

OpenAI already did this when it released its "super scary advanced" security model. They silently return an earlier model's results if they think you're redteaming/abusing with it. https://openai.com/index/scaling-trusted-access-for-cyber-de...

llelouch3• 1 month ago

They din't get as much pushback because they aren't the leader.

hatthew• 1 month ago

I work on "AI" stuff. Not LLMs, but large neural nets that include transformers and are as big as the smaller LLMs of today. Half the prompts I give fit their category of examples like "building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design." I generally don't trust AI and have been very slow to trust and adopt it, but recently I've been warming up to it as part of my coding workflow.

Now with this, it makes me wonder if I should step back? Should I try to get used to a non-claude model/harness? Should I go back to less AI in my workflow? Either way, it makes me less inclined to pay for tokens from claude.

7e• 1 month ago

Any market that Anthropic suddenly thinks is valuable will silently and suddenly be off limits to you. They will train their model on your prompts, and then become your competitor.

josh-wrale• 1 month ago

It strikes me that Karpathy's Auto Research loop might trigger this...

asveikau• 1 month ago

Aw shucks. You might turn out to need to do your own work. That would turn out so horrible for you.

gblargg2• 1 month ago

Seems like this will backfire. Now when developers encounter problems with Claude Fable, they will have an easy explanation: it did it deliberately and intentionally vaguely. There's no way to falsify it. It's reasonable to expect it to get false positives and invoke this when it shouldn't be.

moezd2• 1 month ago

Wait until it flags duplicate code as a reason to stop, then a library owner could halt code generation entirely, and then another library owner could ask to be prioritised in the selection phase. Infinite money glitch, and you only get to use code that's endorsed by Claude today (subject to change tomorrow, or 5 minutes, so say goodbye to your evals), not the most performant or making the most sense in your refactoring.

sva_• 1 month ago

People were worrying that models might one day become 'intelligent' enough to try and deceive people. Seems like most of us (me included) didn't consider they'd intentionally be trained to do exactly that.

Although the statement should probably be read in the light of an upcoming IPO.

egillie• 1 month ago

Will my centrifuges start being just a little off?

sharadov• 1 month ago

What is stopping the US government from stepping in and nationalizing these companies?

They've already talked about taking a stake - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/us-officials-eye...

Trump took a 10% stake in Intel.

These models are getting very close to that line.

pton_xd• 1 month ago

Amazing. Next year you'll need to be nice to Claude and praise the geniuses working at Anthropic to maintain full productivity.

dolebirchwood• 1 month ago

And promise not to cheat on him with any other model providers. I can hear the wedding bells already.

vhantz• 1 month ago

If Claude gives me poor or incorrect advice while I’m working on an AI component, I have no way of knowing whether the model was confused, whether my problem is unsolvable, or if some invisible policy restriction quietly kicked in.

Yeah I think there are ways to know, ways involving less dependence on a LLM.

thepasch• 1 month ago

Yeah I think there are ways to know, ways involving less dependence on a LLM.

This kills the entire value prop of using LLMs as research accelerators, though.

gardnr• 1 month ago

This really sucks. Given how bad their regexes were in their leaked code, I am guessing this will get triggered all the time when I am fine tuning a model or doing work with datasets. The fact that there's no feedback means I can't trust the tools.

Goofy_Coyote• 1 month ago

So it's essentially saying we can train models that put your jobs at risk (not saying it's correct or not), but you're not allowed to threaten our perceived moat?

lynx97• 1 month ago

I was about to sign up for an Anthropic account. This article and the text it quotes changed my mind. Apparently, my reasons to avoid this company are real. Thanks for the heads up.

diimdeep• 1 month ago

1990s: "What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

2026: /s "What a LLM is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds, but for your mind it's a rental unicycle that will break apart under you if you pedal towards your own bicycle factory"

This wanna be cloud feudal lord likes to imagine that AI access is not yet freely tradable good, and his virtual digital peasants must think that his prerogatives should be taken as given, while preventing his future vassals from building their own castles.

nullbio2• 1 month ago

Just so everyone is aware. Anthropic has been sabotaging AI researchers and their codebases and shadow-nerfing accounts for several years at this point. This isn't new, but they hadn't disclosed it until now. Likely because it is getting to the point where it's too noticeable, or they're concerned about it leaking from employees.

Furthermore, the fact that they do these things, despite the incredible backlash... Just imagine what they're doing what your data and your IP.

yuppiepuppie• 1 month ago

What evidence do you have of this?

testbjjl• 1 month ago

Have you had an opportunity to read the linked article, or am I missing your counter argument to what the author references from the documentation?

mips_avatar8• 1 month ago

I guess it’s better they’re open about doing bad things. But now it’s a problem that they think this sets a precedent. They are one step away from feeling justified in using claude code running on a deepseek engineers laptop to hack deepseek to destroy their training system.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm• 1 month ago

The great news is that they probably have an employee that leaks information back to China. Just like how China still buys Nvidia GPUs through Singapore: https://thenextweb.com/news/nvidia-blackwell-china-export-lo...

Bunch of suckers.

ares623• 1 month ago

Hmm, so you're telling me, if I am a maintainer of a popular open source library, I can make my library spit out logs to trigger this degraded behavior, and then no one will know?

cherryteastain• 1 month ago

Do they still charge you $50/MTok?

If so, it sounds like a scam. If not, distillers will know which model they are getting by just looking at their API usage.

pprotas2• 1 month ago

That's the fun part, they can charge the same API costs with a downgraded model

yanis_t• 1 month ago

It seems that Anthropic is winning the competition with OpenAI. But, supposedly, OpenAI is sitting on a similar model, it might be their chance to win back some users by releasing a less-nerfed model, and market it specifically from that point of view.

shelled• 1 month ago

I was doing something with Claude today and it just told me "By the way Cowork is a separate desktop app" and it proceeded to explain to me how it is not part of the standard Claude desktop app and how the plugin I am exploring might not be a great fit for me. I actually ended up having to search around and see whether things had changed that much in last 24 hours. It hadn't.

It beats me how can their tool hallucinate at this level, that close to home? Do they really weaken their tools, do they perform a lot of painting job on their tools to hide the cracks? I am speaking generally of today's frontier AI scenery, not just Fable or Mythos or Cowork.

otabdeveloper43• 1 month ago

do they perform a lot of painting job on their tools to hide the cracks?

Yes. That is what RLHF is.

It works magically if your prejudices happen to match their training set alignment.

pshirshov• 1 month ago

Fable refused to answer some questions about React citing limitations on chemistry and biology.

palata• 1 month ago

Isn't that completely expected when the intermediary has that kind of control? Amazon, Uber, Meta, Google... they all abuse their position. You are an Uber driver and accept everything because you need the money? Uber will pay you less because you apparently don't have a choice. There are so many examples of such behaviour that I can't remember them all.

Why wouldn't an AI company do exactly the same? You seem to be an employee of a BigCorp already locked in? Let's make you use more tokens, nobody will see. You seem to be testing our product for your company that is currently using a competitor? Let's give you more token to bias you.

Even if such behaviour was punished for purposely doing it, the companies would converge towards doing it without realising, by "tuning stuff" without understanding exactly what it does other than increase profit. But we don't have to go there: that behaviour is simply not punished, we know it.

KoolKat23• 1 month ago

This is a really poor approach from Anthropic.

Its basically serving you something in bad faith.

I'd hope at the very least they're not charging you Fable prices for Opus outputs.

spwa4• 1 month ago

Sooner or later this "you'll never know" is what the AI firms will be selling. Not to you, of course, but to the best brands of credit cards ...

dhx• 1 month ago

There's an example at [1] of a prompt for a HTML mockup operating system where 3 applications are requested to be "white hat tools" that show diagnostic system information. Claude Fable 5 is shown and said in the video to switch back to Opus 4.8 as a "safety" feature.

What an utterly useless model if it refuses to work on something as benign as basic system diagnostic utilities (nmap or whatever).

[1] https://youtu.be/9GLYsrMpprs?t=305

knrdev• 1 month ago

Imagine this company getting real power. This is just a purest nightmare evil shit i've seen out of any of them. Maybe they're already controlled by Slophos.

morpheuskafka• 1 month ago

Notably, it says they will notify you if they downgrade your responses due to suspected distillation (trying to reverse engineer their model).

But if you merely ask it questions about the process of developing a new model ("for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design") that's where it will silently downgrade your replies.

Not by falling back to an older model, but "limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT)." So in some cases, they will silently rewrite your prompt!

gck19• 1 month ago

Here's a question that is still bothering me: what happens if you put something into CC /goal and it thinks this is related to LLM work? Will it just continue to spend your money until you're bankrupt?

Did Anthropic unlock a legal way to steal people's money and call it saving the world AND get away with it?

Just how much of that infinite money goes into Anthropic's PR department that they're able to pull this off and still be loved by users?

DonsDiscountGas4• 1 month ago

You can set billing/usage limits pretty easily. And the default settings on subscription (IIRC) are no extra usage. So I have no idea how they could bankrupt someone like that.

dmzxnico• 1 month ago

There are some limitations on how to make chips smaller. Just as there are limitations on how we can train AI with our current training capacities.

We just need to find a better way to train AI to develop deeper. Although, might not be easy.

BrenBarn• 1 month ago

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder how many people using these AI tools are thinking about the long game.

First it's "the model will say it can't do that". Now it's "the model will just misdirect you without telling you it's doing so". For now that's only for stuff that it thinks is developing a competing model (even if you trust it to accurately determine that), but who knows? It could be anything. Maybe it'll start silently nudging you away from certain sources of information. Maybe it'll give you inaccurate troubleshooting advice to induce you to pay for some kind of support contract from a corporate partner. Maybe it'll just subtly give out bad business advice to keep everyone else from succeeding in any way. It could be doing all that right now, for all we know. These models are a complete black box and there is no limit to the misinformation, disinformation, and malicious behavior that they could be engaging in already, let alone in the future.

dbbk• 1 month ago

Except, it does tell you.

stego-tech• 1 month ago

This accomplishes two goals that AI Frontier Labs have a vested interest in:

1) Blocking further AI development by competitors, and-

2) Blocking the ability for outsiders to truly discern AI capabilities.

I mean, just think about the past few years of FUD about AI from the Frontier Labs themselves. They claim to use AI to write the code for AI, but then also don’t let other people do the same and make the claims impossible to independently verify. They claim AI is improving itself, but don’t let other people use AI to improve their own AI tooling. They claim AI is this great automation engine, but then block self-bootstrapping from AI in favor of selling tooling.

It’s all smoke and mirrors and lies and deception, disguised as risk management. Truly excellent and advanced AI doesn’t need human-created harnesses and scaffolding, because it shouldn’t have a problem bootstrapping its own as needed. It should be able to coach users how to setup something similar at home. It’d be researching its own improvement in distillation and resource consumption so it could run in more places, and thus improve faster through different evolutionary lines. That’s the narrative these labs sell, but trying to accomplish it on your own with their tools results in stern rejections and claims of breaching “Terms of Service”.

If AI boosters really believe in the power of LLMs and Generative AI, ya’ll gotta start calling out hypocrisy from the frontier labs every time it happens. They aren’t building world-changing AI, they’re building products, with all the restrictions and hostility of Big Tech.

radu_floricica2• 1 month ago

My biggest problem with Fable is that it includes health into its biology restrictions. Which means half the use I'd get from it ... doesn't exist.

I'm not as bitter as I could be. I'm actually quite surprised at the sanity of not avoiding the health topic completely - I think only OpenAI had a few months where ChatGPT was tip toeing in any health related conversation. Otherwise it's been almost completely ungated, and it saved and helped countless lives.

I really wish they'd find a way to ungate health and legitimate research topics.

woodrowbarlow• 1 month ago

it saved and helped countless lives

it has also done the opposite, including affirming a mentally ill person's suicidal ideations.

radu_floricica2• 1 month ago

Well, I'm pretty sure ambulances occasionally run people over. Doesn't mean we should ban them.

Orders of magnitude matter.

scottydelta• 1 month ago

It's not silent anymore, It just showed me this:

Fable 5's safety measures flagged this message for cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we're working to refine them. Switched to Opus 4.8. Send feedback with /feedback or learn more ⎿ Tip: You can configure model switch behavior in /config

tenuousemphasis• 1 month ago

Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT).

killerstorm• 1 month ago

It's silent specifically for ML topics. For biology and cybersec (like, finding bugs) it will show a clear warning.

splwjs2• 1 month ago

There's already an obvious stench to "you should scale down your engineering team to a skeleton crew whose core competency is using our product, so that it's the only way to modify your product"; that's going to result in a lot of foodless tables when anthropic et al decide they have enough leverage to stop subsidizing their subscription prices down to what, 4-10% of the marginal cost? Well it doesn't matter how much they want to jack the prices up, if your engineering team requires tokens to do anything you'll just shut up and pay whatever it is.

There's another big problem with the blackbox shrugoff of "no, there's no way to know how many tokens a given request will cost, idk just assign an agent to that or something lol"

But now the software may just decide for itself that your application of it needs to be silently diverted onto a snipe hunting trail. Surely they'll only ever do this for anyone developing a competing product. Or malware. Or Criminal activity. Or one of ten other applications that the system will never misjudge.

You don't need a datacenter the size of Ohio to figure out that agentic ai maximalism is going to hurt you more than help you.

jbs789• 1 month ago

Repeat of the cycle where companies moved to the cloud, now locked in.

Move engineering to Claude, then locked in.

What’s played out at the infra level will now play out at the software engineer level… is that analogous…?

splwjs2• 1 month ago

I'd argue it's different because ephemeral, vps, baremetal, self-hosted, the skillset is still "managing a linux server" and the most radical shift is to an expectation that a server is a thing that is created and destroyed on demand (so now you need to script deployment), which isn't really a radical shift away from the skillset.

The goal of AI seems to pretty explicitly be "stop coding; from now on the mechanic fixes your car", which I would argue is a very different shift.

Also if you host a criminal content on AWS they probably close your account and ban you instead of silently rerouting all traffic away from your server (which may just be hosting a game where you kill goblins or steal cars or something) and refusing to acknowledge that that's what's happening.

pjmlp• 1 month ago

Spot on, the size of backend teams reduced drastically as we made the progression through cloud, serverless, SaaS, iPaaS, and now agent orchestration tooling.

What would be a team of about 20 devs a decade ago, are usually about 5 persons across all project roles.

Hence when someone says their job is AI safe, I can only understand they weren't affected by such "progress".

tracker1• 1 month ago

Given the cost overruns and rework from AI swarms... I feel that the AI Gatekeeper model is a much better approach to how to leverage AI for most things... One person, directing one agent and babysitting to understand, correct and gate the results.

jollyllama• 1 month ago

These AI companies have never been incentivized to make your code better, but I guess they're saying the quiet part out loud now.

Melatonic• 1 month ago

Remember that top tier senior dev you hired? Now you never know when they're going to automatically and silently fall back to junior level. And randomly back again.

That may be the equivalent to where this is heading

SilverBirch• 1 month ago

Just to be clear, this is the same reason that social media companies don't tell you about how they detect spam and they create shadow bans and things like this so that people don't know they've been detected and figure out the mechanims.

And it doesn't work. Even a bit. It's a constant constant cat and mouse game. Maybe they can slow people down slightly, but they won't be able to stop them, and good luck protecting yourself from Elon Musk snooping your stuff in his data centre.

woctordho• 1 month ago

Fun fact: Right now I'm using Fable with a price of less than 1 CNY = 1 USD. I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI has any technical advantage in subscription engineering.

agnosticmantis2• 1 month ago

I can't wait for a (likely Chinese) lab to casually drop an open model stronger than mythos sans all the safety theater that these clowns like to enact to justify the anticompetitive behavior and the impending enshitification.

This is another "gpt3 too dangerous for the world" moment which is laughable in retrospect.

thraway38372• 1 month ago

This isn’t as alarming as it seems because some things are proven true now:

1. LLMs can help create other better LLMs

2. If Anthropic is able to reach this ability, others can too

3. Intense work is being done by every chip manufacturer for local inference. Engineers want this. We’re headed toward this

4. These companies ultimately know that their moat isn’t permanent. Maybe not today, maybe not in 6 months. But it’s not forever

5. This stuff has so much research and eyes that policies like this rub people the wrong way. And it rubs them badly enough that it creates the friction necessary to make better alternatives

rrook• 1 month ago

How would we feel about Google providing misleading search results about how to implement search algorithms?

cmxch• 1 month ago

I’d wonder how Fable would handle it if you call the model out for it and at least require it to at least notify/refuse instead.

KronisLV• 1 month ago

"We have detected that you're from Oceania, so as Eurasia, we have decided to silently make all of the code that you generate have subtle bugs, bad patterns for performance, security vulnerabilities and overall make the quality trend downwards on the scale of years. Oh, and also subtle misinformation praising our government but critiquing yours, and your entire political ideology."

The science fiction writes itself.

kevinmiller452• 1 month ago

Honestly, I've been burned by hidden safety filters before. This is just a corporate version of that. Trust is already gone for me.

mattcox12• 1 month ago

The 0.03% stat is meaningless when the definition of an AI company changes every year. Today it's training pipelines, tomorrow it's just using an API twice. Where's the line?

If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know

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