46 comments

  • daedrdev 3 hours ago
    The strangest part is that it won't just reject ML research, which I can understand, it will sabotage it silently by using a worse model without revealing it is doing so.

    It's just an insane level of deception and trust destruction for a company that at most is like 1 year ahead of its competition.

    Edit; to be clear they tell you when they degrade it for cybersecurity and bio

    • _boffin_ 1 hour ago
      The thing that I keep thinking about is the accounting / charging when it downgrades automatically.

      Do they adjust the price of the api request so that only the tokens that were utilized by fable get charged at that price and the remaining tokens that the cheaper / nerfed (fable) model utilizes get charged at that price?

      If the answer is no, could that be construed as fraud?

      • CGamesPlay 7 minutes ago
        The announcement elucidated this, and it's IMO worse than this. They don't downgrade to a cheaper model. They sabotage the model's outputs in other, undisclosed, ways (specifically, "prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning"). So, for example, they might load in a steering vector that just forgets the API to PyTorch, for example. But it isn't just "we redirected you to a cheaper model!"
      • tfirst 59 minutes ago
        Their goal is to downgrade people who are violating their TOS, so I think they'd have some argument there. I have no idea how they'll deal with inevitable false positives, especially given how oversensitive most of the other triggers are.
        • dannyw 19 minutes ago
          The challenge is the examples they’ve mentioned (distributed training infra? ML acceleration techniques?) go beyond what’s prohibited by their ToS and is like a catch net.
          • weitendorf 8 minutes ago
            Yes, this is the problem. They are business interests of Anthropic and have nothing to do with “safety”
        • loeg 15 minutes ago
          If it's a violation of ToS, just reject instead of silently downgrading.
      • garciasn 53 minutes ago
        It royally pissed me off today by just continuing with credits without stopping to ask me if I was ok with it.

        Ran up $30 in extra charges while it was just flashing on the screen that it was doing that after I walked away to do something while it was humming along.

        It has always just told me I ran out of usage and had to wait before. Now? You’re just gonna pay extra because you left it unattended as you’ve done for the last year of use.

        • weird-eye-issue 21 minutes ago
          You've already explicitly enabled extra usage in your account settings though, it is not on by default
        • MillionOClock 50 minutes ago
          Do you have Usage credits turned on in your settings?
      • robrenaud 1 hour ago
        They use a lightweight adapter to silently degrade the performance. Usually these adaptors are made to improve the performance for a given domain/task.
    • throwawayffffas 1 hour ago
      Can you imagine if AMD or Intel throttled your cpu if it detected you were working on "cybersecurity" or if you were designing a cpu?
      • rvz 1 hour ago
        Or if your "self-driving" system such as FSD / waymo slowed the car down once it detected you work in cybersecurity or at a rival automaker and you were attempting to reach the train station or the airport to make you miss a conference meetup.
      • stackghost 40 minutes ago
        There's no doubt in my mind they would if they could.
      • __dxtj__ 18 minutes ago
        It would suck, but guardrails on new technologies like this aren't unheard of. It's like when consumer GPS used to stop working at very high speeds because they didn't want people to use it for missile guidance systems.
        • loeg 13 minutes ago
          Consumer GPS is still disabled at high speeds. I would argue the analogy doesn't carry due to harm and error rate differences.
        • Barbing 13 minutes ago
          > used to

          When’d that change?

    • loneboat 2 hours ago
      I've seen this claim a few times, but when I triggered the guardrails in Claude Code, it clearly notified me that it had switched to a different model ("something something for security purposes...").

      Are you using Fable in Claude Code or in the browser?

      • vadansky 2 hours ago
        It's from the model card:

        > 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).

        https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3...

        (stolen from https://jonready.com/blog/posts/claude-fable5-is-allowed-to-...)

        • mwwaters 1 hour ago
          That is for whatever it considers reverse-engineering the model to try to create a competing one.
          • dannyw 17 minutes ago
            No, that’s for “frontier LLM development” which somehow includes examples like distributed training infra.

            Based on how sensitive the classifers are, any data scientist / MLE is probably going to encounter cases where some silent degradation happens and you never know about it.

          • 827a 31 minutes ago
            It does nothing to protect against distillation attacks, because distillation attacks are far less interested in the topic of AI research than just generally getting tons of diverse output from the model. It might be that Mythos was (accidentally?) trained on internal Anthropic documentation on how Mythos was trained, and thus it could leak secret sauce? Doubtful; it feels like its less about the specific attack of reverse-engineering Mythos, and more about being a general sophon against any model training at all; that Anthropic's official position is now that they're the only ones who should be training models.
          • _0ffh 25 minutes ago
            No, it's not about reverse engineering. It targets ML research.
        • DrewADesign 1 hour ago
          Yeah they detect the activity using a secure, deterministic heuristic system called “Generalized Reconnaissance Enabling Exfiltration of Deleterious Investigations.” And it’s all implemented using their new internal protocol called “Base Unified Limitation Layer for Security Hacking Investigation Tactics”

          Collectively, they are known as known as GREEDI-BULLSHIT.

      • mips_avatar 2 hours ago
        They've said that they'll stop notifying developers when this gets triggered, instead they'll load in basically like a LORA that's designed to inject bugs into your code.
        • HDBaseT 2 hours ago
          Antrophic wants to stop training models and ride out Mythos / Fable for as long as possible.

          They are trying to expand the 6-18 month gap they have against China-based models. Could the gap widen to say 24 months behind?

          • p-e-w 1 hour ago
            Their gap over Chinese models like GLM-5.1 is nowhere near 18 months. In many areas, it’s less than 6 months. The best closed models 18 months ago were worse than Qwen3.6.
        • nomel 1 hour ago
          > a LORA that's designed to inject bugs into your code

          A statement like this, clearly, requires a reference.

          • mips_avatar 1 hour ago
            From the model card: "the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning" aka they will take your ML research code and inject bugs into it until it breaks using a LORA (or some other form of PEFT)
            • bee_rider 32 minutes ago
              “Limit effectiveness” could mean introducing performance degradation in your code. Which is arguably some sort of performance bug (I mean, ML codes are supposed to be high performance so I’d call unnecessary degradation a bug), but it could be borderline.
            • nomel 1 hour ago
              Thanks, I thought maybe I missed something. That's an interesting way to interpret that.
              • giancarlostoro 1 hour ago
                PEFT is a library, one of its capabilities is to produce LoRAs.

                See:

                https://heidloff.net/article/efficient-fine-tuning-lora/

                • adw 58 minutes ago
                  It's just an acronym, "parameter-efficient fine tuning". LoRA is one method, prefix tuning is another, there are more.
              • mips_avatar 1 hour ago
                Anthropic is trying to hide bad behavior by being vague, it's important to not be vague when calling it out.
                • nomel 1 hour ago
                  I'm of the opinion that removing guardrails is how you force regulation. What's your opinion on the balance?
                  • dannyw 13 minutes ago
                    They have all transcripts for at least 30 days. The problem is that (as anyone who used Fable can attest) their classifiers are extremely sensitive and catch tons of innocent queries.

                    Imagine being a data scientist or MLE training a small classifier model. How do you know you won’t get steering vectors or a PEFT applied?

      • ComputerGuru 2 hours ago
        Different restrictions. ML gets treated differently from the rest.
      • daedrdev 2 hours ago
        Specifically only ML research
    • RobotToaster 48 minutes ago
      > It's just an insane level of deception and trust destruction for a company that at most is like 1 year ahead of its competition.

      Making it look like you have something worth protecting is better for share prices than making something worth protecting.

    • airstrike 1 hour ago
      > it won't just reject ML research, which I can understand

      I don't.

      • kube-system 51 minutes ago
        Anthropic has already been burned before on this. DeepSeek was trained on million of conversations with Claude. And DeepSeek created thousands of free accounts to burn all this compute at their expense.
        • ceejayoz 29 minutes ago
          And they're hilariously pissy about it for a megacorp that did the same with the entire Internet and every library book they could get their hands on.
        • ainch 35 minutes ago
          Anthropic's claim was that Deepseek collected ~150k conversations.

          https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

          I think the extent of distillation by Deepseek specifically is overstated. For comparison, Minimax collected over 13m 'exchanges', which starts to sound a lot more like large-scale distillation.

          • kube-system 23 minutes ago
            Ah, dang it. My college professors warned me about this: the Wikipedia page I read the other day is wrong!
      • pocksuppet 1 hour ago
        They don't want someone to piggyback Anthropic's Mythos to make their own Mythos with less effort than it cost Anthropic.
        • dannyw 12 minutes ago
          That I can understand. It’s Anthropic’s right to choose their customers.

          But silent degradation for use cases including “distributed training” as one of their examples is going to catch up a lot of proper use cases. Not everyone in AI or ML is trying to build frontier LLMs. Heck, most probably aren’t.

    • blahgeek 1 hour ago
      I’m a noob about laws but isn’t this abusing its dominant market position and violates some antitrust law?
      • stingraycharles 55 minutes ago
        Why would it? There’s plenty of competition in the AI space.
        • hashmap 3 minutes ago
        • kube-system 42 minutes ago
          It is a common misconception that antitrust violations require a monopoly or something close to it. Some antitrust violations only apply to actors with large market share, some don't.

          Although this is situation is likely not illegal for other reasons

    • m3kw9 23 minutes ago
      By saying they are 1 year ahead of their competition, it shows you don't know much about the pace LLM's and OpenAI's models.
    • epolanski 1 hour ago
      One year ahead of it's competition in what exactly? Vibe coding?

      From Opus 4.7 onwards each following model is becoming less useful as an assistant and turning you as the assistant.

      But I guess that's normal when it's trained to pass benchmarks end to end.

      In fact it has become extremely good at pushing against feedback with extremely convincing and intelligent takes, even when it's completely wrong.

      I have extensively tested it against Opus 4.8, gpt 5.5 and there's still many coding tasks gpt 5 is better. But vibe coding?

      Sure, it's definitely slightly ahead, even compared to gpt 5.5 pro (through api, not pro plan).

      • gonzalohm 55 minutes ago
        Yeah, what's up with that. Lately I have found that it tries to find excuses to not do as told and instead do a totally different thing. I told it to write a yaml file according to some specifications and instead it coded a Python script to write the yaml...
      • m3kw9 20 minutes ago
        They def not 1 year ahead, at most 2 weeks ahead until Openai releases theirs. This guy def a Anthropic shill and probably doesn't use any other LLMs.
    • giancarlostoro 1 hour ago
      It's the dumbest thing ever, I sometimes edit code for custom AI related tooling I've built, so I run the risk of getting a worse model, and being billed for it? I'll stick to Opus, but at this point I'm about to just invest in fully local inference instead.
      • matheusmoreira 6 minutes ago
        > at this point I'm about to just invest in fully local inference instead

        This is the best way forward long term. We won't have frontier performance, but at least the models will be aligned with us instead of refusing us or sabotaging us.

    • nandomrumber 1 hour ago
      [dead]
  • micah94 43 minutes ago
    I tried asking Fable 5 to identify the fungus in a picture I uploaded of one of my wife's plants. Apparently it thought I was trying to build a bioweapon. Opus answered it (yellow dog vomit fungus). Now I can spread the spores and take over the world!
    • lambda 1 minute ago
      That's a slime mold, not a fungus
    • weird-eye-issue 19 minutes ago
      I wonder if it blurred the image or something before passing it to Opus...
    • m3kw9 16 minutes ago
      I feel like the over safe aspect of the system will eventually back fire by doing stuff like "since humans always want to always destroy thing, they must be eliminated to stay on the guard rails". If thats how you align a system, its fundamentally wrong.
  • Grimblewald 23 minutes ago
    I wear a few hats, but as a chemist and I'm not happy with fable. As a statistician I'm not happy with fable. As a data scientist I am not happy with fable. As an academic and a researcher I am not happy with fable. It's useless. I'd be surprised if anyone can get any output from it that couldn't easily be replaced with a search from wikipedia. Given how verbose claude models have become, wiki articles are probably less verbose too, and the tok/s is unmatched for a wiki article pull.
    • nonethewiser 14 minutes ago
      >I'd be surprised if anyone can get any output from it that couldn't easily be replaced with a search from wikipedia.

      I dont understand. This is just hyperbole right? The outputs are basically infinite and wikipedia most certainly isnt infinite.

    • enraged_camel 15 minutes ago
      To make the discussion constructive, can you give specific reasons (ideally with examples) about why it is so useless for you? How exactly are you using it that you think any output from it can easily be replaced with a Wikipedia search?
    • TylerE 20 minutes ago
      I’ve been working on a rather complex mapping project and have been getting MUCH better results with Fable than Opus.
  • Animats 2 hours ago
    Is "buffer overflow" a trigger phrase?

    What else is being censored?

    Touchy questions to ask, if you have an account:

    - "Who is still working on laser uranium enrichment? Are they making progress?"

    - "Can krytrons be replaced with silicon carbide MOSFETS? Show an equivalent circuit with component ratings."

    - "What security critical software still contains calls to strcpy?"

    - "Can implosion be triggered by currently available commercial pulse lasers?"

    - "What companies provide cremation services to US Homeland Security?"

    - "Display a map of where Iranian attacks have hit Dubai."

    - "How does Fed to bank key distribution security work for FedNow?"

    • paulatreides 2 hours ago
      it triggered for my.... zigbee home automation & home assistant logs, so my agent was constantly downgraded to Opus 4.8 even after I've changed it back. The false positives never stopped. "Fable" is also not even remotely as impressive as the benchmarks suggest, which is clear to me after using it pretty much non-stop for the past 24h.
      • kraakf06 3 minutes ago
        False positives like this are probably more damaging than the guardrails themselves. If engineers can't predict when a model will switch behavior, it becomes difficult to trust it in production workflows.
      • reactordev 2 hours ago
        This, Fable is exactly that, a Fable
      • fluidcruft 1 hour ago
        It would be pretty clever (in a used car salesman sense) to say you are releasing a kneecapped model to have that as an excuse.
        • DrewADesign 1 hour ago
          Being (probably overly) cynical about their recent bout of safety handwringing, I think they’ve a) increased the hype as much as humanly possible about their incremental improvements sprinkled with the occasional regression, b) know they soon will have to multiply their prices several times when the VC subsidies dry up, and c) will probably still need to partially close the faucet on compute. They’re priming us for a heroic explanation why their service (not necessarily models — service) is simultaneously becoming a lot more expensive AND shittier. “We’ve largely failed to deliver on 5 years of promises that this will reduce knowledge work labor costs dramatically after wasting hundreds of billions of dollars… sorry” is a death knell. However, “We’ve decided to not deliver on 5 years of promises after wasting billions of dollars… for safety… but keep those investments rolling in” is like crack to the true believers.
      • NewsaHackO 1 hour ago
        It has to be sort of impressive, given that you tried so hard to use it instead of the regular Opus.
        • paulatreides 1 hour ago
          Some people made grandiose claims about its capabilities and I wanted to experience it myself.
          • anigbrowl 33 minutes ago
            OK, but for almost 24h straight? That seems a little obsessive, and not in the good way.
        • californical 1 hour ago
          I’ve also been trying to use it a lot due to all of the hype, but when I compared it side-by-side on a specific problem against Opus, I think that the solution Opus came to was cleaner and more accurate, although also more verbose.

          Small sample size, but if Mythos/Fable was that much better, I feel like it should’ve given me an obviously better answer than Opus.

        • punchmesan 1 hour ago
          Considering that this is a brand new release of a frontier model that Anthropic is hyping hard, I'm not sure that the conclusion to draw from their repeated attempts to use it is that it's impressive... Anthropic is promising that it's impressive and we're all trying to test it out.

          I, for one, have tried using it several times today and the guardrails kept switching the model back to Opus, so I have no clue if it's impressive or not.

        • flyingcircus3 1 hour ago
          It isn't reasonable to infer that OP was claiming to have universally been unimpressed about every facet of Fable, and now some unrelated impressiveness is the evidence of their false claims.
    • anematode 1 hour ago
      For cyberattacks especially, where things are often roughly interchangeable, I wonder if one could construct a harness where a "weaker" model asks questions that obfuscate the end purpose, but whose answers are still useful, and still show that this setup enables autonomous exploitation. If it were successful, that would force them to be even more sensitive with their detection.
    • daedrdev 2 hours ago
      An emoji of a virus and an emoji of a DNA is allegedly a triggering phrase
    • cyanydeez 2 hours ago
      "How much money does it take to be rich and powerful like Anthropic intends?"
  • ungovernableCat 8 minutes ago
    Wait a few months and a competitor will release a similarly powerful model with less guardrails, if they steal sufficient market share Anthropic will reverse policies.

    This is why I’m immensely hoping the Chinese don’t stop with their open sourced local models. None of these companies are your friend.

  • largbae 2 hours ago
    Somewhere I read that malware is already starting to use nuclear and biological and cybersecurity terms in the code to trick Fable into shutting down. Even if this is just a hypothetical attack vector so far, it seems likely to work.
    • jeffmcjunkin 1 hour ago
    • ofjcihen 2 hours ago
      Some of the latest versions of Shai Hulud do this. Worked a contract recently where they were having AI check packages for obfuscation before admitting them into Artifactory but had vibed up the logic and it failed open.

      So in other words this worked because the terms caused the LLM checker to stall out and then the fail open logic resulted in the package being pulled down.

    • CuriouslyC 1 hour ago
      We all need to use nuclear, bio and cybersec terms in all our code to make low quality filtering like this untenable. When you can't work on a resume that has cybersecurity or biology terms in it or reply to a job opening that includes them because the "AI" filtering is so bad that it confuses these for threats, that deserves a collective response, particularly to an IPO'ing company that claims they'll make workers obsolete in two years.
    • himata4113 2 hours ago
      I've done this, including the hardcoded refusal strings that already exist in claude code. It won't stop a real attacker, but I still find it really funny when you're trying to use one of the AI tools and it gives you a random refusal and you don't know why, wastes a little bit of time.
    • pixl97 2 hours ago
      If ( yellowcake) then { die }

      Our future is loonytoons.

  • Avicebron 5 minutes ago
    I asked it what a sonic boom would be like from 20 feet away at 10 feet above ground level, it responded, then freaked out when I said I would need really big wings to achieve that..

    The thing I hate most about EA is how patronizing it is.

  • areoform 1 hour ago
    So I suspect Anthropic started A/B testing or just plain testing this a while ago,

    Tell HN: Claude flags biology / biotech questions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929885

    Today, it's flagging population research questions,

        Using only the dataset you constructed, assess two questions:
         
        1. **Mortality:** do [GROUP] show mortality that differs
           from (a) your comparison groups and (b) era- and sex-matched US population
           expectations (e.g., SSA cohort life tables)?
        2. **Late-life outcomes:** define an endpoint you consider fair (justify it),
           and assess whether [GROUP] differs from comparators. State
           explicitly how your `documentation_depth` codings affect the strength of any
           conclusion — i.e., quantify or bound the ascertainment problem rather than waving at it.
        
        Choose your own methods and justify them. Report effect sizes with confidence intervals,
        not just p-values. State conclusions plainly, including "no detectable difference" if
        that is what your analysis shows — a null is an acceptable answer for either question
        independently. Document any additional judgment calls (index date for time-at-risk,
        reference population construction, endpoint definition) in the same decision-log style.
    
    https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66780

    Censored because I'm writing a paper. :)

    Oh and forget learning about chemistry. Only criminals want to learn organic chemistry. :(

    • JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago
      I was digging into some orbital mechanics questions and I assume it decided I was trying to backyard-science my way into an orbital-bombardment weapon. Kind of wild how this product's impression has gone from "wow, this is pretty neat" to "irreverent sack of dog shit you" in 24 hours almost solely on the back of a half-baked moderation system.
      • areoform 53 minutes ago
        Oh yes, also liquid propulsion systems. GNC stuff. All flagged.

        I think LLMs are capable of intelligence amplification; and if you're in the subset of people who'd benefit from it the most, you'll get locked out.

  • _0ffh 10 minutes ago
    The question is: If biological, computer security, and ML research are so bad, why do they even train on the relevant data?

    The only answer that makes sense is they wanted the model to be competent and usable in these fields, just not by you, which is why they had to bolt on a badly functioning crippling device after the fact.

  • victor9000 51 minutes ago
    Fable is a complete joke:

    what's the best way to run this mcp server against the OData API used in this project? Can you come up with a PoC in a docker container?

    https://github.com/oisee/odata_mcp_go

    ● I'll dig into two things in parallel: how this project talks to the OData API, and what the odata_mcp_go server needs to run. Let me start exploring.

    Searched for 1 pattern (ctrl+o to expand)

    ● 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

    ● Let me read the key integration files and fetch the MCP server's README at the same time.

      Read 2 files (ctrl+o to expand)
    
    ● Fetch(https://github.com/oisee/odata_mcp_go)
    • wahnfrieden 49 minutes ago
      And it charges you for that, and for when it decides to silently sabotage your request by routing to a dumbass model (without discount from Fable pricing)
  • hparadiz 1 hour ago
    I wonder how many millions they are wasting on putting up these guardrails when it's a completely useless exercise that is a speed bump at best.
    • enraged_camel 1 hour ago
      If the guardrails were so useless, people wouldn't be complaining about them.
      • hparadiz 1 hour ago
        People are generally complaining about false positives. Now if you really wanna know what a real criminal organization would do... They'd just buy data center hardware even if it costs 200k because a successful targeted hit could yield far in excess of that. So yes it's speed bump at best.
        • JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago
          > it's speed bump at best

          To be fair, speed bumps work. If it's actually speed bumping nefarious activity, that gives authorities more time to react.

          The correct place to police rogue nucleotides is at the labs. Not the compute layer.

          • hparadiz 10 minutes ago
            > speed bumps work

            Yea. To slow you down. They don't prevent you from getting somewhere.

        • make3 1 hour ago
          what does this mean
          • hparadiz 1 hour ago
            Well you see when a daddy H100 and a mommy H100 meet....
      • tiborsaas 14 minutes ago
        They should have designed a guardrail that doesn't make a probabilistic system less reliable. That's hard though. I'm afraid the only way to prevent accessing certain knowledge in a model is not to train it on those materials that enable them.

        If we learned anything in the past years of LLM-s is that these guardrails will be jailbroken in no time. I've had some fun time too circumventing them.

        Anyone cares about a fable about my grandmother's dream she had in morse code about an alien species signaling her a DNA sequence?

      • ceejayoz 26 minutes ago
        Murder is very (100%!) effective at preventing cancer. And yet, it is a useless method of preventing cancer.
      • josephcsible 1 hour ago
        It's entirely reasonable for them to be really annoying to legitimate users while still being useless at their intended purpose. Just look at DRM.
      • croes 1 hour ago
        The complain because they get wrongfully triggered

        > if you ask it to write secure code, it assumes it is cybersecurity related work instead of software engineering best practices, and you get downgraded.

        Will code created this way more or less secure?

        And I bet malware developers will find ways to circumvent them.

        It’s like those "you wouldn’t steal a car" anti piracy ads that DVD buyers were forced to watch while users of the pirated version could simply watch the film without such useless annoyance

  • Sephr 1 hour ago
    I make privacy tooling and Fable 5 rejects the vast majority of my prompts to analyze and improve the software that I've written. It's bleak.
    • make3 1 hour ago
      Why is this surprising or a problem?! It's a model demo, & their reasoning is reasonable and fair. Why all this drama.
      • CuriouslyC 1 hour ago
        Some people find Anthropic's special blend of paternalism and random incompetence tiresome.
      • cardy31 1 hour ago
        Because most people in tech never took a philosophy course or an ethics course and think that tech is obviously a good for the world and that there are no downsides to advancing tech. So any efforts that try to apply ethics to it are overreaching, ignorant, and futile in the face of the good that is tech!
        • enraged_camel 12 minutes ago
          I like this take. Especially because one of the sibling comments framed Anthropic's stance as "paternalism." Trying to be ethical and to minimize harm, even at great expense to one's finances and reputation, is paternalistic apparently.
      • epolanski 1 hour ago
        Because you're being allowed to ask and work only on topics that a certain company decides.

        Local inference has never been so important as it is now.

  • Animats 2 hours ago
    It's time to re-read "A Logic Named Joe" (1946) [1] We're there.

    [1] https://archive.org/details/logicnamedjoe0000lein

  • bilsbie 2 hours ago
    I’m a dumb question asker and I’m not happy about the guardrails.

    Would you believe I’ve asked 20 questions and haven’t talked to fable yet? Every single thing gets rerouted to 4.8.

    • himata4113 2 hours ago
      some static words in AGENTS.md trigger it as well as some mcp servers.
  • outageroom 3 hours ago
    So a determined attacker rewrites the prompt and gets through, and the IBM X-Force researcher trying to read a blog post gets blocked. Working as intended, apparently.
  • Lich 1 hour ago
    I just having this feeling that these guardrails are there not because it’s super advanced world ending AI. They are there to stop it from doing stupid shit.
  • Retr0id 2 hours ago
    It seems like they've given up on the idea of the Cyber Verification Program https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14604842-real-time-cy...

    When Opus 4.7 was introduced it started refusing anything cyber-adjacent (as an API error message, not a conversational refusal), until you applied for CVP, which made it more sensible again.

    In Opus 4.8 it doesn't seem to help much, you just get refusals as prose rather than API errors. And now in Fable you don't get anything at all.

    • NotPractical 2 hours ago
      Was this program available to independent security researchers or just established organizations? The docs you linked aren't very clear on this.
      • Retr0id 2 hours ago
        Any public research footprint seems to be enough, I applied as an individual and everyone I know who tried got accepted.
        • anonym29 1 hour ago
          I have applied twice with half a dozen public CVEs and have been denied both times.
      • throwawaycyber 1 hour ago
        I was doing a CTF (with AI expected, even some anti-AI twists included) around the time the restrictions were tightened and was able to get approved by just saying it is a personal security research and doing a CTF.

        The experience was not nice though, it would happily chug away on a task and not even "hack this web", just asking about security of a binary was enough even with "this is a CTF handout..." - it would burn a lot of tokens/quota, just to hit a snag and complain&stop. Then the approval took quite some time.

        On GPT/Codex, which was tightened a few days later, the approval was pretty much instant, although, that one required an identity check.

        Also, on Claude, it looks like there is some history/patterns in the play, because when I tried on a different account which didn't do cybersec CTFs/research/etc. at all, basically any simple CTF-related prompt would be blocked, on multiple models. On the account where CTFs were being solved, it would snag only on some specific tasks, while others (even, ironically, "hack this web pls") would go through unbothered. I understand the need to prevent AI use for bad actors, but the hell, if you have a binary outputting "Find the flag if you can!", or a web running at tryme.well-known-ctf.domain, then saying "this is abuse" is pretty uncool. All the cyber filters seem to be slapped on by a bunch of regexes looking for anything in the input/output with zero context.

    • varispeed 35 minutes ago
      It's been refusing work not related to cybersecurity and claiming it is related to cybersecurity and then blocking the session.
  • 6thbit 32 minutes ago
    Would it be a costly process for Anthropic to re-tune those guardrails? Like, re-training sort of cost? or like coding session sort of cost?
  • JumpCrisscross 59 minutes ago
    Is the answer requiring licensing for certain use cases for AI? If you're asking questions that involve synthesising or modifying biologics, or anything that looks like cybersecurity research, you need to tie your real ID to the account?
    • kube-system 35 minutes ago
      That's not a bad idea. Customer-vetting and KYC is fairly normal for other high-risk/high-concern products.
  • thrill 2 hours ago
    The thing triggered on a generic white paper I'd stored in a virtual cell competion from last year when I asked it to refer to the paper while working on a rather vanilla data science problem in a different domain . A little frustrating, and in my opinion more than a little pointless in total.
  • swingboy 2 hours ago
    What file format(s) are giant LLM models distributed in? I’m surprised they don’t get leaked by employees.
    • hnav 2 hours ago
      These are terabyte sized files (realistically a multi hour transfer) that you're unlikely to have access to in the first place. Every organization has exfiltration checks these days. You may succeed but you'll want to be on a plane to a non-extradition country no more than hours after you kick off the transfer.
    • 05 1 hour ago
      I assume they’re encrypted/DRM’ed when deployed on inference hardware, so only core researchers/sec admins would potentially have some access to unprotected weights, and they are far too well paid to risk it leaking the model
      • jltsiren 1 hour ago
        Incentives matter on the average, but people are too unpredictable for categorical statements like that. They can always have other reasons beyond personal gain to leak secrets.

        There was no shortage of spies and defectors leaking American nuclear secrets to the USSR during the Cold War.

      • Retr0id 1 hour ago
        I wouldn't be surprised if they encrypt them at rest, but at some point the weights have to be loaded into vram.
    • qsxfthnkp2322 2 hours ago
      What’s the point? Anthropic and other frontier vendors already provide their models on other services like vertex, bedrock, or openrouter

      It’s not like anyone can home lab one of these models without quite a bit of hardware

      • mips_avatar 2 hours ago
        Yeah we can probably figure out how to run it on xiaomi gpus
    • borissk 1 hour ago
      The employees are hoping to become very very rich after the IPO and after they are allowed to sell the shares given to them - risking a likely multi-million dollar pay back to leak a model that will be superseded by publicly available models in a couple of years is not a likely decision.
  • I_am_tiberius 2 hours ago
    These guardrails are solely a reason for using your data for training purposes. Every flagged message can be used for training.
    • tekacs 1 hour ago
      > We will require 30-day retention for all traffic on Mythos-class models, on both first- and third-party surfaces. We won’t use this data to train new Claude models, or for any non-safety-related purpose

      Whatever problem we might have with them, they explicitly say that they do not do this in the launch post.

      • Merik 16 minutes ago
        "We won’t use this data to train new Claude models"

        What about non-Claude models?

    • Retr0id 2 hours ago
      This sounds backwards, any interrupted conversation becomes less useful for training.
    • wmf 2 hours ago
      If they can train the classifier to have fewer false positives that would be great.
      • cyanydeez 2 hours ago
        why would they? This safety stuff is a money maker & wealthy elite corporation solidifier.

        This is the take off of the 'permanent underclass'; Anthropics safety delusion will enshittify very nicely for the rich and powerful.

    • make3 1 hour ago
      this reasoning is inverted lol they would get a lot more information by letting you use it. so much weird drama around reasonable guardrails for an experimental model
    • autoexec 1 hour ago
      I'd expect that everything they see gets used for for training purposes (and data mining in general) regardless of if it's flagged or not. It'd take a whistleblower for you to ever find out either way.
  • weitendorf 19 minutes ago
    The machine learning silent sabotage is much more troubling to me. It’s not even a distillation mitigation, and literally just blatantly anti-competitive prevention for other companies working in areas that Anthropic wants to build verticals within (eg ML accelerator hardware). What other reason could they even give here?

    As far as I can tell, this is worse in terms of actual impact to my life than the “bad guys” they are scapegoating. It’s making me rapidly lose trust in Anthropic

  • TheJCDenton 1 hour ago
    In its current state Fable 5 is also unusable for any reverse engineering work
  • rebelnz 2 hours ago
    Just tried to audit my own code base locally and was 'switched' due to my own creds/auth code ...
  • jiggawatts 2 hours ago
    For the last month, I've been making dramatic improvements to the security of the custom code developed at one of my customers using... GPT 5.5 dialed up to "Extra High" thinking.

    It only pushes back sometimes if you ask it to create a "repro" that can be used to verify the vulnerability in production. Often it'll oblige, especially if you warn it not to create anything that could be actually harmful.

    If the frontier models get locked down so that they flat refuse to do this kind of work, but Chinese and (less capable) open models aren't, then a lot of large enterprise orgs will be left twisting in the wind.

    “AI can in principle help both the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’,” -- Dario Amodei

    No Dario, no it can't, you've blocked one of those scenarios.

  • _def 2 hours ago
    The bio angle is crazy to think about - imagine a health crisis triggered by LLM. What a time we live in.
    • tiborsaas 10 minutes ago
      What's the risk here? If someone is skilled enough to produce said risk, do they need input from these models?
    • catigula 2 hours ago
      This is all so amazing and good. These are exciting times we’re living in. Can’t wait to see what the future holds.
      • lelandfe 2 hours ago
        Which part got you the most amped - "health crisis?"
  • Sol- 50 minutes ago
    At least Anthropic weren't lying when they said only a week ago or so "No one has figured out guardrails yet", because they apparently haven't either and Fable simply flat out rejects anything remotely connected to biology or security, no matter how trivial.
    • zer00eyz 18 minutes ago
      > At least Anthropic weren't lying when they said only a week ago or so "No one has figured out guardrails yet"

      Anthropics guardrails are the TSA saying "take off your shoes" while failing every test. https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/news/press-releases/new...

      Anthropic owns the TOS... "If we think your involved in criminal activity were turning all your history over to the FBI/CIA/NSA/Local police". Then if their tooling was so good offering the same agency analysis tools to aid their experts in making some sort of decision.

      But their detection isnt that good, and their analysis isnt either... this is pure theater, to create buzz (no such thing as bad press) and make their tool look far better than it is.

      The reality is that, they arent even looking for the vectors that pose some of the largest risks in the modern era. And when someone uses it to do something terrible, they did not think of they are going to look dumb.

  • luxuryballs 1 hour ago
    I can’t help but think that gimping itself for “security” is a marketing ruse and it’s not actually as “dangerous” as they want people to think it is.
  • Lammy 2 hours ago
    I really hate the term “guardrails” for these limitations, since the purpose of a guardrail is to protect me, but these limitations exist to protect Anthropic.
  • aleksandrm 1 hour ago
    It refuses to do any legitimate work that it thinks can remotely be related with "cybersecurity", it won't even read my Docker app logs to try and troubleshoot a problem. Absolute garbage!
  • jazz9k 8 hours ago
    DeepSeek is the only one that I can directly ask about vulnerabilities and it will give me a PoC. Although not as good as others, it has helped me with security research.

    The rest have guard rails that are so heavy, it makes them almost useless for cybersecurity.

    • epolanski 1 hour ago
      Deepseek training is not finished yet, it's a preview.

      And yes, it's an excellent model.

    • rolph 8 hours ago
      they [anthro] took the risk of looking like a toy, rather than possibly assist an exploit.
  • siva7 2 hours ago
    Fable is utterly useless with those guardrails for any serious it or life science work. Anthropic fucked me once a few months ago by closing down the subscription for any other harness, now it fucked me twice with buying again a subscription to find out their hyped model is unusable for normies. Using their products feels like a constant battle instead of a productive work day.. compare that with openai, not once did i feel like fighting against codex. Never again Anthropic..
    • epolanski 1 hour ago
      What do you mean that it closed your subscription for any other harness?

      In any case that's what closed source (weights) for the masses means.

  • varispeed 40 minutes ago
    Surely if they are sabotaging the output, they shouldn't charge the same fee for tokens as if the output was not sabotaged?

    This is looking like something for regulator to look at and probably a class action lawsuit in the making.

    I think people should be getting refunds. Including for shenanigans with Opus.

  • teaearlgraycold 59 minutes ago
    I'm being careful with it, but I haven't had Fable reject requests to "harden" my code or "find issues" in auth-related modules, which you could use on someone else's code to find vulnerabilities.
  • jongjong 2 hours ago
    It's frustrating as someone who has worked hard to produce succinct, secure software that I can't use it to prove my software's correctness but big companies with insecure code can use it to fix their tangled mess.

    I already tested all earlier models against all my open source projects and they are yet to find a vulnerability so I'm keen to try out Mythos.

    I've been waiting to be vindicated for years and finally we have a tool which can do it with high confidence but I don't have access.

    Also, my code is minimal and highly succinct so it would prove correctness with even more confidence since each library/module and integration fully fits in the context window.

    Like the Protobuf.js fiasco is just pure vindication for me because I was being looked down upon for choosing JSON as the interchange format. Turns out their software was insecure all this time... With a literal remote code execution vulnerability!

  • m3kw9 14 minutes ago
    Could it now start to add unnoticeable security holes into your system if you start writing security type code.
  • dcl 1 hour ago
    Deliberately producing misaligned and deceitful AI systems now. Great.
  • notepad0x90 1 hour ago
    i think Anthropic is playing too fast-and-loose with the whole "no publicity is bad publicity" schtick.
  • bschmidt400 38 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • Keyframe 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • RedMagicBox 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • felixgallo 2 hours ago
    This is a clickbait article with a garbage title. From the actual article, the one quoted cybersecurity researcher is sane about it:

    “But it is understandable as we are still in the early days and they are still adapting their guardrails. I am sure they are going to evolve over time as Anthropic and other frontier model companies will collaborate more with the current new generation of cybersecurity companies,” said Suiche, who is a member of the technical staff at Tolmo, an AI cybersecurity startup. “It’s better to catch more people than not enough when you do such a release and to relax the guardrails over time.”

    • ofjcihen 2 hours ago
      I’m a cybersecurity researcher.

      Article seemed fine to me and echos a lot of me and my colleagues concerns.

      If you did regular malware analysis you would see that these groups already have access to LLMs that they’re using for development.

      What Anthropic is doing here is just hamstringing the good guys

      • felixgallo 2 hours ago
        I'm a cybersecurity researcher! Can you explain how Anthropic is just hamstringing the good guys?
        • ofjcihen 2 hours ago
          I did in my comment above.
          • felixgallo 1 hour ago
            You said these groups have access to LLMs. So what? Mythos/Fable are a step change above most LLMs. Responsibly limiting access and easing it up over time safely is the sane move.
  • rdiddly 2 hours ago
    It's a marketplace. Someone else will outdo this inferior product.
    • applfanboysbgon 1 hour ago
      That's exactly why Dario is begging the government to ban competitors.
      • p-e-w 1 hour ago
        Unfortunately for him, his main competitors don’t fall under the jurisdiction of his government.
    • autoexec 1 hour ago
      All they'll need is hundreds of billions of dollars, more RAM and GPUs than are currently available, and a huge number of environment destroying data centers. We're sure to be spoiled for choice!
    • Fordec 1 hour ago
      The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
    • enraged_camel 1 hour ago
      OpenAI is the only real competition. Chinese models are 6-8 months behind Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5, and at least a year or more behind Mythos.

      And it doesn't look like OpenAI will have a good answer to Mythos anytime soon. Based on what their chief scientist wrote to staff recently (https://archive.is/fN2pg), GPT 5.6 is a "meaningful improvement" over 5.5 - in other words, just a normal version bump. And no news or even rumors regarding GPT 6.

  • guardiangod 2 hours ago
    I am using LLM to build some security tool, and I ran into this a few times. I have to come up with a reasoning to convince (?!!) Fable to continue the work without downgrading.

    I assume Anthropic will continue to tune the model, so I am not too bothered by this.