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Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

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Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does it help?

By withholding it from bad actors.

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#242
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why Dario is begging the government to ban competitors.

Unfortunately for him, his main competitors don’t fall under the jurisdiction of his government.

Access and use of it does.

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#243
post #5

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

> 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.

Any kind of silent sabotaging is absolutely unacceptable for any commercial service

They charge for tokens and charge a lot. They can't just degrade service silently and still charge you the same.

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#244
post #5

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

There’s a toggle in the web ui as to whether the conversation should just end when you hit a guardrail vs automatically downgrading to another model. Have you tried using that?

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#245
post #5

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

I guess the real question at the end of the day -- how dependent are people on Claude to tolerate that kind of behavior? It certainly opens up for the competition to explicitly not do that.

Feels like a big fumble from a strategic business perspective. It feels worse than that though.

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#246
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this surprising or a problem?! It's a model demo, & their reasoning is reasonable and fair. Why all this drama.

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!

Or... they just disagree with Anthropic's ethical stances and approach to applying them?

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#247
post #5

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

> 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.

My hypothesis is they know they can’t build effective enough guardrails, so scaring people into not trying is how they have decided to stop it.

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#248
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

You know, I'm not saying I don't understand what they are doing from a business perspective, but I'm just saying: DeepSeek V4 doesn't silently sabotage you because it thinks you are trying to violate a ToS. Anthropic's clawing back a bit of a moat perhaps, with Fable being an actual improvement of sorts, but now with torching user trust they are really banking on open weight models not catching up to where they are now. I wonder if they have a good reason to believe that they won't, or are hoping for something entirely different to save them.

(P.S. Yes of course I know about model censorship, a different problem, but all of the models are censored to some degree. It happens to be less of a problem for open weight models anyhow, but I figured I'd just preempt this since it's inevitable.)

I actually kinda like DSv4 over Opus 4.7 for some tasks, although I have not figured out what the deciding factor is. (Opus 4.8 so far has not worked very well for me at all, no idea why.)

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a noob about laws but isn’t this abusing its dominant market position and violates some antitrust law?

Why would it? There’s plenty of competition in the AI space.

I would assume that it’s like the Chrome browser does not allow you downloading Firefox using it, surely that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?

Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

#250
post #178
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of the opinion that removing guardrails is how you force regulation. What's your opinion on the balance?

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?

Since your answer isn't direct, I'm having a little trouble interpreting it.

Are you saying they should relax guardrails since they have 30 days to know if you produced something bad? If that is what you're saying, then I suspect they chose their current path to prevent, since you can't un-produce. Producing is what would cause regulations/PR problems.

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