In its current state Fable 5 is also unusable for any reverse engineering work
Can confirm it is also useless for building tools defending against reverse engineering work (unless asked to do code review for some reason?)
Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
311–320 of 570 posts
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry, I’m specifically referring to the silent degradation of the model to “limit frontier LLM development”. From the description, it appears to encapsulate far more than frontier LLM development, but general ML research and development too.
Those cases are never bad for the world firstly, and a broad coverage of ML work is even more damaging.
My proposal would be (1) don’t degrade models, with 30D retention I’m sure they can do a reasonable job at banning deepseek or whatever, or (2) surface user facing refusals instead of silently degrading ML work.
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#313News just broke in this Wired story: "Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude" https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o... > “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.” Sounds like the wides…
They need to walk back a lot more.
Unilaterally revoking zero-data retention, even for enterprise contracts that explicitly require that? Nope.
Fable is utterly unusable for any kind of security work. I tripped the safeguards yesterday - using Fable to dig into a complex (& annoying) security bug that has so far resisted both human and Opus 4.8 level investigation. "Sorry Dave, I can't let you do that."
For the time being we are requesting Anthropic disable Fable for our enterprise and turn ZDR back on. The two may be interlinked so that one will always get neither or both. ZDR is a contractual obligation. Fable in its current form is useless. Might as well flip the old behaviour on and avoid burning money for no reason while this mess is being sorted out.
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#314News just broke in this Wired story: "Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude" https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o... > “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.” Sounds like the wides…
To late. I canceled my Max subscription. The idea they would even do this is so destroyed any remaining trust. Why would I pay them 1000s of dollars in extra usage per month for something they could still be doing behind the scenes? Any errors previously chalked up to thinking effort or other backend changes? Maybe it was intentional prompt injection the entire time.
that you still had max after all their deceptions is amazing
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
To late. I canceled my Max subscription. The idea they would even do this is so destroyed any remaining trust. Why would I pay them 1000s of dollars in extra usage per month for something they could still be doing behind the scenes? Any errors previously chalked up to thinking effort or other backend changes? Maybe it was intentional prompt injection the entire time.
that you still had max after all their deceptions is amazing
Yeah; not my smartest decision given their ongoing “issues”
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#316kennedy had a famous statement about "Splintering the CIA into a thousand pieces and scattering it into the wind". they murdered him afterwards though.
the statement is applicable to anthropic today.
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#317[dead]
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#318I 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 l…
>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.
> The outputs are basically infinite
If the model refuses to output, then it's actually finite, zero.
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
The announcement elucidated this, and it's IMO worse than this. They don't downgrade to a cheaper model ([edit] for certain classes of offense they suspect you of). 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. But it i…
It honestly explains so many issues I have been having, as I used it primarily for ML research (on my personal account, doing things not related to my job I should note). It would literally typo package names and spend huge amounts of time failing to setup simple environments…then do stupid things like set the learning rate to 1e-7, and use the eval set as training data.
It burned through all of my tokens in a very short time. I wonder if it their ML mitigations leads to model into deadlocks.
Re: Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
#320News just broke in this Wired story: "Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude" https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o... > “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.” Sounds like the wides…
They are still downgrading. They just aren't doing it silently. I don't know how big of a win that is? They still trained on everyone else's data without license or attribution but want to prevent someone else from doing the same thing to them.
Some pretty audacious hypocrisy from Anthropic this week.