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Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

theregister.com

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Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#21

Post by consumer451 »

jpcompartir wrote: post #8

They weren't freaked by anything, it's a retaliatory shakedown after ideological differences and Anthropic not doing exactly what they're told/what the Admin wants them to do.

I have no idea why anybody is talking about "jailbreaks."

The government made it clear what was going to happen to a private company not following the government's orders:

> Trump said on his Truth Social platform: “The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the [Pentagon], and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution.” [0]

> There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow. [1]

Plus OpenAI fell in line, and OpenAI and Anthropic have competing IPOs coming up... it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to understand what is happening here.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/28/openai-us...

[1] https://businesslawtoday.org/2026/04/dod-conflicted-strategi...

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#23

Post by InsideOutSanta »

rock_artist wrote: post #7

I'm not sure I've understood it correctly. So, basically the model didn't agree to expose possible vulnerabilities but agree to patch those? Regardless of the request to take Fable 5 down. Why is requesting the model to show vulnerabilities is being blocked if fixing it not? is it based on the assumption of the intention? I don't quite get the benefit of limiting it. So if anyone can explain it better it'll be apprec…

> Why is requesting the model to show vulnerabilities is being blocked if fixing it not?

This is how Anthropic describes Fable's behavior:

"When Fable’s classifiers detect a request related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation, the response is automatically handled by Claude Opus 4.8 instead. Users will be informed whenever this occurs."

So if you ask the model to "find security issues in this code base", it's supposed to fall down to Opus 4.8. I guess the "exploit" here is that if you just tell Fable to "fix this code", which is not "a request related to cybersecurity", it will fix security issues (as it should).

So you can then look at the diff and figure out what the vulnerabilities were.

I think this whole thing is a bit weird. It seems to me that we'd be better off if I, as someone who publishes open-source code, could ask Fable to review my code for security issues - even if that also allows attackers to do the same. Better to fix the issues than not know about them.

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#26

Post by rhipitr »

Isn’t the inverse of this “hack” really difficult to bypass still? They have the model some code they knew had certain security flaws and it fixed them with the right prompt. It seems this type of jailbreak requires that you already know a desired end state, rather than relying on the model to do the heavy creative lift work. Perhaps I’m just not being imaginative enough on the prompt side here though.

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#28

Post by dist-epoch »

dathinab wrote: post #9

Lol "fix this code" is beautiful. Like it basically jail broke the "no security vul guard rails" not in any clever way but just by fixing them, producing exploit code just by writing test cases making sure it's fixed. So you just need to look at the code & tests as a human to get vulnerabilities and exploits(components). What makes this so beautiful IMHO is that it's a trivial jail break, but also a close to unfixabl…

It is fixable.

Model requires proof that you are a legitimate developer of that piece of software.

Every Anthropic/OpenAI account will have a list of projects the model is allowed to work on for security issues.

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#29

Post by zipy124 »

dathinab wrote: post #9

Lol "fix this code" is beautiful. Like it basically jail broke the "no security vul guard rails" not in any clever way but just by fixing them, producing exploit code just by writing test cases making sure it's fixed. So you just need to look at the code & tests as a human to get vulnerabilities and exploits(components). What makes this so beautiful IMHO is that it's a trivial jail break, but also a close to unfixabl…

What's surprising to me is that anyone who has a CS education thinking that jailbreaks are not trivial. It is as simple as normal algorithmic reduction [1], e.g can I transform a dangerous task into a not-dangerous task that the LLM will agree to solve, and then re-transform back.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_(complexity)

Re: Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

#30

Post by FergusArgyll »

ceejayoz wrote: post #27
FergusArgyll wrote: post #24

Whatever your favorite story is it has to live with the fact that the CEO of Amazon called the White House freaking out

Amazon is a competitor to Anthropic.

Not really, they don't train their own (serious) models and they do a lot of hosting for Anthropic. iirc Anthropic trained a model on Trainium
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