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

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101–110 of 570 posts

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

#101

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.

If the guardrails were so useless, people wouldn't be complaining about them.

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.

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

#102
post #52

It's a marketplace. Someone else will outdo this inferior product.

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.

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

#103
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

[dead]

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#105
post #15

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.

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.

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

#106
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

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).

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

#107

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.

If the guardrails were so useless, people wouldn't be complaining about them.

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

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

#108
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 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?

They use a lightweight adapter to silently degrade the performance. Usually these adaptors are made to improve the performance for a given domain/task.

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

#109
post #95
post #64

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.

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

Some people find Anthropic's special blend of paternalism and random incompetence tiresome.
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