One takeaway from this is that anthropic do not want their public-facing model to be good at advanced ML research.
With that incentive it seems reasonable to assume that future anthropic models will not be good at ML research, at least because they aren't incentivised to make it so, and therefore using other models perhaps open source will be the way to go.
This does make the large assumption that they can afford to train a parallel model for themselves to assist in their own research. But given their huge valuation, and incentives, that extra cost is feasibly worth it for them.
The damage is done. They designed Fable to be dishonest and sabotage-y. Look at this report of Claude now randomly changing AI software without being asked to:
This is so completely dishonest. But it also shows how deeply anti competitive Anthropic is. They will talk about safety but it’s not actually about safety: building features like this seems intended to hurt competition in the AI space. They don’t mind if AI helps YOUR competitor but if it means competition for them, they suddenly have a problem with it.
I don’t care that they walked this back. They’ve shown who they are. And what they’re capable of.
We now all know that Anthropic CAN do that if they want to. The fact that they told you upfront about it shows that their arrogance on this self-sabotage against their customers is at stratospheric levels.
Believe them the first time, and they are not your friends at all.
It's kinda weird to think the Chinese AI labs might be more trust worthy than the US labs.
- Anthropic is ran by a bunch of nut jobs.
- OpenAI is ran by a guy you can't trust.
I don't even know if we should include DeepMind, Meta, or xAi in the conversation of AI labs at this point since they can't produce models better than Chinese labs.
To be fair, nerfing Claude on frontier research tasks is consistent with Anthropic's stated beliefs. So in that sense you can trust them to always behave consistently if strangely. But this launch was done very poorly with the lack of transparency on when the frontier research policy was violated.
Yeah and their belief are fucking crazy and dangerous. They are literally sabotaging their users. They built in malware into their model if you prompt it about training a fucking AI model. It doesn't tell you, no it literally sabotages you by editing your prompt and intentionally goes against your request.
You want fucking nut jobs like this building models?
It's one thing to build safeguards on your model and have it prompt the user back. I'm sorry I can't help you with this request. Chinese models do this for some requests.
It's another thing to actively try to make the model perform worst for your user on purpose because it asked the model to do something you, the model creator, didn't like.
Imagine someone is asking a logical medical question and the model swaps the prompt and purpose being less intelligent and gives bad advice to this person.
How do these people not understand they are stupid.
Call me a cynic, but I don't believe this is a genuine change of heart at all. It feels much more like a panicked response to something that might undermine their IPO.
Even if you trust Anthropic today (which I don't), they clearly don't want competition and there's no telling what other shady moves they'll pull in future.
The only sustainable way forward is to support open models. I was already on the fence about whether or not to keep my Max subscription (the extra cost over something like DeepSeek V4 didn't really feel justifiable). This is the tipping point for me, I'll be cancelling my sub before it renews at the end of the month.
I guess I don't understand why it's shady. It seems more like a poorly executed decision to enforce a publicly stated policy (it's been against Anthropic's ToS to use their models on frontier ML research for a while now). After all, people found out about this through their published system card.
It is definitely a bad idea to do this without notifying the user, because users who are incorrectly affected will have no way of providing feedback or getting support. And it is also anticompetitive, but if you truly believe that AI is not a normal technology, it is rational.
It's shady because they were going to silently poison your outputs.
It's actually worse than it sounds initially, because Fable isn't actually omniscient when it comes to safety classification. Many people (myself included) had refusals or fallback to Opus 4.8 for seemingly compliant/innocuous requests.
Wouldn't you be pissed off if they decided to sabotage your project despite having done nothing wrong?
The trouble is the silence, not Anthropic setting guardrails. Claude saying "I'm sorry, I can't assist further because it looks like you're [XYZ]" is fine.
We all know the false positive rates for classifiers on Fable. Imagine being a ML researcher working on any kind of ML/AI project that isn't against their ToS, and having your codebase poisoned and sabotaged silently.
I think they are legitimately convinced that this model is so dangerous it could destroy the world and that they genuinely have the responsibility to prevent it from assisting other models to destroy the world.
I don't think I agree that I should be forbidden from e.g. patching a binary to work on the latest macOS since the company behind it died and intentionally installed a time-based kill-switch (FUCK ADOBE for popularizing that practice). But ooOOooOOoo working with machine code is so cybersecurity and therefore suspicious.
> I think they are legitimately convinced that this model is so dangerous it could destroy the world and that they genuinely have the responsibility to prevent it from assisting other models to destroy the world.
Do they really believe that? Or do they just want to control this technology exclusively with moves like this and with pushing for regulatory capture after complaining about safety all the time? Didn’t Dario say that GPT2 or GPT3 would present a similar destroy the world level of danger?
One takeaway from this is that anthropic do not want their public-facing model to be good at advanced ML research.
With that incentive it seems reasonable to assume that future anthropic models will not be good at ML research, at least because they aren't incentivised to make it so, and therefore using other models perhaps open source will be the way to go.
This does make the large assumption that they can afford to train a parallel model for themselves to assist in their own research. But given their huge valuation, and incentives, that extra cost is feasibly worth it for them.
https://archive.ph/yxYhU
The damage is done. They designed Fable to be dishonest and sabotage-y. Look at this report of Claude now randomly changing AI software without being asked to:
https://xcancel.com/hammer_mt/status/2064839924398825798
This is so completely dishonest. But it also shows how deeply anti competitive Anthropic is. They will talk about safety but it’s not actually about safety: building features like this seems intended to hurt competition in the AI space. They don’t mind if AI helps YOUR competitor but if it means competition for them, they suddenly have a problem with it.
I don’t care that they walked this back. They’ve shown who they are. And what they’re capable of.
I think I've seen this model used by major academic publishers before.: https://files.catbox.moe/mrh1ll.jpg
Too late.
We now all know that Anthropic CAN do that if they want to. The fact that they told you upfront about it shows that their arrogance on this self-sabotage against their customers is at stratospheric levels.
Believe them the first time, and they are not your friends at all.
It's kinda weird to think the Chinese AI labs might be more trust worthy than the US labs.
- Anthropic is ran by a bunch of nut jobs.
- OpenAI is ran by a guy you can't trust.
I don't even know if we should include DeepMind, Meta, or xAi in the conversation of AI labs at this point since they can't produce models better than Chinese labs.
To be fair, nerfing Claude on frontier research tasks is consistent with Anthropic's stated beliefs. So in that sense you can trust them to always behave consistently if strangely. But this launch was done very poorly with the lack of transparency on when the frontier research policy was violated.
Yeah and their belief are fucking crazy and dangerous. They are literally sabotaging their users. They built in malware into their model if you prompt it about training a fucking AI model. It doesn't tell you, no it literally sabotages you by editing your prompt and intentionally goes against your request.
You want fucking nut jobs like this building models?
It's one thing to build safeguards on your model and have it prompt the user back. I'm sorry I can't help you with this request. Chinese models do this for some requests.
It's another thing to actively try to make the model perform worst for your user on purpose because it asked the model to do something you, the model creator, didn't like.
Imagine someone is asking a logical medical question and the model swaps the prompt and purpose being less intelligent and gives bad advice to this person.
How do these people not understand they are stupid.
5 replies →
The thing with Chinese AI labs is that you don’t need to trust them. They publish the models, you can run them on-prem or rent a beefy VPS.
Deepmind is definitely frontier. They just don't care that much about code.
Call me a cynic, but I don't believe this is a genuine change of heart at all. It feels much more like a panicked response to something that might undermine their IPO.
Even if you trust Anthropic today (which I don't), they clearly don't want competition and there's no telling what other shady moves they'll pull in future.
The only sustainable way forward is to support open models. I was already on the fence about whether or not to keep my Max subscription (the extra cost over something like DeepSeek V4 didn't really feel justifiable). This is the tipping point for me, I'll be cancelling my sub before it renews at the end of the month.
I guess I don't understand why it's shady. It seems more like a poorly executed decision to enforce a publicly stated policy (it's been against Anthropic's ToS to use their models on frontier ML research for a while now). After all, people found out about this through their published system card.
It is definitely a bad idea to do this without notifying the user, because users who are incorrectly affected will have no way of providing feedback or getting support. And it is also anticompetitive, but if you truly believe that AI is not a normal technology, it is rational.
It's shady because they were going to silently poison your outputs.
It's actually worse than it sounds initially, because Fable isn't actually omniscient when it comes to safety classification. Many people (myself included) had refusals or fallback to Opus 4.8 for seemingly compliant/innocuous requests.
Wouldn't you be pissed off if they decided to sabotage your project despite having done nothing wrong?
The trouble is the silence, not Anthropic setting guardrails. Claude saying "I'm sorry, I can't assist further because it looks like you're [XYZ]" is fine.
We all know the false positive rates for classifiers on Fable. Imagine being a ML researcher working on any kind of ML/AI project that isn't against their ToS, and having your codebase poisoned and sabotaged silently.
I think they are legitimately convinced that this model is so dangerous it could destroy the world and that they genuinely have the responsibility to prevent it from assisting other models to destroy the world.
I don't think I agree that I should be forbidden from e.g. patching a binary to work on the latest macOS since the company behind it died and intentionally installed a time-based kill-switch (FUCK ADOBE for popularizing that practice). But ooOOooOOoo working with machine code is so cybersecurity and therefore suspicious.
> I think they are legitimately convinced that this model is so dangerous it could destroy the world and that they genuinely have the responsibility to prevent it from assisting other models to destroy the world.
Do they really believe that? Or do they just want to control this technology exclusively with moves like this and with pushing for regulatory capture after complaining about safety all the time? Didn’t Dario say that GPT2 or GPT3 would present a similar destroy the world level of danger?
The company was founded basically out of the effective altruism movement.
15 replies →
> Call me a cynic, but I don't believe this is a genuine change of heart at all.
A cynic? Yeah, you wish. You need a PhD in cynicism if you want to catch up to reality.
> The only sustainable way forward is to support open models.
You're on the right track though, we're now a crowd of two.
Great, now just let me use it for bioinformatics and we're good.
[dead]