Comment by nmfisher
8 days ago
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.
What is the impact of effective altruism? I looked it up, but I don't understand how it differs from simple logical consideration, i.e. how it would be responsible for any of Anthropic's eccentricities.
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which is effectively a delusion about out racing entropy: guys, if we just make a lot of money, we can fix all thw problems that making a lot of money creates
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> 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.