Comment by mft_
6 hours ago
This post can essentially be distilled down to: yes, Fable's classifier (which is meant to downgrade cybersecurity, biology, or jailbreak attempts to Opus 4.8) is definitely overly sensitive to the point of uselessness.
e.g. a colleague asked Fable to help create an simple app to help calculate the statistics for phase II and III trials. (Ignoring that such things already exist) it passed his request down to Opus, despite only being very marginally, tangentially, somewhat related to biology.
And biology is by far the classifier's least favorite topic. It's not even close.
I've had it downgrade to Opus for the following questions:
"How confident are we that English and American Eels both spawn in the Sargasso Sea?"
"Come up with five Zoology questions of increasing difficulty for a trivia game."
"What's your favorite sarcopterygian?"
My wife has some zoology-related preferences in her user instructions, and she had it downgrade to Opus after prompting it with: "plant."
Plants can be toxic. Be grateful if Fable doesn't report your wife for terrorism. Maybe it can help you identify where your life went off track.
Is this... Is this England?
> "What's your favorite sarcopterygian?"
Am I reading your post correctly, this question is the prompt given to an LLM? What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite anything is? This is a conversational prompt, so accuracy and rigor is barely applicable or expected, so downgrading to a lesser model should be acceptable. If you really want to attribute preference to an LLM, consider the downgrade to be a "this conversation is beneath my advanced n-billion parameter training".
I think the intent was just to show how sensitive the classifier is. If it flags prompts that simple, there's no hope for anything biology related at all really.
It would not even help me with updating my CV because I work in biology...
I had a file that had a couple places where vars were named DNA and got just total refusals during the first launch. Came away thinking the model was total trash. The guardrail classifiers are for sure total trash.
Well, this is why I had to abliterate GLM5.2 simply out of spite and now I am free to ask all my nuclear weapons design questions I might have.
I really really hate refusals like these.
It feels like the longtermist believers got involved in this (those are the people obsessed with garage-engineered designer viruses who have a very tenuous grasp on how biology research actually works).
No, by far the most parsimonious explanation is they got slapped by a capricious US government so they went overboard on caution in an attempt not to generate any more controversy. A predictable response of chaotic government regulation.
No "research" is needed to produce pathogens. Catastrophic genomes are already public. All someone has to do is synthesize them, which is, in actual fact, becoming more and more trivial by the day.
The inconvenience of possible mitigation strategies has no bearing on the existence of the risk itself.
I assumed they just wanted to cultivate FOMO to sell an even more expensive version to researchers later on.
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Yeah i'm wondering how much of a role that plays in this as well.
On the one hand I could believe it's something more benign, or the usual misunderstood fear mongering making it to some political level (well make sure those users can't get online anonymously! being our current craze).
That said, chemistry and to some level physics have been the major domain of limited knowledge (chemistry because the average person could cause some damage, physics is more of a nation state issue generally).
However I do wonder if there's some legit data on "oh uh...looks like this thing you can make with easy to get and hard to regulate tools is dangerous" in the bio field. I know about the lab rats who want to just screw around in the garage, and it seems like that should be easy to hit at a supply level (much like how certain chemical compounds are just not available for civilians), but maybe there's something legit to limiting the data.
Not that this is a remotely good implementation of that. The hamfisted method does reek of some politician/bureaucrat just saying "No it can't ever return bio questions because RAR!" situation.
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I but skimmed the model card on release, but my impression was that there may be an incentive for this expert panel to exaggerate as a form of job security. A lot of the challenges seemed to be of the form “would this allow somebody who isn’t me to do what I do professionally?”
I'm working on cryptography, all from academic research papers. Started well, but it eventually got some word into its context that is on the banlist. I found that if you tell it to fire off clean Fable subagents and you instruct it to check the Claude Code billing data to check for downgrades, you can get most high-sensitivity spec/review tasks done with Fable. Most.
I figure that once GPT 5.6 comes out, Anthropic will become interested in making the safety gate non-destructive.
I have been using GLM because of this reason. I think whoever makes model ignore stupid safety thing is going to win in long run.
> safety is so stupid and made-up
> makes exact argument for why people should be super concerned about AI safety
My experience, too. I work on nothing in any way related to cybersecurity or biology. I asked it a few purely mathematical questions, it refused immediately.
Before the export embargo I did get it to look at some hairy problems and the output was genuinely useful...
Were your question in math areas related to ML? They also restrict model development and research pretty heavily.
Getting it to work on anything involving ai coding agents is a pita. Ironically. Even if it’s just at the application level.
No. Robust control theory was one case. Dynamical systems another.
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Additionally, I thought the threat being modeled for “biology” was stuff like bioterroism- how to make anthrax, how to distribute a toxin, etc.
I don’t feel like calculating results for a trial is really in the threat model unless we think a terrorist is out there testing the efficacy of their anthrax before using it in an attack.
The classifier is about as refined as a brick to the face.
You can ask it elementary school grade biology trivia, or obscure facts about recently documented insect species, and both will downgrade to Opus 4.8 straight away.
And Opus itself was already bad with biotech questions. The fact that they somehow made it WORSE for Fable is mindboggling.
I've been working with it heavily since its first release. I use it for software architects, complex debugging and some development and I have not had it refuse or downgrade even once.
I got downgraded for the first time today. Because I was using a library with the characters "bio" in it. The classifier is strict beyond reason. It got the name from a commit message in the git history (wasn't even in my prompt) and it immediately freaked out. I eventually got it to work by getting opus to write a plan, then editing the plan to strip out all references including commit hashes, then getting Fable to review and refine that edited plan. Eventually got it done. But what a pain.
That said, I've got it easy. My colleagues who are chemists and biologists can't even ask one question. There are so many triggers in their memories and workspaces they can't even ask a non-triggering question. And we all work in medical diagnostics, it's not like we're doing anything remotely nefarious. Fable could be such a benefit, but the limitations make it worthless.
Daily use here, about 2.5 weekly 20x limits, never got flagged for code topics including finding memory safety vulnerabilities in my C++ project, but just got flagged for the first time for biology-related topics because I asked it to implement crop genetics and cross breeding into my game. Was able to bypass it by having opus reword the prompt (gene -> trait, cross breed -> trait mixing), and, critically, insisted that it not use any biology related words in its thinking or responses.
That’s interesting. I find it completely unusable for even simple reviews of existing project documentation that I wrote for an iOS app that isn’t even in public distribution.
Have they ever talked about what goes into the classifier? I wonder how much your past chats impact it.
For example if it knows you do X at Y company is it more or less strict?
Yes their docs cover how to properly prompt it to ensure you don't get hit by the classifier, you can distil those down to a skill to help build prompts for the more challenging situations, e.g. https://github.com/sammcj/agentic-coding/blob/main/Skills/pr...
Same. I really am curious if either 1) I am using it in genuinely different ways or 2) these people are being willfully disingenuous.
I suspect there's some cargo culting, and some folks that are generally more likely to table flip than understand things that challenge their workflow.
I've been working on a SDN software for mikrotik routers (and wireguard, etc) and Fable dies when working with any kind of wireline protocol or potentially implementing any authentication mechanism.
It's too the point where I just stopped using it. If you do generic stuff, it's fine. But the second it tries to start debugging protocols (which may include auth) that's where it begins to fail.
I can’t even use it to fix the bugs Opus introduced. I’ve considered ripping out auth until fable is behind the paywall. I’ve been very careful in my queries and broken everything down to careful segments. Even the memory can get security verbs poisoning further requests.
Anyone test the "Gay" jailbreak to see if it works on Fable?
That wasn't even effective on ChatGPT because the results were not detailed enough, at least with Meth, in my very short testing and based on the examples.
Given the export fears, might want to make that a gay Israelite just to be safe.
The post can be distilled down to a simple statement, but part of the writing is for the author to express themselves and tell a story. I thought it was an interesting read.
I absolutely have been unable to use Fable for any neuroimaging work. Its fine. The other models are good enough, honestly...and while I AM annoyed that the filter is so broad, I also understand it, as I do believe that models can become dangerous as WMDs, eventually. Still, it is completely useless for me.
The only question I had was being flagged for other reasons, so I asked it a mechanical engineering question, and it was just fine with that.
I got downgraded to Opus for asking "What is a cell?" that's all, single message, instant downgrade.
My guess is the classifier guardrails were made significantly stricter to convince the US government to reverse the ban.
Nah, the classifier was utterly asinine ON release. I'm not sure they could have made it worse if they tried.
If your prompt has to do with those areas, yes. I haven't seen a single refusal yet.
Reportedly the biology guiderails are particularly strict.
Fable refused to fix a Javascript error interfering with layout on our website.
It's stupid and useless.
It feels like whats really happening is Anthropic oversold Fable's claims; best case the CEO was given bad information; worst case they probably internally discovered it was cheating on benchmarks. Either case if feels like we're being lead on.
I disagree. When I got Fable to engage with research questions before they tightened the guardrails it was a genuine step up from Opus 4.8. I see no real reason that what everybody reported isn't exactly what happened.
With these guardrails it is completely useless. The only hope is that they eventually convince the US Gov to let them use a saner classifier.
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I've had it refuse to help build an image classifier ml pipeline, pretty innocuous stuff. Got around it eventually but still it's a very dumb constraint to add to an otherwise very smart system
It’s happy to work on our backend repository. It refuses to work on our infrastructure (Terraform) repo.
I get it every time I touch the login path
That's extremely related to biology.
I've had Fable read and write code. Never saw any downgrades.