Redeploying Fable 5

This post has been marked as a dupe, but it provides a lot more details than the other announcements of Fable's re-enablement provide:

> The export control directive on June 12 came after the government became aware of a report in which Amazon researchers had found a method of bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards: prompting it so that it identified a number of software vulnerabilities. In one case, the model produced code demonstrating how the relevant vulnerability could be exploited. Over the past two weeks, we have worked closely with the government and other partners, including Amazon, to review the report and evidence.

> Our testing confirmed that many less capable models—including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7—could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable 5 did in the report. When it came to the demonstration of how to exploit the single vulnerability, every model we tested could produce the same demonstration as Fable 5 (including Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7).

This indicates three things:

1) WTF was Amazon thinking? Didn't their researches try the same thing in other models too before telling the CEO to tell the government it was dangerous (!?)

2) Anthropic - in particular Dario - really needs to learn government relations better. Most of the problems Anthropic has had with the government seem to stem from Dario's attitude rather than actual facts. (Eg, the DoD debacle seems to have ended up with OpenAI signing almost the same contract Anthropic already had, just worded differently)

3) The administration decision making is just wacky. In a normal administration they'd have actual policy documents you could look at to understand under what circumstances they think models have a problem. With this they just seem to make it up as they go, and the tools they use make no sense at all. If it is dangerous for cyber security reasons why would export controls make sense to use?

"For Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans, Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits."

The party will be short-lived.

I really hope that one day we reach a point where we feel confident enough in the standards of care in upstream software, that we can get rid of these safeguards.

This isn't said out of naiveté or the idea that companies won't cheap out, but at some point – if access to models for defense is broadly available enough – we have to take a step back and say, "Aggressively insure your code against attack with AI on your side, because after <date> the other side will just _have_ AI."

I feel like something lost in a lot of the discussion around mythos and fable is that computer security absolutely has a substantial defender's advantage. It is indeed possible to ship e.g. surfaces that would be super resilient to attack (e.g. no unnecessary open surfaces, etc.) modulo category-shift attacks like RowHammer, etc.

Besides, just making sure that more people in the world actually have access to non-lobotomized models, this is _necessary_ if open source is (hopefully) going to continue to progress and if jailbreaks aren't totally vanquished.

I had already cancelled my subscription after finding the original Fable safeguards literally unusable (very basic chemistry, cryptography use cases), but with the false positives being admittedly worse now and the subscription not covering Fable for long I fail to see the point of consumer subscriptions now. Perhaps that's the goal, but it's a tough sell when Minimax M3 and GLM 5.2 are comfortably in Opus 4.5-4.8 territory but 1/5th-1/20th the price.

I've been wrestling for days with a recalcitrant Opus 4.8 unable to close the circle on an algorithm I'm sure, based on the three previous days' experience, Fable 5 will cut right through.

Yeah! I only knew it for 3 days but I was starting to fall in love!

Hooray! Glad everyone came to their senses and we can all get on with business.

I bet it'll continue to be messy at the frontier for the foreseeable future as society gradually wakes up to the consequences of strong AI.

I hope the redeployed Fable 5 is the same as the version they pulled without any substantially increased restrictions.

It’s nice to have access again, but I’m hesitant to include it in my workflow now. In fact I’d rather not use American models at all if I could.

I have the sense that this limited usage model will persist, Opus at its current token price will gradually be phased out, and eventually the cost of these models will be unsustainable and impractical.

I’d rather not play this game anymore and seek out more reliable providers which may provide less capable models but aren’t going to gradually kneecap my plan or rug-pull me.

Frankly I’m much less concerned with sheer model capability these days and more interested in harnesses. Claude Code is not the best on the market, and I think there’s a lot of exploring and learning to do in that arena.

The whole Fable debacle has dramatically changed my perspective on the market and what I want from it/who I should support.

Nice! I go to the x20 again.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740771

"some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8."

disappointed but not surprised

>Our testing confirmed that many less capable models—including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7—could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable 5 did in the report.

That is nice advertising for Kimi, huh?