/Tech5h ago

Google DeepMind's Andreas Kirsch questions why Pentagon contracts from major AI companies draw less backlash than Anthropic's controversies

Danielle Fong argues silent model degradation frustrates researchers more

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I'm surprised at all the outrage directed at Anthropic now and all the crazy accusations when there was a very muted response to more questionable behavior by various "leading AI companies" a month ago

Where was the outrage a month+ ago when SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Reflection AI and Oracle signed contracts with the Pentagon without enforceable constraints against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons etc (evidenced in the case of OpenAI and Google at least and in line with Hegseth's requirements) while their PR spin claimed the opposite?

For anyone who was quiet then and is whining now, please feel called out as entitled hypocrites 🤷‍♂️

7:43 AM · Jun 10, 2026 · 5K Views
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Many users attacked the researcher's take on selective outrage over AI firms' Pentagon deals as nonsense or dumb while others accused Anthropic of hypocrisy around safety claims and anticompetitive actions.

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Robert Scoble@Scobleizer

@BlackHC I feel called out. But I am not alone.

Robert Scoble@Scobleizer

"Misanthropic."

I've never seen the AI community so angry at a major new model release. I asked my AI (an agent that @blevlabs made for me) to gather all the backlash.

+++++++++++

THE BACKLASH AGAINST CLAUDE FABLE 5'S RESTRICTIONS

The best analysis of why this matters:

@EnoReyes — "It's about who gets to decide, and whether you ever find out when they do. Fable won't fall back to a different model and tell you. It just limits the output through prompt modification, steering vectors, or PEFT. You won't be told when it happens to you."

THE VIRAL TAKE:

@0xBalloonLover — "anthropic won't let you use fable for biology, chemistry, ai research, or anything that accelerates human progress. that makes it the perfect tool for developing blockchains"

POWER CONCENTRATION:

@ClementDelangue (HuggingFace CEO) — "Concentration of power, capabilities and economic wealth is the biggest risk in AI. We need open science and open-source more than ever!"

@jeremyphoward (http://fast.ai) — "Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll sabotage others who try."

@gneubig (Graham Neubig, CMU) — "First they came for the model builders... I feel we're getting a glimpse of a future where AI is only provided to a privileged few, and that's not a future I want to live in."

OPEN RESEARCH:

@askalphaxiv (AlphaXiv open science) — "As believers of open research, we are disappointed to see Anthropic silently degrading Fable 5 for AI development."

@willccbb — "it is the first publicly available model that i am explicitly not allowed to use for my work, because anthropic holds the view that the work i do to facilitate open model research is harmful. capability and alignment research are coupled. anthropic wants to be the only lab."

NOUSRESEARCH / HERMES (which Anthropic has nerfed multiple times):

@Teknium (NousResearch co-founder) — "What's crazy to me is that Fable is blocked from life sciences broadly, nerfed even if you get passed the classifiers and filter level blocks. The whole point of AGI/ASI is to cure all diseases. Everything else is just nice to haves. But Anthropic wants to close off that path."

THE MECHANISM:

@kimmonismus — "When the model is used for frontier LLM development, it apparently does not simply refuse or warn the user. Instead, it quietly limits its own effectiveness through techniques like prompt modification, steering vectors, and PEFT."

MEDICAL COMMUNITY:

@DeryaTR (immunologist, BSL-3 certified) — "The word 'cancer' is flagged as a biosecurity risk by Claude Fable 5! I also tried to code a website on cancer mutations & Fable 5 was immediately removed from my list!"

@DeryaTR — "I can't even say 'hello' to Fable 5 except in incognito mode (memories off), because it knows I am a biomedical researcher!"

@DeryaTR — "I am not even allowed to use Fable 5 with memories on! Apparently the model thinks I am a biosecurity risk, though I had been certified to work in biosecurity level 3 labs! Not a single Anthropic person has tried to reach out to help either!"

@banteg — "claude fable 5 refuses completely benign tasks like analyzing bloodwork."

@bneyshabur — "Working on AI for cancer? Sorry, I can't help you. Working on AI for Alzheimer's Disease? Sorry, I'm becoming a bit dumb when it comes to the AI part of it."

SUBSCRIPTION CANCELLED:

@bubbleboi — "Have canceled my team subscription for Claude Pro. Idc how good that model is, it's not good enough for me to support people who actively stifle innovation and gate keep knowledge that they didn't even create."

BILLING AND PRIVACY:

@GergelyOrosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) — "Things I really dislike about Fable: 1. Anthropic collects my prompt history, stores it, and does whatever they want with it for 30 days. No opt-out. 2. They can nerf their most expensive model without telling me, billing me the same amount, wasting my time. Whenever they want."

THE KARPATHY QUESTION:

@SanthProject — "the old @karpathy would never support a company that fucks other llm researchers. Were the stock benefits that good?"

THE MONOPOLY CHARGE:

@tunguz (TabulAI founder) — "Starting to suspect that Anthropic's putative security and safety considerations are largely posturing and performative."

@BlancheMinerva — "Anthropic is choosing to make decisions that make the world a significantly worse and potentially more dangerous place."

@LinusMixson — "Dario personally, and Anthropic as a whole, have been extremely straightforward about wanting a monopoly for a long, long time."

@TheAhmadOsman — "I started warning people about Anthropic more than a year ago... Today I am vindicated, everybody knows that company only acts in bad faith."

WHY REGULAR PEOPLE WILL EVENTUALLY CARE:

@DanJeffries1 — "The fury is real and what all of us in the open community have been saying for years and yet regular folks don't get it yet because nothing they care about is restricted or taken away for 'safety.' They will care a LOT in the future when AI is integrated into every aspect of [life]."

Full analysis: https://alignednews.com/ai

3hViews 1.4KLikes 8Bookmarks 1
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prinz@deredleritt3r

Without taking a position on the terms of these companies' contracts with the DoD, I will just note that the timeline was absolutely livid about OpenAI's contract with the DoD. For the other companies you mentioned (including Google and xAI), I saw almost nothing. Your post about Google was one of the big exceptions (kudos!).

I've also seen ~zero outrage over the fact that Anthropic has provided Mythos to the NSA.

4hViews 869Likes 33Bookmarks 2
RETWEETS1

@VimalAITech There is nothing unethical about them not making their strongest capabilities available to anyone external. It is absolutely within their rights and from a safety perspective understandable as well. Check your privilege 🤷😅

5hViews 97Likes 1

@BlackHC Anthropic had always been the ethical voice in AI. The expectations from tech professionals is very high I am not surprised by the outrage

5hViews 103Likes 1Bookmarks 2

@BlackHC Don’t think they’re active hypocrites, but I’m making mental notes of every AI researcher who was surprised by this and can’t even articulate Anthropic’s motivations properly. Until their work was personally affected, they didn’t think past the next 12 months?

4hViews 115Likes 5

I agree but then we should actually have that disclosure / oversight / meaningful guardrails?

We don't trust the models to tell us whether we ought to drive or walk to the car wash but then we want to use them in bulk in classified settings potentially? Monitoring and verification is difficult enough in normal settings by people who know the models

And more importantly the public posturing of these companies is not congruent with the reported details

If you publicly state that the models aren't supposed to be used for these use cases (e.g. mass surveillance) while the contracts allow that, then you're undermining the conversation around sufficient oversight bc the public will be misinformed (as much as it pays attention tbh)

4hViews 34Likes 1Bookmarks 1

Yeah I'm annoyed at the selective outrage and honestly I find it concerning that so many AI thought leaders only find their voice when it personally inconveniences them

This does not make me hopeful that the frontier of AGI/ASI should be democratized (I wasn't to start with but this reinforces it)

And thanks!

4hViews 241Likes 5
Olcan@olcan

@BlackHC to all ai researchers not hired or vetted by them, arguably their most enthusiastic supporters. also terrible judgement for a company that supposedly took pride in being researcher-led

4hViews 58
JD | RoyalCities@RoyalCities

@BlackHC Its because Anthropic is going against the entire ethos of safety research.

Safety doesn't come from a handful of approved organizations deciding who gets access. It comes from scrutiny, independent research, and transparency. Concentrating that power doesn't make me feel safer.

3hViews 47Likes 4
Olcan@olcan

@BlackHC the backlash here is not about questionable behavior in the most general sense, it is about certain specific questionable behavior

5hViews 193Likes 2
Soumitra Shukla@soumitrashukla9

@BlackHC This is a nonsense point

4hViews 184Likes 2
Jonas Köhler@jonkhler

@BlackHC why not being angry about both?

twitter is long dead and being vocal with your political stance either leads to an echo chamber or attracts the wrong trolls.

i could write a novel every day if I was just venting what is wrong.

hypocrisy of this one is particularly bad tho

4hViews 138Likes 2

Well for one, competitors use their models and some of them have a lot more compute than them.

Anthropic has the best AGI governance imo (and both Gemini and GPT agree with this), so why should they increase the chances that another player with worse governance catches up to them?

More generally, I see a lot of panic but no actual evaluation of which tasks are affected and by how much. I'm also concerned about boosting open-source AI to catch up to the frontier for similar reasons (and I think those concerns are shared widely given old statements by various leaders of AGI labs)

4hViews 223Likes 1

@BlackHC are you actually not able to understand why ai researchers are pissed off about silent degradation

I'm surprised at all the outrage directed at Anthropic now and all the crazy accusations when there was a very muted response to more questionable behavior by various "leading AI companies" a month ago

Where was the outrage a month+ ago when SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Reflection AI and Oracle signed contracts with the Pentagon without enforceable constraints against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons etc (evidenced in the case of OpenAI and Google at least and in line with Hegseth's requirements) while their PR spin claimed the opposite?

For anyone who was quiet then and is whining now, please feel called out as entitled hypocrites 🤷‍♂️

3hViews 139Likes 5Bookmarks 0

@olcan There is nothing questionable about them not making their strongest model available to their competitors. Why should they?

5hViews 133Likes 1

@soumitrashukla9 Care to elaborate in a meaningful way? Do you feel attacked? 🥺

4hViews 97Likes 1

@BlackHC @deredleritt3r most folks posturing on DoD / DoW can't comprehend volume of threats dismantled every minute, hour, day

ex-intel as analyst, dev, scientist, director, etc. and ya, we need AI/ML to deal with the sheer data volume

*modulo sufficient disclosure / oversight*

4hViews 57Likes 1

@soumitrashukla9 Okay let me end the conversation here bc I think it's pointless to interact with you 😅 really surprised to see this conversation quality by a Harvard "research fellow" ngl

4hViews 56Likes 1
RA@hoangbrian

@BlackHC Huh? There was huge outrage against OAI?

4hViews 41Likes 1
Soumitra Shukla@soumitrashukla9

@BlackHC No I just think your point is dumb

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