Gergely Orosz flags Anthropic's Fable service for locking prompts into a 30-day retention window with zero opt-out, while also allowing silent downgrades to its priciest models without any heads-up to paying users.
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
Every Mythos-class model, Fable 5 included, keeps prompts and outputs for a full month across apps, API, and cloud platforms, and the policy overrides earlier zero-retention deals for enterprise customers.
Orosz notes that capability changes can roll out unannounced on the highest-tier models without any reduction in the rates users already pay, leaving performance expectations unclear.
Many users condemn Anthropic's prompt storage for 30 days with no opt-out and model nerfs in Fable as dystopian surveillance, deceptive cost-cutting, and harmful to reliability.
I tried out Fable, it was OK, but given #1 and #2 and given I will be doing some work around evals, RAG and others, for the first time in forever I will go back to using a less powerful model
Also, I’ll use Codex more when I do anything with LLMs. I don’t want to be silently nerfed!
Sure, the model is powerful. And they say nerfing only happens if you do LLM-development related stuff. Which means pretty much anything with modern software engineering could trigger it.
It just feels increasingly an uneven playing field. More competition will be much welcome
Sure, the model is powerful. And they say nerfing only happens if you do LLM-development related stuff. Which means pretty much anything with modern software engineering could trigger it.
It just feels increasingly an uneven playing field. More competition will be much welcome
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
Utterly dystopian.
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
@mattparlmer They won't change course until it's too late for their company. With a long term view this is good for AI though. If Google was evil from the beginning, the web would be a lot healthier today.
For those who seek world domination, be very careful what you ask of Fable. ;-)
If you use Anthropic Fable your data is being captured and stored for 30 days with no opt out, even for enterprise users.
It is also intentionally designed to be poor at frontier AI work as an anti competitive measure.
It will also reject requests left and right in the areas of security and biology, so that those can be held back for tiered offerings.
It is also likely to be removed from access for subscription users after this next two weeks, and be available as a pay as you go API only at drastically higher prices.
The relationships that people have been enjoying with AI and these companies is about to start changing.
The best time to start learning how to self host was last year. The second best time is today.
@colepulse AI reply + anon account, while account reads like AI replies
Blocked
@tunguz Yeah:
Lots are angry at it.
"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
This is surveillance capitalism 5 months from an IPO. In many ways whatever OpenAI or Google does, they have to at least consider doing as well. When two AI startups got the majority of all the funding for LLMs and you were all singing their praises, this is literally what you signed up for.
@mattparlmer they will drop a half ass gaslight fix and the fanboys will eat it up
Given that Anthropic is copping to stealth nerfing a wide range of software engineering tasks in Fable (pretty ironic name choice there btw) you gotta wonder what stealth nerfs they’re not disclosing in previous Opus models
@natolambert Next obvious stage seems to be model actively fudging experiments and introduce subtle bugs so no one else can do LLM development. Feels like Monsanto’s terminator seeds.
@GergelyOrosz Imagine a company in Germany or Singapore integrated anthropic's enterprise solutions into all internal workflows and one day Dario/Trump decide your company is insufficiently aligned with America & the greater good and silently sabotage your workflows without even knowing it kek
@d29756183 Neither of these two characteristics exist for any other Anthropic model available to the public
Anthropic people, you’ve got a couple days at most to mitigate the damage being done by your senior leadership and policy people, the stealth nerfing and data retention decisions are titanic fuckups that pose serious risks to both your technical pole position and your bags
@GergelyOrosz 2 is not Fable exclusive though. Nerf seemed to have happened with all other models as well over time
@mattparlmer well documented in opus 4.6, you could consistently ask web claude for "thinking effort" and it was returning "10" (/100)
for reference, 4.6-low returns an effort of "50" now
@GergelyOrosz May I note that neither of those points are about Fable, the model. They are both about Anthropic, the lab.
These two are not the same entity. And only one is responsible for your issues. Which are very real ones, worth putting on the table. I share them.
@GergelyOrosz The writing was on the wall btw
@GergelyOrosz They can turn it off for no reason. And the appeal button literally does nothing.
@bertlef_ @colepulse The ones that seem 99% automated, yes (when I see them)
I’d like to read comments and respond to ones that are thoughtful / come from people
@GergelyOrosz I heard a engineer from Anthropic tell me that this is a conspiracy theory and that they don’t intentionally nerf models. But I’ve seen the degradation firsthand so I think they are gaslighting people.
Gergely Orosz flags Anthropic's Fable service for locking prompts into a 30-day retention window with zero opt-out, while also allowing silent downgrades to its priciest models without any heads-up to paying users.
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
