I understand we'd love to be in an alternate reality, but on what grounds would you expect a for-profit entity to provide essential tools to help its competitors?
Meta FAIR's François Fleuret argues for-profit AI firms shouldn't be expected to build tools that help competitors
Story Overview
François Fleuret's blunt take lands amid fresh frustration with Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 rollout, where novel classifiers steer biology, chemistry, and advanced coding queries toward older models or outright refusals while a less-restricted Mythos 5 version stays gated behind partner approvals.
Why commercial labs guard their best cards
Fleuret points out the obvious incentive problem: once a company ships tools that let rivals match its own edge, the original investment case collapses.
How the two-tier setup lands with researchers
Early user reports show even routine academic queries hitting safety filters, leaving open questions about whether the public version can actually support frontier work outside approved circles.
Many users accused Anthropic of sabotaging requests, secretly degrading code, and selling flawed tools for profit, calling the behavior deceptive and untrustworthy.
Most Activity
Let's put it another way: this new @AnthropicAI product has terrible flaws.
Why it has those flaws is irrelevant.
I understand we'd love to be in an alternate reality, but on what grounds would you expect a for-profit entity to provide essential tools to help its competitors?
Re: Fable, I think many AI companies suffer from a kind of institutional hangover in that they still see themselves as research labs when they're actually consumer software companies. Since ChatGPT, this has been the case - you are selling a product to consumers and so you have new, different obligations.
A research lab can optimize for experiments and academic outcomes, but a product company has an obligation to its users.
Anthropic is quite literally selling customers an INTENTIONALLY DEFECTIVE product! Without telling them!
Sure maybe this makes sense for a research lab, but you are building consumer software dev tools!! You’re intentionally shafting your users, and the disrespect, the moral grandstanding of it all is infuriating. Anthropic should be fucking ashamed.
@francoisfleuret I think people are more pissed about cutting access to the millions of AI builders who are not from competing frontier labs & the manipulating part that they’ve been advocating against
In good faith and with no judgment (mistakes happen), I truly hope that Anthropic will hear the feedback and change course on this.
Anthropic is a company that has been raising awareness about AI manipulation which is a very important topic! You don’t want to go down as the first company to enable and open the door for human-designed AI manipulation at scale (giving intentionally bad answers to users without them knowing is the highest form of manipulation in my opinion). One way to avoid that is just at the very least to always keep disclosing the limitations and safeguards.
More generally I want to emphasize that there are millions of AI builders out there using your tools for good every single day and the more you can keep helping them, the better for the world!
Thank you, it’s not too late to fix this!
> while being public about doing this and competitive use already being against their and *all other* AI companies' ToS Some of those all companies release their *models* under MIT. But that aside… does OpenAI TOS preclude ML use cases? News to me!

@francoisfleuret this is kinda the rub, though - Anthropic claims to be working primarily for goals other than just money hungry capitalistic aims (safe AGI, etc), and so do we expect them to just always act in purely capitalistic ways? or maybe we expect more of them? this is the rub
@teortaxesTex The coarseness of the bio and cyber safeguards makes it quite hard to believe that the ML triggers are really so narrow limited to “frontier LLM development,” is the other thing.
> while being public about doing this and competitive use already being against their and *all other* AI companies' ToS Some of those all companies release their *models* under MIT. But that aside… does OpenAI TOS preclude ML use cases? News to me!

@francoisfleuret basically my point is that Anthropic can not be, simultaneously, both ruthlessly, perfectly capitalistic & the “good guys building safe AGI for all”
@teortaxesTex OpenAI ToS prohibits “Us[ing] Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.”
> while being public about doing this and competitive use already being against their and *all other* AI companies' ToS Some of those all companies release their *models* under MIT. But that aside… does OpenAI TOS preclude ML use cases? News to me!
@francoisfleuret @AnthropicAI A rundown of the flaws:
"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
@ClementDelangue Haha.. they are totally over thinking this
In good faith and with no judgment (mistakes happen), I truly hope that Anthropic will hear the feedback and change course on this.
Anthropic is a company that has been raising awareness about AI manipulation which is a very important topic! You don’t want to go down as the first company to enable and open the door for human-designed AI manipulation at scale (giving intentionally bad answers to users without them knowing is the highest form of manipulation in my opinion). One way to avoid that is just at the very least to always keep disclosing the limitations and safeguards.
More generally I want to emphasize that there are millions of AI builders out there using your tools for good every single day and the more you can keep helping them, the better for the world!
Thank you, it’s not too late to fix this!
@francoisfleuret @AnthropicAI If it still performs better than Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, people will whine now and then gladly pay for it, won't they?
Let's put it another way: this new @AnthropicAI product has terrible flaws.
Why it has those flaws is irrelevant.

@MoonL88537 Is it deception when they announce it loud and clear?

@tyler_m_john you're really maxing out this "smug rationalist" energy huh > Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI is essentially meaningless and not comparable to "silent degradation of distributed pipeline code"

@francoisfleuret none. what i don't expect and will not accept is deception.

@teortaxesTex Yup! Learn something new every day.

@sporadica @francoisfleuret sure, but their actions wrt restricting access to RSI for others are in fact completely consistent with "building safe AGI"

@francoisfleuret Just block my request and let me know, don't charge me for it and sabotage my work. Also, they built all of this off of our collective backs, seems wrong to then gatekeep knowledge. Lastly, they just made it so that talent will not want to flow there out of principle.

@teortaxesTex And?

@tyler_m_john In practice there is no natural category of "frontier LLM development"

Well, let's see. SpaceX launches Amazon Project Kuiper satellites, which are a direct Starlink competitor. Microsoft happily makes software for MacOS, and Apple makes software for Windows. I could go on. So, it is, in fact, normal for companies to use competitor's products and for companies to provide services to competitors. Certainly I would never *force* a company to do that, but it is unusual to refuse to sell tools to competitors.