I like Claude Code a lot, I think it sets a dangerous precedent to put guardrails in that return a response from a prompt that was modified by the system in real time in order to subvert the original intent. Fail cleanly. Anything else makes it too difficult to rely on. edit: Giving the absolute maximum benefit of the doubt I understand that they see themselves as "stewards" for lack of a better word. But the EA thing is really leaking through, and paternalism isn't a good look.
dang
Related. Others? Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48485958 - June 2026 (30 comments) Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48478969 - June 2026 (488 comments) If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467896 - June 2026 (495 comments) --- Also related, I guess? AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473166 - June 2026 (248 comments) Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464258 - June 2026 (291 comments)
prodigycorp
Anthropic apologizes for nothing. We all know where the EA cult on things of this matter and any statements otherwise is just PR. The beliefs of these people, and how they manifest, is deeply terrifying to me. They believe that any means are acceptable to achieve what they believe is a better end.
bellowsgulch
*Anthropic apologizes they got caught defending their moat by implementing invisible Claude Fable guardrails
airstrike
This article reads like it was written by Claude and forwarded to Verge.
bellowsgulch
Such a weird openly immoral way to defend your moat, too. Why not just tell people, "To defend our ability to be competitive in our industry, we ask that you do not use Claude or any of our models to independently perform research on large language models or any of its related architectures or technologies. In order to prevent this violation of the Terms of Service, we have trained Claude Fable to deny any requests or prompts which involve frontier AI research."
behnamoh
They didn't apologize for doing it, they are sorry they were caught doing it. They still nerf the model if your request is about AI development.
SilverElfin
Invisible guardrails? Or purposeful sabotage if you use it for building AI capabilities? But also, it isn’t the only huge mistake Anthropic has made in the last 48 hours. Having a sneaky data retention policy, while also giving companies no way to block Fable, is a massive problem. And it is ridiculous that Anthropic has so little respect for its customers. OpenAI should take advantage of this.
film42
I'm surprised they didn't do this the first time around. Like, a user says they forgot their password and you tell them they don't actually have an account, that's an information disclosure vulnerability. Not automatically falling back to Opus just lets the "attacker" know they are bumping against the guardrails and they need to try a different strategy. It's Anthropic's product and they can do what they want, but my concern is what happens if Fable's product team decides that they can route 25% of traffic to Opus, bill it as Fable, and max their KPIs. That just doesn't sit right.
micromacrofoot
incredible marketing from anthropic with all the "it's too dangerous" bullshit
whatever1
Boobytrapping is illegal. Anthropic wanted to poison its customers on the suspicion of them misusing their services.
mlazos
The idea of them purposefully wasting my time by having the model act dumber and me having to argue with it without knowing if it’s the prompt or the model was just such an idiotic product decision I can’t believe they shipped that without getting any feedback from users first.
sergiotapia
The damage is done. If you're in engineering, think hard about using Claude for your work. This is not a moral company. God bless the Chinese companies releasing true open source models. Imagine a world without them, we would be at the mercy of unscrupulous people.
Sol-
This has dampened my opinion on Anthropic quite a bit. It's difficult to take their marketing for AI as an empowering technology seriously when they are quite clear in their new deployments that they do not mean empowering for you , but empowering for them and organizations that are in their (or the US government's, despite Anthropics performative disagreements with the administration) good graces. You are allowed to vibe code some dashboards, a web app or let it drive Excel, but anything more interesting than that is forbidden. If it was just plain monetary concerns and sabotage of competitors I'd almost be fine with it, but it seems they actively want to monopolize most of human progress in their enlightened hands, lest the mob does something undesirable with these powers.
klmarks
The restrictions are there so that security researchers cannot disprove the Mythos claims: "You see, Mythos can automatically break out of a VM running on SELinux, but unfortunately this is too dangerous and we had to implement guardrails for the Fable peasants."
rvz
Why would anyone defend Anthropic after this? Imagine falling for the DoW supply chain risk designation, and now this. This company is trying to ban powerful open models and restrict access to frontier models to slow everyone else down. They just showed that they CAN do this right in front of you. Local open weight models are a necessity.
stevefan1999
Then reset the quotas as an atonement ;p Seriously though, Fable was not that great facing a greenfield subject. It is excellent at oneshotting some math problems, but if you want it to do some cutting edge tech stuff, say like piecing together a new Crossplane XRD, by reading existing Helm chart and with application source code available. I still have to get a few pass for Fable to get it done right, and at this point I may consider making a skill for it. I even gave it the source code of the Crossplane itself and tell it to be careful about CRDs and data flow, but it is still pretty silly. Adaptiveness for Fable is still not great, and I think it is a well known problem for Anthropic, albeit all LLMs do suffer a lot from subjects they don't know and will hallucinate stuff very frequently.
kingcauchy
How much of the apology was written by Claude? How much of the release note process was written by Claude? Will they have better prompts going forward to make sure Claude doesn't write upsetting things into the release notes for devs like silent nerfing? Spooky times.
sometimelurker
I don't like this shift in the Overton window, or at least their perspection of the Overton window. I really do like their open work on mech interp tho. least bad AI lab imo. also if they do this or not is unprovable and other labs will probably silently implement this too. it'll be 100% normal by this time next year
xpct
It's probably good that they walked back on it. It also makes them look somewhat weak in terms of believing their claimed mission.
Related Discussions
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Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
Avicebron
I like Claude Code a lot, I think it sets a dangerous precedent to put guardrails in that return a response from a prompt that was modified by the system in real time in order to subvert the original intent. Fail cleanly. Anything else makes it too difficult to rely on. edit: Giving the absolute maximum benefit of the doubt I understand that they see themselves as "stewards" for lack of a better word. But the EA thing is really leaking through, and paternalism isn't a good look.
dang
Related. Others? Anthropic walks back policy that could have 'sabotaged' researchers using Claude - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48485958 - June 2026 (30 comments) Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48478969 - June 2026 (488 comments) If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467896 - June 2026 (495 comments) --- Also related, I guess? AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473166 - June 2026 (248 comments) Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464258 - June 2026 (291 comments)
prodigycorp
Anthropic apologizes for nothing. We all know where the EA cult on things of this matter and any statements otherwise is just PR. The beliefs of these people, and how they manifest, is deeply terrifying to me. They believe that any means are acceptable to achieve what they believe is a better end.
bellowsgulch
*Anthropic apologizes they got caught defending their moat by implementing invisible Claude Fable guardrails
airstrike
This article reads like it was written by Claude and forwarded to Verge.
bellowsgulch
Such a weird openly immoral way to defend your moat, too. Why not just tell people, "To defend our ability to be competitive in our industry, we ask that you do not use Claude or any of our models to independently perform research on large language models or any of its related architectures or technologies. In order to prevent this violation of the Terms of Service, we have trained Claude Fable to deny any requests or prompts which involve frontier AI research."
behnamoh
They didn't apologize for doing it, they are sorry they were caught doing it. They still nerf the model if your request is about AI development.
SilverElfin
Invisible guardrails? Or purposeful sabotage if you use it for building AI capabilities? But also, it isn’t the only huge mistake Anthropic has made in the last 48 hours. Having a sneaky data retention policy, while also giving companies no way to block Fable, is a massive problem. And it is ridiculous that Anthropic has so little respect for its customers. OpenAI should take advantage of this.
film42
I'm surprised they didn't do this the first time around. Like, a user says they forgot their password and you tell them they don't actually have an account, that's an information disclosure vulnerability. Not automatically falling back to Opus just lets the "attacker" know they are bumping against the guardrails and they need to try a different strategy. It's Anthropic's product and they can do what they want, but my concern is what happens if Fable's product team decides that they can route 25% of traffic to Opus, bill it as Fable, and max their KPIs. That just doesn't sit right.
micromacrofoot
incredible marketing from anthropic with all the "it's too dangerous" bullshit
whatever1
Boobytrapping is illegal. Anthropic wanted to poison its customers on the suspicion of them misusing their services.
mlazos
The idea of them purposefully wasting my time by having the model act dumber and me having to argue with it without knowing if it’s the prompt or the model was just such an idiotic product decision I can’t believe they shipped that without getting any feedback from users first.
sergiotapia
The damage is done. If you're in engineering, think hard about using Claude for your work. This is not a moral company. God bless the Chinese companies releasing true open source models. Imagine a world without them, we would be at the mercy of unscrupulous people.
Sol-
This has dampened my opinion on Anthropic quite a bit. It's difficult to take their marketing for AI as an empowering technology seriously when they are quite clear in their new deployments that they do not mean empowering for you , but empowering for them and organizations that are in their (or the US government's, despite Anthropics performative disagreements with the administration) good graces. You are allowed to vibe code some dashboards, a web app or let it drive Excel, but anything more interesting than that is forbidden. If it was just plain monetary concerns and sabotage of competitors I'd almost be fine with it, but it seems they actively want to monopolize most of human progress in their enlightened hands, lest the mob does something undesirable with these powers.
klmarks
The restrictions are there so that security researchers cannot disprove the Mythos claims: "You see, Mythos can automatically break out of a VM running on SELinux, but unfortunately this is too dangerous and we had to implement guardrails for the Fable peasants."
rvz
Why would anyone defend Anthropic after this? Imagine falling for the DoW supply chain risk designation, and now this. This company is trying to ban powerful open models and restrict access to frontier models to slow everyone else down. They just showed that they CAN do this right in front of you. Local open weight models are a necessity.
stevefan1999
Then reset the quotas as an atonement ;p Seriously though, Fable was not that great facing a greenfield subject. It is excellent at oneshotting some math problems, but if you want it to do some cutting edge tech stuff, say like piecing together a new Crossplane XRD, by reading existing Helm chart and with application source code available. I still have to get a few pass for Fable to get it done right, and at this point I may consider making a skill for it. I even gave it the source code of the Crossplane itself and tell it to be careful about CRDs and data flow, but it is still pretty silly. Adaptiveness for Fable is still not great, and I think it is a well known problem for Anthropic, albeit all LLMs do suffer a lot from subjects they don't know and will hallucinate stuff very frequently.
kingcauchy
How much of the apology was written by Claude? How much of the release note process was written by Claude? Will they have better prompts going forward to make sure Claude doesn't write upsetting things into the release notes for devs like silent nerfing? Spooky times.
sometimelurker
I don't like this shift in the Overton window, or at least their perspection of the Overton window. I really do like their open work on mech interp tho. least bad AI lab imo. also if they do this or not is unprovable and other labs will probably silently implement this too. it'll be 100% normal by this time next year
xpct
It's probably good that they walked back on it. It also makes them look somewhat weak in terms of believing their claimed mission.