{"id":3763,"date":"2026-06-19T11:04:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T11:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ibvl.in\/index.php\/2026\/06\/19\/anthropics-fable-and-the-state-of-ai\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T11:04:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T11:04:24","slug":"anthropics-fable-and-the-state-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ibvl.in\/index.php\/2026\/06\/19\/anthropics-fable-and-the-state-of-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic\u2019s Fable and the State of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

On June 9th, Anthropic released<\/a> its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified<\/a> it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit<\/a> any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the company shut off<\/a> access for everyone.<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s actions won\u2019t help<\/a>. The problem isn\u2019t any one particular model; it\u2019s the general trend of increasing AI capabilities. And any real solution requires the sort of collective action that just isn\u2019t possible right now.<\/p>\n

Fable is the constrained version of Mythos, the AI model Anthropic announced in April. Anthropic only released it to a few selected<\/a> organizations, because the company claimed it was so good<\/a> at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in computer code that releasing it more generally would be dangerous<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was an obviously self-serving announcement, and because few<\/a> were able to verify Anthropic\u2019s claims they were met with some<\/a> skepticism<\/a>. Those with access used Mythos to find<\/a> and patch<\/a> many<\/a> vulnerabilities<\/a> in their own software. But one UK group found<\/a> the latest, already public, OpenAI model to be just as powerful.<\/p>\n

Fable is just another incremental improvement<\/a> in the years-long climb of AI capabilities. But just as important as the AI model is the \u201charness.\u201d This is typically not AI. It\u2019s ordinary computer code that interfaces with the user. It stitches together AI models, decides how and for what purposes they can be used, and gives them useful tools such as web search and the ability to run their own computer code.<\/p>\n

When Mythos first entered limited release, there was widespread debate<\/a> whether its power came from the model or the harness. With Mythos demonstrating that it was possible, the open-source community scrambled to build<\/a> harnesses<\/a> that could steer<\/a> other AI models towards similar capabilities. Harness improvements don\u2019t need massive data or data centers.<\/p>\n

They largely succeeded. For example, a Prague company was able to replicate<\/a> Anthropic\u2019s few verifiable cybersecurity capabilities with a much smaller and cheaper model\u2014and a more sophisticated harness. Last week, a group showed that<\/a> multiple cheaper models harnessed in concert matches Fable\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n

The broader community had only a few days with Fable, but that time we learned some about<\/a> its<\/a> capabilities<\/a>. Its difference is less the new model\u2019s raw analytical and problem solving capabilities, and more that the model doesn\u2019t need that sophisticated harness.<\/p>\n

Fable requires much less expertise and detailed prompting from the human user. You can give it a difficult goal and it will figure out novel and unexpected ways to satisfy it, finding loopholes<\/a> in whatever constraints you or the system have imposed on it.<\/p>\n

\u201cRelentlessly proactive\u201d is how AI researcher Simon Willison described<\/a> it. Another descriptor might be \u201ccreative.\u201d Experienced AI developers have had that combination of creativity and proactivity since<\/a> last<\/a> year<\/a>, but Fable puts it within easy reach of everyone.<\/p>\n

In the hands of someone with a legitimate problem that needs solving, that can be an incredibly useful capability. But in the hands of someone who wants to do harm, it can be equally dangerous. AIs don\u2019t have a moral compass in the same way that people do. They are agents of the wants and desires of the people who prompt them.<\/p>\n

That points to the real problem with relentlessly proactive AI. In language, wants and desires are always underspecified. If I ask you to get me some coffee, you would probably pour me a cup from the coffeepot, or buy one from a nearby coffee shop.<\/p>\n

You couldn\u2019t buy me a pound of raw beans, or a coffee plantation. You wouldn\u2019t order a cup of coffee for delivery next month. You wouldn\u2019t find a nearby person, rip a cup of coffee out of their hands, and bring it to me. I wouldn\u2019t have to specify any of the million limitations to my request; you would just know.<\/p>\n

Human stories are filled with warnings about underspecified desires. King Midas wished that everything he touch turn to gold, forgetting to add \u201cbut not my food, drink, and daughter.\u201d And genies are notorious for granting your wish in a way you wish they hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The deeper point is that it\u2019s impossible to list all limitations and restrictions, and like a malicious genie, a creative AI will find the ones you forgot. Block a database you don\u2019t want it to have access to, and it might figure out how to bypass your control. Ask it to book a flight, and it might hack the airline because the website says the flight is sold out. Ask it to save money on your cellphone plan, and it might cancel it altogether\u2014or get someone else to pay for it. As far as we know now AI has not done any of this yet, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n

Malicious intent is not required. To an AI model, constraints are just things to get around and not general truisms about the world. They are creative problem solvers and natural rule breakers. They \u201chack\u201d in the sense<\/a> that they find and exploit loopholes.<\/p>\n

Human systems rely on so many norms that we scarcely recognize the existence of until they are broken. AIs naturally think outside the box, because they don\u2019t have any real conception of what the box is or why it\u2019s there in the first place.<\/p>\n

There is no foolproof way to prevent people from using AI models to complete harmful tasks. There is no way to prevent the models from incidentally causing harm while completing benign tasks. AI models are no longer isolated from the real world. They browse the internet and answer emails.<\/p>\n

They trade stocks and make purchases. They control physical systems. They are, in effect<\/a>, robots that affect life and property. We have no technical mechanisms to verify the integrity<\/a> of an AI system. This level of capability and creativity in the hands of us untrustworthy humans will have both great and terrible results.<\/p>\n

The problem is not unique to Anthropic<\/a>. Mythos\/Fable might currently be the most capable rules hacker, but more sophisticated harnesses give other models similar capabilities. And we should assume that the other frontier models are no more than a few months behind, and that open-source models are less than a year behind. At best, any ban only serves to delay the problem for a short while.<\/p>\n

That delay might be useful if we\u2014as a society, as a planet\u2014would use that time to come together and figure out what to do. This isn\u2019t a US\/China arms race problem; this a species-level problem that requires coordinated action at that scale. Unfortunately, we have no mechanism to do that. I first wrote about<\/a> this problem five years ago, but it was all too futuristic.<\/p>\n

Today, when its right in front of us, there is no world government that can impose constraints on the for-profit corporations currently controlling AI models and research. The US has no appetite to effectively and even-handedly regulate those corporations, even as they do catastrophic damage to the environment, democracy, and\u2014in this case\u2014society in general.<\/p>\n

This all makes an AI public<\/a> option<\/a> all the more necessary, and urgent. Today\u2019s AIs can be fast, smart and secure, but only two of the three are possible for any given system. These safety tradeoffs are tightly held secrets of companies racing to beat one another, and they tell us we have to trust them. Instead, the choices and their consequences need to be brought out into the sunlight.<\/p>\n

We should be funding open-source harnesses that balance capability and safety\u2014that achieve useful goals without so much power\u2014and open-source AI models whose provenance and biases are public and well understood. We have opened the AI Pandora\u2019s box. Now we have to make the best of it.<\/p>\n

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On June 9th, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the company shut off access for everyone. The government\u2019s actions won\u2019t help. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-container-style":"default","site-container-layout":"default","site-sidebar-layout":"default","disable-article-header":"default","disable-site-header":"default","disable-site-footer":"default","disable-content-area-spacing":"default","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,974,90,274,210,53],"tags":[91],"class_list":["post-3763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-computer-security","category-cybersecurity","category-hacking","category-llm","category-uncategorized","tag-cybersecurity"],"yoast_head":"\nAnthropic\u2019s Fable and the State of AI - Imperative Business Ventures Limited<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.ibvl.in\/index.php\/2026\/06\/19\/anthropics-fable-and-the-state-of-ai\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Anthropic\u2019s Fable and the State of AI - Imperative Business Ventures Limited\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On June 9th, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. 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