Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

Claude Fable 5 secretly throttled AI researchers, and the internet went wild

read original more articles

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.

ZDNET's key takeaways

Fable 5's backlash is about transparency, not raw AI power.

Hidden safeguards made researchers question what they were testing.

Cybersecurity experts warn guardrails can also block defenders.

Mythos was introduced in April as part of Project Glasswing, a partnership among top-tier tech organizations and Anthropic formed to find and fix vulnerabilities in internet infrastructure. It was restricted to only certain organizations because a tool that can find previously unknown vulnerabilities to fix them can also be used to find previously unknown vulnerabilities to exploit them.

Also: Apple, Google, and Microsoft join Anthropic's Project Glasswing to defend world's most critical software

Mythos and Glasswing are far more powerful than Anthropic's Claude Security tool, which is designed to run in Opus. Still, Claude Security can scan a codebase and help find some issues. But then, earlier this week, Anthropic announced and released Fable, technically "Fable 5," which is effectively a muzzled version of Mythos.

Anthropic was clear that Fable would not support certain risky avenues of research in cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry.

... continue reading