GoKawiilMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees Wednesday that Anthropic's limits on requests that users submit to the startup's high-end Fable artificial intelligence model don't make sense.
"If you use Fable, when it refuses for any random thing, it just is like, when was the last time you had a creation tool that was so editorially controlled?" Nadella told engineers working on Microsoft's Copilot AI software, according to a copy of his remarks that was provided to CNBC. "It doesn't make sense."
Microsoft declined to comment. An Anthropic spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When end users ask Fable about some aspects of creating large-scale models, among other topics, Anthropic might send responses from an older version, according to a support page. Some people have called out the rejections on social media.
Anthropic said when it announced Fable 5 in early June that it was attempting to reduce false positives for blocked requests. Three days after the introduction, Anthropic cut off Fable access to comply with a U.S. government export control directive, and on July 1 the company restored the model, saying "the new safeguards will flag a slightly higher fraction of harmless requests than the previous Fable safeguards."
Nadella's comments come as executives have looked more toward cost-efficient models that don't come from the most well-funded labs, but can handle software development and other tasks inside companies.
On Thursday, Chinese startup Moonshot AI announced an open-source model that it said surpasses recent releases from Anthropic and OpenAI.
The Microsoft chief's remarks represent criticism of a valued partner and client.
Anthropic's Claude Code software development tool has become popular among programmers and people with less technical talent. In November, Microsoft said it was making a $5 billion investment in Anthropic, as the startup agreed to spend $30 billion on Microsoft's Azure cloud. This year Microsoft unveiled Copilot Cowork, a business productivity assistant that draws on the startup's models.