Fable 5 回归概率上升，Anthropic 新模型已训练完成

It does look good, actually.

After the odds had dropped quite a bit, they’re looking good again, with a 60% chance of restoration by July 1 and 88% by July 31, in the wake of groundwork looking like it is being laid in various places:

leo: BREAKING: Claude Code v2.1.190 introduces several string changes that hint at preparations for a Fable 5 return, with it being permanently included in subscriptions with weekly usage.

The string “You’ve used your Fable 5 usage for this week” has been added, and “purchased separately from your plan” has been removed

leo: UPDATE: Fable 5 has now reportedly also reappeared in Amazon Bedrock

If the update is based purely on the above info I would treat the new odds as overconfident. These moves seem reasonable to make even if you have no confidence in the restoration, in order to be ready if that moment arrives.

This also suggests a potential permanent quota for Fable for subscribers. Even a modest amount is a big game here, since even a modest allocation means you can use it for non-coding tasks or minor coding tasks within the subscription.

With that on the horizon, it seems time to update our understanding of what has happened and is otherwise likely to happen, and how to think about all this.

A Rather Terrible Policy

Even if access is restored in the coming week as expected, this was a fiasco.

Dean Ball and I both invite you to imagine this situation in reverse.

Dean W. Ball: I invite you to imagine what various commentators and industry actors would have said if president Kamala Harris had export controlled grok indefinitely and for no disclosed reason.

The chosen implementation was such a train wreck that not only did we piss off our allies and call into question the reliability of the entire ‘American AI stack,’ we also caused the NSA to lose access to Mythos.

Hopefully no one reading this thinks the new AI executive order is meaningfully ‘voluntary.’ Jessica Tillipman illustrates that Federal procurement is one set of ways they will be imposing the new licensing mandate, with the rules flowing down to subcontractors. It’s actually a lot less voluntary than that, because the government will lean on you as needed, as it is currently leaning on lone holdout Meta.

Andrew Curran: The Trump administration is pressuring META to agree to submit its models to the government for voluntary review. META is now the only holdout, as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Microsoft have all agreed to these terms. Reporting by the NYT.

Meta says they are ‘working through the details and hope to sign an agreement soon’ as per Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan.

The People Have Spoken

So say we (almost) all.

The good news is, these decisions are not up to a public vote, either of Twitter or otherwise. The public does not understand these issues. The public has no idea what it is talking about, and its decisions will be mostly uncorrelated with the right answer.

Thank You, Next

The public does not get to use Fable 5 until further notice.

That does not mean the labs are going to stop developing more capable AI models.

Andrew Curran: A new, more capable version of Mythos has emerged from training. I don’t know whether it will be called Mythos 5.1 or Mythos 6, or if Anthropic will keep it internal to accelerate further development – but it has arrived.

Stopping models like Fable 5 or Mythos 5 from being served to the public does nothing to slow down development. In fact, it probably speeds it up slightly by freeing up resources. There are also no rules preventing the labs from continuing to advance capabilities while any current model is under embargo – or from keeping progress quiet until they choose to release it. None of them can afford to pause or slow down.

We need only look at how capable GLM-5.2 is as proof of this. To protect their business models, the frontier labs must continually train increasingly capable systems to stay ahead of open source, and each other. The current continues to rage beneath the ice, and we continue to race toward our destination.

₿AX: source?

Andrew Curran: Me.

Phil: So you made it up?

Andrew Curran: No.

Andrew Curran: Original Mythos finished training February 7th. They have had plenty of time.

There was a brief period where Anthropic will have been somewhat slowed down by inability to use Mythos 5, internally, to train the next Mythos, forcing it to fall back on worse models. That period may already be over. I don’t think Curran would make this up without a source, but even if he claimed it purely on priors, those priors are not going to be that far off.

And if trying to release their best model gets it potentially restricted, Anthropic or OpenAI might well decide to keep it internal. Which is where the biggest risks are.

See this Law360 report, Anthropic Export Controls Stir Fear of Unforseen Sanctions. It is impossible to reliably predict how the US government will react going forward.

Inability to deploy, or uncertainty and delays around deployment, do modestly reduce the business case for pushing development, but not enough that you wouldn’t push maximally hard. There is no alternative, and the valuations of the companies make the related costs highly affordable.

Be Very Very Quiet

We will see if this prediction holds up.

Peter Wildeford (June 21, 7:07pm): The fact that we’ve gone eight whole days without any major AI news is kinda weird

Dean W. Ball: I’d assume the whole AI industry in America is effectively frozen from new public releases until USG resolves the Fable situation they have stumbled into.

Kevin A. Bryan: Frozen from releases but not from development, of course!

Dean W. Ball: correct. if anything development can maybe be faster

What These Babies Can And Cannot Do

It’s not news, but to remind us of the stakes: The full version of Mythos can hack basically anything complex that it wants to hack, if given sufficient information, time and context.

What it cannot do is hack into all the classified networks in a matter of hours without being given various other affordances an outside attacker would not have.

What actually happened was that a professional authorized red team, given physical access to air gapped systems, identified issues in our classified systems within hours.

Dustin Volz and Julian E. Barnes: In reality, the tests involved “red teams” of N.S.A. analysts who were using Mythos in a highly tailored environment that would be extremely unlikely for an adversary to replicate, officials said. The red teams began their tests within classified N.S.A. systems designed to be accessible only from certain computers and completely cut off from the broader internet.

To be clear, this was still impressive and exceeded expectations.

Mythos is the real deal.

Dustin Volz and Julian E. Barnes: The controlled tests proved impressive even within the halls of the N.S.A., a secretive fortress outside Washington that specializes in developing digital espionage techniques against foreign adversaries and protecting U.S. networks from cyberattacks.

… Still, even though the N.S.A. did not experience the doomsday scenario some had feared, analysts at the spy agency were stunned by how capable Mythos appeared to be in controlled test settings, which exceeded already lofty expectations.

A series of misunderstandings created quite the pull quote that Mythos ‘broke into almost all NSA classified systems in hours.’

Mythos provided a lot of uplift, and that first result is still a big deal.

But let’s not get carried away, as some did, including inside the government.

Bull Theory: The NSA’s own director says Mythos broke into almost all of its classified systems in hours [during a read team exercise].

Per The Economist, Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said General Joshua Rudd, who runs the NSA and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, told him this directly.