Every one of the competitors capable of a similar model have been salivating for a long time at the idea of consensual data sharing. Anthropic just opened the door for everyone to do the same thing without having to deal with being the first to do so. My bet is that OpenAI etc’s next model will have these same requirements.

Ever since the Mythos announcement it’s been clear that we’re heading towards a future where SOTA models are no longer available to the average person, and not only cost more, but also require payment in the form of use case verification and data sharing. OpenAI’s 5.5-Cyber model requires the same, so it’s not just Anthropic.

We’re unhappy with this because we’ve all gotten used to being able to play with the new shiny model as soon as it’s available, but what I’m seeing in this thread about Anthropic being “stupid” is emotion-based wishful thinking.

They are betting that without a competitor distilling their most powerful models, they can stay ahead far enough and long enough that people will accept this.

Let’s be real, chances are that the people with a lot of money on the line have given it more thought than the passing thought that you gave this comment.

> This is odd behaviour, and provides some evidence that Anthropic isn't being managed by serious people

It's hard to tell how much of what Anthropic are currently saying is just pre-IPO marketing bullshit, or how much will be their long-term policy.

If this is just marketing bullshit ("our models are so powerful we need to keep them chained up at night"), then it does seems massively ill-conceived. I can't think of a better way to break hard-earned customer trust than to say:

1) If we don't like what you're working on - if we think it may complete with ourselves - then we will silently fuck-up the code you're paying us to generate for you

2) Much reduced privacy guarantee. We will now retain everything you send us for an unspecified amount of time while we investigate it

Both of these seem especially self-defeating given that Anthropic has been very successful at courting corporate use, especially coding, and also still seem interested in courting military use.

The silently refusing to comply one (do they just mean deliberately dumbed down, not giving you what you are paying for, or actively sabotaging the generated code?) is really quite extraordinary. Why not just refuse the request? Perhaps they want to claim that gives too much signal as to what they think is valuable, although I think this "recursive self-improvement" story is 100% bullshit trying to juice the IPO. Are they really so arrogant to think that every other company developing LLMs hasn't figured out things like basic development infra?

IMO just the fact that Anthropic think it's in any way acceptable to silently fail requests that might reflect someone else trying to build anything that competes with them is bad enough, but the massive incompetence in what "Fable" is refusing shows that any such decision making is going to be causing them to silently fail a lot more than what they are trying to do.

The Anthropic model names "Mythos", "Fable" seem to have been conceived by a 14-year old thinking that "epic" names will convince people that the model is powerful. It's a bit like putting racing stripes and a loud farting exhaust on your Honda Civic.

I don’t think there are other models near Fable’s capabilities.

OpenAI just added their own models to Bedrock recently too, making that an easy switch.

I mean, they were already capacity constrained and just introduced a larger model that takes more capacity to run... They were gonna have to hand some business to competitor one way or another.