Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

Boomers. Frightened their boomer backdoors days are numbered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Kids playing with their toys without understanding it, sigh. Of course open source code needs to have testcases to verify nothing else breaks it in the future. That's a feature, not a bug

More likely, they didn't freak out at all.

It was an excuse to fuck with them, just like the "supply chain risk" finding a few months back.

(See, for example: https://x.com/PeteHegseth/status/2065897156226015690)

Damn, I was hoping for another three words "make no mistakes"

I think this is just yet another act in theater around Anthropic IPO.

I doubt Anthropic has enough computing resources, to satisfy demand for Fable. More so with long 1M context many users take full advantage off. On other side they needed to make Fable public, in "trial version" so people could independently experiment and verify it.

I think this ban is the best outcome for Anthropic. It means they want bleed out cash and compute, gave them cheap publicity, and allowed users to try it! Actual paying customers will still get full access!

This is one of the things I am most afraid of. Governments can break the progress of AI and this could be a bubble burster?

Question to folks building user-facing products on LLMs:

How do you protect yourself against this kind of misuse/jailbreak? Is it just a bunch of prompts? It seems like the fact that LLMs are so trivially jailbroken really limits how you can actually use them in products. How do you navigate these limitations?

So, they gave Fable a codebase full of exploits and said "fix this code", and it fixed the code?

Sounds like they freaked out because Fable is too good at finding NSA backdoors?

I think it could be even simpler: They're not playing ball with the Trump administration like the Trump administration would like, so they decided to drop a bomb on a product that took a lot of resources to develop.

Does anybody actually trust the official version of events from the US government anymore? I know I sure don't. For all I know, this was an insider play to boost the spacex valuation or something equally meaningless and stupid.

In a world of security through general incompetence, competence is a threat.

The article is not too clear what exactly happened from the perspective of "feds", but I would not be surprised if the title is true exactly. We are in a tiny bubble even among software engineers who knows you can tell AI with sufficient access: "here are two pictures, put them into a single PDF", and AI will do it. Most people just don't know, "feds" including.

Well this makes it sound the feds were less worried about someone using Fable 5 to attack them, but were worried about someone using Fable 5 to prevent the Feds from attacking others ...

As in worried about other countries/organizations using Fable 5 to actually do decent cyber security.

While there is some irony in the AI is dangerous marketing Anthropic uses, the main story here is that the Trump administration is apparently retaliating against Anthropic for refusing to relax certain safeguards. Trump and Hegseth have both posted highly immature, vindictive social media posts.

Most notably, any default assumption one might have had that the Trump administration can be counted upon to act in good faith should be viewed at this point as completely false. Even conservative legal scholars like Richard Epstein are shocked at the bad faith conduct across many areas.

This is a government making an authoritarian move to sabotage one of the top US AI companies. It's pure sabotage, nothing else.

>“That’s it,” Moussouris wrote. “‘Fix this code,’ plus several manual steps to generate test scripts, should never have triggered an export control. I feel like making ’90s-style t-shirts with ‘fix this code’ on the front and ‘this shirt is a munition’ on the back.”

Huh? Presumably if it shipped without guardrails, then it would still have triggered an export control, would you make a plain shirt on the front which says this shirt is a munition on the back?

The munition is the exported good, not the bypass of its safety feature. If anything that the bypass is 3 words long should make the export restriction more justified, not less.

i asked claude something about what happens at execution time of a binary and the thinking prompts flashed "considering the moral implications of ...something..." before giving me a correct (and predictably mundane) answer

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Of course it isn't about that, what we see online in the "news" is completely irrelevant with reality in most cases, it's exhausting to see people parroting what giant corps & gov are saying as if it's not extremely well crafted and plain false or deceptive most of the time. It's not even about politic left or right, both sides are acting completely dumb about it, look at Google trends, people are literally being "switched" topic at scale just because a news is saying something, it's absurd. Reading a news shouldn't affect your behavior for the coming months if you have common sense.

This TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/15/the-us-governments-anthrop...) article is a typical example of something to completely ignore and trash, the picture is the US president doing a weird face which means it's not even here to inform you, it's clearly rage-bait, not professional and incompetent obviously, I'm not from the US and when I see this, it makes me feel that those journalists are really pathetic and anyone following journalists that do so probably don't have much discernment in life.

My personal opinion is that it makes sense so the US remain a superpower by forcing tech businesses and research to move/re-incorporate to the US so practically anything "new" will always be US Made. If we assume that better models means more revenues for any company in the future, then US will always have an edge if they lock everything down, but it's a risky bet.

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Whatever your favorite story is it has to live with the fact that the CEO of Amazon called the White House freaking out

All of this could have been avoided if anthropic had anyone with common sense to point out that when you spend 4 month loudly claiming how dangerous your knowledge is as a marketing campaign could backfire by bringing attention from the authorities.