Anthropic’s Fable and the State of AI

On June 9th, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the company shut off access for everyone. The government’s actions won’t help . The problem isn’t any one particular model; it’s the general trend of increasing AI capabilities. And any real solution requires the sort of collective action that just isn’t possible right now. Fable is the constrained version of Mythos, the AI model Anthropic announced in April. Anthropic only released it to a few selected organizations, because the company claimed it was so good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in computer code that releasing it more generally would be dangerous . It was an obviously self-serving announcement, and because few were able to verify Anthropic’s claims they were met with some skepticism . Those with access used Mythos to find and patch many vulnerabilities in their own software. But one UK group found the latest, already public, OpenAI model to be just as powerful. Fable is just another incremental improvement in the years-long climb of AI capabilities. But just as important as the AI model is the “harness.” This is typically not AI. It’s ordinary computer code that interfaces with the user. It stitches together AI models, decides how and for what purposes they can be used, and gives them useful tools such as web search and the ability to run their own computer code. When Mythos first entered limited release, there was widespread debate whether its power came from the model or the harness. With Mythos demonstrating that it was possible, the open-source community scrambled to build harnesses that could steer other AI models towards similar capabilities. Harness improvements don’t need massive data or data centers. They largely succeeded. For example, a Prague company