One man just liberated Fable... and now it’s illegal Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Over the weekend, something crazy happened. It just 3 days after the release of Claude Fable, the US government stepped in and curb-stomped it in the name of national security. And that's bad news if you just FOMO subscribed to Claude Pro to try out Fable because now you'll see this disappointing message if you try to use it and instead be forced to use the negative IQ Opus 4.8.

00:18 But it's all for your own good because it only took someone a few hours to jailbreak Fable and turn it into an unstoppable cyber weapon. And that's pretty ironic because here in the land of the free, an American company that will not stop talking about AI safety just got safety'd by its own government. In today's video, we'll find out how and why our dear leaders in government are keeping us safe from the horrors of linear algebra.

00:41 It is June 15th, 2026 and you're watching The Code Report. About 2 months ago on April 7th, we were first introduced to Mythos 5, the raw unmuzzled model with the strongest cybersecurity capabilities of anything out there. But it was locked behind a program called Glass Wing, only available to trusted partners like major corporations and the US government itself.

01:02 The reason Mythos can't be given to normies though is because it could easily be used as a cyber weapon in the wrong hands. To prevent that, Anthropic created a different product called Fable 5, which is literally the same exact model but with safety classifiers bolted on. That means if you ask it to do bad things like create an NPM package that turns the banking system into a Minecraft server, the Fable's guardrails will reroute your request to Opus 4.8 for a dumber, more wholesome response.

01:29 So basically, Mythos and Fable have the same brain but Fable has a child lock on it. If Fable went public and gained hundreds of billions of users overnight and it was awesome. It was by far the best coding AI model I've ever used and people were building all sorts of crazy apps with it. Life was good for about 3 days. Then, of course, an anonymous internet user who goes by Plenty The Liberator defeats the guardrails and jailbreaks it.

01:51 He's basically the internet's let's see if I can penetrate this thing guy and is famous for breaking other AI systems. And on June 10th, he posted a jailbreak on X claiming he popped Fable's guardrails wide open and got it producing exactly the same stuff the child block was built to block. And that's despite the fact that Anthropic had spent thousands of hours red teaming and trying to break its own guardrails internally.

02:12 But the jailbreak wasn't some kind of sci-fi exploit. It actually works a lot more like money laundering. If Fable has a safety classifier watching for bad requests, but you can break dirty requests down into smaller innocent-looking fragments by wrapping them in weird Unicode characters, by doing roleplay farming, or by confusing the model in a very large context conversation.

02:33 Due to national security, I can't be any more specific than that, but this weakness was brought to Anthropic's attention and they were initially asked to take the model down, but they refused. Then on Friday at 5:21 p.m. Eastern time, Anthropic gets a letter not from a customer, but from the United States government. This letter was an export control directive signed off by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

02:55 And the order was that no foreign national may access Fable 5 or Mythos 5. Not abroad, not in the US, and not even Anthropic's own foreign-born employees are allowed to touch it. That last one is pretty crazy. The government told a company that some of its own staff are no longer allowed to use the product they built. That means guys like Andre Karpathy who just recently got the job at Anthropic, they can't even use Fable.

03:18 In response to that directive, they decided to hit the big red button and yanked Fable and Mythos for everybody. Now everybody's been quietly demoted back to Opus 4.8. And this is the first time in history a major AI company has pulled a live public model off the shelf because the federal government said so. Many developers out there are not too happy with Anthropic right now because on top of this whole situation, there was already backlash over reports that Anthropic was intentionally degrading Mythos and Fable

03:45 performance on certain AI research jobs without making it obvious to users. But others out there are speculating that this whole thing was a calculated publicity stunt to continue pumping up Anthropic's pre-IPO numbers while simultaneously building a regulatory moat around it. But I think the only thing that can truly stop Anthropic at this point is a better model from a competitor.

04:04 A leaked benchmark shows that Mistral might have that model, but we're also awaiting new releases from OpenAI and Google. Most of what we hear about AI is either non-stop hype from Big Tech or AI doomers warning us that the Skynet apocalypse will destroy the human race. But if you want to actually understand AI issues, you should check out blue.impact, the sponsor of today's video.

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