Nathan describes the strange resolution of the Fable pause: Anthropic calmed government concerns largely by arguing the flagged capabilities weren't new, already existing in competitor models. ✦ AI generated
Nathan · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-07-02 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 9:52
“Do you have any thoughts on where we are at this point?”
the best information I've seen suggests that the way that they mostly reassured the government was to painstakingly point out that the things that were observed had already been capabilities that were in the wild with other models for some time.
verbatim transcript · starts at 9:52
9:52government was to painstakingly point out that the things that were observed had already been capabilities that were in the wild with other models for some time. And again, that's a sort of strange way to get back into the, you know, the approved column is to say, look, everybody, it's kind of like, you know, something my kid would try, right? like he was doing it too. It's a sort of a
10:18strange way to uh try to get out of the frontier model penalty box. Uh so yeah, I mean if you fill in all the gaps in a charitable way, you can tell a Jud uh resin type story where this is, you know, kind of a clumsy perhaps but ultimately enlightened uh step to take for the government. or if you fill in those gaps in an uncharitable way, you're just kind
10:48of left shaking your head and thinking, who's making these weird moves and and causing these weird hiccups, and I would love to see better information at a minimum. You know, at this point, it really seems like the conversation can and should be more public than it has been. So, that's what I'll be watching next in between prompting fable. Do you have any thoughts on where we are at this point?
11:16There's also the question of how nuked it is coming back or nerfed. Um, and there I haven't I don't have enough information yet to really render a good judgment. For my personal use, it does not seem to have been affected so much that I can't do what I want to do. But then I have seen at least some reporting online suggesting that the fallbacks to Fable are more or the the fallbacks to
11:39Opus are more frequent and that on some you know coding benchmarks, terminal style benchmarks, the performance overall is worse because of those uh higher rates of fallback. What do you make of it at this point? >> So in my testing the fallback rates were lower than before. >> Interesting. And it it primarily because uh I was dealing with the production database etc. And the fable before uh the moment