> This is odd behaviour, and provides some evidence that Anthropic isn't being managed by serious people
It's hard to tell how much of what Anthropic are currently saying is just pre-IPO marketing bullshit, or how much will be their long-term policy.
If this is just marketing bullshit ("our models are so powerful we need to keep them chained up at night"), then it does seems massively ill-conceived. I can't think of a better way to break hard-earned customer trust than to say:
1) If we don't like what you're working on - if we think it may complete with ourselves - then we will silently fuck-up the code you're paying us to generate for you
2) Much reduced privacy guarantee. We will now retain everything you send us for an unspecified amount of time while we investigate it
Both of these seem especially self-defeating given that Anthropic has been very successful at courting corporate use, especially coding, and also still seem interested in courting military use.
The silently refusing to comply one (do they just mean deliberately dumbed down, not giving you what you are paying for, or actively sabotaging the generated code?) is really quite extraordinary. Why not just refuse the request? Perhaps they want to claim that gives too much signal as to what they think is valuable, although I think this "recursive self-improvement" story is 100% bullshit trying to juice the IPO. Are they really so arrogant to think that every other company developing LLMs hasn't figured out things like basic development infra?
IMO just the fact that Anthropic think it's in any way acceptable to silently fail requests that might reflect someone else trying to build anything that competes with them is bad enough, but the massive incompetence in what "Fable" is refusing shows that any such decision making is going to be causing them to silently fail a lot more than what they are trying to do.
The Anthropic model names "Mythos", "Fable" seem to have been conceived by a 14-year old thinking that "epic" names will convince people that the model is powerful. It's a bit like putting racing stripes and a loud farting exhaust on your Honda Civic.