Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
Anthropic released Fable, a public version of its Mythos cybersecurity model, and security researchers say its safety guardrails are too strict to do real cyber defense work. When a prompt touches cybersecurity or biology, Fable pauses and routes the request to the weaker Claude Opus 4.8. Researchers report that ordinary tasks, including code review, secure-coding requests, and even reading a blog post, get blocked.
Key Takeaways
- Cybersecurity researchers are complaining that Anthropic's new model Fable has guardrails that are too strict for any cybersecurity work.
Anthropic released its latest model Fable on Tuesday, billing it as a public and limited version of its powerful and much-hyped cybersecurity model Mythos.
- The guardrails were put in place to limit the risk that Fable could be used to develop malware or compromise software - a long-standing concern within Anthropic.
The restrictions on biology come from a similar concern around developing biological weapons .
- Fable is programmed to fall back to Claude Opus 4.8 if it hits a guardrail.
"It seems to be keyword based, so anything in the lexical field of 'cybersecurity' triggers the guardrails."
- I am sure they are going to evolve over time as Anthropic and other frontier model companies will collaborate more with the current new generation of cybersecurity companies," said Suiche, who is a member of the technical staff at Tolmo, an AI cybersecurity startup.
"It's better to catch more people than not enough when you do such a release and to relax the guardrails over time."
- Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai Senior Reporter, Cybersecurity Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is a Senior Writer at TechCrunch, where he covers hacking, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy.
Stats & Key Facts
- #Last week, Anthropic expanded access to Mythos to hundreds of organizations in 15 countries.
Cybersecurity researchers are complaining that Anthropic's new model Fable has guardrails that are too strict for any cybersecurity work. Anthropic released its latest model Fable on Tuesday, billing it as a public and limited version of its powerful and much-hyped cybersecurity model Mythos. But not everyone is happy with the restrictions, and a number of cybersecurity researchers and professionals have aired complaints online.
"[Fable] rejects any request that could be tangentially cyber related. Even innocuous tasks like reading a blog post," said Valentina "Chompie" Palmiotti, a well-known security researcher who works at IBM X-Force. When a prompt triggers its guardrails, Fable pauses the chat and says that its "safety measures flagged this message for cybersecurity or biology topics."
The guardrails were put in place to limit the risk that Fable could be used to develop malware or compromise software - a long-standing concern within Anthropic. The restrictions on biology come from a similar concern around developing biological weapons . When the AI giant released Mythos in April, it restricted the model to a limited number of companies and organizations in what it called Project Glasswing , an effort to deploy the model to secure critical software and infrastructure.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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