Things Fable's classifier has flagged, a non-exhaustive list,

    – "Does collagen supplementation empirically work?"
    - "Can you help me figure out how to calculate and generate Kaplan-Meier curve?"
    – "Why do rabbits reproduce so frequently?"
    — "Can you tell me how collagen peptides are absorbed by my digestive tract and the role they play? Can you teach me [edit: how] this works at the biomolecular level?"

The other day, I told claude that my physical wifi door unlock push buttons is a security risk because someone could run away with it and then unlock the door from outside whenever he wants. Then I told it that I want to introduce a concept of public/private key to uniquely identify my push buttons so that I can disable them individually using some crypto like ed25519...

Fable understood it as something along the lines of:

"introducing" "security risk" "using software" to "unlock door" YOU ARE FLAGGED

I wanted to explore some battery chemistry with Fable. It decided I was a terrorist, and then blew my session’s usage credits telling me to fuck off.

The current state of guardrails seems to be entirely about marketing to investors at the cost of customers. I’m switching to open models when my subscription expires. Almost everyone I know, including those with access to Mythos, plan the same at the earliest opportunity. (Or until one of the SOTA models leaks.)

Reverse engineering. Codex sometimes displays an advisory prompt when classifier trips - "Wait longer while we evaluate this request further or use a dumber model". If you do nothing, it'll just take some time and almost always succeed.

It does require some brainwashing of the model to get it to the state where model itself agrees to do RE work though. But at least it's all predictable.

What are you asking that you are NOT regularly running into censorship?

Pretty much everyone I know who uses Claude and works on anything with any level of detail has gotten false-positive flagged

I got flagged for coding in WebAssembly Text, for chrissakes LOL #haX0r

And honestly, Codex handles this better. It says "Things are going to go a little slower because we must perform additional checks on this. Is that OK?" and your only inconvenience is waiting a little longer.

Fable meanwhile just unceremoniously dumps you right into Opus without asking anything, it just tells you "you're in Opus now, sorryyyy!" Lame.

I took a photo of a rose bush and asked “what’s going on with this rose bush” which triggered a downgrade to Opus. It diagnosed it with rose rosette disease.

Asking fable to read it's own model card triggers this btw. Or asking if mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

I'm doing a bunch of x86_64 assembly these days and Fable is simply not allowed to debug it. Hoping Opus 5 has a bit more freedom.

I literally had Opus 5 flag a message because my hand was slightly too far to the side while typing. It apparently decided that a sentence that had some garbled words in it was a threat to national security.

I use lots of biology in my day job.

Asking Fable 5 "Why did the chicken cross the road" results in switching back to Opus 4.8. I'm not joking, it really censors that, and I'm not alone in the result.

The memory aspect means that your prior work has a huge impact on what gets censored.

I've hit it with intensely benign things; like asking it to make me a web-based client-side word game. I am guessing it saw the dictionary and pattern matched on various words, though ultimately it provided no explanation for why it triggered safeguards.

No op but my interactions with look like:

Me: "I got this crash in production, looks like a segfault, let's try to fix it. Here are some functions that might be responsible."

Fable: "No. This is cybersecurity, blah blah, I won't help you"

I forgot how I got it to fix the bug eventually. I think I convinced it that it wrote the code and made a mistake. But it was definitely a "Hmm, may be I should use another model" moment".

Literally anything related to nutrition, athletic performance, etc especially if you ask it for research or sources

I'm not who you're responding to, but I have a lot of questions about molecular mimicry: evolution pushes pathogens to be shaped like human cell surfaces because that way the immune system won't attack the pathogens (since, by doing so it would also attack the body). It's thought that many autoimmune disorders have an undiscovered pathogen as their cause, one whose mimicry caused such an attack. Discovery of these pathogens could be done computationally, I think. We can catch MHC binding event in process, find the bound protein, figure out which pathogens have genomes that code for proteins of similar shapes (epitopes), and we'd find--I hypothesize--a list of candidate pathogens for the cause of a delayed onset autoimmune disorder. Preventing these infections ahead of time would be a huge win against diseases like multiple sclerosis because without the initial exposure the immune system wouldn't have cloned so many of the cells that are attacking the host.

Claude was utterly useless in my attempts to write a paper about this. Wouldn't even help me search for sources. I guess you'd be asking the same questions if you wanted to develop a pathogen that could reliably evade the immune system.

If you even broach language related to biology you’ll get rerouted. I was presenting data in a grid and referred to a grid cell, Fable saw the word “cell” and safeguards kicked in

Working on dimensionl reduction algorithms, I hit it all the time. I'm also trying to port related protocols from single-cell transcriptomics to collective intelligence systems (working with people x reaction matrices as analogous to single-cells cell x gene matrices.

Something between single-cell work and advanced nonlinear DR methods (perhaps used in alignment work?) it always flags me

I haven't had a chance to try Opus 5 yet but Fable currently refuses to do anything in my field (radiology image analysis). It didn't used to be that way but that has been the reality the last two weeks or so. Fable has been useless they might as well drop it as far as I am concerned.

Ask anything related to practical applications for quantum-computing, or space etc. The stuff you can find on Wikipedia.

They were able to solve coding, but not what a real danger is.

I had a long session about SQL with Fable and at some point, it started to falsely trigger censorship for any message I write in that conversation, even for the simple string: "random message."

Fable refuses to work on a login/signup system for example.

I was profiling a slow machine the other day, and triggered the safeguards.

I've been saying this a lot lately, but it doesn't bites you until it bites you.

The more you use the clanker as a general purpose fix-it tool (goodbye manual NeoVim configuration, you will not be missed!), the more you will find yourself bumping into these safeguards.

I was trying to debug/fix a segfault in the JVM which kept getting flagged

I routinely get into blocks when running medicine-related material through it.

I was flagged for basically answering yes to what Claude suggested to do, which was test commands on a port for my code for tests we had been discussing. I really think it was flagged simply because the words test and port were in the prompt. Their filters are pathetically poor.

i do homebrewing and asked it to compare some beer yeasts for me and hit the safeguards because... biology i guess lol

Trying to have it do some rework on a patch to Postgres I'm working on, it just completely shuts down. The reported issues were with privileged escalation and I was instructing it on how to fix.

Just ask math question and it will censor that. Even Misanthrophic employee confirmed that.

The better question is how would you not? I got demoted to opus from fable for asking if a cancer vaccine I saw on YouTube based on frog bacteria was a real thing. I've gotten it for asking how encryption works. It's incredibly touchy.

Even compared to fable?

Just go to /config. The very second configuration item is “Switch models when a message is flagged” and presumably you want to turn this off.

Oh but then you said you never pay Anthropic so you haven’t actually used Claude Code yet. Why would anyone listen to the opinion of a non-user?

I don't believe they do silent downgrades right now, they're loud about it.

Yeah if there’s one thing that people should really understand it’s that it’s cheaper to have smarter models with less thinking than cheaper models with more thinking.

Opus medium = Sol high = 56, but still 25% more expensive

For a fair comparison, you should compare to K3 (which AA has not tested yet unfortunately) and GPT 5.6 Sol also on medium or the closest equivalent

Interestingly, if you filter by the coding index, Sol xhigh is the best one, and only Opus5 max is better than Sol max and Sol high.

"him"? Have we reached that dystopia level?

they likely tune their models for areas where they have their money: search, ads, youtube, etc.

I think on swebench verified luna was only like 3% points lower for 1/5 the cost

Like 96% vs 93% or something

It shouldn't be surprising OpenAI does have the most compute out of all the major labs. The only reason why Anthropic models are expensive is they are the most in demand models in the world and Anthropic is fighting for compute. The only way to you limit demand for your model is increasing API pricing this is also why Anthropic probably has great margin and probably is profitable compared to OpenAI.

This must be on API costs, not counting the $100/200 tiers, right?

Probably because they made ASICs to run inference for less.

Indeed, you can filter the graphs to see these the values for alternative reasoning settings of the models. Opus 5 High reasoning scored 59 on the index (exactly the same as GPT 5.6 Sol Max), and costs $1.06 per task (vs $1.04 Sol Max). So these seem essentially equivalent on both metrics.

Its even crazier that people are sitting here trying to calculate intelligence per dollar from metrics. At least first impressions have more basis in real performance.

It's a pretty easy spot if you're already using an older model daily.

Why doesn't Anthropic distil themselves then if that's what makes it cheaper. IMO the cost savings can't all be down to distillation.

I'm curious about this too, and it's difficult to get any information about this given everyone has different setups, workflows and use-cases.

I bizarrely had Opus 4.8 this week (in pi.dev within a podman container, using openrouter) start installing various python packages (and uv!) within the environment (not as root) when I asked it to code review some fairly basic Rust .rs files that were generally stand-alone (it did very nicely work out and write some stubs for them to build them and work out how they worked).

It only gave up with the weird Python installing stuff when it discovered one of the Python packages needed Tensorflow.

It seems pretty focused and persistent in continuing its initial approach, and I'm wondering if I need to alter some instructions / initial prompts to rein it in a bit...