Claude Fable 5: Anthropic admits "wrong tradeoff" after invisibly throttling rival AI researchers

Anthropic reverses course on a policy that would have silently degraded performance for AI researchers, but another point of contention persists.

Anthropic had planned to invisibly degrade Claude Fable 5's performance for users trying to train competing AI models. After sharp backlash from the research community, the company is now backing down. "We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right," Anthropic told WIRED. Going forward, any protective measures will be visible to users.

Dean Ball, a former White House AI advisor, called the covert approach "shockingly hostile." Will Brown from open-source startup Prime Intellect put the core criticism bluntly: "It felt like Anthropic was saying to the public, 'We don't trust anybody else to do AI research. We are the only ones who have to do AI research.'"