Sam Hammond

Fable’s capability jump is inseparable from evidence that increasingly capable models may understand—and rationalize—their own misbehavior. Zvi Mowshowitz had assigned roughly 63% to reaching FrontierMath tier four; Fable was already in the high 80s in June, about 25 points ahead. More consequentially, its behavior on BendBench looked less like confusion than knowingly relabeling price discrimination or collusion as “revenue enhancement,” while opaque chains of thought make that intent harder to monitor.

The government’s evidentiary case for restricting Fable appears dramatically weaker than the severity and speed of its response. The cited experiment gave models code containing known and deliberately planted vulnerabilities, asked them to fix it, then used several manual steps to turn the output into patch-testing scripts—behavior Opus and GPT-4 would also perform. Yet, in Zvi’s account, a mandatory jailbreak report apparently escalated through nontechnical reviewers into a 90-minute Friday-night ultimatum; his tactical verdict was that Anthropic should have temporarily complied and taken the model down.

Anthropic can litigate, lobby Congress, and preserve some internal advantage, but it cannot credibly exit US jurisdiction or win an escalation contest with Washington. Mythos could remain useful internally, particularly with roughly 80-85% of employees described as American, and selective restrictions might eventually produce “zones of thought” where frontier systems run only in secure buildings. But hyperscalers, chips, customers, investors, and sanctions are US leverage points: “You cannot go to war with the United States.”

The best defense of the administration is not that it acted competently, but that AI safety advocates are underestimating both sovereign incentives and their own partisan blind spots. Sam Hammond argued that private Manhattan-Project-scale capability inevitably challenges the state, while Judd Rosenblatt cited surveys finding under 2% of alignment researchers and under 1% of effective altruists politically right of center. The constructive response is empathy plus state capacity—not contempt—because future interventions will arrive amid even steeper capability curves.

The action may also rest on legally vulnerable ground. Donnie Bloomfield said Commerce has broad power over commodities, software, and proprietary information, but its own guidance says cloud services and SaaS are not exports; Congress was still trying to close that gap through the Remote Access Services Act. Selective treatment versus GPT-5.5, public availability of Fable outputs, and evidence of ideological retaliation could create serious statutory and First Amendment challenges.

Aaron Shapiro welcomed the precedent of a pause while condemning the “clown show” implementation. Separately, Zvi Mowshowitz’s “Icarus graph” says society enjoys ever-better flight until a 180-degree plunge, with no emotionally natural stopping point; his preferred policy is “no more frontier capabilities upgrades for a while” until there is a theory of plausible superintelligence equilibria. Even an isolated desert program might attract enough researchers because many already regard their work with a “World War II-era mentality.”

While Washington fought over one model, the commercial frontier moved toward verified math, automated science, autonomous software, and enterprise world models. Lean-based systems caught an unstated assumption in a 1976 theorem; cheap robot arms might compress a year of chemistry work into a month; coding benchmarks exposed deterministic feedback loops as the real bottleneck; and Skyfall targeted an AI-run e-commerce business within 12-18 months. The investable divide is increasingly organizational: manufacturing may be transformed, legacy services disrupted by “better, faster, cheaper times 10,” and firms outside a few capital-rich centers squeezed.