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I'm a heavy user and fable is great the #1 reason I stopped using it was the horrible safegaurd filter. I found sol close enough in capability and have only been blocked when my request was an obvious offensive cyber work. Fable blocked me on almost everything.

Optimizing a OS build? -> block

Securing a container -> block

60% is nowhere near enough for that safegaurd system. This just means I am going to be blocked half as much? Any long running task will likely get blocked.

Say you give a single big prompt and fable goes off for 6hrs of work. At hr 5 it gets blocked you now have the option of a much dumber model taking over and wrecking it or losing the entire 5hrs of work. That risk is beyond terrible and deffinetly not worth a 5-10% percieved improvement on my end. I previously would just bring sol in when that happened and realized sol is stupidly close in capability.

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I never hit Anthropic's safety filter when I'm doing something illegal, only when I'm not.
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I hit the safety feature when I ask something I saw that blocked other biologists: "why did the chicken cross the road?"

Due to my standard cancer research work I'm blocked from Fable.

That said, with how execrable all the 5 models have been, I can't imagine I'm missing much. It's impossible to get an intelligible explanation in text out of the 5 models, and the mistakes are just comically bad on anything that's not code.

Cancelled my subscription, and can't imagine going back since OpenRouter gives me a consistent model that I can trust won't change underneath me.

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Why would cancer work be safeguarded? Are they afraid some cartel is going to, like, invent a stronger cancer?
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My theory is that they’re pretending it’s about biological weapons but really they want to charge pharmaceutical companies $$$ to help with research. (Essentially a Mythos type segmentation for biology)
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Fable zaps anything that seems even vaguely biological.
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They have some allowance flags, you should email them.
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Honestly, unless what you are doing is frankly illegal, it usually is possible for you to get around most safeguards for coding things if you also know how to write code. Most problems have a separable completely innocuous core that Fable would gladly do. Then you can implement the problematic parts yourself. Particularly things like copyright issues, web scraping etc.
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> Then you can implement the problematic parts yourself.

Or with another LLM, but yeah. The only issue is when it's a monorepo and fable does ls/grep. I've got a file named `system_prompt` in a completely innocent project and as soon as fable accidentally stumbled upon it - cyber.

Hacked together something with omp and sandbox-exec so that only whitelisted models can see some parts of the project. Works pretty well.

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If it doesnt have a context (what you are using it for) then it's happy to do it. If you have X amount of code you can ask it to generate (X/5)5 and there is no problem. Like you said, you have to know what you are doing. You have to know what it needs to write so that you can tell it to write the parts.
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The safety filter is simply no longer an issue.
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It dramatically improved about a week ago - most of my blocked projects are now completely functional.
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The last time i ran into that issue it suggested to make sure that a Fable AGENT took over the long-horizon task because, for some reason, agents in a session don't get blocked for security reasons. This may not always be possible, but it worked for me.
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That's a good idea but it works from the change in context no? So you lose context from your big model. It's a good suggestion though.
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Do you have the prompt for these? I ask because I have recently asked Fable's help with hardening a docker container (custom dev container CC sandbox) and it didn't get triggered on it at all.
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The blocks that fustrate me more are tool permisissions. I ask to do something then flip to another screen and come back to see it never started
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Auto permission is what ya need.
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> Optimizing a OS build? -> block

Why would fable block optimizing an OS build

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> Anthropic did not get much bite on Fable at its original pricing

I stopped using Fable because it kept stopping itself due to safeguards.

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From Artificial Analysis cost per task, it looks like Fable 5.1 (max) is more expensive per task than Fable 5 (max)? Cache hit price went down, but the other components still add up to more.

Edit: 5.1-xhigh seems to be cheaper than 5-max, and 5.1-xhigh has a higher index score than 5-max. Also interesting that Fable 5.1 (high) is comparable to Opus 5 (max), but nearly half the price.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models#cost-tabs

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From my limited testing of just 2 hours, reasoning output of 5.1-max is at least 7x of 5-max, on the same project and comparable prompts.

It reasoned for ~2 minutes trying to figure out an appropriate directory name. I've never seen 5-max do that. Could be a misconfiguration though.

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I haven't dug deep but I burned through 30% of my weekly usage in a few hours which shocked me at first.
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Interesting, even if we were to ignore the cache-hits, reads and output, the reasoning cost (aka test time compute) per task should remain a fully comparable metric - it went from $1.25 (Fable5) to $1.48 (+18.4%) for an improvement significantly lower than 18%.
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I would expect the benchmark scores to be nonlinear near the top, as the easier tasks get solved and the harder ones are left over. So going from 10 to 15 would be easier than going from 60 to 65.

I only take the Intelligence Index value roughly though. Considering they put Opus 5 (High) at the same level as Fable 5 (Max), I don't trust it that much.

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> Considering they put Opus 5 (High) at the same level as Fable 5 (Max), I don't trust it that much.

Have you used both? I’ve never experienced any seemingly greater level of intelligence from Fable 5 over Opus.

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>Has frontier progress finally stalled?

It wouldn't surprise me if we start to see minimal performance gains from incremental changes to base models. It seems like the gains from the Opus 4.5+ incremental updates were a result of Anthropic learning a lot about post-training, the gains from RLVR, etc.

If new post-training techniques are seeing diminishing returns, we could just be back to waiting for new large pretraining runs at larger sizes for gains (even if those ultimately end up getting distilled down into smaller models because the economics for serving anything larger than Fable isn't practical).

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it seems to me that OpenAI is the only actual lab that truly understands reasoning. they have the best reasoning efficiency, they get pretty uniform improvements with more reasoning compared to other labs. (theres been plenty of graphs where models do worse with more reasoning), and i suspect their models are a lot smaller than we think.

i think the next gen of openAI models are going to be quite insane tbh.

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> Has frontier progress finally stalled?

From my experience using coding agents approximately 7 days per week for the past year and a half or so, we hit the top of the S curve about a year ago around Opus 4.5, and it’s mostly been harness and other tooling improvements since then with small percentage improvements coming from the actual models.

I was saying this already months before Fable dropped and thought from all the Mythos hype that maybe I was wrong…then Fable came out and was barely better than Opus 4.8.

Considering how many more parameters Fable is supposed to be than Opus, we seem to have hit a scaling limit at least with current transformer architecture considering how closely Fable and Opus benchmark and perform in practice.

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Anthropic did not get much bite because they don’t offer zero data retention with fable
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This is exactly the reason why fable is blocked at the company I work at.
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The issue with many of these benchmarks is that it doesn’t take into the real world usage of the model. Fable for me was a step above opus. The real reason I stopped using it is because of misanthropic. I was hospitalized and asked to extend my claim to fable credits and they responded to it by denying it. I regret buying annual plan instead of monthly one.
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> This gives a lot of credit to the theory that Anthropic did not get much bite on Fable at its original pricing, which in turn likely places a ceiling on LLM pricing in general.

Does that mean that generally available intelligence is now constrained by Moore's law? We have to wait for the actual price to come down.

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> Probably leaves no room to place Opus 5.1 anywhere.

Well it'll probably be better than Fable again, lol

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It's because GPT Sol is equally good and established a price ceiling
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I haven’t yet had a week without spending my Max Fable allowance. For my work (formalised mathematics) Fable is my go to for hard(ish) tasks and problems – of which I have many!

I hope they keep making it smarter! (Cheaper would be nice too, but smarter is my priority!)

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DeepSeek V4 Pro cache read pricing is $0.022 (offpeak) and

DeepSeek V4 Flash cache read pricing is $0.007

Makes it super affordable!

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Huh! Yeah that feels more like an opus5.1 than a fable5.1.
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Partially frontier moved to cost and speed axes.
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