Fable 5. Safety Taken to an Extreme

A user testing Fable 5 on Claude.ai was blocked from asking 'Why don't cats and dogs get along?' and automatically switched to Opus 4.8 due to overly broad safety safeguards that flagged the harmless question as a potential bioweapon risk, highlighting concerns that excessive security measures render the system useless.

I finally decided to try out Fable 5 using the standard Claude.ai interface. I have a go-to test prompt that answers simple kids' questions in an absurdly scientific style. I asked a pretty straightforward one: "Why don't cats and dogs get along?" Immediately, the interface bumped me from Fable 5 to Opus 4.8 with a warning: "...The safeguards are intentionally broad right now and may flag safe and routine coding, cybersecurity, or biology work..." Since the question has absolutely nothing to do with coding and definitely doesn't touch on cybersecurity, it seems the system thought that figuring out why cats and dogs fight could somehow lead me to engineering a bioweapon. It reminds me of what someone said about Java applets back in the 90s: "Secure means useless." Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783246 Points: 1 Comments: 0