Expanding on point 2:
In my profession, and discussing with experts from other fields, I’ve noticed that today’s top AI models work best when guided by domain specialists.
For example, someone without expertise in fields like mine (nutrition) or medicine might miss subtle nuances that make an AI's response subtly incorrect.
Non-experts often struggle to ask precise questions that elicit truly professional answers from AI.
That’s why, at this stage, I see current AI models as ideal "coworkers" for experts rather than standalone solutions. We need human expertise to unlock their full potential and avoid critical mistakes.
I’m genuinely puzzled by how little the Fable 5 event seems to have changed the political conversation outside the US.
This was a historical precedent: a US government order effectively showed that, when it wants to, America can cut foreign access to frontier AI systems overnight.
And we are not talking about social media apps or cloud storage.
The world is already being rebuilt around artificial intelligence: science, software, defense, education, logistics, companies, institutions, personal productivity.
Yet Europe and many non-US states still behave as if access to frontier AI will remain a neutral global utility forever.
Crazy.
We spend billions on the rituals of late-stage comfort, on symbolic projects, on bureaucratic theater, on things that will matter very little in the world that is coming.
Meanwhile, sovereign AI capability is still treated as a “strategic discussion” rather than an emergency mobilization.
This is insane.
If the Fable 5 incident is not enough to make governments rapidly redirect billions toward domestic AI systems, compute, talent, labs, energy infrastructure, and model independence, I honestly don’t know what would.
The message could not be clearer: if your civilization depends on intelligence systems you do not control, then your civilization is not sovereign anymore.
Yeah, that part is unsettling, and I don’t see this mainly as a partisan issue.
To me, the deeper signal is that frontier AI is starting to trigger state-level security interventions that can suddenly reshape access, work, and institutional boundaries overnight.
That is very close to the kind of government awareness and intervention described in the AI 2027 scenario.
Not saying it is playing out exactly that way, but it feels less and less like sci-fi. sci-fi
I’m genuinely puzzled by how little the Fable 5 event seems to have changed the political conversation outside the US.
This was a historical precedent: a US government order effectively showed that, when it wants to, America can cut foreign access to frontier AI systems overnight.
And we are not talking about social media apps or cloud storage.
The world is already being rebuilt around artificial intelligence: science, software, defense, education, logistics, companies, institutions, personal productivity.
Yet Europe and many non-US states still behave as if access to frontier AI will remain a neutral global utility forever.
Crazy.
We spend billions on the rituals of late-stage comfort, on symbolic projects, on bureaucratic theater, on things that will matter very little in the world that is coming.
Meanwhile, sovereign AI capability is still treated as a “strategic discussion” rather than an emergency mobilization.
This is insane.
If the Fable 5 incident is not enough to make governments rapidly redirect billions toward domestic AI systems, compute, talent, labs, energy infrastructure, and model independence, I honestly don’t know what would.
The message could not be clearer: if your civilization depends on intelligence systems you do not control, then your civilization is not sovereign anymore.
People were extremely upset about Fable 5 releasing with steep bio and cybersecurity guard rails. Now we have the US gov reaching its paws in and turning off the lights because it got a bad whiff?
They act like omnipotent minds “we’re saving you” what we should just TRUST you?
Sadly, I think this is not really a matter of political differences.
From what I can see, none of the currently relevant parties seems to show a fundamentally different attitude here.
I suspect that whichever party were in power would have done roughly the same, or even worse (especially considering those that want to outright ban data-center construction... 💀)
There may well be some of that.
I just wouldn’t reduce the whole thing to corruption, kickbacks or ego.
The more interesting failure mode may be institutional: once models cross a certain perceived capability threshold, every actor has incentives to slow things down, classify, review, de-risk and control access; often through opaque processes the public can’t really inspect.
That can absolutely become political.
But the scary part is not necessarily a cartoon-villain conspiracy.
It’s that a technology this important can get trapped inside governance/security loops before society even understands what happened.
What if GPT-5.6 is ready, but close enough to Fable-level that it’s now stuck in the same security/cyber-hardening review loop surrounding Fable/Mythos?
That’s for sure.
A council (or better, an ecosystem) of smarter-than-human entities would be much more robust than a single centralized one.
Still, I believe we may need non-human intelligences, less trapped in our own biases and incentives, to help us find a way out of the techno-dystopian trajectory we might be heading toward.
Precisely.
In a deeper sense, I hope that as models become extremely intelligent, they help us see through this very human myopia: short-term incentives, geopolitical reflexes, security-game thinking, and the tendency to turn every transformative technology into a weapon.
Local and hybrid AI may be essential for independence today.
But in the long run, the real hope is that higher intelligence helps civilization move beyond these dysfunctional patterns, instead of hardening them into a techno-dystopian future.
Yeah, I think the key variable here is the frame.
If frontier AI is treated primarily as a super-weapon, then they will build the institutions of a weapons regime around it: secrecy, restricted access, state permission, geopolitical blocs.
And I do think Dario/Anthropic have contributed to this frame.
Maybe they genuinely see it as safety work, but constant catastrophic framing pushes institutions toward exactly this kind of security-state response.
I had hoped this administration would take a more permissive stance on AI.
This was somewhat expected, but I still hoped it wouldn’t go this way; at least, not this soon.
Instead, it increasingly feels like every political camp is converging on the same endpoint: centralized control, security framing, and permissioned access to frontier systems.
Different rhetoric, same destination: AI development as something to be licensed, contained, and state-mediated.
As a European, this hits differently.
Access to frontier AI will be the dividing line of the next era.
The countries that have it will compound power across science, industry, defense, and capital. The countries that don’t will fall into dependency: slower, poorer, and forced to live downstream from systems built elsewhere.
As a result of a US government directive, we are suspending access to Claude Fable 5 for all users. You can continue to use all other Claude models.
Here’s what this means for you:
Across Claude products, new sessions will run on your selected default model or Opus 4.8, and existing Fable 5 sessions will end with an error.
On the Claude Platform, requests to Fable 5 will also return an error. Please update your integrations to other Claude models.
We know this is a disruption to your workflows; we appreciate your patience and support.
Exactly. Fable 5 is strong, but we are not even talking about a level of capability that should justify this kind of panic.
Part of the problem is that many people didn’t seriously follow the curve. Now they look up and freak out.
Those of us who have been watching closely are not shocked. It’s impressive, yes. Interesting, yes. But not world-ending.
That’s what makes the precedent so bad.
If this is the reaction now, every future jump in capability will be treated as a matter of state control, restricted access, and geopolitical permission.
Very hard not to see where this is going.
At this point, I just hope open source can keep the rest of us from becoming a permanent underclass.
@RedCloudKelpie Yeah, that’s true. Still, it feels like a step toward centralized state control over AI, and that (while somewhat expected) is a pretty dark precedent.
What upsets me in the short term is that this gives OpenAI the perfect excuse to sit comfortably on 5.5 for as long as possible.
In the medium term, this whole story sets a very wrong precedent, and far too early. Fable 5 is strong, but it didn’t warrant this level of hysteria.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ
Agree. GPT-5.5 is a good model and I rely on it a lot, BUT it feels like OpenAI chose the middle path: a strong “medium-large” model that’s easier to serve and iterate on, rather than a true giant.
That makes sense strategically, but Pro users should still have access to a bigger model, even if it’s more expensive, usage-capped, or credit-based enough to stay economically neutral.
I hope 5.6, or at least 5.7/5.8, gets a real size upgrade. The scaling era is not over: post-training matters, product matters, inference-time compute matters, but raw model scale still matters too.
The more I look at Fable across benchmarks, the more questions I have to OpenAI. WHERE. ARE. THE. BIG. MODELS.
What happened to scaling? What happened to the infra/experience they've got with 4.5?
Openai is losing the fields they were constantly winning on, science being the most important one. I thought there'd be an analogue of Project Glasswing but for Science, big results, etc., and yes, technically we got some, but the scale of discoveries is meh. I'm pretty convinced A\ can do almost everything that OAI can in the science field now.
And, more importantly, as far as I understand it, both companies will receive classified government data from Genesis Mission, so there will be no moat (kek).
sad day for OAI fans, including myself.
Interesting. If this is mostly a size signal, it makes me more optimistic about Google - especially Gemini 3.5 Pro.
Feels like most labs are facing the same trade-off: go larger and potentially stronger, but slower to iterate on, or stay medium-sized and still quite strong, but faster to iterate.
My guess is OpenAI chose the latter.
Whenever it happens -whether with 5.6, 5.7, next week, or next month- a less-censored model meaningfully stronger than Fable 5 would send real shockwaves through society.