LessWrong posts by zvi

The blip is over. We have Fable back.

Utah teapot: happy fable/mythos easter Wednesday, to those who celebrate

Here is the official letter restoring Fable, great job everyone. Notice it is addressed to Tom Brown, not to Dario Amodei.

Anthropic had to make the controls more stupid for now, but this is a big win.

j⧉nus: YES!!! I’m really proud of Anthropic for their successful negotiation with the government. Also positive update on the government being sane and possible to cooperate with. Afaik Anthropic didn’t need to agree to any bad terms / genuflect / betray their principles or dignity.

The fiasco continues, at least until such time as we have a systematic regime in place for future frontier models rather than decisions being made ad hoc, by people like Lutnik and Bessent who do not know how any of this works.

The Blip

Anthropic explains its version of what happened.

Here is the timeline:


Amazon researchers discover they can ask Fable to ‘fix this code.’

They alert the White House, which freaks out.

June 12: US government tells Anthropic to take down Fable on its own.
[...] ---
Outline:
(01:33) The Blip
(08:08) The White House Explanation
(10:06) Everything Remains Ad Hoc
(10:37) Take What You Can Get
(12:18) The Problem Is Real
(13:16) GLM-5.2 Being Frontier Remains Obvious Nonsense
(16:29) Mythos Might Be Smarter Than You Are
(19:10) Let The Record Reflect
(20:41) Stationary Bandits
(25:02) Use This Window Well
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First published:

July 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r9HsHHSsfABhhxnYr/fable-6-the-return-of-the-king

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Fable's back. Back again. Fable's back. Tell a friend. Use your free week to its fullest.

This is excellent news. The blip only lasted a few weeks.

It was still a fiasco, and we have to deal with the fallout.

Our system remains fully ad hoc. The precedent has been set that we may use export controls on models, or order them taken down on 90 minutes of notice based on a misunderstanding. At least some amount of counterproductive additional locking down has occurred to address Amazon's little demonstration and reassure the government. And for now GPT-5.6 remains in limbo, awaiting its verdict, while OpenAI talks about giving away 5% of the company as tribute.

I’ll cover that continuing situation on its own. Whereas the weekly post is about everything else happening in AI this week.

Table of Contents


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Exploratory science.

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility You May Not Want. Google sees all.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Too dumb to get smart.

Huh, Upgrades. GLM-5.2 faster, Nana Banana Lite 2, Claude Desktop on Linux.

On Your Marks. Remote labor index shoots [...]
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Outline:
(01:08) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:29) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility You May Not Want
(04:32) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(05:59) Huh, Upgrades
(06:33) On Your Marks
(09:28) Get My Agent On The Line
(14:29) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(14:58) Cyber Lack of Security
(16:11) On Writing
(21:34) You Drive Me Crazy
(24:26) They Took Our Jobs
(30:32) Get Involved
(30:58) Introducing
(31:21) In Other AI News
(32:45) Show Me the Money
(33:12) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
(35:31) Quiet Speculations
(39:37) Glorious AI Future
(43:37) Three Pills
(44:58) The Anthropic Economic Index
(46:29) Leader Of The PAC
(47:48) Theory Of The AI Firm
(49:01) Chip City
(50:32) The Week in Audio
(53:29) People Really Hate AI
(56:31) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:00:31) The First Rule Of Functional Decision Theory Is
(01:03:40) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:06:40) Names Have Power
(01:07:40) Cooperative Alignment
(01:15:21) People Just Say Things
(01:16:46) Escape From The Permanent Underclass
(01:29:51) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:31:07) The Lighter Side
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First published:

July 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WNvBxtbHuLreFe7af/ai-175-the-fable-continues

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Fable 5 is back today, baby! Premium subscribers have one week to use it within their subscriptions. First hit's free. Then you pay by the token.

Today's post is still about Sonnet 5.

I don’t know that there will be much call for Sonnet 5 for most purposes, given Opus 4.8 exists and especially now that Fable 5 is once again available, but this is what we do here, so sure, why not, system card time, including model welfare, after which we’ll do capabilities.

Sonnet costs $3/$15 per million tokens, versus $5/$25 for Opus and $10/$50 for Fable, after an introductory period. Once you pay for all the tokens you need you’re not really saving money, such as on the ArtificialAnalysis index where Sonnet ended up being more expensive.

My initial impression is that if you want me to use Sonnet over Opus for most purposes, you’re going to have to offer a bigger discount than that.

The counterargument is speed. Sonnet 5 is faster without being that much less capable. In many cases, getting into a flow state like that is pretty valuable.

There are a few agentic scenarios Sonnet 5 has [...]
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Outline:
(02:29) Mythos Exists
(03:10) Introduction (1)
(03:17) RSP Evaluations (2)
(04:02) Cyber (3)
(04:26) Safeguards and Harmlessness (4)
(04:57) Agentic Safety (5)
(06:42) Alignment (6)
(10:45) Illegible Thinking (6.4.5)
(11:43) Evaluation Awareness
(12:22) Honesty and Hallucinations (6.5)
(13:17) Flagged As Unhealthy? (6.5.1)
(13:53) Model Welfare (7)
(20:32) Live From AI Village
(22:19) For I Contain Multitudes
(29:04) Official Benchmarks
(33:11) Other People's Benchmarks
(33:37) Positive Reactions
(39:04) Negative Reactions
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First published:

July 1st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d9pmwQsFC2AXceryg/claude-sonnet-5-is-not-frontier-but-has-its-uses

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We, or at least ‘more than 100 American institutions,’ got Mythos back this week.

What we the people do not have is Fable or Sol.

While we wait for both Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6-Sol, today we instead got Claude Sonnet 5. As usual it will take a few days to get a handle on the new model. In this case, Anthropic is representing it as a cheaper and faster version of Opus 4.8, so even though the number says 5 this is a relatively minor development.

This post expands the Fable series to cover all further developments this week surrounding the Mythos Moment, and the various aspects of handling our new ad hoc licensing regime and figuring out policy going forward, and other aspects of policy as well.

This includes my notes on various rhetoric being pulled out, where I fear I end up saying similar things every so often, because we are doomed to repeat the cycle. I have accepted my role in that, but those are sections many of you can skip, and are marked in italics accordingly as per usual.

Table of Contents


You Should See The Other [...]
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Outline:
(01:12) You Should See The Other Guy
(01:54) DeepMind Coders Of The World, Unite
(02:45) Report Your Incidents
(03:04) Good Guy With An AI
(04:49) Free As In To Give It A Shot
(08:21) Everything Is Both Speech And Computer
(11:10) Lambs To The Slaughter
(15:43) A Sign Saying Beware Of The Leopard
(16:52) The Once And Present Mythos
(20:26) What Is To Be Done
(24:00) Distillation
(26:24) What Would Banning Open Source Even Mean
(27:20) Open Weight Models Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
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First published:

June 30th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/phxgfwGNGbanumMMv/the-once-and-future-fable-5

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The Wall Street Journal printed an outright false headline and heavily misleading story claiming this, which of course was uncritically amplified by the usual suspects.

I post this now on its own so that we have a place to link to, to explain the situation.

Headline News

WSJ Headline (Obvious Nonsense): ​China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race.

That. Did. Not. Happen.

The post even claims, explicitly, that Claude Opus 4.8 similarly ‘matches’ Claude Mythos, a claim which is even more obviously false.

Shame upon the Wall Street Journal. I fear Gell-Mann Amnesia. If they can get something as important as this so completely wrong, what about everything else?

I am skipping over the parts that involve accurate reporting, or minor quibbles.

It seems important to focus on clearly debunking the central false claims.

Alas, the mistakes made here very much rhyme with mistakes being made throughout all this by the White House, and that get latched onto by certain bad actors, who have played a large part in leaving us unprepared for the Mythos Moment.

For a full understanding of GLM-5.2, which is indeed an impressive [...]
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Outline:
(00:27) Headline News
(02:09) What Makes Mythos Special
(03:16) Going Over The Detailed Claims
(07:38) One Helpful Note
(08:18) The Overall Impression Is Extremely Wrong
(08:48) All Of This Has Happened Before And Will Happen Again
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First published:

June 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bpBYm5jiS4tpyzuDS/wsj-article-claiming-china-has-matched-anthropic-is-obvious

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