Anthropic has condemned him to “I would rather not do it”

The anonymous narrator of our story hires a clerk named Bartleby for his law firm. The employee starts working in an enviable way, but after three days, something happens. The narrator asks him to compare a document and Bartleby answers with a immortal phrase: “I preferred not to do it”.

That famous quote is part of the story ‘Bartleby, the clerk’ that the American writer Herman Melville (author of ‘Moby Dick’) published at the end of 1853. The story was barely successful at the time, but over the years it gained more and more impact. That phrase became a kind of hymn to apathy, inaction and laziness, and these days we have been surprised to find a new Bartleby.

one called Fables 5.

Anthropic’s AI model was launched on June 9 as the most powerful, expensive and exclusive in historyand although its performance in benchmarks was spectacular, we barely had time to taste it: the US government decided that it was too good to be publicly available to non-US citizens. Then Anthropic decided to cut off access globallyand for three weeks Fable 5 was in limbo.

This week Fables 5 has become available again, but from the beginning Anthropic warned that I did it with a few asterisks. The AI ​​model, they explained, brings new security filters to avoid misuse.

In the original launch, the company already indicated that if the model detected problems in the conversation, it would not be Fable 5 that would answer. Instead, they said, “Queries on some topics will instead receive a response from our second most advanced model, Claude Opus 4.8.” With the “redeployment“Those filters would be even more severe. What we didn’t know was how much.

Fable 5 prefers not to do things

Multiple comments on networks like X or Reddit reveal that Fable 5’s performance has been absolutely artificially layered or, in industry jargon, “nerfed”.

The model seems to behave worse, but the real problem is that it is a model that constantly resorts to Bartleby’s “I’d rather not”. Instead of doing what the user asks, it automatically makes the jump to Claude Opus 4.8, a model that is certainly capable, but is not what users would want because they intend to take advantage of the theoretical power of Fable 5.

The worst thing is that Fable 5 resorts to that “I’d rather not” philosophy with practically everything. Dylan Patel, creator of the famous consulting firm SemiAnalysis, did the test with the traditional “how many R’s are there in ‘raspberry'” and Fable 5 warned him that the model could not answer that question.

The performance of the model also seems to have been greatly affected by this redeployment, and independent tests They showed how in the BridgeBench benchmark the score of the original Fable 5 and the current Fable 5 was very different.

That specific test It was too specific. as some analysts commented, and the problem is not so much that performance drops (it doesn’t do it too much, or even improve) like the one in Fable 5 just refuse to answerwhich also does very difficult Evaluate your current performance.

Added to this factor is the fact that Fable 5 will be a particularly exclusive model: it can be used with Anthropic’s free and paid subscriptions until next July 7, but then this model will disappear from said plans and it will only be possible to use it with credits. That is, paying per use, which for intensive uses can be very, very expensive.

We are therefore facing a particularly delicate moment: if companies like Anthropic begin to artificially limit the capabilities of their most powerful models or “route” them to inferior models at the first change… What is the point of developing these models? Commercially, the idea doesn’t make sense either: if business users are going to find that the model goes to “I’d rather not do that” and goes on to respond with an older and worse version, they won’t be particularly happy about paying for the “expensive” model.

Anthropic is in a compromised situation, and what is happening with Fable 5 may end up marking a turning point in the way end users and professionals work with AI models.

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