AI:AM #3: Zvi on Fable, the Cases For & Against the Ban, + AI for Math, Logistics & More

**Nathan Labenz** (0:01)
This was the week the United States government tried to take Fable away from Anthropic. Welcome to the AI in the AM weekly highlights, the moments from a week of live mornings that I most want the people closest to this technology to have. Here's the shape of what's coming. We opened inside Fable system card with Zvi Mowshowitz, the genuinely strange, genuinely important findings buried in it. A model that one boxes on Newcomb's problem, that hides a filter bypass inside an unreadable wall of emojis, that seems to know when it's misbehaving. Then the fight itself, how a Friday night export control order actually came down, what Anthropic can do about it, and Zvi's verdict that you do not go to war with the United States. In part two, I stress-test my own reaction against the sharpest people I could reach. Sam Hammond on how the government actually moves, Judd Rosenblatt, who told me to my face that the AI safety world, me included, owes the administration more empathy than we're giving it, Donnie Bloomfield on whether the ban is even legal, and Liran Shapira on why he's strangely glad it happened. It ends in a desert bunker. In part three, because the future did not pause for any of this, the builders, verified mathematics, one-minute medical scans, software that writes itself, and what all of it asks of the rest of us. Quick context, this is still an experiment, live most weekday mornings from a studio Prakash Vydkoded himself, and we publish the skills behind it as they mature. If this cut earns your time or wastes it, tell us, that feedback is the whole project right now.
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Nobody makes sense of a fast, contentious AI moment like Zvi Mowshowitz. He writes the newsletter, Don't Worry About the Vase. He reads and synthesizes more frontier AI news than just about anyone alive. And by the time we got him on, he'd already done a full close read of Fable's system card.
So before we get anywhere near the government fight, start where he started, with what the card actually reveals about this model. Some of this is genuinely niche. It is also exactly the stuff that, if you're listening to this show, you came for.
First, just how big a junk Fable is. Measured against a number I put on the record before the model came out.
I looked back at my prediction from the beginning of the year in the, I think it's, gosh, it's the folks that make the AI Village that did this little forecasting competition. Last year for calibration, I made the top 5% and I consider the results to have been validated by the fact that Ryan Greenblatt and Ajay Akotra were number two and three respectively. So, the fact that they beat me validates the methodology. But okay, did it again this year. For FrontierMath, I came in above average, above the median, giving it something like, I think I said 63% for Tier 4 of FrontierMath. And, Fable is 25 points ahead of that in the high 80s already in June. And obviously, they have this model trained. I guess, I don't know if Mythos Preview is exactly the same score.