Microsoft’s wandering eyes, data labeling duties for senior devs at Meta, and prod is the new source code

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:04)
So, Andrew, last week, you were telling us all get out and use Fable before they take it away. Did you use Fable before they took it away?

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:13)
I used every token of Fable that was available to me before they took it away. I was in the middle of using it when they took it away, and I got a special little message from the Cloud Code Harness that I had never seen before. It was like, due to a government order, you can no longer use this model.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:31)
Oh, that's terrifying. Yeah, I know.

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:32)
I was like, what did I do? I'm just like, I'm just having it like, look at this project.
How is anybody else involved? But it was short, short but sweet time to have it.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:45)
Yeah, Fable, we hardly knew you. We'll miss you.

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:47)
What about you, Ben? Did you use it?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:49)
You know, I got to use it a little bit, and I was planning to use it over the weekend too, but obviously that didn't get to happen. So, you know, for our listeners, I might have missed last week. We were excited because it was the first time we ever got to cover an Anthropic model release on this show. And then that day, the model gets taken away from us all. So yeah, if you haven't been following it, the US government ordered Anthropic to immediately disable access to Fable 5 for all foreign users. But of course, you know, Anthropic can't just turn it, they don't have, you don't know who their users are, where they live, so they just had to shut it down for everyone. And the US federal government cited national security concerns over an apparent jailbreak. And Anthropic has come out with some statements about it. You know, they claim that the jailbreak is narrow, it's non-universal, it's a similar issue that exists in other widely deployed models, including OpenAI's GPT 5.5.
And yeah, you know, it's interesting because, you know, I don't think we have a complete picture of this all yet, because we certainly haven't seen what the alleged concerns or the issues were. The rumors are, though, that it was a research team at AWS actually that reported this to the federal government. So there's potentially some like competitive stuff going on here. But, you know, yeah, it was nice to get to use it a little bit before it disappeared. So I at least got like a sense of what it could do. But yeah, I know you, Andrew, have been using Fable a lot. So maybe explain what you've been using it for, or what you used it before, before it took it all away.

**Andrew Ziegler** (2:22)
Well, like I covered on the show, definitely used it to upgrade all my skills, upgrade all my hooks and my harness, update anything that was going to remain for other models to use. Because I think the name of the game right now is choosing the right model for the task and doing model routing. And one of the most effective ways to be successful in choosing lower cost, lower tier models, is to make sure that you have a really strong and robust system in place for them to protect them. Like anybody who's experimented with local small models on their machine, knows how important it is to sandbox it, because these models could very easily do damage to a machine if not guarded. Whereas maybe on a more sophisticated model, you can put more protections in place as part of the model usage itself that are more protective. So in my case, I used Fable to protect myself and my maybe less smart models from hurting themselves and my machine. The one thing I'll point out is that the time we had Fable might have been pretty short, but in the time we had it, I think it caused a pretty seismic shift for the folks who did try it. But most importantly, it came and left at a time when so many companies and enterprises and individuals are starting to get bigger and bigger in France bills from places like Anthropic and OpenAI.
And this kind of instability really calls into question, how can I reliably and safely scale my business in this kind of economic environment? Because for those of you that aren't following like the toll jailbreak saga with the White House, ultimately what they're demanding to Anthropic is that no jailbreaks can be possible, which is kind of like a grandparent telling a grandkid that like, oh, why can't my computer just be hacker-free? It's just fundamentally like an intrinsic part of the technology that will always have to be worked on and updated. And so to make it a hard block puts Anthropic in a pretty hard position in order to escape this. And in the meantime, you get a lot of folks who are maybe pivoting to smaller models, some of which we're going to talk about on the show today, and otherwise maybe looking away from paying Anthropic for every single inference call that they do. So it's definitely a shift in how folks are using the tools. And if you're not feeling that yet, I definitely encourage you to pay attention, especially on social media, on how folks are reacting to the models coming and going, because folks are starting to bunker down and protect themselves from those shifts in the future.