I have the sense that this limited usage model will persist, Opus at its current token price will gradually be phased out, and eventually the cost of these models will be unsustainable and impractical.
I’d rather not play this game anymore and seek out more reliable providers which may provide less capable models but aren’t going to gradually kneecap my plan or rug-pull me.
Frankly I’m much less concerned with sheer model capability these days and more interested in harnesses. Claude Code is not the best on the market, and I think there’s a lot of exploring and learning to do in that arena.
The whole Fable debacle has dramatically changed my perspective on the market and what I want from it/who I should support.
This is generally true, but there are some providers offering inference at relatively stable prices. They aren’t Opus-tier models, but some appear to be at or close to Sonnet 4.5 or so. For much of the work I do, this is fine.
Essentially if you aren’t at the frontier, you can find cheaper tokens that aren’t about to be rug-pulled or decommissioned on a whim.
It’s so expensive, though. Useful interactively in coding agent but boy if you have a kind of task that Fable can do in an agentic loop that Opus can’t then you’re in a good place. Doubtless the frontier will move forward. These kinds of “problems of the future” are great to have solutions for.
And for an interactive agentic loop, not using Fable is just missing out on something. There’s no lock-in there.
I bet it'll continue to be messy at the frontier for the foreseeable future as society gradually wakes up to the consequences of strong AI.
The party will be short-lived.
And yes, after the IPO.
I think the 5x subscription is here to stay - I'd bet they make money on that from lots of people not using it.
The 20x is already unavailable in Teams plans.
This isn't said out of naiveté or the idea that companies won't cheap out, but at some point – if access to models for defense is broadly available enough – we have to take a step back and say, "Aggressively insure your code against attack with AI on your side, because after <date> the other side will just _have_ AI."
I feel like something lost in a lot of the discussion around mythos and fable is that computer security absolutely has a substantial defender's advantage. It is indeed possible to ship e.g. surfaces that would be super resilient to attack (e.g. no unnecessary open surfaces, etc.) modulo category-shift attacks like RowHammer, etc.
Besides, just making sure that more people in the world actually have access to non-lobotomized models, this is _necessary_ if open source is (hopefully) going to continue to progress and if jailbreaks aren't totally vanquished.
disappointed but not surprised
That is nice advertising for Kimi, huh?
> The export control directive on June 12 came after the government became aware of a report in which Amazon researchers had found a method of bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards: prompting it so that it identified a number of software vulnerabilities. In one case, the model produced code demonstrating how the relevant vulnerability could be exploited. Over the past two weeks, we have worked closely with the government and other partners, including Amazon, to review the report and evidence.
> Our testing confirmed that many less capable models—including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7—could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable 5 did in the report. When it came to the demonstration of how to exploit the single vulnerability, every model we tested could produce the same demonstration as Fable 5 (including Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7).
This indicates three things:
1) WTF was Amazon thinking? Didn't their researches try the same thing in other models too before telling the CEO to tell the government it was dangerous (!?)
2) Anthropic - in particular Dario - really needs to learn government relations better. Most of the problems Anthropic has had with the government seem to stem from Dario's attitude rather than actual facts. (Eg, the DoD debacle seems to have ended up with OpenAI signing almost the same contract Anthropic already had, just worded differently)
3) The administration decision making is just wacky. In a normal administration they'd have actual policy documents you could look at to understand under what circumstances they think models have a problem. With this they just seem to make it up as they go, and the tools they use make no sense at all. If it is dangerous for cyber security reasons why would export controls make sense to use?
BatFastard•1h ago