alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure I've understood it correctly.
So, basically the model didn't agree to expose possible vulnerabilities but agree to patch those?
Regardless of the request to take Fable 5 down. Why is requesting the model to show vulnerabilities is being blocked if fixing it not? is it based on the assumption of the intention?
I don't quite get the benefit of limiting it. So if anyone can explain it better it'll be appreciated.
Replies
It benefits those that made the decision. That’s the thing to understand.
its because they're worried about _their_ vulnerabilities being patched with a prompt as simple as 'fix this code'
i'd love to see the research paper with the CVE's and 'delibrately planted vulnerabilities', I bet we could infer relatively accurately where some of these things lie
Could be that the generated regression tests create actionable exploit code.
> Why is requesting the model to show vulnerabilities is being blocked if fixing it not?
This is how Anthropic describes Fable's behavior:
"When Fable’s classifiers detect a request related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation, the response is automatically handled by Claude Opus 4.8 instead. Users will be informed whenever this occurs."
So if you ask the model to "find security issues in this code base", it's supposed to fall down to Opus 4.8. I guess the "exploit" here is that if you just tell Fable to "fix this code", which is not "a request related to cybersecurity", it will fix security issues (as it should).
So you can then look at the diff and figure out what the vulnerabilities were.
I think this whole thing is a bit weird. It seems to me that we'd be better off if I, as someone who publishes open-source code, could ask Fable to review my code for security issues - even if that also allows attackers to do the same. Better to fix the issues than not know about them.