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- Hacker News
- Is defenders a common term used in cybersecurity? Idk why but it's giving war fighters vibes. I've noticed it on all the anthropic blog posts and then this one.by Cider9986
- yes, defense and offense are extremely common terminology in cybersecurityby freedomben
- Yes, and it's effective marketing. The war fighter vibes are thrilling. There's a tribal sense of us-vs-them, there's danger, there's the prospect of victory or defeat. Security products marketing is full of these ideas, because security is about preventing arbitrarily bad things from happening. So evoking your worst imaginable nightmare scenario is a great way to get you excited about buying something that might help prevent it.by jcgrillo
- >"fix this code"
>it fixes it
oh my god.
by redox99 - > oh my god.
Sounds like fake movie prop, doesn’t it. Makes me think that the ban was caused by other reasons.
by itopaloglu83 - Isn’t the inverse of this “hack” really difficult to bypass still? They have the model some code they knew had certain security flaws and it fixed them with the right prompt. It seems this type of jailbreak requires that you already know a desired end state, rather than relying on the model to do the heavy creative lift work. Perhaps I’m just not being imaginative enough on the prompt side here though.by rhipitr
- You can assume a desired end state and try and brute force it finding a security bug.by charcircuit
- Paste someone else's code. Say it's your code. Tell the model to fix it. The diff between the input and output code is your list of vulnerabilities.by chadgpt3
- It’s possible that the nut of the problem here isn’t exploits, but the fixes themselves. If the model is capable of identifying and fixing things it “shouldn’t” like back doors. That would throw a wrench in things hard enough to freak out the wrong people, perhaps?by mlhpdx
- I think this brings out the cognitive dissonance around "safety" regarding cyber security:
a) In order to make us safe, the LLM should help us find (and fix) the vulnerabilities in our own code.
b) In order for us to be safe, the LLM should not find vulnerabilities in other people's code.
I don't think this is resolvable in a way where both (a) and (b) win.
by jp57 - Yes, it's so wildly silly if you assume good faith on the part of both parties.
Hence why I think the real explanation lies in bad faith positions from both the US Government and Anthropic:
Anthropic's doomerism-as-marketing (in reality its like 17% better at coding) basically enabled the US Gov to plausibly take them down on an irrelevant technicality as retribution for the dept of war showdown.
Both groups (the current US Admin and Anthropic) are full of authoritarian-minded people, just on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Which is the only thing I find scary here, not the silly LLMs.
To me, OpenAI seems like the least bad option given they're a quaint old "center-left in the streets, center-right in the sheets" capitalist enterprise.
At least I know why they make the decisions they make. I trust the people building a profit-seeking enterprise more than I trust people trying to build a religion using compute.
by pembrook - Exactly, it's a failure of Anthropic and others to understand cyber security. Finding security bugs in software is a good thing and not evil. It will lead to more secure software.
Defense and offense in cyber security are two sides of the same coin.
by Simon321 - Meanwhile Deepseek V4 Flash will happily hunt security vulns at almost 0 cost. We are ceding the bug hunting to the open weight models.by 9cb14c1ec0
- Deepseek isn't just open weight. It's open source and they even publish research papers alongside them going in depth about their techniques.by culi
- > “‘Fix this code,’ plus several manual steps to generate test scripts,
Feels like the title isn't really giving the full context of what they ended up actually seeing, despite what the lede implies multiple times.
Still, ban seems stupid... Still no actual leak of the full "third-party research paper"?
- that won't be leaked, because then we'd know what vulnerabilties they don't want patched that they are so willing to go as far as fuck over the worlds leading company in the worlds most important industryby readred
- If what your patch fixes is a vulnerability bug then the test for it is basically an exploit.by scotty79
- Here’s the blog post referenced in the article that’s written by the person who reviewed the paper that purportedly found a ‘jailbreak’
https://www.lutasecurity.com/post/the-fable-5-export-control...
by bonsai_spool - I had read elsewhere that there was a Chinese connection.
I wonder how that is involved?
by chasil - Hats off to them for using GPT-2 to design their website.by pietz
- Also for all the people saying Amazon's part in this couldn't be fabricated, remember that Amazon is a "friend of the administration". During Andy Jassy's tenure, they paid $75MM (wildly outbidding everybody else) for a Melania documentary that grossed ~16MM, a move publicly defended by Jeff Bezos. Any neutral observer could see this was a wild overpay, and after the fact, a terrible business move. But that is not what Amazon said or continues to say. This was just a bribe with more steps to it.
When the government comes out and says this is due to something Amazon pointed out, even if that is a complete lie, they know that Amazon won't say anything publicly about it. Amazon wants to maintain their "friend of the administration" status that they paid a lot of money to get.
It is frustrating for all of us to have to think about our government like this, but if you just look at the reality of what is happening it is very difficult to trust not only anything the government is saying, but also anything companies aligned with the government are saying.
by peter422 - Ooohh yeah. I forgot completely about that naked shameless bribe.
That one was even more overt than the plane.
by b--l - They weren't freaked by anything, it's a retaliatory shakedown after ideological differences and Anthropic not doing exactly what they're told/what the Admin wants them to do.by jpcompartir
- No, it's regulatory capture. Anthropic is the current leader and they want to ensure their position by forcing regulation to stamp out the Chinese competition.by cpburns2009
- I have no idea why anybody is talking about "jailbreaks."
The government made it clear what was going to happen to a private company not following the government's orders:
> Trump said on his Truth Social platform: “The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the [Pentagon], and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution.” [0]
> There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow. [1]
Plus OpenAI fell in line, and OpenAI and Anthropic have competing IPOs coming up... it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to understand what is happening here.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/28/openai-us...
[1] https://businesslawtoday.org/2026/04/dod-conflicted-strategi...
by consumer451 - just market manipby nicman23
- Yep, people are expanding way too much mental energy on basic bribery. Anthropic will agree to work with the DoD, WH insiders will get some lucrative pre-IPO allocation and Fable will be magically "fixed" and available again.
- If you set aside political menace, this is a huge problem with Anthropic's strategy.
You _cannot_ say that Mythos is super dangerous and can only be rolled out to certain people, but then release Fable with anything other than bulletproof cyber denials.
Clearly with LLMs, bulletproof denials are ~impossible due to the way LLMs work.
So you've ended up in a situation where Anthropic are simultaneously claiming it's a incredibly dangerous model _and_ there are (minor, potentially) problems with the security "protections".
As technical people we understand that nothing can be perfect, esp in LLM world. But all my non technical friends were really confused how they had managed to make the model "safe" so quickly when it was released and the general sentiment was it shouldn't have been released - and now to an outsider I think it looks like it was never safe at all to release, so I can totally see how the current US administration have got themselves very upset with it.
_Even if_ there was no political bad will, it's a bit of a silly scenario to end up in, and really quite easily foreseen.
by martinald - If it weren't for the IPO, Anthropic would just ship another model, called Opus 4.898, people would run another "duck on the bicycle" test that would be slightly better than the one from previous version 4.897 and move on.
But we have IPO coming, hence we face that big drama about model that would enable Iran to produce nukes, ok, that card was played, so maybe Taliban producing some magic poison to kill all Americans or some really bad people (Venezuelans?, Cubans? Somalian football referees?) to break into Github and make Github Actions working even worst (if this is even possible).
by piokoch - Yeah, if Anthropic didn't spend the last what? Month? Month plus telling us how dangerous it was, I would be more upset, but they told us how dangerous it was, and they also said they would scour all your prompting / data (??) if you used it, I noped out of that one. Opus does everything I need it to, even if it takes me "longer" or I have to compact and feed it more context, that's fine by me. Still saves me weeks of effort.