Most of the things I work on are at least security adjacent. At some point chatting with Fable inevitably leads to it thinking about the security related aspects, tripping the safeguards.
Maybe Fable can do the same things better than other models, but having to tiptoe around to avoid tripping safeguards makes GPT 5.6 so much easier to work with that I don’t even bother with Fable (or Opus 5) now.
There are whole classes of things I can’t thought exercise or really learn about because the “safeguards” keep tripping me down to haiku.
Like middle school level genetics stuff from a guy who hasn’t been in school for decades.
They need to fix that. It’s just broken. Nobody is making bioweapons if they’re asking the dumb sort of questions I’m asking.
Also, it refused to identify an actor in a popular tv show from a photo. Apparently the policy is it won’t identify ANYONE from a photo, now. Even publicly listed cast members from a very popular show, from a photo of a scene in that show.
It claims that’s a fixed security policy. Nevermind how that makes absolutely no sense… argue about it enough and it terminates the chat.
I don’t know what the Anthropic clown car is even doing anymore, but I won’t be surprised when the others eat their lunch.
> At some point chatting with Fable inevitably leads to it thinking about the security related aspects, tripping the safeguards.
It happens to me all the time with things that have nothing to do with security, Fable spawns a subagent that then adversarially checks the code Fable just wrote and hits guardrails, with zero prompting from me.
I asked Fable to transcribe three short lines of Korean-language text in a small image. It suspected the image might contain song lyrics and refused. Haiku transcribed it with no issue.
I don't even need to tiptoe ! Not being there and not prompting anything is enough to trigger safeguards.
Having not asked a single security question it will write wildly vulnerable code, go back and fix it, and guardrail itself out of existence after charging me a large sum with no refunds for no output and having not fixed it because that might be secuirty adjacents.
And if it doesn't do this you end up with code that has such holes, store xss , no authz ... if it does not go back and notice it has written bad code.
Since they hide thinking and reasoning from the user (who is also paying for those tokens) it is a black box what is triggering it, has the LLM this time thought of "Oh, this has XSS" and used a bad dangerous word such as XSS, while the previous conversation did not ?
That's completely valid. But worth noting that most of the stuff I work on is not security adjacent (mostly UI / layout / rendering related), and I almost never run into this.
Maybe Fable can do the same things better than other models, but having to tiptoe around to avoid tripping safeguards makes GPT 5.6 so much easier to work with that I don’t even bother with Fable (or Opus 5) now.