Anthropic is changing course after facing criticism for quietly downgrading certain requests to its most capable AI model.
Some AI researchers complained Anthropic’s move would slow down AI development, including Jeremy Howard, the cofounder of nonprofit research group Fast.ai.
On Wednesday, Anthropic’s critics got at least part of what they were asking for: visibility.
“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune. “Starting this week, flagged requests will visibly fall back to Opus 4.8. On the API, any flagged requests will return a reason for their refusal. You will see this every time it happens.”
The company will continue to downgrade some requests, partly because its terms of service prohibit its model from being used to create competing AI systems, a restriction the company said is standard across the industry.
Yet, it also cited national security as part of the reason why its large language model downgrades or rejects some requests. The company said it doesn’t want foreign adversaries to improve their AI capabilities to the detriment of the U.S.
“The U.S. and its allies hold an edge in frontier chips and the highly optimized software that runs them at full potential. These safeguards ensure Claude isn’t used to erode that advantage—by optimizing chips developed by those adversaries, for example,” the spokesperson said.
The company also emphasized its restrictions “do not affect the vast majority of coding and ML work.”
“We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right,” an Anthropic spokesperson said.
