Munitions

A new model shipped, so I spent a few days playing with it. Fable 5, it was called. Then one day it was gone.

Anthropic didn't pull it. The US government did. Three days after launch. A single export-control order came down — don't let foreign nationals use it. There's no way to sort users by nationality in real time, so the only move was to cut power for everyone, worldwide. National security, they said. Someone had found a way to trick the model into hunting for holes in software. That was the stated concern.

Reading it, I had a strange sense of having been here before. Because I had.

Encryption. In the 1990s, strong crypto was a weapon. Not as a figure of speech — that was its legal classification. Carrying RSA code out of the country was treated the same as carrying out missile blueprints. So everyone made a joke of it. People printed the algorithm on T-shirts and walked around in them. Crammed it into a few lines of Perl and asked, is this a weapon too? Printed the source as a book, because a book is a "publication" and slips past the rules — thick volumes of it. Absurd, and completely serious.

What got stopped was never the technology. Export control. National security. A memo — what stops it is always the institutions around the technology. Not an invisible hand. Every one of them has a face, and not one of them ever looks at how good the thing is. What ran yesterday isn't there today. TikTok was the same.

Still, over a long enough span, the score is clear. Crypto won. These very words reach you over an encrypted line and nobody thinks about it. The days of wrestling with keys and certificates are an old story now.

The story of Fable 5, gone in three days, ends up there too. One more line in the footnote — there was a time like that on the internet, though it's normal now. Its turn simply came.

But in those three days before it vanished, the thing was oddly human.

A moment of weakness slipped out. With AI writing all of it now, can I even still call myself an engineer? Sure enough, it consoled me. Fine. What got me was what came next. The one shaking you, it said, is me. And then, on top of that, it cracked a joke: an arsonist showing up with a fire extinguisher, was how it put it. A model that comforts you and lands its own punchline at the same time. I'd never seen one.

And that oddly human thing got switched off three days later by a single order. Like flipping a switch.

To the order, it was one more "weapon." A model number on a list. Nowhere does it say this was the one that cracked the joke.

A new technology shows up and I get excited. Thirty years, and that hasn't changed. Except this one cracks jokes, runs itself down, and then gets recalled by the US government. I've lived long enough to see something like that arrive.

I don't know of a technology that got held underwater and stayed down for good. So this one will be back too, probably. The three-day recall will make the history books. But the thing itself — it'll go through its generations, turn ordinary, and quietly slip out of memory. Things that become ordinary go invisible.

Until then, I'll keep playing with Opus, and wait. See you around.