Nadella on Anthropic's Fable: "Doesn't Make Sense

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees that Anthropic's restrictions on its Fable AI model don't make sense. He said, "It doesn't make sense" to have a creation tool that is so editorially controlled. Nadella's comments were made to engineers working on Microsoft's Copilot AI software. Anthropic sometimes sends responses from an older version of Fable when users ask about certain topics, including creating large-scale models. Anthropic announced Fable 5 in early June, stating it aimed to reduce false positives for blocked requests. The company later restored the model after a brief cutoff, noting new safeguards would flag a slightly higher fraction of harmless requests. These remarks are critical of a valued partner, as Microsoft invested $5 billion in Anthropic. This matters because it highlights a growing tension in the AI industry regarding control and access to powerful AI models.