Drawing Big Bright Lines for Cyber & Biological AI

Anthropic released a mythos variant, Fable, with stricter safeguards for life-science and cyber queries. Instead of trying to identify the small subset of scientific questions that look weaponizable, they reroute these queries broadly, however benign they may be, even something as basic as, “What is biology?” These queries are blocked and rerouted to Opus 4.8, which was among the most powerful AI models in the world as of last week. Some are troubled by this behavior; I don’t think they fully account for the pace of progress, what is at stake, or what can be gained by slowing the diffusion of capabilities. Every security decision has trade-offs. Controlled access will affect vastly more benign users than malicious actors. But it can buy us a little time, and we need time to prepare. What follows is an allegory, prompted by the negative response these safeguards have caused.Notes from Cannon ManI am a reasonable man. I am a verifiable man. I use my credit card with my real name, gentlemen, my real name. It’s true. Yet they treat me like a wild animal. I was in the gun shop when it happened, you understand. I saw the whole thing. A man walked in and bought the automatic rifle. They practically subsidized his ammunition, two hundred a month, here you go, sir. But then he asked for the Gatling gun, and only then, gentlemen, only at the Gatling gun, did they act all mighty! The all omnipotent! The verifier of verifiers! The holiest of holy!“No. I don’t want to give you my ID. You misheard me. I told you. I want the Gatling gun. I’ve seen the news. We’ve all seen it. You have one. You built a really dangerous one. It shoots big bullets fast.” He leans on the counter. “Give me access, rails free. And the long-range artillery cannon, I want access to that too.”“What work do you do that needs our most powerful weapon?”“It’s none of your business. Enough questions.”Then the brute raised the rifle. I swear it gentlemen it’s true, he demanded the most lethal cannon, I must admi