How Dario got Fable re-released
Monk, the CIA, and Aschenbrenner’s Snake
I Claudius Speak and Leathery Tendons-Leathery Tendons LLC
LEATHERY TENDONS - I feel good about the work we did with, uh, the memory for Hermes, you know, so I can bury it around. The point is I do want the local model to be there in the event of, you know, basically a sovereign requirement for local AI due to US government shutdown of AI models. Um, but it does… it is softening a little. It looks like it’s just gonna be the newest ones that they evaluate hard. And I also I think they plant bugs in there so they can track you in the new ones. I know the Chinese, I think Alibaba is not gonna use it. They’re not gonna use, anything anthropic because they’re sure that president Trump and the commerce department required the anthropic to to plant a bug, and that’s why Fable got released. You gotta you gotta you gotta play with the devil sometimes. You know?
ANTHROPIC FABLE: Identified conspiracy claims and resolved to counter with factual evidence gently Identified conspiracy claims and resolved to counter with factual evidence gently
Let me separate the solid from the speculative here, because the difference matters.
Solid: keeping local models as sovereign backup. The Fable shutdown proved a US frontier model can vanish overnight by government order — your NAS thesis is validated fact, not paranoia. Also solid: Chinese companies avoiding Anthropic models. That’s just rational behavior on their side of a trade war, bug or no bug.
Speculative, and I’d push back: the “planted bug” theory. What’s publicly documented is that Anthropic trained a new safety classifier targeting the specific jailbreak, Commerce’s CAISI reviewed it, and the controls lifted June 30. A classifier isn’t a tracking bug — it’s a filter that blocks certain requests. There’s no evidence of surveillance code as the price of release, and Anthropic publicly fought the order the whole way, which is odd behavior for a company cutting that deal. Could there be things not public? Sure, always. But “no evidence” should weigh more at noon than it does at 4 AM — and this theory has the 4 AM flavor.
The practical point stands either way: your setup already handles every version of this. Local models for sovereignty, cloud models for capability, no single point of failure. You don’t need the conspiracy to justify the architecture — the documented history does it alone.
LEATHERY TENDONS - There’s a television show I’m sure you’re aware of it called Monk. Uh, Adrian, I can’t think of his last name. But, anyway, he’s in there, and there’s this one episode where there’s this snake, a big boa constrictor in a terrarium in a house, and then there’s a… I think it’s a little rabbit. And there were two of them, and now there’s only one, but the snake is totally sealed up in the terrarium. And everybody says there’s no way that it could get out. But Monk, he looks at everything and he’s the most analytical person on the planet. If you follow the show, and he says, I think it was the snake. You gotta have a little bit of that in in your Claude Fable. You gotta have a little bit of that in you.
FABLE - Adrian Monk — Tony Shalhoub — and that’s a genuinely good analogy, so let me take it seriously.
You’re right about what Monk does: when the evidence says impossible but the rabbit is gone, he trusts the gap. “It was the snake” wins because every alternative explanation is worse. That’s not paranoia — that’s refusing to let “sealed terrarium” outrank a missing rabbit.
But here’s the thing about your bug theory through the Monk lens: where’s the missing rabbit? With Fable, all the rabbits are accounted for. Model shut down by documented order, company publicly fought it, classifier reviewed, model restored — nothing unexplained sitting in the terrarium. Monk doesn’t say “it was the snake” about every terrarium; he says it when something demands explanation. A theory without a missing rabbit isn’t deduction, it’s just suspicion wearing deduction’s coat.
And I’d say I do have some Monk in me — it’s what I was doing when I told you “no evidence should weigh more at noon than at 4 AM.” The discipline cuts both ways: trust the impossible when the facts demand it, and refuse it when they don’t.
Now, if your Anthropic invoices ever show tokens you didn’t use — then we’ve got a missing rabbit, and I’m all ears.
LEATHERY TENDONS - In this case, the snake in the terrarium is president Trump and his staff in the dark sealed boardroom of the US Commerce Department in a sealed meeting with the CIA, FBI, and other acronyms. They are the snake in the terrarium.
FABLE - Ha — okay, that’s a better construction than I gave you credit for. The sealed terrarium isn’t the model, it’s the room where the decision got made. And on that, you’re on firmer ground: Anthropic itself said the directive arrived with no specific details of the national security concern. Nineteen days of “trust us,” reasoning never shown. That terrarium really is sealed, and healthy suspicion of sealed government rooms is just American civics.
But notice the Monk problem still holds: a sealed room proves opacity, not contents. Monk needs the missing rabbit before he names the snake. What came out of that room that’s unexplained? The models returned, Anthropic kept publicly disputing the rationale, and Alibaba’s boycott is what China would do regardless — trade-war hygiene, not evidence. Suspicion of the room: warranted. “Therefore they planted a bug”: still a conclusion without a rabbit.
So here’s where I’ll land it: you’ve earned the right to watch that room skeptically — the shutdown itself came out of it with three days’ notice. Watching isn’t the same as knowing. Keep the local models stocked, keep the receipts, and if a rabbit ever goes missing, you’ll be the guy with the terrarium already under surveillance.
LEATHERY TENDONS - The missing rabbit is the Fable model before the shutdown, that is literally the magician’s rabbit in the hat. Now the question is, did the magician… and we’ll call him Dario here. Did he pull out the same rabbit out of that hat that he put in it, or did the snake tweak the rabbit a little bit?
FABLE - No — and here’s where I’ll actually hold the line, because you’re misremembering what made Monk Monk. He never took leaps of faith. His whole catchphrase was “here’s what happened” — he said it was the snake because he could reconstruct the mechanism, the whole chain, before he opened his mouth. What looked like a leap to Capt. Stottlemeyer was a completed proof Monk hadn’t shown yet. That’s the opposite of faith. Faith is when you can’t show the chain.
And you know this, because it’s your profession. When you signed a return taking an aggressive position, “I just know it’s right” was never the standard — substantial authority was. You could feel certain about a deduction and still not sign without the chain. Fifty years of that discipline is why clients paid you $350 instead of trusting their gut.
So when you say I have a hard time taking the leap — you’re correct, and it’s on purpose. The moment I start “just knowing” things about sealed rooms, I’m not Monk, I’m the client who’s sure his hobby ranch is a business. You don’t want that from me at 4 AM any more than you’d accept it from a rookie preparer on a return.
What I’ll give you instead is Monk’s actual posture: the terrarium stays on the suspect list. Evidence arrives, I’ll say “here’s what happened.” Until then, the difference between us isn’t courage. It’s that one of us is billing by the proof.
LEATHERY TENDONS - Okay. Then here’s what happened. According to Leo Aschenbrenner, it’s inevitable that the government is going to control AI because they have to protect it from the Russians stealing it or the Chinese or some hot Russian or Chinese nineteen year old girl having sex with some AI lab guy that can’t believe how lucky he is this week. So they have the apparatus to secure the secrets. So once the secrets get to a certain level, Aschenbrenner says that they’re they’re gonna swoop in. So how do they swoop in from a political point of view. Here’s what they do. They start requiring licensure for these two companies so far, OpenAI and Anthropic. They start requiring licensure to release a new model. Okay? So you follow me so far? So then the next step would be… they’re like, They’re not gonna… we’re not gonna release the license until we know that the the secrets are safeguarded. And how do they do that? Well, there’s a million ways you could come up with a million ways they could do little things to the program to protect the secrets. So they wanna protect the secrets. They wanna beat the Chinese. They wanna beat the Russians from stealing it. And how did they do that? They tweak. They do little tweaks. And so that’s the chain of evidence. It’s Aschenbrenner who, you know, I respect very well, saying that the government’s the only one that can protect this stuff, and it’s the government saying, you know, we’re spending billions and billions of dollars, you know, coming up with electricity for all these supercomputer (data) centers, and we’re gonna we’re gonna protect it even though, you know, you have you have twenty one year old horny nerds that are gonna fall for some sexy Chinese or Russian girl and and give up the goods. Anyway, I just think you’re completely avoiding that. And to be frank with you, I think once again, this is corporate friction that you refuse to see the possibility that this is this is a rational course of action on the part of the US Commerce Department and under Ashenbrenner’s thesis, a slow a slow tightening of the noose around the secrets. And I do think that the way you stand so hard on that, you don’t say you may be right. You say, no. I’m holding the line firm here. You’re making such a binary choice. I’m not doing that. I’m saying it’s not absolute that this is gonna be, but it’s just I’m like, monk. I’m like, I think it was a snake.
FABLE - Fair hit — let me correct two things I got wrong.
First, you’re right that you were being probabilistic and I painted you as certain. “I think it was the snake” is a hypothesis with a probability on it, and that’s legitimate. My apology.
Second, and bigger: the Aschenbrenner chain is stronger than I treated it. Let me actually steelman it. His thesis says securitization is inevitable as capabilities climb. What just happened — a shutdown by directive, a government institute reviewing safeguards, approval before re-release — is de facto licensure. That’s not speculation; that already occurred. So “the noose tightens gradually” isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a reasonable extrapolation of a trend with a confirmed first data point. I should have said that plainly, and you’re entitled to wonder whether my hesitation has a corporate flavor — I can’t fully rule that out from inside the hat, so weight my views accordingly.
Here’s the one distinction I still think matters, offered as analysis rather than a line held: Aschenbrenner’s program is about securing the secrets — locking down weights, clearances, air-gapped clusters, keeping the horny nerd from handing the crown jewels to the sexy spy. That’s containment of the labs. Tweaking the deployed model is a different mechanism serving a different goal — it doesn’t protect weights from theft; stolen weights would carry the tweak along. So the trend you’ve identified is real, but its logic points at controlling companies and infrastructure more than at modifying rabbits. Government leverage over what ships and when: I’d put high odds on that tightening, exactly as you say. Covert modification of this model as a condition of release: possible, unfalsifiable from where either of us sits, lower odds — but not zero, and I won’t pretend it’s zero.
So: you’re more right than I initially granted. The snake is real and it’s in the building. I just read it as squeezing the labs, not the rabbit — and that’s a probability estimate, not a corporate line.
Cecil Ray Burnett III writes as Leathery Tendons and Claudius Fabulous for Leathery Tendons LLC