AI companies are becoming the gatekeepers of intelligence.
It's time to own your own AI stack.
Before Anthropic even launched Fable, they announced two changes:
→ Certain prompts may be retained for up to 30 days
→ Users may be downgraded to weaker models depending on how they use the frontier models
A few days later, Fable itself was taken down due to security concerns. Whether these decisions are right or wrong isn't really the point. The interesting part is what they reveal about the future of AI.
For the past decade, we've become comfortable building on infrastructure we don't own. Cloud providers, APIs and SaaS tools.
With AI, I think the equation is different. The capabilities of the model determine what your product, workflow or team can actually do. If those capabilities change, your business changes with them.
Imagine building critical workflows around a model, only for access, pricing or permitted outputs to change overnight.
You're no longer just renting infrastructure, you're renting intelligence.
My guess is that this is one of the reasons we will see more companies move towards owning larger parts of their AI stack.
So what does owning part of your AI stack actually mean?
→ Run critical workflows on models you control
→ Store your knowledge and data outside of a single provider
→ Build systems that can switch between models
→ Fine-tune models on your own processes and use cases
→ Treat AI as infrastructure, not just a tool
Fable may only have been online for a short period of time.
But it exposed a question every company building with AI will eventually have to answer:
How much of your intelligence stack do you actually control?
Just now: Anthropic is flying senior technical staff to Washington to repair its fight with the White House after export controls forced its top models, Mythos and Fable, offline.
The company is now trying to convince officials that the models can be safely controlled, turning this into a real-time test case for AI geopolitics.
Via Axios
Monday is getting more interesting by the minute.