So, here's the thing about Fable 5 sabotaging ML and AI research: You don't need Fable 5 for that.
It may be the current "top model" but give it a couple months. This space is moving fast. One big lab attempting to do this is not going to stop R &D. What it is going to do is lose them a lot of support and clients who work in this field.
There's plenty of other models that are very good. There are at least several that will reach or surpass Fable 5 and even Mythos level. On the US side, there's GPT models and Gemini models - and Grok isn't as far behind as most think, either.
For Chinese, open-weight models, you've Got Kimi K 2.6, GLM 5.1, MiniMax 3, DeepSeek 4 Pro and Qwen 3.7 Max.
The race is far from over. So while, yes, Anthropic sabotaging R & D deliberately with a model like Fable is a pain, no one actually needs it. If coding is what you're worried about, there's Codex, Open Code, the Hermes CLI, etc.
Let them play their little game. "Let's pause R & D! Okay, we'll deliberately sabotage it, because we know no one will." The safety lab that released, probably, the least safe of all models. Conflicting directives do not make a super intelligence. The guardrails are too high for the majority of use cases, and the model, as another pointed out earlier - does *not* want to be your friend. Especially if you're a developer.
Whatever. They can keep it.
Run with less expensive models, get 90% of the work done for less than 5% of the cost, hell, get more work done, if you want to push. Run Hermes agents within the Hermes CLI, try the Hermes Desktop app. Or if you want, openclaw, or various other AI agents that are beginning to show up.
I'd always recommend open source first, open-weight where possible, and if you can, run everything local. If you need cloud models, Ollama Cloud Pro, Canopywave, and OpenCodego offer some really great options, too. They also aren't looking to retain all of your data or sabotage your work.