US Secret Weapons Supplier Requirements Baffle Microsoft Boss
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has sharply criticised Anthropic’s Fable, saying the restrictions on requests to the AI model make no sense.
He delivered the criticism to engineers working on the company’s AI Copilot.
“If you use Fable, when the software refuses something at random, it feels like — when was the last time you had a creative tool that was so editorially controlled?” Nadella said, quoted by CNBC International on Friday (17/7/2026).
“That doesn’t make sense,” he asserted.
On its support page, Anthropic explained that users would receive responses from an older version when asking about certain topics.
It is not only Microsoft; the refusals have also been criticised by a number of social media users.
Fable 5 was announced in early June. Anthropic said the AI model was designed to reduce false positives for blocked requests.
Three days after its launch, Anthropic was found to have cut off access to Fable. The reason given was to comply with US government export control directives.
Only on 1 July 2026 was access to Fable restored. The company said it had added new safeguards to the model.
“The new safeguards will flag a small fraction of harmless requests compared to Fable’s previous safeguards,” Anthropic said.
The restrictions imposed on Anthropic’s AI products are the fruit of a soured relationship between the company and the US government. Anthropic was previously the only AI trusted for use by the US government in daily operations.
However, the relationship later deteriorated after Anthropic refused to allow the US military to use its AI models for surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems.
The US did not take this lying down and retaliated. The Donald Trump administration placed Anthropic on a national security blacklist.
In addition, the US government ordered the suspension of exports of Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable to various countries around the world. Government officials cited national security concerns as the reason.