Microsoft CEO Nadella criticizes Anthropic’s Fable AI over refusals in internal Copilot meeting Proactive uses images sourced from Shutterstock
Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella criticized Anthropic’s Fable 5 model in an internal meeting with Copilot engineers, saying the AI’s refusal of certain requests feels “editorially controlled” and “doesn’t make sense,” CNBC reported.
“If you use Fable, when it refuses for any random thing, it just is like, when was the last time you had a creation tool that was so editorially controlled?” Nadella told the engineers. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Nadella also weighed in on the broader question of AI concentration, arguing against a market dominated by a small number of players. “It can’t be that there are only two companies in the world with token capital, and everybody else is renting it,” he said.
Anthropic restored access to Fable on July 1 after suspending the model to comply with a U.S. government export control directive. The company said at the time that the updated safeguards would flag a somewhat higher share of harmless requests than the previous version had. A support page indicates that queries touching on certain elements of large-scale model development, among other subjects, may be handled by an earlier version of Fable rather than the current one.
Microsoft has committed $5 billion to Anthropic, while Anthropic has pledged to direct $30 billion toward Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Microsoft also launched Copilot Cowork this year, a workplace productivity offering built around Anthropic’s technology.
Microsoft shares were down 2% in early Friday trading.