It\u2019s often difficult to tell apart beneficial and harmful uses of AI in biology. For example, in some cases researching a treatment for a disease requires scientists to produce the dangerous compounds that cause that disease in the first place. This is most obvious for live vaccines, which require scientists to grow the same pathogen they\u2019re aiming to prevent. It\u2019s also the case for some medicines. To develop the drug captopril, which treats hypertension, scientists isolated toxic components of snake venom that crash blood pressure in humans. As new biological capabilities develop on the frontier of AI, we need to be cautious to ensure that the new risks they pose do not materialize ahead of their potential scientific benefits.<\/p>\n
Sophisticated actors who wish to use our models to do harm know how to exploit this ambiguity to obscure their intent, making dangerous tasks look like ordinary research pursuits. The US Intelligence Community\u2019s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment<\/a> makes clear that such actors exist, and that advances in biotechnology including synthetic biology and genomic editing \u201ccould lead to novel biological threats.\u201d It notes that several state actors likely maintain active offensive biological and chemical weapons programs\u2014programs that could be accelerated by access to the raw capabilities of frontier AI models.<\/p>\n Because of our concerns about these \u201cdual-use\u201d capabilities (those that could be used for beneficial or harmful purposes, and where the line between them is not always easy to draw), we intentionally launched Fable 5 with almost all biology queries blocked. This enabled us to make the model available for users in other domains. We knew this would be frustrating for legitimate biology users: it would result in a high number of false positives in the near term, where users asking biology-related questions would have their requests blocked and sent to a less capable model. Nevertheless, we chose to make this tradeoff because the cost of Fable being misused in a dual-use domain like biology could potentially be catastrophic<\/a>.<\/p>\n How our biology safeguards work<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1786086368_918_image.webp\"\/)
Illustration of our biology classifiers. Content that falls on the left-hand side of the classifier boundary is allowed; content that falls on the right-hand side is safeguarded (and is therefore blocked and sent instead to a less capable model);. Clearly harmful content (red), and content that is dual-use (orange), triggers the classifier and is blocked. We include a safety margin that includes content that is very likely benign but which is still blocked out of an abundance of caution (light green). Clearly benign content is in darker green.Upon its launch, Fable 5 had very broad classifiers (A) that triggered on a wide range of requests\u2014even ones that were almost certainly benign (those in the safety margin). The classifier boundary is thus very far to the left-hand side of the diagram. The update we are announcing today (B) means that many more benign requests are allowed by the classifier, which has become better at discerning subtle differences between benign and dual-use queries. The classifier boundary in the diagram has therefore moved further to the right-hand side.Conclusions<\/p>\n