Microsoft Balks at Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 Data Retention Policy

Microsoft is limiting employees’ use of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 while its legal teams evaluate changes to Anthropic’s data retention requirements, Reuters reported Wednesday (June 10), citing a paywalled article by The Verge.

Anthropic’s data retention policy for the newly released Claude Fable 5, which is a Mythos-class model, includes retaining prompts and outputs for 30 days on every platform on which the model is offered, and for up to two years if the prompts and outputs are flagged by Anthropic’s trust and safety classifiers as violating the company’s usage policy, according to the report.

The company retains this data for trust and safety purposes, the report said.

Anthropic announced Tuesday (June 9) that it launched Claude Fable 5 after developing safeguards to prevent it and other Mythos-class models from being misused.

When the company announced the first Mythos-class model, Claude Mythos Preview, in April, it limited the release of the model to select partners so they could use its cybersecurity capabilities to strengthen their systems.

Claude Fable 5 is safe for general use, with safeguards designed to prevent it from being misused for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation, Anthropic said Tuesday.

The company added that the model has capabilities that exceed those of any previous model Anthropic has made generally available, is state-of-the-art on most benchmarks of AI capability, and performs especially well in software engineering, knowledge work, vision and scientific research.

In its Tuesday announcement of the release of the model, Anthropic said it introduced a new data retention policy for Claude Fable 5 and other models with similar of higher levels of capability.

Anthropic said that the new 30-day data retention policy applies to both first- and third-party surfaces and that the company will ensure the data’s deletion after 30 days in “almost all cases.” The company added that it won’t use this data to train new Claude models, or for any other purpose not related to safety, and that it logs all human access to the data.

“The data will help us defend against complex and novel attacks (including new jailbreaks and attacks that operate across many requests) as well as help us identify and reduce false positives,” Anthropic said in its announcement.