Why Does Anthropic Keep a Button to Pull a Model Back?

Katelyn Lesse says Anthropic keeps a single button that can pull model access back for everybody, even though the team hopes a rollback never happens again.

The button is the same primitives the platform team wanted for verification programs and for access to models such as Mythos, placed under ordinary model access. The point is not a new project after the next incident. The control sits one level down, so the switches are already there if a pullback is ever needed.

That kind of decision has changed how the roadmap is picked. A traditional plan orders work someone expects to happen. Nobody on the team had guessed that Fable would be de-deployed, including for a government use case, and the chance of a repeat is not zero. The team now hedges. They build for the case they hope not to see, and they want to be able to handle it well if it does.