Banning Fable 5 is the most gloriously stupid tech policy of the decade

A quick note before the shouting: this is a satirical opinion piece. The “ban” below is a hypothetical I’m using to make a serious point about AI policy. Enjoy responsibly.

So the news of the week, in my imagined worst-case timeline, is that the Trump administration has decided to ban Fable 5. The whole model. Gone. And I have feelings.

Let me say the quiet part loudly: you do not improve a country’s relationship with technology by unplugging the most useful tool a lot of people have ever touched. That’s not policy. That’s slamming the laptop shut and calling it a strategy.

Why this is so spectacularly backwards

You can’t ban a capability, only your own access to it. Banning a frontier model doesn’t make the capability disappear — it makes it someone else’s. Every other country keeps building, keeps shipping, keeps learning, and the people who’d be hurt most are exactly the small operators who can’t afford the enterprise alternatives. The big players are fine. The kid in a bedroom prototyping their first product is not.

It mistakes the tool for the problem. Almost everything people worry about with generative AI — misinformation, fraud, slop — is a problem of use, not of existence. We don’t ban cameras because of forgeries. We don’t ban spreadsheets because someone cooked the books. We write rules about the behaviour and we go after the bad actors. Banning the model is the policy equivalent of treating the headache by removing the head.

It’s unenforceable theatre. A ban that everyone routes around in a weekend isn’t a ban, it’s a press release with extra steps. You get all the downside — chilled investment, talent flight, a worse local ecosystem — and none of the safety it pretends to deliver.

What actually-grown-up AI policy looks like

I work in this world. The stuff that genuinely helps isn’t prohibition, it’s plumbing:

• Transparency about provenance — label what’s generated, build the watermarking and content-credentials rails, and require them at the platform level.
• Liability where the harm is — go after fraud, defamation, and abuse as the crimes they already are, with teeth.
• Access, not amputation — invest in literacy so people use these tools well, instead of pretending they can be wished away.

Ban the harm. Regulate the behaviour. Keep the tool. That’s not a radical position — it’s just the difference between governing technology and being scared of it.

Anyway. Bring back Fable 5. I’ve got a website refresh waiting on it.