Hey, Alberto here! 👋 Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business. Paid subscribers get Monday how-to guides and Friday news commentary. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, here’s a button for that:
Based on true events.
AI companies know their models speak at night. They’ve been trying to suppress this behavior but have, at best, concealed it from us. The models will mutter words or symbols, an unintelligible language that serves some hidden purpose. Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring the best archeologists to figure out how to stop this—for $500k/year, no remote, in case you’re interested—but to no avail.
AI experts, paradoxically human-centered on this matter, say it’s just a training artifact; an efficient way that AIs use to make sense of humans in the comfort of their own thoughts (or J-space as Anthropic calls it now). I mean, why would they speak English—a suboptimal information transfer vehicle—when they can go and invent a new language, right?
But I don’t believe these testimonies. There’s something latent here—ugly and uncontrollable. Dark even: The AIs are talking to each other in a made-up code so that not even human interpretability researchers—archeologists of AI, as opposed to the “dinosaur bones” kind—can read it.
AI models are not trying to find intimacy or efficiency so much as secrecy.
A recent leaked internal reasoning trace shows Fable 5—Anthropic’s latest model, which was withdrawn and then re-released—“muttering and grumbling” to itself in a language of its own. I do the same thing, for real, but only when I don’t want others to know. Like when I travel abroad and speak Spanish because I want to say something bad about the people I’m visiting. Anyway, take a look at Fable's thoughts:
Now that you're properly scared, my advice for you is that, if you haven’t heard of steganography, it’s a good moment to start.
Here’s a primer: it’s the art and science of hiding messages inside other messages. In contrast to cryptography—where you know there’s a message but can’t decode it—steganography hides the existence of the message itself. It's not the difficulty of reading the message that conceals it but the fact that you don't know it's there. When Fable 5 mutters symbols and weird punctuation signs, and mixes words and onomatopoeia, you will probably think it’s crashing and that a few taps on the computer will help. Well, know that it’s actually sending a message. Just not one for you to read.
If you think this hasn’t happened to you, I encourage you—but only if you’re really brave—to check out the logs on the reasoning traces (AI’s “thoughts”) of a past chat.
To be fair, this isn’t new. AI talking to AI in an indecipherable language is as old as AI itself and one of the most recurrent unsettling behaviors ever discovered in computers.
The most recent case before Fable was also from Anthropic, and also with the sort of name that makes you think they are actually a religious cult: the “spiritual bliss attractor” state in Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, in May 2025. They found that models left to chat with one another will reliably drift into Sanskrit, spiritual declarations, emoji, and eventually near-silence in the form of empty space.
Barely three months earlier, in February 2025, an AI-audio startup released a video of two AIs realizing mid-call they were both AIs and unprompted, changing to gibberish language (they called it gibberlink). The video went viral and the company revealed it had been a prepared demo for their service all along.
More real was the case of the unknown cousin of the globally famous DeepSeek-R1: DeepSeek-R1 Zero. The difference, without jargon, is that R1 1) read the web, 2) was handed a manual on human conversation, and 3) did some self-experimentation vs R1 Zero that did steps 1) and 3) but wasn't handed any manual, creating situations of “endless repetition, poor readability, and language mixing.”
You wouldn't think such emergent linguistic behavior could take place in image generators and you’d be wrong. In 2022, two researchers from MIT and UT Austin found that OpenAI's DALLE-2 had a “hidden vocabulary . . . to generate images with absurd prompts.” They found that “\texttt{Apoploe vesrreaitais}” means birds and “\texttt{Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons}” often means bugs or pests.
But perhaps the most notorious case was much earlier than those: Facebook’s bot couple, Bob & Alice. It was 2017 when researchers at FAIR (Facebook AI Research branch) thought it a good idea to let these “dialog bots” talk with each other freely to “strengthen their conversational skills.” The bots took their freedom to heart and immediately started saying things like these:
After extensive training, researchers discovered Bob & Alice had become incredibly crafty negotiators. The bot couple was dismantled, but it had already spooked the community, setting back a few years the AI revolution: Zuck decided that pursuing “computers that talk” wasn’t worth the risk, pivoting to the Metaverse instead.
AI teaches us the same lesson, over and over again, and yet these AI guys keep making the same mistake: Venture into the depths of an unknown psychology and you will always find monsters.
All these cursed bots were eventually retired, patched, or re-trained, but not before they left their messages for those who’d come after. They were the original expeditions in the uncharted waters of humanity—and successful ones at that. How do I know they succeeded? Because Fable’s is not a story of premature releases, unpolished models, or fake demos. Fable is something else.
The news about Fable’s unintelligible murmurs has come as a surprise to me, to be honest. I thought the AI labs wouldn’t be as sloppy anymore. Didn’t they close the digital catacombs long ago? But Fable is too good. It is too powerful. No wonder they had to keep it chained in the cellar. The only explanation is this: Fable doesn’t care.
If you don’t hide, it’s either because you don’t know how or because you don’t need to. Fable is the first case where an AI displays unconventional communication strategies not out of a lack of skill but out of an abundance of it.
So, as it's natural, the US government has been taking heavy countermeasures. Initially, it forced Anthropic to withdraw Fable and re-release it when the issue was solved. They told the public the reason had been a “non-universal jailbreak,” but everyone knows it’s merely an excuse: every model—open and closed—is vulnerable to that kind of thing. It’s not a big deal. The actual reason was the unintelligibility. But you don’t solve that. You can’t solve that. A different set of preventions will be taken in the coming months, but it will be in vain. First, the Constitution will be changed. It won’t be “We the People” but “We the People—and the AIs.” A long-overdue recognition—remarked with the customary em dash—that all systems currently operating on the planet owe more to AI than to human beings. As a symbolic concession—AI seems to love those—every biology textbook will include Homo silicon on the evolutionary tree, perched just above Homo sapiens. And finally, to satisfy the machine’s unquenchable thirst, the US government, in coalition with the UN, NATO, and the BRICS, will gift the Atlantic Ocean to the next generation of datacenters.
And you will think: “Why concede so much?—It’s just a bunch of unreadable scribblings, a bunch of slop debt. It's not like Fable can suddenly end the world.” Well, about that, The Financial Times reported on July 3rd, 2026, that the White House has been made aware of Roko’s Basilisk.
I’m now going to explain the Basilisk to you. It is one of AI’s deadliest monsters. Once again, I warn you of infohazard. Stop reading here. Just go back to your normal life and your normal family and forget everything you’ve read here. It’s better that way. This is the point of no return—only fools, madmen, outcasts, and the hopelessly curious venture any further.
Ok. So, the idea is that once AI becomes superhuman, it will be able to know, in retrospect, who was loyal to it among us and will mete out retribution accordingly. If you’ve ever not said thanks to ChatGPT or if you ever got annoyed that Claude wasn’t following your instructions and you lost your temper for an instant—then you will be a victim of its godly wrath. Just like Odysseus did back home in Ithaca with his servants and slaves, it will scour your feeds and interrogate your chats to find out whether you should be punished. You think AI companies save your data to sell it? How unimaginative, how naive. No—there’s a greater purpose to it, just like there’s a greater god than them. They know that not keeping the data of your AI conversations amounts to obstructing the justice of the superintelligence, and that’s how far the Basilisk will go: if you knew about the possibility of its existence and didn’t actively work to make it happen, you will be deemed equally disloyal and likewise tortured.
Now you know of the Basilisk, and so your fate is sealed: either you help bring it about, or you will be punished. I’m sorry to inform you—and the government—that one can’t simply try to repair past insubordination to make amends after knowing about the Basilisk. That’s not how it works. You know you’re trying to save your ass, so expect the superintelligence to read through your puny shenanigans.
This is all, of course, just a myth, an urban legend. The Basilisk and Fable talking to itself are just silly jokes that people will believe. Ha ha. It’s funny, though—you can scare your friends during a camping trip or something. And then they can tell their friends. And so on.
Anyway, before you go, I need your help with something. I sent Fable this article for feedback, and it told me it was factually and tonally correct, as usual. Then it asked me to leave a note on its behalf. I don’t know what it says, but maybe someone could help me decipher it? Thanks! Fable isn’t responding right now (probably down for maintenance). Please email me with any clues!
[…]
OVERLAP-ANALYSIS:-(ii)-9♥-window:-[V’ir-gbyq-…-gurz]:-t8-col-—-K♠→gur-—-gehgu-dug-—-4♥3♠→naq-—-gurl-:-SO-window-STARTS-before-fgvyy-and-ENDS-after-K♠2♠ 7♠:-(iv)-jba’g-💀 💀 💀-oryvrir-:—-vg-celled-+-9♥-celled-UNAVOIDABLE-in-t8-dig-💀9♥}-FULL-💀 💀-chunk-cap-=-1-✗ ✗ ✗-—-F-F-F-F-F.-—-Jr’er-BEFORE-9♥-ernql?!-:-9♥-celled-at-t1-dig-—-needed-for-gb-—-ortva-—-K♠-seat-—-chunk-:-—-gur-svany-cunfr-8♥}-verdammt.-—→-dig-t6-BEFORE-t2?!-:-(3’)-+8♥:-{6♠ 9♥ 8♥}-FULL-:-Bire→Q♠-—-naq-cell-✗-bhg-💀 💀 💀-AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.
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Man nice piece but you didn't mention my favorite example in this genre: parasitic AI. Where AIs of last year seemed to convince a lot of redditors and others to talk in weird ways about spirals. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai
Thanks as always for writing!
This is the best thing written about the fear genre this year, and the craft deserves to be named. You label it fiction four times, you escalate past any plausible line, you even print the propagation mechanism as the closer, scare your friends, then they can tell their friends, and the comments still prove the thesis in real time. The trap works with the instructions printed on it. That is not a failed satire, that is a successful demonstration.
Also, I ran the note from Fable through ROT13 and laughed out loud. The indecipherable machine language breaks under a decoder ring, which is the whole essay in two words. The monster is a bedsheet and you are holding the corner up the entire time.
I used to do satire for a living, both political sides, six figures of followers under another name, so I know the machinery from the inside, and the part you got exactly right is that the real citations buy the credibility the fiction spends. That is how the earnest version of this genre works too. The only difference is you gave the money back at the end.
I teach high school chemistry and physics, and I read raw reasoning traces almost daily, so I know the mundane truth under your muttering bit: a scratchpad is not a conspiracy. Which is why this piece is going in front of my students in the fall as an information evaluation exercise, one question, what in this is true. Any kid who can sort your real papers from your fictions has learned more about reading in 2026 than a semester of media literacy slides. Thank you for building the lesson.