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Mythos Back?
00:21:05
The US lifted its block on Anthropic's Mythos 5, clearing it for 100+ institutions. Researchers said China's GLM-5.2 matches US models on security bugs. South Korea pledged ~$590B for chips, and the memory crunch turned existential for small makers.
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And we're live on Matchday as Doug reaches for a Buffalo wing. He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it, it just tastes better. Matchdays deserve Pepsi.
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Welcome to the Tech We Write home for Monday, June 29, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today the U.S. lifted its block on Anthropic's Mythos 5. Researchers said China's GLM 5.2 matches U.S. models on security bugs. South Korea pledged $590 billion for making new chips. And the memory crunch has turned existential for small electronics makers. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech, The older I get, the more I really need a full eight hours of sleep to function. At least that's until I try Blueprint's Longevity Mix created by Brian Johnson. Just one scoop helps support energy, cognitive performance, mood, focus, sleep, cellular res, resilience and healthy aging. The Longevity Mix is packed full of ingredients like magnesium, taurine, glycine and creatine, all to help you age better and survive on less sleep. Science backed precision dose, no BS for a limited time only. Our listeners get 20% off plus free shipping at blueprint.bryanjohnson.com by using code TBRH at checkout. That's code TBRH@blueprint.brianjohnson.com for 20% off. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. So please support support our show and tell them our show sent you. Over the weekend, the US government lifted its block on Mythos 5 a little bit, allowing Anthropic to release it to more than 100 US institutions. Sources say talks about Fable 5 are still ongoing, but insiders say that could be back as soon as this week. Quoting semaphore the decision in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic is a major de escalation in the confrontation between the Trump administration and one of the world's most valuable private companies. The letter is silent on Fable 5, a weaker version of Mythos that was briefly the most powerful AI model widely available to consumers. People close to the talk said they are moving forward releasing Fable as well, though that timeline is unclear. I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 model. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic's Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown Friday, citing significant progress in the intense daily talks between the government and the company since the block went into effect. Anthropic has committed to work with the US Government on protocols and standards and releases for its models, lutnick wrote. The move comes the same day that Anthropic's leading competitor, OpenAI, released its latest model, GPT 5.6, to a short list of government approved partners. Under the new Anthropic arrangement, a license will no longer be required to export re export or in country transfer, including deemed exports and re exports the Claude Mythos 5 model to entities identified in Annex A to this letter and their foreign national employees or to Anthropic's foreign national employees, end quote. Lutnick's letter marks the beginnings of a new regulatory regime that gives the US Government control over the release of Frontier AI models. Though the leaders of Frontier Labs have bridled at the possibility of losing time in the intense global AI race, Commerce Department spokesman Berno Kass cited the speed with which the government acted to address its concern about Anthropic. In just two weeks, we have worked diligently to ensure America remains the global leader in AI while safeguarding our security, cass said. The framework for overseeing AI is being built on the floor. Fly and many users of the most powerful tools, from non US governments and companies to consumers remain in the dark as to when they will get access to Mythos and Fable. European officials and other US Allies have expressed frustration at their new dependence on decisions in Washington. Lots of chatter over the weekend that all of that might be moot anyway because of headlines like this, quoting the journal Chinese artificial intelligence systems have matched the performance of Anthropic's powerful model Mythos in some cybersecurity scenarios, a development poised to reset the global tech race and pressure the White House in its overhaul of US AI policy. Security researchers said that a new AI model released last month by China's Zhipu AI, known as Zai, can match the latest US Models when it comes to finding security bugs, although it still lags Behind Anthropics and OpenAI's products in other tasks. Overall, the capability gap between top US Models and those built by Chinese companies has narrowed significantly, and use of Chinese AI systems has surged as businesses seek to rein in runaway costs. A host of companies, including Microsoft, are weighing how they can offer Chinese models on their platforms, a development that is set to alter the balance of power among tech companies. China is making sure that the gap becomes smaller and smaller over time, said Lior Div chief executive officer of the cybersecurity company 7AI. The ability of AI systems to find bugs in software has added urgency to efforts to use models to close quickly vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers. Otherwise, the world will face what some researchers have called Bugmageddon. Unlike models from anthropic or OpenAI, Zhipu's GLM 5.2 is open weight. That means it can be downloaded and run on hardware operated by anybody, and can be modified and used without supervision. Open weight models are ideal for users who want unfettered access to systems they control, but they are also ideal for hackers who can run them in the shadows. GLM 5.2 has ranked as one of the 10 most used AI models, according to data from OpenRouter, a company that provides access to more than 400 AI models in some benchmarking tests. According to the cybersecurity company Semgrep, GLM 5.2 bested Anthropic's Cloud Opus 4.8 model, which was released in May. When given Further instructions, Opus 4.8 and GLM 5.2 can match mythos in bug finding ability, according to the researchers. On Wednesday, the Chinese cybersecurity company 360 Security Tech Technology released a new bug finding tool called to Longfang. The company said it was comparable to Mythos in finding bugs as well. Those capabilities have alarmed many national security officials and CEOs. This kind of powerful weapon that can alter the landscape of cyber warfare can't remain solely in American hands, 360 Security Chief Executive Zhao Hong Yi said at a cybersecurity conference in Beijing. Zhao, an outspoken Internet veteran and member of China's top political advisory board, said China would face unacceptable risks if American entities could use advanced AI models to scan critical Chinese network systems while denying Chinese companies comparable capabilities. Many have called the US Administration's attack on Anthropic counterproductive and criticized its decision to allow exports of AI chips to China in light of the nation's recent advances. Banning Fable while selling chips China needs to develop its own version is a gift to China, said Saif Khan, a distinguished technology fellow at the Institute for Progress think tank who worked on export restrictions in the Biden administration. The U.S. needs to maximize the use of Mythos and comparable models to harden its cyber defenses while it can, he added. Among the Mythos 5 and Fable 5 users that had lost access before Friday's decision to restore Mythos 5 access for some trusted entities was the National Security Agency, which had been testing the tools and found them impressive in trials, according to people familiar with the matter. Critics of the White House approach have said it has been lax in restricting use of Chinese open weight models from companies such as Deepseek and Jipu, which are popular among US Businesses. The nation of South Korea and the Korean Companies Samsung and SK Hynix say they plan to collectively invest around $590 billion to build a new chip complex, including four chip making plants and a chip packaging cluster. Quoting the FT South Korea has announced a nearly $600 billion plan for the world's two largest memory chip makers to significantly expand capacity as the AI boom exacerbates. Chip Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will invest a combined $590 billion alongside the government to build chip making facilities in underdeveloped parts of South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung said on Monday. The investment pledges are part of the president's three mega projects for the Great Leap Forward initiative aimed at building up the country's capabilities in semiconductors, AI, data centers and robotics. The plan is also part of Lee's effort to rebalance economic growth, which is historically concentrated around Seoul and Samsung and SK Hynix have major chipmaking facilities in the capital region. South Korea was at a turning point for a new Great Leap Forward, lee said. We must swiftly complete the chip production hubs under construction and secure overwhelming manufacturing capacity through large scale investment in the Southwest. Samsung and Skhenix will each build two chip making plants in the country's southwestern region while constructing a chip packaging cluster in the central region. Chip packaging is the final stage of semiconductor manufacturing, where finished chips are enclosed in protective casings and connected for use in electronic devices. South Korea also plans to invest over the next 15 years to develop next generation memory chips on device AI chips, AI server chips and semiconductors used in defense. South Korea's chip makers are racing to meet surging demand from the data centers that power chatbots and other AI tools. The world's five largest AI companies are expected to spend more than $1 trillion in 2025 and 2026 on data centers. Their demand has raised price customers, including consumer electronics makers. Last week, Apple raised MacBook and iPad prices, citing the unsustainable cost of memory and storage. Samsung and SK Hynix now have a combined market capitalization of roughly $2 trillion. They account for nearly 80% of the global market for high bandwidth memory chips, which enable the rapid movement of the massive volumes of data required for AI applications. End quote. AI in real Life the future of AI isn't just digital. It's physical. From robots and drones to cars, industrial equipment and medical devices, intelligent machines can transform our lives. But every intelligent device needs an efficient brain, one that can reason locally without cloud inference delays and without draining its battery. That's where SIMA AI comes in. With the Agentic Software Environment Palette NEAT and the Modalics Machine Learning System on chip hardware developers can build high performance physical AI applications not in months, but in days and hours. Join the webinar to see how customers use reasoning enabled AI and agentic workflows to accelerate the development of intelligent machines and autonomous systems. Discover what's possible with physical AI. Head to Sema AI Neat. That's Sema AI Neat.
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theme of the whole memory chip crunch, Ming Chi Kuo says the memory supply demand gap will widen throughout 2027, with an estimated 15 to 20% of 2026 consumer electronics capacity shifting to data centers in 2027. So next year, almost a fifth of all memory chips produced will go to data centers, according to Jefferies. Memory prices are expected to rise 40 to 50% just in Q3 of this year and 30 to 40% in Q4 as Chinese memory makers are unlikely to be able to provide meaningful near term relief. And CNBC says while Apple and Microsoft, raising prices, is getting all of the headlines, the real story might be the Armageddon that smaller electronics players are facing. Quote earlier this year, Mono Technologies assembled and shipped nearly 1,000 units of its flagship product, a $600 router development kit. Co founder Tomasz Jaman, who started mono in 2024, found early traction with networking aficionados who use the product to speed their Internet connections. Then came the memory crunch, which has driven up the cost to produce practically every electronic device on the planet. Now Zaman isn't sure what to do, especially for the 1300 prospective customers who put down a $100 deposit for his next production running Mono's cost for 8 gigabytes of a type of DRAM from Micron shot up from $35 when he was first developing the product to $300 today at his three person company. Zaman says he hasn't decided if he'll go ahead with a second batch and increase the price by at least one third. Or introduce a new model with 75% less memory. Even a router of R class, It's a poor value if you make it at $900 to $1,000, Aman told CNBC in an interview. But we have to, or we trim it down to the bare minimums. Zalman's experience is becoming common across the consumer electronics market, from iconic devices like iPads and Xbox consoles to niche products that are barely past the testing phase. Costs are soaring due to a global supply crunch caused by the artificial intelligence boom, which has led chip makers like Nvidia to suck up ever increasing amounts of memory for their processors and advanced systems. GoPro, the struggling maker of action cameras, warned this month that it might go out of business after memory costs shot up between 80 and 115% at the end of the first quarter, and shares of speaker maker sonos are down 23% this year as memory prices pressure margins. Nabila Popal, an analyst at idc, described the current situation as an absolute existential crisis for companies such as smaller Android phone manufacturers or local players that are making devices below $100. They won't be able to get the memory because memory suppliers are only answering calls of the big players, popal said. End qu? Finally today I was talking about this with someone recently. In fact, folks don't consume full content really anymore because you don't have to. You can basically watch most or all of anything just by watching clips on social media. Quoting CNBC as the New York Knicks clinched their first championship in 53 years and the NBA notched its highest Finals series rating since 1998, professional basketball was inking another record. The five game series between the Knicks and the San Antonio spurs generated 15 billion views and counting on social media, the most ever for an NBA Finals and nearly triple the previous record set in 2025. According to the NBA, Game 5 alone generated more than 4 billion views on social media platforms, breaking the record set three days prior by Game four. It's emblematic of an intensifying battleground in live sports as professional leagues seek to reach new and younger fans and media consumption shifts. Online TV and streaming platforms have been attracting some of the biggest audiences for live sports this year. The NBA Finals series claimed an average of 20.6 million viewers per game on Disney's ABC and ESPN networks. And yet social platforms like TikTok and Google's YouTube are claiming a disproportionate amount of viewing time for Generations Z and Alpha, often at no cost. That's left the sports leagues and live rights holders weighing whether to go all in on social as a funnel for future audiences or to reinforce the walled garden of subscription programming to offset rights broadcast fees. It's always a question of what the leagues are doing versus what the rights holders want to do, said Jonathan Miller, a former Fox and NBA executive who currently serves as chief executive of Integrated Media, which specializes in digital media investments. Reaching and cultivating the youth sport base is a major priority and focus of the leagues themselves, Miller said. In today's fragmented landscape, it's no longer a luxury to have a young base. It is a necessity to ensure future health. For years, YouTube has snagged the biggest share of streaming viewership, according to Nielsen's monthly report, known as the Gauge. Rather than watching live games in their entirety, consumers are increasingly watching sports clips, highlights, athlete made videos and creator content on social platforms. According to s and P Global's 2025 State of US Sports Viewing Report, 68% of sports viewers reported watching live games on TV or through streaming 38% reported watching highlights, interviews and other clips on social media, YouTube and other platforms and 12% said they interact with social media accounts or fan forums or professional players, teams or leagues. What we're seeing today is the evolution of consumption, said Adam Kelly, president of global sports marketing agency img. The TKO Group owned firm packages and sells media rights and brand rights, as well as providing consultancy on some of the biggest TV deals globally. Live games that are aired exclusively on streaming consistently draw significantly younger audiences than those aired on linear tv, according to Nielsen, which began breaking down weekly sports viewership consumption. Industry executives told CNBC that as sports migrate more and more onto social platforms, the content is acting as a conduit to live games, not as a pure replacement. It's just a continued development of the accessibility of content, a lot more platforms in the marketplace catering to short form content, said William Mao, senior vice president of meteorites consulting at Octagon, a global sports and entertainment agency. Mao said the rise of social content around live sports is an acknowledgment that companies need to target and engage those younger demographics, those future consumers where they are, mao said. The appetite for clips is creating something of a land grab between leagues and media rights holders. According to Mao. Both the broadcasters and the leagues have their own social media presences. If multiple accounts want to use the same footage, it could dilute the audience, Mao said. As a result, media negotiations can go so far as to determine how long a highlight or clip can be used exclusively on one platform versus Another. The hope is that a healthy highlight reel on social feed spurs interest among younger fans in live matchups. Rolo Goldstaub, the global head of sport at TikTok, said 42% of users watching sports content on that short form video platform will go on to tune in to a live game on TV or streaming. End quote. So just a bit of a heads up programming note, tomorrow night we are flying to Paris. So starting on Wednesday things might sound slightly different because I will not be in my studio. I will be coming to you from an apartment on the Ile St. Louis. Looking forward to that. Talk to you tomorrow.