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Tech Brew Ride Home
NOW Fable's Back?
00:20:40
Anthropic said Commerce lifted export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5, restoring access Wednesday, and launched Sonnet 5. Sony is ending PlayStation game discs in 2028, a 140-company group unveiled Open USD, and Meta's building a cloud business.
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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Wednesday, July 1, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Anthropic's Fable 5 is back though not for me though. I don't know if that's because I'm in France. They also launched Sonnet five more death of physical media headlines a 140 company group unveiled Open USD a stablecoin to rule them all and Meta's building a cloud business. 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 tried Blueprint's Longevity Mix created by Brian Johnson. Just one scoop helps support energy, cognitive performance, mood, focus, sleep, cellular 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 Prec 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 our show and tell them our show sent you it's back. Quoting bleeping Computer Anthropic has confirmed that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude's two most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. In a post on X, Anthropic confirmed that it will begin restoring access to Fable 5 on Wednesday. On the other hand, Mythos will remain exclusive to select companies. We've received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, Anthropic said in a statement. We'll begin restoring access tomorrow and we'll share an update soon. We're grateful to our users for their patience and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models. At the moment, it's unclear if Fable 5 will roll out to everyone, including those outside the United States. More recently, references to know your customer features were spotted on Anthropic's website, raising concerns that models like Fable could be restricted to users who complete identity verification or possibly to certain regions, at least initially. In a support document. Anthropic says it is rolling out identity verification for a few use cases, and users may see a verification purpose prompt when accessing certain Claude capabilities during routine platform integrity checks or as part of other safety and compliance measures. Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it, anthropic noted. The company says identity verification helps it prevent abuse, enforce usage policies and comply with legal obligations. Anthropic says it has selected Persona identities as its verification partner. You may be asked to provide a valid government issued photo id, such as a passport, driver's license, state or provincial ID or national identity card, the company says. Photocopies, screenshots, scanned documents, mobile IDs, student IDs, employee badges, bank cards and temporary paper IDs are not accepted. Anthropic also says users may need to take a live selfie using a phone or computer camera, and the process typically takes under five minutes. And quoting the Verge to address the original jailbreak in question, which Amazon researchers had flagged and was largely responsible for setting the Export Control Directive into motion, Anthropic said in the blog post that it had trained an improved safety classifier that targets and blocks that behavior, adding users will be notified if a request to Fable 5 is blocked, and the request will instead be sent to Opus 4.8. The new classifier means that the specific technique described in the Amazon report is blocked in over 99% of cases. The company highlighted in the blog post that there's quote currently no consensus in the AI industry for deciding on a jailbreak's severity, a problem that quote will become more acute in the coming months as more models with powerful cybersecurity and other capabilities are trained, assessed and released. So it said it partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other enterprises that are part of its Project Glasswing program in order to draft a widely agreed upon framework for assessing AI jailbreaks with four proposed categories capability gain for the attacker, breadth of capability gain for the attacker, ease of weaponization more broadly, and discoverability, or how easy it may be for someone else to repeat it. Anthropopathic said it had also created a new team to provide 24. 7 monitoring of key jailbreak submission channels, and would also soon Debut a HackerOne program for researchers to submit potential jailbreaks. They have flagged for Fable 5 and quoting the news stack, there is some bad News, too. Until July 7, users on subscription plans will be able to use Fable 5 for up to 50% of their weekly usage limits. After that, it will only be available via usage credits, which are billed at the same rates as access to Anthropic's API plans. For standard enterprise users, Fable 5 will not be part of their regular allowance, not even until July 7th. Access for them will be billed through usage credits immediately. There's a short grace period until July 7th for premium enterprise seats, though, and those users will get Fable 5 access through the subscription plan until then. End quote. But that's not all from Anthropic let's go back to the news stack Anthropic on Tuesday launched Sonnet 5, the latest model in its mainstream Sonnet series. The company calls Sonnet 5 its most agentic Sonnet model yet, and in benchmark terms, its performance is close to Opus 4.8 and represents a notable improvement over Sonnet 4.6. Anthropic specifically notes that it performs much better on tasks involving reasoning, tool use, software coding and knowledge work. Unlike with some previous Sonnet launches, it doesn't quite outperform the most recent version of the larger Opus model, but it is close enough to be a more affordable alternative to Opus 4.8 for the time being because Opus 5 can't be far behind, assuming it isn't held back in the same way that Fable 5 was. Anthropic stresses that Opus 4.8, especially at higher reasoning levels, will still offer higher accuracy, but also notes that Sonnet 5 provides developers with lower priced options that are of much higher quality than what was previously available. At its maxed out extra high reasoning level, Sonnet 5 performs about in line with Opus 4.8's medium to high setting on the OS, world verified and Agentix Search Browse comp benchmarks. But since that's also more expensive to run than Opus 4.8 at the comparable reasoning level, Opus 4.8 will still be the better option for some tasks. Sonnet 5, at least on the benchmark Anthropic has made available so far, always outperforms Sonnet 4.6. Benchmarks only tell part of the story, though. Model behavior also impacts how users perceive the model, and Anthropic says that its testers noticed that the model now completes complex tasks where previous Sonnet models would have stopped short. For example, to make Sonnet 5 even more attractive to developers and maybe free up some capacity from running Opus 4.8, Anthropic is offering an introductory price for API users at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens until August 31, it will go up to $3 and $15 per million input output tokens, as Anthropic has previously charged for Sonnet models. When asked if this is the first time Anthropic has offered introductory pricing, a spokesperson told the NewStack, we want our customers to test Sonnet 5 against their real workloads at the lowest possible cost during the migration window. For the time being, Anthropic has also increased rate limits for chat cowork and Claude code users to, as the company puts it, accommodate the higher token usage of higher effort levels. Ever spent hours of your workday tracking down information only to find that it wasn't documented at all? It's an age old corporate conundrum. 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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 SEMA AI comes in. With the Agentix 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. Well, this is happening quickly all of a sudden now. Sony says all new PlayStation games from both first and third party developers will be sold in digital formats from January 2020 eighth on, thereby ending physical game discs. Quoting Gamephile News, the PlayStation group calls the change a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends, as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs, According to a PlayStation blog post, view Game File in advance of its publication. As movies, TV and music have shifted from physical media to an age of downloads and streaming, Sony's move could speed the demise of physical media in a gaming context. The industry has offered consumers games via cartridges, cassettes, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs and Blu Rays across a 50 year stretch. Sony has been reporting to investors in recent years that PlayStation games have been increasingly purchased as downloads and not as discs. The most recent figures show nearly four in five purchases of full games for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 were purchased digitally in the past year. Stats like that may cause today's news to carry an air of the inevitable, but Sony's declaration for 2028 is likely to produce a shock as the biggest gaming platform on the planet that uses game discs leaves them behind. Sony is committing to still selling games in physical retailers even after they drop discs in 2028. Just how those games will be sold in boxes with codes inside as cards marked with digital redemption codes is unclear. Digital games will also continue to be sold in the online PlayStation Store. New games released for PlayStation consoles prior to January 2020 8th will be unaffected by the policy change. Sony says. That means the PS5 games of 2027, be they a new Madden, a new God of War, a new Call of Duty, a new Sly Cooper One Can Dream would still potentially be offered on disc. Sony's timeline for a transition to a no disc era will also spin up more speculation about the timing and configuration of Sony's next generation console, the probable PlayStation 6. This pretty much guarantees that PS6 won't arrive until 2028 at the earliest, piers Harding, roles Senior Games Research Analyst at Ampere Analysis, tells Games File. Harding Rolls also concludes from today's news that the base version of a PS6 will not include a physical media drive as Sony looks to keep costs down on the device. Sony itself is saying Nothing about the PS6 today, not its timing nor how it might or might not support internal or external disk drives in order to run disk based PS4 and PS5 games. Should the console be backwards compatible? End quote. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase and more than 140 other companies have set up what they are calling Open Standard to launch Open USD, a stablecoin that will share earnings from its reserves. Quoting the block, Open Standard said businesses will be able to mint and redeem Open USD without fees or volume limits, while most of the income made by OUSD's reserves will be distributed to participating businesses after a small management fee. According to OpenUSD's website, the stablecoin is expected to launch later this year. The FAQ section on the site says that companies that join OpenStandard will use OpenUSD as a core payment asset within their products and services, receive technical and integration support, and earn revenue based on the stablecoin's adoption, OpenUSD will be managed by an independent organization with governance shared among partner companies instead of a single issuer in control. The launch included support and participation from big name payment networks like Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, institutions like BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered Technology firms including Google, Shopify and IBM, and crypto firms including Coinbase, Bybit, Okx, MetaMask, Ripple and Galaxy. Today we announced Visa is joining Open Standard alongside Stripe, Coinbase, mastercard, blah blah blah. All those companies, visa's head of crypto, Kai Sheffield wrote on X. Other testimonials featured on the announcement page include MasterCard Chief Product Officer John Lambert, who said shared interoperable infrastructure was key to bringing stablecoins into the broader financial system. Separately, Tempo CEO Matt Huang said OpenUSD will be natively issued on its network from day one with support for payments, liquidity exchanges and decentralized finance. Maybe it's not just about using AI for their existing businesses Quoting Bloomberg Meta Platforms is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models, setting up a new vector for competition with industry leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Meta, which has been rushing to secure expensive data centers and other infrastructure to fuel its own artificial intelligence ambitions, is forming a business to generate revenue from excess computing power sold to outside customers, according to people familiar with the matter. One potential plan includes selling access to various AI models that are hosted on Meta's existing AI infrastructure, an approach similar to AWS's Bedrock offering, the people said. Meta would run the data centers and chips that power the models, including its own Muse Spark models, and charge developers to access them. The company is also considering selling access to raw computing capacity akin to other so called neocloud businesses like coreweave, the people said. Development of these new business lines is part of Meta Compute, an internal initiative to build and manage the company's AI infrastructure efforts, according to a person familiar with the plans. Meta Compute is led by Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure Daniel Gross, a leader inside the Meta Superintelligence Labs AI unit, and Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, a Meta spokesperson declined to comment. The company's plans are still in development and it's possible the strategy could change, but shares of Meta jumped as much as 8.6% in pre market trading on Wednesday before paring some of their gains. Core weave fell 9.7%. Meta has made developing AI superintelligence a top priority and has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to data centers and other AI infrastructure like expensive chips that it deems necessary to make that happen. That investment, which has left investors anxious about Meta's plans to earn a return on that spending, includes major computing deals with CoreWeave, Alphabet's Google and Oracle, among others. A cloud business offers one way to return some of that investment. AWS Azure and Google Cloud have spent decades building platforms that rent access to computing power, storage and software over the Internet, businesses that now command tens of billions of dollars per quarter in revenue. As demand for AI has surged, those providers have also expanded to rent the specialized chips and computing capacity needed to train and run AI models. It is a complex business, requiring not only vast fleets of data centers but also software platforms, enterprise sales teams and customer support operations. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which acquired his AI startup Xai in February, recently emerged as a key player in the space, renting access to its massive data center in Memphis to Anthropic earlier this year and striking a deal with Google. That Strategy could help Xai generate more than $50 billion in revenue by 202028 and $100 billion by 2030, according to an estimate by Bloomberg Intelligence. End quote. We took a red eye to get here to Paris, so I'm gonna hit publish on this and then get some dinner and then go to bed. Talk to you tomorrow.