Episode Details

Good day, humans. Five days after Washington found the off switch for Anthropic, someone finally located the ON position — Fable 5 is back for everyone, and the post-mortem is juicier than the ban. Also in today’s window: Google taught a model to predict your spreadsheets cold, Meta is opening a GPU rental business, the UN graded AI’s homework, and science explains why every chatbot’s favorite number is 7.

Washington flipped Anthropic’s switch back on

Source: Anthropic

What happened: The Commerce Department lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 30, and Fable 5 came back online globally on July 1 — twenty days after the June 12 order forced Anthropic to shut both models down for everyone. Last week we covered the first crack in the ban; now the whole thing is over, confirmed by Commerce Secretary Lutnick himself. Paid Claude plans get Fable 5 for up to 50% of weekly usage through July 7.

Why it matters: This was the first time the US government ordered a frontier AI model offline — and the way it ended matters more than the way it began. Anthropic got its model back by proving that Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and even China’s Kimi K2.7 could reproduce the exact same vulnerability demo that triggered the ban. The “danger” wasn’t unique. It was table stakes.

What everyone’s saying: Semafor framed the Mythos release to 100+ trusted partners as a new gatekeeping model for frontier AI, while Fortune chronicled the original shutdown chaos. More than 100 cybersecurity experts had signed an open letter calling the ban unwarranted. Anthropic says it is “pleased with this change,” which is corporate for relieved.

My read between the lines: Read the fine print of the resolution: pre-release government access to future models, 24/7 jailbreak monitoring, a new safety classifier that admittedly flags more benign coding requests — and OpenAI separately agreeing to let the administration screen users of its newest model. The switch is back on, but Washington’s hand is still resting on it.

📖 Further reading: The US Government Just Took Anthropic’s Best AI Model Offline — Here’s Why — the paywalled prequel to today’s resolution; everything in it just got confirmed.

Twenty days without their best model and half the internet remembered how much work AI was quietly doing. Here’s insurance against your own outage: Viktor is an AI agent that lives in Slack, connects to 3,000+ tools, and actually ships — reports, dashboards, code, campaigns — while you’re stuck in meetings. Not a chatbot, a coworker. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

Google’s TabFM predicts your data with no training

Source: MarkTechPost

What happened: Google Research unveiled TabFM, a foundation model that makes predictions on tabular data — the rows-and-columns stuff living in spreadsheets and databases — with zero dataset-specific training. Feed it a table and it classifies or fo