Tech Brew Ride Home - NOW Fable's Back?

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

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. Anthropic says the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 and that it will begin restoring access Wednesday (X) Anthropic says the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 and that it will begin restoring access Wednesday (BleepingComputer) Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, saying it nears Opus 4.8 performance at lower prices and is substantially better than Sonnet 4.6 for agentic work (Anthropic) Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, saying it nears Opus 4.8 performance at lower prices and is substantially better than Sonnet 4.6 for agentic work (The New Stack) Sony says all new PlayStation games from both first- and third-party developers will be sold in digital formats from January 2028, ending physical game discs (Game File) Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and 140+ companies join Open Standard to launch Open USD, a stablecoin that shares earnings from its reserves (The Block) Sources: Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models, to compete with AWS and Azure (Bloomberg) SpaceX cuts monthly Starlink prices in half in the Memphis area, as it endures blowback and legal challenges from opponents of its Colossus data centers (Bloomberg) Subscribe to the ad-free feed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Welcome to the Tech Route right home for Wednesday, July 1st, 2026, I'm Brian McCullough today. Anthropics 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 5, more death of physical media headlines, a 140 company group unveiled Open U.S.D., a stable coin to rule them all, and meta's building a cloud business. Here's what you miss 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 Blueprints' longevity mix created by Brought.

Ryan 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, precision dose, no BS. For a limited time only our listeners get 20% off, plus free shipping at blueprint.bri-a-N-jonson.com by using code TBRH at checkout. That's code TBRH at Blueprint.Briennjohnson.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 Methos 5. In a post on X Anthropic confirmed that it will begin restoring access to Fable 5 on Wednesday. On the other hand, Methos will remain exclusive to select companies. We've received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Methos 5, Anthropics 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 patients 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 Anthropics' 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, Anthropics says it is rolling out identity verification for a few use cases, and users may see a verification prompt when accessing certain clog 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, end quote. 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, Anthropics said in the blog post that it had trained an improved safety class.

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's 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. Anthropics said it had also created a new team to provide 24-7 monitoring of key jailbreak submission channels and would also soon debut a Hacker 1 program for researchers to submit potential jailbreaks they have flagged for Fable 5, end quote. And quoting the new stack. There is some bad news, too, until July 7th, 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 Anthropics 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 new stack, quote. 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 agentic 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, quote, 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 31st. It will go up to $3 and $15 per million input slash 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 new stack, 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, co-work and Claude Code users to, as the company puts it, accommodate the higher token usage of higher effort levels, end quote. 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. Critical knowledge isn't available or accessible to the folks who need it. That's the very problem our sponsor, Scribe, was built to fix.

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of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Well, this is happening quickly all of the sudden. Now Sony says all new PlayStation games from both first and third-party developers will be sold in digital formats from January 2028 on, thereby ending physical game discs. Quoting GameFile 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 viewed by GameFile 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 and 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 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 2028th 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 disk. 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 Peers Harding Rolls. Senior Games Research Analysts and Amper 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 OpenUSD, a stable coin that will share earnings from its reserves. Quoting the block, Open Standard said businesses will be able to mint and redeem OpenUSD 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 Open Standard 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, 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 stable coins 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, end quote. 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 powers 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's

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 Corweave, 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. Metacompute is led by Santosh Janaradan, 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 pairing some of their gains. CoreWeave 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 2028 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 going to hit publish on this and then get some dinner and then go to bed. Talk to you tomorrow. If you want a $3,000 a month, pay Payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies?

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