#251 - Mythos Back, Sonnet 5, Etched, LongCat

Our 251st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/01/2026 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov [https://twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov] and Jeremie Harris [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/] Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/ In this episode: * Anthropic redeploys Claude Fable 5 after talks with the US government, adding new cybersecurity classifiers, drafting a jailbreak-severity framework with major partners, and expanding model-testing coordination; broader concerns remain about the inevitability of jailbreaks and uneven release constraints versus OpenAI. * Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 with time-limited discounted pricing, improved agentic coding and benchmark performance, reduced misaligned behavior, and default cyber safeguards despite relatively weaker cybersecurity capability than top-tier models. * New tools and apps include Google NotebookLM generating TikTok-style vertical video summaries of uploaded research and Google releasing Nano Banana 2 Lite, a faster, cheaper image generator available via API. * Business and research updates span Etched’s push toward full-stack inference hardware with major funding and contracts, Baidu’s AI chip unit IPO ambitions, Agility Robotics’ SPAC plan, DeepSeek’s hiring expansion, and China’s open-source Longcat 2.0 MoE model with notable large-scale training and efficiency techniques alongside new long-horizon agent benchmarks. Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes): * (00:00:10) Intro / Banter * (00:02:07) News Preview * Tools & Apps * (00:02:32) Trump drops restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models | TechCrunch [https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/trump-drops-restrictions-on-anthropics-mythos-and-fable-models/] * (00:16:08) Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents | TechCrunch [https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-launches-claude-sonnet-5-as-a-cheaper-way-to-run-agents/] * (00:20:35) Google’s NotebookLM can sum up your research in a TikTok-style clip | The Verge [https://www.theverge.com/tech/959778/google-notebooklm-ai-clips] * (00:22:08) Google introduces a faster, cheaper image generator with Nano Banana 2 Lite | TechCrunch [https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/google-introduces-a-faster-cheaper-image-generator-with-nano-banana-2-lite/] * Applications & Business * (00:22:50) Etched Pulls 400+ Engineers From NVIDIA, TSMC & More to Build a New Frontier Inference Cluster For AI Which Is Already Worth $1B in Demand [https://wccftech.com/etched-pulls-400-engineers-nvidia-tsmc-build-new-frontier-inference-cluster-for-ai/] * (00:31:17) Baidu Rallies on AI Chip IPO Report [https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/baidu-rallies-ai-chip-ipo-130434714.html] * (00:33:54) Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal | T [https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/24/agility-robotics-plans-to-go-public-via-spac-in-a-2-5b-deal/]