Anthropic is locking in compute at scale – a $35 billion cloud deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda, tied to a data center campus in Texas. Just ahead of a planned IPO, it says more about strategy than about hardware.
On Fable 5.1's launch day, Claude Code follows right along: 2.1.257 makes the new model the default, finally brings configurable time formats and a new auto-mode rule. 2.1.258 clears up a nasty startup failure on macOS Monterey.
Anthropic shipped Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 – the same model with different levels of safeguards. Two things stand out: the price drops by around 25 percent, and the real-world research examples are surprisingly concrete.
Simon Willison diffed the Fable 5.1 system prompt against the old one. The most striking addition: a hard ban on reproducing song lyrics. Days after Sony and Warner Chappell sued.
Simon Willison ran all five effort levels of Fable 5.1, Nick Saraev picked apart the benchmarks. The upshot: low and medium apparently don't think at all, while max produces the best pelican Anthropic has ever drawn, at a cost of 14 minutes.
Same price, same tokenizer, but not a drop-in replacement. If you're moving from Fable 5, you'll trip over forced tool calls, bound thinking blocks, and a model that suddenly rewrites whole files.
On the same day as Fable 5.1, Google puts out its third Flash version in six weeks. 90.8 percent on Terminal-Bench 2.1, the same price as before, and a locked-down cyber model on top.
Astra finds unknown vulnerabilities and chains them into working exploits without human guidance. OpenAI has now officially placed it at the highest risk tier. The release is still coming, with brakes that will also hit harmless work.