US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says Anthropic is 'back on the right side.' After export controls, a Pentagon blacklist and a court fight, that is quite a turnaround. And co-founder Tom Brown is suddenly the one in the spotlight.
Astra uses a technique called 'recurrent depth': the model runs a query through itself several times instead of writing out its reasoning step by step. That makes the chain of thought harder to read. Redwood Research and Zvi Mowshowitz warn of a race to the bottom.
Just in time for the holiday season, Anthropic ships a ready-made kit for building commerce agents on Claude. One partner reports carts up to 35 percent larger and shoppers 60 percent more likely to buy.
Since Fable 5, Anthropic had to keep all traffic for 30 days. Many business customers found that unacceptable. Now there's a solution where the data stays in the customer's own cloud and no Anthropic employee ever looks at it.
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.