Don't Worry About the Vase

GLM-5.2 arrived last week. It boasts excellent benchmarks and looks strong.

Benchmarks here are a de facto ceiling of how good it is, not a point estimate. Essentially all other aspects of an open model like this, beyond speed and price, will almost always be worse than the numbers suggest. Still, impressive.

It is definitely a large step up from GLM-5.1, and likely the strongest open model.

GLM-5.2 is still substantially behind the absolute frontier, although plausibly on the cost-benefit Pareto frontier. It seems closer to the frontier than previous efforts, including probably closer than DeepSeek R1 was during the DeepSeek moment.

Only three days after the release of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic was forced by the United States Government to make it unavailable, when a jailbreak was brought to its attention, rather than the previous situation of ‘yes obviously experts can jailbreak anything if they care enough’ and ‘yes obviously you can ask Fable to fix your code.’

Three days was enough time for many of us to learn to love Fable, and for us to dearly miss it now that it is gone. The world was briefly smarter, and now it is again stupider. At some point it will get smarter again, which will likely be within two weeks.

A lot of things are always happening. Only one story matters.

Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 were shut down, by the White House, via an imposition of export controls at 5:23pm on Friday, wreaking all sorts of havoc.

There was then a scramble. Anthropic flew its people out to Washington, where they met with the Trump Administration on Monday, with hopes expressed that this could be quickly resolved.

What caused this? The Trump Administration said it was due to a jailbreak of Fable, which we now know they were told about by Amazon. They called Dario Amodei, who they complain did not take the issue sufficiently seriously. Rather than shutting down the model, he tried to explain why he saw no need to do that. This did not go well.

The mainstream media continues to sleep on the most important story in the world.

It has now been two days since Anthropic flew its people out to Washington, and I offered my previous update. We have heard nothing back from those meetings.

Prediction market prices have moved rapidly, and have once again stabilized at about a 55% chance of restoration by July 1, 30% by June 26 and 12% by June 19.

That seems modestly higher than I would put those numbers, but not unreasonable.

Every day that Fable remains unavailable further damages America, its cyber defenses, its productivity and the world’s trust in its AI and supposed ‘tech stack.’

Fable and Mythos are currently unavailable, but likely will return within a few weeks. I will continue to cover that fiasco, but in the meantime I will also finish my review of Fable, as if it were available, including use of the present tense.

As it did with Opus 4.7 and Opus 4.8, this includes a discussion of issues surrounding model welfare. If you want to properly understand Fable, even purely for its potential value as a user, this is a vital part of the picture.

Introduction

Everything impacts everything. All knobs that you turn generalize. Thus, when you try to solve one problem, you often create another. When you add new capabilities, or try to create new limitations, you create new problems.

First things first: Claude Fable 5 is the new best publicly available model.

I have noticed a step change, where Fable can suddenly help me in ways that previous models were not worth bothering to query. Almost everything it has noticed in one of my drafts so far has been spot on and it is downright scary. Suddenly I am motivated to once again continue improving my Chrome extension. I only ask for things I actually want or am curious about, and it has nailed every question I have asked it.

That does not mean it is the right tool for every job.

A lot happened this week, including a great trip out to Lighthaven.

The main event, the one that matters, was the release of Claude Fable 5. The public now has its hands on a Mythos-class model, alongside strong safeguards.

As always with a new model, I take a few days to draw in reactions, try out the model and read the system card, before I offer my takes, other than to say this is an extremely strong model. Full coverage of Mythos begins tomorrow with the model card, which will include discussion of the controversy over model safeguards.

This post is instead about all the things that did not involve Claude Fable.