Extended four times, then it just… stopped.
That’s the shape of Claude Fable 5’s rollout since Anthropic first threw the model open to paying subscribers in early July. Free access was meant to run through July 12. It didn’t. Backlash over the early cutoff pushed that out to July 19. Then, on July 18, Anthropic announced the real end date: July 20, when Fable 5 stops being a bonus and becomes a plan feature.
Moonshot AI’s new flagship undercuts Claude Opus 4.8 on price and edges past it on the industry’s leading benchmark. The catch is that it isn’t actually open yet, and won’t be runnable by anyone outside a data centre when it is.
Six labs now field a model scoring above 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Two months ago it was two. Grok 4.5, GPT-5.6, Muse Spark 1.1 and now Kimi K3 all launched within eight days of each other. The newest entrant landed this week, it’s Chinese, and it undercuts Claude on price.
“Go’n load us up with tariffs, but we’ll never be the 51st state." That’s the chorus Bryan Adams dropped on Canada Day, and it’s about as subtle as a power chord. He never says ~Trump’s~ name once. He doesn’t need to. CBC covers the release: a two-minute, sixteen-second rock anthem timed to July 1 (Canda Day), built around the annexation rhetoric Trump has repeated on and off for the better part of two years.
Virtually every time I fire up either Claude or ChatGPT’s desktop app, I see there’s an update. The changes are not earth-shattering but are progressive improvements. Here are some.
Never so blatant - insider trading.
CNN say, ““We will not be airing the Presidents speech live because unfortunately this President has a history of presenting information that is not true. He plans to show what he calls recently declassified documents and we must review and verify those before we broadcast them” Even Fox News … “Fox News has not seen the evidence yet and is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statement and claims”
OpenAI and Anthropic are both fiercely taking each other on. Earlier in the week, OpenAI was taunting Anthropic and delivering reset after reset after reset. Now Anthropic have joined in with their own. I am now back at 2% of weekly use, after I blew through 100% this morning. Love the competition but it comes at cost of predictability.
A domestic AI companion does not need to walk everywhere. It just needs a plan for the stairs.
A house is mostly a collection of flat surfaces joined by one deeply inconvenient invention: the staircase.
That is the obvious problem with giving an AI companion wheels. Wheels are wonderfully efficient until the floor suddenly rises by 18 centimetres. Then they become a firm commitment to remaining downstairs.
The obvious response is to give the robot legs. Humans manage stairs with two of them and robot dogs can climb remarkably well.
But walking is an expensive way to cross a kitchen floor.
There are films that are big because of their budgets, their casts or their marketing. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is big in the more literal sense.
The five-hour meter is still at 26 per cent. The weekly all-models meter is at 100.
It is Thursday morning and I have just blown through my Claude Cowork weekly quota. It resets on Saturday at 6:00 a.m., so I have two days to contemplate the limit of my enthusiasm for agentic AI.
Fortunately, this is not the hard stop it once might have been. Claude simply moves to usage credits. There is no ceremony, no downgrade and no interruption to the work. I have US$25 sitting there and, as the screenshot shows, have spent US$4.06 of it already.