You have seen the move a thousand times. Someone lays out clear, well-researched evidence and the reply comes back: “that’s just your opinion.” Vaccine safety, climate data, the economics of a trade decision - the subject barely matters. The move puts a measured finding and a gut feeling on the same shelf, equally weighted, free to be picked up or put down depending on which one feels better that morning.

It looks like a debating trick. It is actually a worldview. And Brexit is the cleanest proof we have of what that worldview costs, because unlike most arguments about science and reason, this one came with a bill you can add up.

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I just tasked Claude Opus 4.8 to extend a chart, first drawn by Axios, to show the comparative performance of US presidents in their term up to the equivalent of the end of May in their second year, as we have just passed that point for Trump II. The longer I looked at it the more it bothered me.

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Anthropic launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 last week. By the weekend, the US government had ordered both suspended for every foreign national on earth.

No advance notice. No specific public explanation. Just a directive citing national security, and Anthropic - with no practical choice - complied. Access to other Claude models remained unaffected. The concern, widely reported, centres on Mythos 5’s ability to detect software vulnerabilities. In the right hands it’s a security tool. In the wrong hands it becomes a cyberweapon. The US government has apparently decided it cannot control whose hands are whose.

This is what AI geopolitics looks like up close.

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Moments ago Anthropic wrote: Update June 12: We’ve suspended access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. Please Use Opus 4.8 or another model. **Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 ** The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

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Update 13 June: Access to Fable 5 blocked for non-US citizens by order of US Government. See Anthropic announcement https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

Anthropic’s Fable 5 is out, and I’m experiencing a mild anxiety I didn’t expect: I don’t have a killer app idea to throw at it.

It’s a civilian version of their previously announced Project Glass Wing - reserved for select organisations because of its potential for misuse in cyberwarfare and mass-scale hacking. Mythos ships with guardrails that prevent the most dangerous applications. One of those, naturally, is using it to train competing models.

They’ve made it free to subscribers through 22 June and reset quotas to give people more room to play. After that, anyone wanting to use Fable will need to pay for it based on API-like billing. Basically pay as you use, as opposed to drawing on your Anthropic subscription.

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Quoting Andrew Singleton who neatly sums up some of the current madness around AI valuations including the incestuous cross-investment that further muddies the picture. “Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business.

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Two years ago Apple demonstrated the new Siri. But that was just it - a demo. They didn’t show anything live. They didn’t let the media try it for themselves. It was a stitched together demoware concept. Fast forward to now and Apple have put a beta of Siri AI in developers hands. It works. According to accounts it works really well delivering on the promise Apple made in 2024 and more.

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Tempted as I am I will not, must not, dabble with beta software.

Perhaps I need this etched on my mouse to remind me?

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At WWDC 2026 this week, someone asked Siri to go through a folder of contractor quotes as PDFs, compare them, pick the best option and draft a reply email. Siri did it. Live, on stage, in front of an audience.

That’s not a kitchen timer. That’s not “Hey Siri, what’s the weather.” That’s the kind of task you’d currently hand to Claude or ChatGPT with careful prompting and a bit of luck. Apple just demonstrated it happening through a voice assistant most of us had written off.

It is worth understanding how they got there - because the architecture behind it is genuinely interesting, and a lot of it comes down to a clever solution to a very unglamorous problem: memory.

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Apple didn’t announce anything revolutionary at WWDC. For a company of this maturity, that’s not a criticism - it’s a read of the room.

The focus was platform optimisation and extension: making what already exists faster, smarter and less visually exhausting. Yes, they’ve walked back some of the Liquid Glass overload. Good.

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