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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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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Twelve months ago the most capable model you could rent was Claude Opus 4, at $15 in and $75 out per million tokens. Today the flagship Opus costs a third of that: $5 in, $25 out. So the price of frontier AI collapsed over the year, right?

Not even slightly. It went up. You just have to know where to look, and who is paying.

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Microsoft’s annual developer conference, Build, kicked off at 3am Melbourne time on Wednesday. I didn’t stay up to watch - but I’ve absorbed the media releases and technical docs, and there’s a genuine shift happening here that’s worth unpacking.

TL;DR for the non-technical: AI assistants are about to get much more capable, but that creates a trust problem - how do you let a smart assistant do things on your computer without giving it the keys to everything? Microsoft just announced that Windows itself will act as the security guard. It will control exactly what an AI assistant can see and touch on your machine, track what it does separately from what you do and run smaller AI models directly on your computer so your data doesn’t have to leave your desk. Think of it as giving your AI assistant its own office with its own keycard, instead of letting it wander freely through yours. The catch: it needs newer, more powerful hardware to work properly, and most of it isn’t shipping yet.

Now, the details.

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The Tifosi are furious, and they are aiming at the wrong target. The Ferrari Luce, Maranello’s first production electric car, was unveiled near Rome on 25 May to a wave of revulsion. “A Nissan Leaf with a prancing horse,” said the internet. Nissan, delighted, leaned in and thanked Ferrari for the compliment. The market was less amused. Ferrari shares fell more than eight per cent in Milan and over five per cent in New York the next morning. For a marque that has sold beauty for almost eighty years, that is a remarkable thing to do with a single reveal.

But the styling is not the story. The styling is a symptom.

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Last time it was the cables lying to you. You binned the mystery leads, bought the certified ones with the speed and watts printed on the side, labelled the survivors. Good. You fixed the drawer.

Now look at the laptop itself, because it is about to play the same trick on you. Two ports, same oval socket, same confident silver moulding. One is fast. One is not. And nothing on the outside tells you which is which.

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Open the drawer where you keep your cables. Go on. Somewhere in that tangle are two USB-C cables that look identical, came in similar boxes and feel the same in your hand. One will charge your laptop at full speed and drive a 4K monitor. The other can barely run a mouse.

The connector tells you nothing. That is the whole problem.

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The work I’ve been doing between Claude Cowork and Excel lately has been considerably more involved than what follows. But this example makes the pattern clear - and it captures exactly why the combination saves so much time and frustration.

I had a list of 20 ASX stocks in an Excel file. Two columns: ticker code and company name. I wanted two more: market cap and 12-month return, pulled from most recent data.

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Benedict Evans just dropped the Spring 2026 edition of his annual AI presentation and it is, as usual, the clearest thinking on the subject you’ll find in a single sitting. The deck is 79 slides. It is not a TED talk. It does not tell you AI will save humanity or that the robots are coming for your job by Thursday. What it does is something rarer: it maps what we actually know, what we can reasonably infer and where the honest answer is still “we don’t know yet.

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