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Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Well this is nuts: 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. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to…

Simon Willison's Weblog
OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context

OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context

OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context I built the first version of this tool in December 2024 to try out the then-new OpenAI WebRTC API for interacting with their realtime audio models. Last month OpenAI introduced a brand new model to that API called GPT‑Realtime‑2, which they promoted as "our first voice model with GPT‑5‑class reasoning" - with a Sep 30, 2024 knowledge cut-off. I've been waiting for that model to show up in the ChatGPT iPhone app but it still hasn't, so I…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Andrew Singleton

Quoting Andrew Singleton

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. A reporter from Forbes is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes…

Simon Willison's Weblog
This Week in AI: The Next-Gen Recommendation Experience

This Week in AI: The Next-Gen Recommendation Experience

This week Miguel Fierro, a former Microsoft principal researcher who recently founded his own company, RecoMind, joined data and AI evangelist Christina Stathopoulos to talk about the state of recommendation systems. Christina also ran through the latest AI news she’s been watching, from Anthropic’s continued rise to responsible AI, announcements from Google’s I/O 2026 conference, […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive. It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hacking on Datasette Agent today when I noticed a glitch: a horizontal scrollbar that shouldn't be there in the jump menu chat prompt. I snapped this screenshot: Then I started a fresh claude session in my datasette-agent checkout, dragged in the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
datasette 1.0a33

datasette 1.0a33

Release: datasette 1.0a33 This alpha is a significant step on the road to a stable 1.0, finally extending the ?_extra= pattern I introduced in Datasette 1.0a3 to cover queries and rows in addition to tables. That pattern is also now documented! I wrote a whole lot more about the new release on the Datasette project blog: Datasette 1.0a33 with JSON extras in the API. Because API explorer tools are almost free to build now I had Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code (for the plan) and GPT-5.5 xhigh in…

Simon Willison's Weblog
When Context Collapses: Teaching Agents to Detect and Recover from Lost Memory

When Context Collapses: Teaching Agents to Detect and Recover from Lost Memory

This is the eighth article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, part six here, and part seven here. “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”—Bill Gates (allegedly) If you’re building AI agents that do complex, multistep work, you’re going to run into context […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude

Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude

Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude Big scoop for Maxwell Zeff at Wired: “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.” There's been a huge outcry about Anthropic's policy, tucked away in their system card, that Claude Fable/Mythos would identify "requests targeting frontier LLM…

Simon Willison's Weblog
datasette-agent 0.2a0

datasette-agent 0.2a0

Release: datasette-agent 0.2a0 Highlights from the release notes: Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await context.ask_user(...) can ask a yes/no, multiple-choice (options=[...]) or free-text (free_text=True) question. While a question is unanswered the agent turn suspends: the question renders as a form in the chat UI and persists to the internal database, so suspended conversations survive a server…

Simon Willison's Weblog
DiffusionGemma

DiffusionGemma

DiffusionGemma Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further announcements about it. That research has returned in the best possible way: as a new open weight (Apache 2 licensed) Gemma model, google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it. NVIDIA are currently hosting the model for free on their NIM cloud API. I used that API to generate this pelican,…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Jeremy Howard

Quoting Jeremy Howard

Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement: The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI But everyone else should have access to it. By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance. It also has the critical benefit of avoiding a dangerous power imbalance. Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll…

Simon Willison's Weblog
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