LWiAI Podcast #248 - Opus 4.8, MAI, Anthropic IPO, Minimax-M3

LWiAI Podcast #248 - Opus 4.8, MAI, Anthropic IPO, Minimax-M3

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LWiAI Podcast #248 - Opus 4.8, MAI, Anthropic IPO, Minimax-M3

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LWiAI Podcast #248 - Opus 4.8, MAI, Anthropic IPO, Minimax-M3

Exploring Claude Fable 5’s impact, Siri AI’s latest enhancements, and the competitive IPO landscape shaping AI’s future

Andrey Kurenkov

Jul 21, 2026

Transcript

Note from Last Week in AI (Andrey): I’m back! And i’m sorry for putting the substack on a silent pause, work got a bit too overwhelming so I fell behind on this. I’ll do my best to resume normal posting, starting with catching up on podcast episodes missing from here (which are not last week… but I guess I should post them still, sorry for the spam!)

I’ve also paused paid subscriptions until I can get back to consistent posting. Apologies for the flakiness, and thanks for being a subscriber!

Our 248th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 06/12/2026

Note: we recorded just before the OTHER big news about Fable... we’ll discuss it on the next episode.

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai

In this episode:

• Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 (a safeguarded version of Mythos 5), showing major benchmark jumps and new risk findings in its system card (eval awareness, transgressive actions, CBRN concerns), alongside controversy over severe guardrails and silent downgrades.

• Apple announced Siri AI at WWDC, positioning a more capable conversational assistant integrated across iPhone features, reportedly built on a custom Gemini partnership; Google also rolled out Gemini 3.5 Live Translate and cut Google AI Plus pricing while bundling more storage.

• Business and infrastructure updates include OpenAI’s confidential IPO filing amid an IPO race with Anthropic and SpaceX, Bezos-backed Prometheus raising $12B for “physical AI,” DeepSeek seeking a major external round, and Google paying SpaceX about $920M/month for GPUs.

• Open-source, safety, and policy developments feature new Gemma 4 and Diffusion Gemma releases, a lab letter urging DNA/RNA screening laws, Amodei calling for an FAA-like AI regulator and third-party testing, research on agent harms and RL “societal hacking,” and a dispute over music-label settlements with Suno/Udio.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:01:11) News Preview

• (00:01:53) Sponsors

• Tools & Apps

• (00:04:53) Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 + Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails

• (00:27:06) Apple announces Siri AI and its next generation of Apple Intelligence | The Verge + I tried Siri AI, and so far it actually works

• (00:33:47) Gemini 3.5 Live Translate rolling out to Google Meet and Translate

• (00:35:39) Google just fired a warning shot in the AI subscription price wars | TechCrunch

• Applications & Business

• (00:37:55) OpenAI Confidentially Files for IPO on the Heels of SpaceX and Anthropic | WIRED

• (00:41:57) Jeff Bezos’s Prometheus raises $12B to build an ‘artificial general engineer’ for the physical world | TechCrunch

• (00:45:39) DeepSeek slated to raise $7 billion in maiden funding round, sources say

• (00:48:18) Huawei-led team claims it post-trained DeepSeek’s 1.6-trillion-parameter model — 1,000 Ascend 910C chips used in training

• (00:51:57) Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute | TechCrunch

• (00:55:51) Elon Musk Shows Off AI Data Centers SpaceX Wants to Send Into Space - Business Insider

• Projects & Open Source

• (01:01:14) Google’s new Gemma 4 12B model is designed to run on any laptop with 16GB of RAM - Ars Technica

• (01:05:13) Google AI Releases DiffusionGemma, a 26B MoE Open Model Using Text Diffusion for Up to 4x Faster Generation - MarkTechPost

• Policy & Safety

• (01:09:42) OpenAI and Anthropic Sign Letter to Prevent AI-Developed Biological Weapons | WIRED

• (01:14:04) Anthropic CEO publishes lengthy article: AI is moving too fast, and policies can’t keep up. | PANews

• (01:20:18) Anthropic Urges Global Pause in AI Development, Flags ‘Self-Improvement’ Risk - WSJ

• (01:24:46) When Benign Inputs Lead to Severe Harms: Eliciting Unsafe Unintended Behaviors of Computer-Use Agents

• (01:27:42) Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society

• (01:33:46) Senior US officials eye government shares in AI giants

• Synthetic Media & Art

• (01:37:45) AFM Sues UMG, WMG Over Settlements With Suno and Udio

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