#251 - Mythos Back, Sonnet 5, Etched, LongCat

Our 251st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/01/2026 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 Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/ In this episode: Anthropic redeploys Claude Fable 5 after talks with the US government, adding new cybersecurity classifiers, drafting a jailbreak-severity framework with major partners, and expanding model-testing coordination; broader concerns remain about the inevitability of jailbreaks and uneven release constraints versus OpenAI. Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 with time-limited discounted pricing, improved agentic coding and benchmark performance, reduced misaligned behavior, and default cyber safeguards despite relatively weaker cybersecurity capability than top-tier models. New tools and apps include Google NotebookLM generating TikTok-style vertical video summaries of uploaded research and Google releasing Nano Banana 2 Lite, a faster, cheaper image generator available via API. Business and research updates span Etched’s push toward full-stack inference hardware with major funding and contracts, Baidu’s AI chip unit IPO ambitions, Agility Robotics’ SPAC plan, DeepSeek’s hiring expansion, and China’s open-source Longcat 2.0 MoE model with notable large-scale training and efficiency techniques alongside new long-horizon agent benchmarks. A thank you to our current sponsors: Box - visit box.com/LWIAI to learn more Notion - visit notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today. ODSC AI - visit odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026. Factor - visit factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes): (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:02:07) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:02:32) Trump drops restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models | TechCrunch (00:16:08) Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents | TechCrunch (00:20:35) Google’s NotebookLM can sum up your research in a TikTok-style clip | The Verge (00:22:08) Google introduces a faster, cheaper image generator with Nano Banana 2 Lite | TechCrunch Applications & Business (00:22:50) Etched Pulls 400+ Engineers From NVIDIA, TSMC & More to Build a New Frontier Inference Cluster For AI Which Is Already Worth $1B in Demand (00:31:17) Baidu Rallies on AI Chip IPO Report (00:33:54) Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal | TechCrunch (00:37:06) China's DeepSeek plans to at least double staff in all departments | Reuters Projects & Open Source (00:40:44) Introducing LongCat-2.0 (00:57:42) OSWorld2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks (01:01:33) TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents (01:04:29) SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions Policy & Safety (01:07:38) Taiwan raids Supermicro and two supply-chain partners in widening Nvidia smuggling probe — nine sites hit as six people summoned for questioning | Tom's Hardware Research & Advancements (01:11:53) Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data (01:17:13) Reinforcement Learning without Ground-Truth Solutions can Improve LLMs Synthetic Media & Art (01:22:54) Neon Buys ‘Artificial,’ a Film About OpenAI, After Amazon Dropped It - The New York Times (01:26:32) Tidal won’t pay royalties on AI-generated music, but isn’t banning it outright | The Verge See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .