#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.

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

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