The Mythos Fable-5 Let Down 2026
China is massively increasing Capex for datacenters. Twitter is angry at Anthropic. Closed vs. Open model debate rages on. Quotes and reactions. š SpaceX IPO analysis in infographics.
We donāt really know what AI could becomeā¦
Good Morning,
The two biggest events this week are likely the reaction to Fable and the SpaceX IPO.
Iāve been struggling a little trying to think about whatās really new that was announced at Google I/O, Microsoft Build Conference and Appleās own more recent developer conference of WWDC 2026. There was a tangible sense of how empty many of their tech announcements were, especially with regards to AI.
I canāt even put my finger on why this is, maybe itās the AI overload of the news cycle, the exaggerated hype or how lacking in meaningful products and application layer innovations weāve even seen after three years of LLMs (so many models) and more datacenters. I canāt help put have the feeling that I was expecting more in the 2020s that we are likely to see from Generative AI.
Hopefully next year in 2027 with a deluge of AI devices this will feel different. Will a Codex version of ChatGPT feel different? Apparently, a senior OpenAI executive went so far as to say that āchat is dead,ā shifting its focus toward a platform centered on agents and coding tools. It just goes to show how ChatGPTās success story is fading so badly. But how would OpenAI ever compete with Cursor or Anthropic at this point for Enterprises and companies where trust is a major factor. OpenAI might have to try to lower prices, but they are already burning so much capital. Cursor who now have $4 Bn. in ARR and are accelerating even faster.
There certainly will be winners and losers to paraphrase Sam Altman. His eye-scanning startup isnāt fairing any better.
Will BigAI Disrupt Incumbents by 2030?
Will the hyperscaler names be re-written by AI too? š¤ I had written about this back in June, 2025:
The verdict on how BigTech (incumbents) react to BigAI is still unclear? Outside of Google, it doesnāt look so good for the others. Their capex to AI execution is looking rather poor in more than one case.
Letās first see how the 2026 IPOs pan out but Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and other incumbents donāt feel like they are active participants at the frontier of Generative AI. Appleās lineup of AI devices looks fairly impressive however for 2027 and 2028.
Chinaās Massive AI Compute Announcement
With news that DeepSeek is getting $7 Billion in funding a week ago along with massive Capex increases from ByteDance and Alibaba for compute - China is going all in. China is preparing to spend around 2 trillion yuan ($295.43 billion) over the next five years on building data centers āacross the country, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, as āBeijing looks to challenge the U.S. in the intensifying AI race.
So instead of relying purely on private tech giants like Alibaba, ByteDance or Tencent to build isolated clouds, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is spearheading a blueprint to knit the country's scattered computing facilities into a unified national network by 2028. If China feels they have to do this too, itās going to be a brave new world. Curiously how Beijing is boosting Huawei isnāt so different how the Trump Administration has been supporting Nvidia with circular financing of the entire ecosystem in a spider-web of deals. But what exactly are we building for civilization in the big picture.
We Donāt really know what we are getting ourselves intoā¦
Claude Skills Guides
KDNuggets (not an affiliate) has an interesting Anthropicās Complete Guide to Claude Skills Building.
The Claude (Content) skills I use to run Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar
How to use Claude AI for Investing (the first post in our series on AI in Investing got a lot of bookmark saves on X).
Reactions to the Frontier Model of Anthropic
Reactions on X to the Fable 5 release were conflicted and fairly heated: š„ Also baffling to me considering the pressure Anthropic is under both from a legal, compute constraint and pre-IPO perspective.
Fable 5 is Controversial
I wanted to gather some quotes to give you a live-sentiment sort of reaction to the announcement and nature of Claude Fable 5.
Quotes:
āThere is a lot of justified anger at Anthropic for sandbagging Fable 5 for AI development tasks. But an unanticipated side effect is that third-party evaluators can no longer credibly use the model for evaluations.ā - Sayash Kapoor
āIn experiment after experiment I conducted, it outperformed basically every other public model I have used by a considerable margin. It was capable across many problems and produced some startling results ā it would work up to a dozen hours executing on multi-page specifications.ā - Ethan Mollick
āAnthropic designing Mythos/Fable to prevent frontier AI research is the most disappointing part of their release. Hope it doesn't set a precedent (I don't think it will).ā - Ben Dickson
āClaude Fable 5 is by far the most ridiculous model that makes me genuinely afraid for the future of software engineering.ā - Deedy Das (Menlo Ventures who are investors in Anthropic).
āClaude Fable 5 just changed the AI game. People are one-shotting games, 3D worlds, app builders and insane code optimizations. There's a major shift.ā - Min Choi
āWhen Fable 5 is used for frontier LLM development, it does not notify the user and instead limits the modelās capabilities through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, and PEFT.ā - User @Hangsiin - this is thought to be the account of Seungwoo Jeong.
āMythos / Fable is unbelievable. Was on a customer call today and had Claude transcribing in the background. As they were telling me about the features they wish their current software had, Claude was building the features in real time.ā - Todd Saunders
āClaude Fable 5 is likely very capable inherently on healthcare. That's great! Too bad it's near impossible to tap into those capabilities due to their extremely sensitive safety filters. I hope this is adjusted going forward.ā - Tanishq Mathew Abraham
Things I really dislike about Fable:
1. Anthropic collects my prompt history, stores it, and does whatever they want with it for 30 days. No opt-out
2. They can nerf their most expensive model without telling me, billing me the same amount, wasting my time. Whenever they want. - Gergely Orosz
āThe fury is real and what all of us in the open community have been saying for years and yet regular folks don't get it yet because nothing they care about is restricted or taken away for "safety."
They will care a LOT in the future when AI is integrated into every aspect of our lives. When it's our interface to the world and knows every intimate detail about us.ā - Daniel Jeffries
āLabs starting to pull up the ladders on the ability to diffuse AI was inevitable. Doing it without telling the user is misaligned.ā - Nathan Lambert
āDegrading performance on ML research *without telling the user* is shockingly hostile and a terrible look. That could silently damage all sorts of work, including some of my own. Also the type of thing that could raise the eyebrows of antitrust enforcers worldwide.ā - Dean W. Ball
āFable is the best model I have used for coding, by a wide margin. It is a big step up, enabling less prompts and steers, more efficient token use, better code quality, better tool use, more intelligent self-verification, longer running sessions, and higher trust & autonomy.ā - Boris Cherny
āAnthropic wants to control who gets access to their models and what they're allowed to do with them, but also wants the US government to block Chinese labs from developing open weight models. Sorry, but ***[no] (edited for profanity). - Zach Korman
āThe scary part about Anthropic's Fable nerf is not that it refuses to answer biology or cryptography. It's that it foreshadows what's coming. A world where a couple companies decide what you can and cannot do. They're building a new ruling class and you're not in it...ā - PĆ©ter SzilĆ”gyi
My SpaceX IPO analysis at the end. The intersection of leadership, AI policy, Government and risk-management is not looking good in 2026. Americaās commitment to closed-model AI Supremacy is not looking benevolent either.
