Washington as gatekeeper - now with a live example of the model returning. The prior digest covered GPT-5.6's government-gated launch; this week we got the other bookend - Fable 5 came back after 21 days offline, but only with a new commitment that gives the US government a 30-day pre-release look at every future Anthropic model. The kill-switch precedent is now paired with a restoration precedent, and both run through Washington.

The frontier lands cheaper - fast. Sonnet 5 approaches Opus-level capability at mid-tier pricing, and Cognition's Devin Fusion proves multi-model routing can cut agentic-coding costs 35-41% without losing benchmark ground. Google is pushing the commodity floor up from below with sub-cent image generation. The unit economics of running AI are moving faster than the capability headlines.

Inference is the battleground. Etched exits stealth with $800M and $1B in orders for transformer-baked-into-silicon chips; Meta plans to monetize its compute surplus as "Meta Compute." Who controls - and prices - inference may matter as much as who trains the best model.

AI deployments are the new attack surface. An 81M-attempt Azure CLI password spray and threat actors weaponizing misconfigured Ollama/LiteLLM endpoints show enterprise AI sprawl outpacing security hygiene - attackers are now stealing the compute, not just the data.

In this episode