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Good morning, it is Thursday, June 11, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
Anthropic had a rough one. They launched Claude's new Fable 5 model and researchers immediately found hidden guardrails quietly blocking it from being used to build competing LLMs. The backlash was fast and brutal — Hinton, Dean Ball, others all piling on. Anthropic reversed by end of day, called it the wrong tradeoff. The problem isn't just the decision. It's that Dario published an essay the same day calling for FAA-style mandatory testing of frontier models. Hard to sell that posture when your own launch involved secret restrictions and a same-day walk-back.
On the capital side, things are moving at a genuinely different scale now. SpaceX's IPO is three times oversubscribed at over two hundred fifty billion in demand. OpenAI is telling staff to expect a public offering within the year. Oracle posted strong numbers but dropped ten percent after hours on a forty billion raise. The infrastructure buildout is not slowing down.
And the token price war is coming. OpenAI is reportedly considering serious cuts ahead of a pricing battle with Anthropic. The race to the bottom on model costs is accelerating faster than anyone wants to admit publicly.
More tomorrow.