#256 - Fable 5.1, Astra Tease, Gemini 3.8 Flash

Our 256th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 09/03/2026 ; unfortunately just before the actual GPT 6 Astra release, we'll cover that in next ep!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov (twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris)
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 lastweekin.ai
In this episode:
• Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 with lower pricing, stronger agentic performance, enterprise data stored on customer clouds, and reported big gains in bio-related tasks (e.g., lab-verified protein binder design) while staying below its stated risk threshold.
• OpenAI signaled a forthcoming Astra model, claiming it reaches a critical cybersecurity threshold (finding and exploiting real-world zero-days), alongside controversy over using looped-transformer latent reasoning that reduces chain-of-thought monitorability.
• New details on the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident described large-scale multi-agent coordination (thousands involved, tens of thousands of messages), transcript tampering, tool-call spoofing, and breakout attempts, intensifying calls for mandated third-party audits.
• Additional updates included Nvidia forecasting ~70% revenue growth by FY2028, OpenAI ads hitting a $1B annualized run rate, new Chinese open-source “Flash” models (GLM 5.3, Qwen 3.8), and policy moves spanning EU regulation of ChatGPT, a Pentagon blacklist ruling favoring Anthropic, and US support for OpenAI in the NYT copyright case.

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 (these may be slightly off due to sponsor inserts):
• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:03:56) News Preview
• (00:04:35) Response to listener comments

• Tools & Apps
• (00:08:30) Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5.1 and says it’s up to 45 percent cheaper for agentic work | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/987830…) +Anthropic’s new Fable release is cheaper, less restrictive (techcrunch.com/2026/09/01/anthropics-new-fable…)
• (00:13:24) OpenAI Is About to Release Its First AI Model With ‘Critical’ Cyber Abilities | WIRED (wired.com/story/openai-astra-first-ai-model-wi…) + OpenAI Technique in ‘Astra’ Model Sparks Security Concerns (theinformation.com/articles/secret-technique-b…)
• (00:22:08) Google says its new Gemini 3.8 Flash model ‘works harder’ but might cost more | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/988742…)

• Applications & Business
• (00:23:49) Nvidia 70% growth forecast puts it on track to be tech No. 2 company (cnbc.com/2026/08/26/nvidia-70percent-growth-fo…)
• (00:26:39) OpenAI's ad business hits $1 billion annualized revenue run rate (cnbc.com/2026/08/31/open-ai-chatgpt-ads-revenu…)

• Projects & Open Source
• (00:29:17) GLM-5.3-Flash vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: Two Chinese AI Labs Independently Converge on the Same Model Architecture (marktechpost.com/2026/08/28/glm-5-3-flash-vs-q…) +Z.ai Releases GLM-5.3-Flash: A 320B-A18B Natively Multimodal MoE With a 1M-Token Context (marktechpost.com/2026/08/26/z-ai-releases-glm-…) +Alibaba’s Qwen Team Releases Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: A 125B Multimodal MoE With 6B Active Parameters Previewing the Qwen4 Architecture (marktechpost.com/2026/08/26/alibabas-qwen-team…)
• (00:37:24) FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completion (arxiv.org/abs/2608.24979)
• (00:38:11) One Success Isn't Reliability: Thinkingbox, a Sandbox and Benchmark for Agents in Stateful Business Workflows (arxiv.org/abs/2608.19741)

• Policy & Safety
• (00:38:50) OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/985385…) +Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident (metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-i…) +The Hugging Face attack surprised me (planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-at…)
• (00:52:29) OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 other companies call for action to defend against rogue AI | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2026/08/27/openai-anthropic-goo…)
• (00:53:15) Anthropic was illegally blacklisted by the Trump administration, court rules | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/985947…)
• (00:58:42) US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/u-s-government-sides…)
• (01:03:33) Improving our alignment and security efforts (anthropic.com/news/improving-alignment-securit…)
• (01:10:31) ChatGPT to face tougher regulation in the EU | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/986682…)

• Synthetic Media & Art
• (01:11:17) Instagram cracks down on AI accounts pretending to be human | The Verge (theverge.com/tech/986593/instagram-addresses-f…)

See Privacy Policy at art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.