Last Week in AI #251 - Mythos Back, Sonnet 5, Etched, LongCat

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Last Week in AI #251 - Mythos Back, Sonnet 5, Etched, LongCat

Trump lifts restrictions on Anthropic, Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, Google's NotebookLM updates, chips stories from Etched and Baidu, and more!

Last Week in AI

Jul 21, 2026

Note from Last Week in AI (Andrey): I’m back! And i’m sorry for putting the substack on a silent pause, work got a bit too overwhelming so I fell behind on this. I’ll do my best to resume normal posting, starting with catching up on podcast episodes missing from here (which are not last week… but I guess I should post them still, sorry for the spam!)

I’ve also paused paid subscriptions until I can get back to consistent posting. Apologies for the flakiness, and thanks for being a subscriber!

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

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):