#251 - Mythos Back, Sonnet 5, Etched, LongCat

Anthropic带着新模型回来了！这次Claude Sonnet 5主打“更便宜的AI代理”，让开发者花更少的钱就能让AI自动写代码、完成任务，还特别加强了安全防线。与此同时，Google的NotebookLM学会了把研究报告变成抖音风格的短视频，而中国团队开源的Longcat 2.0大模型则用更高效的方式训练出超长上下文能力，整个行业都在拼性价比和安全。通俗来说，这期新闻其实就讲了几个关键变化：Anthropic的Sonnet 5降价了，但性能没缩水，反而在代理任务（比如自动操作软件、写复杂代码）上更聪明，而且默认加了安全盾牌，防止被恶意诱导。Google的新工具让普通人也能一键把枯燥的论文转成有吸引力的短视频，科研传播变得像刷短视频一样简单。中国那边，Longcat 2.0作为开源模型，用上了大规模训练和效率技巧，给开发者提供了更强大的“免费大脑”。对普通人来说，最直接的影响是：你用的AI助手可能会更便宜、更安全，比如以后用Claude做合同分析、自动写报告，成本可能直接腰斩。做研究、学习时，Google的短视频摘要能帮你10秒抓住论文核心，再也不用啃长篇原文了。而开源模型越来越强，意味着更多免费或低价的AI工具会出现，普通人也能用上原本企业才用得起的高端AI能力。整体看，AI正从“炫技”走向“实用”，价格和安全成了厂商比拼的新战场。

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 07/01/2026Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie HarrisFeel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.aiIn 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):(00:00:10) Intro / Banter(00:02:07) News PreviewTools & Apps(00:02:32) Trump drops restrictions on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models | TechCrunch(00:16:08) Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents | TechCrunch(00:20:35) Google’s NotebookLM can sum up your research in a TikTok-style clip | The Verge(00:22:08) Google introduces a faster, cheaper image generator with Nano Banana 2 Lite | TechCrunchApplications & Business(00:22:50) Etched Pulls 400+ Engineers From NVIDIA, TSMC & More to Build a New Frontier Inference Cluster For AI Which Is Already Worth $1B in Demand(00:31:17) Baidu Rallies on AI Chip IPO Report(00:33:54) Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal | TechCrunch(00:37:06) China’s DeepSeek plans to at least double staff in all departments | ReutersProjects & Open Source(00:40:44) Introducing LongCat-2.0(00:57:42) OSWorld2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks(01:01:33) TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents(01:04:29) SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User SessionsPolicy & Safety(01:07:38) Taiwan raids Supermicro and two supply-chain partners in widening Nvidia smuggling probe — nine sites hit as six people summoned for questioning | Tom’s HardwareResearch & Advancements(01:11:53) Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data(01:17:13) Reinforcement Learning without Ground-Truth Solutions can Improve LLMsSynthetic Media & Art(01:22:54) Neon Buys ‘Artificial,’ a Film About OpenAI, After Amazon Dropped It - The New York Times(01:26:32) Tidal won’t pay royalties on AI-generated music, but isn’t banning it outright | The Verge