AI in the AM — Week 2 Highlights (June 2026)

**Daniel Murfet** (0:00)
We could be in a benevolent basin, but I would like to know that rather than just hope that.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:06)
That's Daniel Murfet, and that one sentence is the week in miniature.
This was Fable launch week. Anthropic's new Frontier model arrived, booked Thursday's show by itself, took over my Twitter account, and settled at least one argument. AI is not slowing down. This is the AI in the AM weekly highlights, the moments from three live mornings this week that I most want the people closest to this technology to have. Quick context, this is still an experiment. We're live most weekday mornings, through June at least. From a studio, Prakash Viedkoded himself, and we published the skills and artifacts behind the show as they mature. If this cut earns your time or wastes it, tell us, the feedback is the product right now. First, the launch as we actually lived it. Wednesday morning, day one of Fable in real workflows, and Prakash came in with a field report you will not find in the model card.
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Thank you to Mercury for supporting The Cognitive Revolution. And now, on with the show.

**Prakash Viedkoded** (2:24)
So, one thing to note about the nerfing. So, what has happened with Fable is we have a lot of rejections. And whenever Fable decides to reject you, it drops from Fable to Opus 4.8. So, there's a natural downgrade. In experiments overnight, I tried to fix, make a number of bug fixes on this very studio app. And what I found was Fable would always consistently drop to Opus 4.8 whenever it was asked to do anything in production. So, touching the production database, touching any of the security keys, touching, you know, asking it to review production directly.
In every case, I've had three or four times it's dropped out. Every time it's dropped out, I've basically restarted the conversation, added back the context that we were using, but excluding the parts about going into production, you know, addressing the production database, and it has continued to work. So, I think there are a number of triggers there.
Online, people are saying, hey, it's not going to do machine learning research for me. I think that's just tip of the iceberg.
You're seeing that because the people who are testing it intensively right now are machine learning researchers. If you were, I think, to test it on finance or your budgeting process, and you told it you're going to be directly addressing my QuickBooks or Salesforce, I think you might see similar results. Fable right now, I would say, is a research release, almost a preview. It is there so that I think they can judge the demand, because they don't have a sense of how intense the demand is going to be, and they're going to judge whether or not it's safe to release, which they've started off with the most constrained version of it, with the least number of functions which are open. And I think over the next few weeks, they will start to take away some of those gates. And as they take away some of those gates, I think we will see both the increase in usage and some decisions on what needs to be relegated and what doesn't. So I think we are in the early stages of exploring what Fable can do.