Fable Ban Reversed + Dr. Dana Suskind on Parenting With A.I. + Prediction Market Drama

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
There's no playbook for modern work. But on the podcast Work Life, company builder Molly Graham talks with operators and leaders from the most well-known companies like Facebook and Instacart about how they make decisions, redefine success, and navigate change as tech's impact on work continues to grow. From leadership to AI to the uncertainty of it all, tune in for convos that go deeper than your typical work advice. Find Work Life, a podcast from Ted, wherever you get your podcast.

**Kevin Roose** (0:31)
So Casey, we are back in the office after a vacation, and I was going through my mail this morning, which is usually just junk and books that people send me.

**Casey Newton** (0:40)
Letters from prisoners.

**Kevin Roose** (0:41)
Letters from prisoners. But today, I got a letter that was neither a book nor from a prisoner.
It came from a seventh grader who wrote to us. He said, Dear Casey and Kevin, I am Nathan Herrick, and I'm a seventh grader at St. Peter's School in Cambridge. He says some very nice things about the show. Well, let's hear it in full. Okay. He says, I wanted to inform you how helpful your podcast is for me. Before listening to your podcast, I always felt behind in tech. All my friends were talking about things in tech that I didn't understand. It made me feel isolated and alone from them. But your podcast helped me rejoin my friend group with more confidence about technology.
He said, thank you for creating Hard Fork or as my sister calls it, Hard Dork.

**Casey Newton** (1:27)
Brutal. By the way, that is such a sister comment.

**Kevin Roose** (1:30)
It is. Nathan, don't listen to your sister.

**Casey Newton** (1:33)
Do not listen to her.

**Kevin Roose** (1:34)
But do listen to Hard Fork.

**Casey Newton** (1:35)
Absolutely.

**Kevin Roose** (1:36)
We're so glad to have you. I'll just say it, if you're a seventh grader and you're writing paper, letters and sending them in the mail to podcasts, you're going to make it in life.

**Casey Newton** (1:46)
The idea that you're so far behind in tech news that it was harming your relationship with other 12-year-olds.

**Kevin Roose** (1:53)
What are they talking about?

**Casey Newton** (1:55)
Who are these nuclear physicists he's hanging out with on the playground?

**Kevin Roose** (1:59)
They're running agentic loops. Yes.

**Casey Newton** (2:01)
Exactly.

**Kevin Roose** (2:02)
Doing their social studies homework.

**Casey Newton** (2:04)
Seventh grader with a Claude swarm is a terrifying thing to consider.

**Kevin Roose** (2:14)
I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

**Casey Newton** (2:16)
I'm Casey Newton from Platformers.

**Kevin Roose** (2:18)
This is Hard Fork.

**Casey Newton** (2:19)
This week, the Trump administration lifts its restrictions on Anthropics most powerful models. What have we learned about how the government wants to regulate AI? Then, pediatric surgeon Dana Suskind stops by to discuss her new book on parenting in the age of AI.
Finally, it's our new segment about prediction markets against all odds. The odds that you'll like it, they're pretty high.

**Kevin Roose** (2:50)
Well, we've had some big news out of Washington in the past few weeks. We are in the middle of something truly insane and unprecedented that is happening between the Frontier AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, and the federal government, which has decided all of a sudden, with basically no rhyme or reason, that it wants to start picking and choosing which customers are allowed to use the Frontier models.

**Casey Newton** (3:15)
Yeah, when this happened, many listeners reached out to us and asked us if we would consider doing an emergency episode. And I'm happy to say that the emergency lasted so long that we were able to get to this now on our regular schedule.

**Kevin Roose** (3:28)
Yeah, it's sort of a rolling emergency. It's sort of like a permanent crisis, if you will.

**Casey Newton** (3:33)
Exactly.

**Kevin Roose** (3:34)
So before we get into Fable, since it does involve AI, we should make our disclosures. I work for the New York Times. We're just doing OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity.

**Casey Newton** (3:43)
And my boy... Oh. Oh!
Downgrade. And my fiancé works for Anthropic.

**Kevin Roose** (3:50)
Let's just explain what's been happening, and then we can talk a little bit about what we think about it. So the first sort of salvo in this dispute was on June 12th, which was the day that we officially left for our break. Very good timing by the US government.
When the Commerce Department issued an Export Control Directive, shutting down access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the most powerful versions of Anthropics models. Fable in particular had just been released a couple of days earlier. And basically, the government said, no one is allowed to use this if you're a foreign national, including an employee of Anthropic inside or outside the US.,