Inside Claude Opus 5, Open-Source AI Regulation, Google’s Chip Financing Strategy

**Akash Pasricha** (0:13)
Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Monday, July 27th. We have got a big week of quarterly results ahead. Wednesday, we've got Microsoft, Meta, Robinhood.
Thursday is Apple, Amazon, Coinbase, and Reddit. And tomorrow, we have PayPal, which should be interesting to see in light of reports that there has been acquisition interest for that company. We'll be covering all of those results this week, so stay tuned to our shows. Today on the show, we are unpacking initial reviews on Anthropic's Opus 5 model. We're bringing on the head of AI at Clay to talk about that. We're then going to speak with a former top White House official about her view on the debates that Kimi K-3 has sparked around AI policy. We've also got some new reporting on how Google is taking a page out of Wall Street's ambitious approach to debt as it seeks to finance its AI build out. We're going to close out the show with a conversation with our partner, PwC, for a broader look on where Fortune 500 businesses stand on open source AI and how they're using it. It's going to be busy shows and a busy week, so let's get right on into it.
Anthropic on Friday released its latest Opus 5 model, which means developers were very busy over the weekend seeing what the new model is made of. I want to bring on Jeff Barg, the Head of AI at AI Sales Engineering Company, Clay, for his thoughts on all this. Jeff, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

**Jeff Barg** (1:41)
Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:44)
Busy weekend, were you playing around with the new model?

**Jeff Barg** (1:47)
Yes. Busy weekend, I think we spent a lot of time both evaling the model for our internal use cases, how our customers will use it, and as well just trying to use it as a personal coding agent. So it was a busy weekend.

**Akash Pasricha** (2:01)
So what's the review?

**Jeff Barg** (2:04)
Yeah, the headline is, it's really good. I think it's always interesting to see what happens with an Anthropic launch because sometimes you see some benchmarks and then they don't replicate in either vibes or in actual eval results from our internal evals. I think here, the internal benchmarks that we had pretty much matched what Anthropic said publicly, which is really close to Fable's performance at a fraction of the cost.
I think Anthropic said about half the cost of Fable, we were seeing even more than that. So maybe a third or even less of the cost of Fable and really close to the performance across some of our hardest evals.

**Akash Pasricha** (2:45)
What about GPT 5.6?

**Jeff Barg** (2:48)
Yeah, I think it's a really hard, they're playing a really hard space because actually 5.6 comes in just around the same as both Fable and Opus 5
And it's even cheaper than both of them. So I think Anthropic is really planning in this hard middle ground where they have the frontier, Fable seems to be really doing well at frontier performance and writing, in quality of code, etc. But in this kind of tier two where you have, I don't know, just the daily workhorse model, it's not really a tier two but you're kind of daily model for doing things. I think Anthropic faces some pretty steep competition from what they had.

**Akash Pasricha** (3:28)
Interesting. So that's the benchmarks and the evals.
What about the vibes? I mean, this is kind of an interesting soft metric, I guess. And I think when it first came out on Friday, it seemed like some people weren't too bullish on the vibes here. Unpack that for why do you think that was the case?

**Jeff Barg** (3:49)
Yeah, it's been interesting. I think every Opus launch has had this kind of reception on arrival. I'm thinking back to the Opus 47 launch where I think it was maybe based off of a new pre-train. A lot of our internal users at Clay really didn't like Opus 47 and that's when actually a lot of things started moving over to Codex and the GPT series models. I think with Opus 5, the vibes are good, but I think most users internal to Clay will continue to use Fable. I think the vibes on Fable are just so immaculate and just effervescent.
There's something to the quality of the writing and the intangibles that are really hard to replicate, I think.

**Akash Pasricha** (4:35)
You're saying that even acknowledging the tremendous cost of Fable, you think people are still going to be using that?