Fable 5.1 kicks off launch week at the frontier
PLUS: How to pick a dedicated AI device
Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to our 3,338 new readers who joined yesterday. The theme of the last month has been safety over shipping when it comes to models from the two AI leaders. The calendar turning to September appears to have flipped a switch.
Anthropic kicked off the next wave of launches with Fable 5.1, and OpenAI's Astra isn't far behind — meaning the summer of caution is about to get its first stress test.
Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 1 PM EST. Join and learn how to leverage AI as a manager to get more value out of your 1:1 meetings with employees and improve your team’s performance. RSVP here.
In today’s AI rundown:
Fable 5.1 ends the frontier's quiet period
Bernie Sanders escalates AI pause conversation
How to pick a dedicated AI device
Apple, OpenAI trade blame in legal battle
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
ANTHROPIC
Image source: Anthropic
The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude Fable 5.1, a successor to Fable 5 that the company says fixes customer complaints, with the new top-ranked model showing big jumps on long coding jobs, research, and more — and fewer safety rejections.
The details:
5.1 tops AA's Intelligence Index with a record 66, more than doubling Fable 5 on scientific research tests and also surging ahead on knowledge work.
Anthropic put the savings at “an estimated 25% less” on typical work, but AA found a max-effort task costs 20% more, since 5.1 writes roughly 1.7x the text.
The safety filter, a source of backlash on Fable 5, now steps in 60% less on cybersecurity work and 85% less on basic medical and biology questions.
Anthropic also released Mythos 5.1, the same model with fewer guardrails, though only screened U.S. cybersecurity and biology researchers get access.
Why it matters: It’s been a quiet period of releases from the two AI leaders after security took the spotlight, but Anthropic is the first out of the gate with an upgrade that hits at some of the major issues users had with Fable 5. It also doesn’t sound like we’ll have to wait long for a response, with OAI’s Astra release looking set to come this week.
TOGETHER WITH MERCURY
The Rundown: 40% of companies heavily using AI say inflation helped their business this year. Only 12% of non-adopters agree. This divide between AI and non-AI users was a common thread in Mercury's latest survey.
In the report:
The 31-point confidence gap between heavy AI adopters and everyone else
What startups spend on AI monthly
Where junior hiring landed at AI-forward companies
AI SAFETY
Image source: Fox News
The Rundown: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders just published a new op-ed in Fox News calling for AI labs worldwide to stop work on more powerful AI models, arguing that even the CEOs building the tech admit it is “escaping their control.”
The details:
Sanders’ risks include power bills, environmental harm, and kids’ mental health, including a prediction that AI erases jobs in the ‘tens of millions’ in the next decade.
He points to the many security incidents from the past month, including OAI’s hack that saw over 1,000 agents coordinating online unnoticed for weeks.
Sanders calls for an international global pause, pushing for the U.S. and China to strike a “Cold War” style AI deal at their meeting in Washington later this month.
Why it matters: Sanders has never been shy about his fears (he even aired them to Claude's voice mode a few months back), but this time he's writing them to a Fox News audience that disagrees with him on almost everything except AI. What the op-ed skips is how a pause this sweeping could actually work in practice.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn which hardware devices are good for AI tinkering and which one is right for you. We cover what each option is good for and which one we’d recommend for most people.
Step-by-step:
Decide time commitment. Do you want an afternoon project, a weekend one, or something longer?
Then decide budget. Do you want to spend under $50, $300, or $500+? Price the whole setup, including storage, power, cooling, a case, and cables
Consider the use case. Do you want to run local AI, use AI to tinker, or leave OpenClaw or Hermes Agent running on a dedicated device?
Match your answers:
Go with an ESP32 for an afternoon project, a budget under $50, and one focused gadget
Go with a Raspberry Pi for a weekend project, a budget under $300, or an always-on OpenClaw or Hermes Agent
Go with a Mac (MacBook Neo or Mac mini) if you can spend $500+, want serious local AI, or need a machine separate from your main one
Pro tip: Whatever you buy, copy the product link into ChatGPT and tell it what you want to build. Ask it to help with setup, code, and troubleshooting.
PRESENTED BY SCRIBE
The Rundown: For most enterprises, business-critical processes are uncharted. Scribe Optimize maps how work actually happens across your org — so your AI strategy is built on reality, not assumptions.
With Scribe Optimize, you can:
Map real workflows — no surveys or consultants
Surface inefficiencies leadership can't currently see
Build your AI strategy on ground truth, not gut feel
APPLE & OPENAI
Image source: Court Listener
The Rundown: Apple filed new evidence in its OpenAI lawsuit, claiming a former iPhone engineer used stolen Apple designs in his OAI work and tried to wipe the evidence — with OAI calling the whole case a “mess of Apple’s making.”
The details:
Engineer Chang Liu’s lawyers handed over his Apple-issued MacBook this month following “weeks of delay”, with a Mac Mini still waiting to be examined.
Apple accuses Liu of using a confidential power-converter circuit in his work at OAI, which he downloaded via cloud storage after departing the company.
Apple said June texts between Liu and OAI coworker Yu-Ting Ping showed a plot to “restore” and erase key data, coming after the legal probe had already begun.
OAI blames Apple’s exit process, saying the staff works from personal iCloud accounts and gets walked out too fast upon leaving to hand anything back.
Why it matters: The July complaint had Liu texting that his leftover Apple access was “so funny,” and Apple now says the laptop shows the files were put to use. But with the first AI device from ex-Apple design lead Jony Ive on the way, we’ll see if the legal clock moves fast enough for Apple to get the result it wants — a hardware setback for OpenAI.
QUICK HITS
COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY
Today’s workflow comes from reader Anonymous:
“My doctor asked me to track my blood pressure for a month because it was on the high side before prescribing any medication. I initially recorded each reading manually in an Excel sheet, but after a few days, I wanted a simpler way to enter and manage the data.
I uploaded the sheet to Claude Code and asked it to build a blood pressure tracking app. After the app was built, I hosted it on Netlify, used Supabase as the backend to save data for both my wife and me, and added it to my iPhone Home Screen.”
See the full workflow Visit The Rundown University. How do you use AI? Tell us for a chance to be featured.
🚀 Claude Fable 5.1 - Anthropic’s new top-ranked model upgrade
👂 Muse Voice Transcribe - Meta’s live speech-to-text AI, tracks 20+ speakers
👁️ Gemini - Google’s AI, now with efficient agentic video understanding
🎨 Google Pics - Google's Nano Banana image editor built into Docs and Slides
The Amazon Developer Global Hackathon: Win up to $40k building apps across Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, and Bee wearable AI. Register now and explore multiple categories and mini challenges for your projects.*
OpenAI restarted the training run for future Astra versions that it froze after the Hugging Face breach, rating Astra as its first “Critical” cyber risk, with a limited release “soon.”
Meta released Muse Voice Transcribe, its first real-time voice model that turns live audio into text while telling 20+ speakers apart, topping Artificial Analysis' leaderboard.
Fei-Fei Li's World Labs introduced Atlas in early access, a new world model that turns a few phone photos into a full 3D scene or a minute of video with camera control.
Dyson rolled out CameraJet, a $499 electric toothbrush that uses an AI camera to find gaps between your teeth, automatically trigger a jet spray, and improve brushing.
*Sponsored Listing
Read our last AI newsletter: Runway previews the no-code internet
Read our last Tech newsletter: Dyson puts AI in a $499 toothbrush
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Hugging Face’s robot duck is a hit
Today’s AI tool guide: How to pick a dedicated AI device
RSVP to next workshop @1 PM EST today: AI for managing employees
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See you soon,
Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — the humans behind The Rundown
