Show Notes
Anthropic shipped Claude Fable and Mythos 5.1 with a 75% cache-price cut, Google countered with Gemini 3.8 Flash, OpenAI teased Astra's public release, a judge spared Google's ad exchange from a sale, and the FBI probed a 153M-license leak.
Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5.1, which is generally available, and Mythos 5.1, for trusted partners and with cybersecurity and life sciences safeguards (Anthropic)
Fable 5.1 cuts cache-read pricing 75% to $0.25/1M tokens, lowering effective costs ~25% for typical workloads and up to ~45% for agentic ones, and debuts Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (VentureBeat)
Google launches Gemini 3.8 Flash, three weeks after 3.7 Flash launch, for an introductory price of $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens until December 31 (9to5Google)
OpenAI says it plans to publicly release a version of Astra "soon", but will give access to "its most advanced cyber capabilities" only to testers and partners (Wired)
Sources: Astra's "recurrent depth" technique obscures chain-of-thought reasoning, sparking concerns inside OpenAI and across the industry, though OpenAI limited its use so Astra's thinking stays legible and monitorable (The Information)
A US federal judge rules that Google does not have to sell off its ad exchange and instead must make its ad tech tools work with those operated by rivals (Bloomberg)
The FBI is investigating Nexus, a new ID theft service on the dark web claiming to sell digital scans of 153M+ drivers licenses from people in the US and Canada (Krebs on Security)
The leaked licenses, including SecDef Pete Hegseth's, trace back to ID-verification provider IDScan, used by Hertz and Planet13; the FBI's New Orleans office has opened an investigation (Tom's Hardware)
Acer unveils the Swift Blade 14, an ultralight laptop weighing 1.76lbs with Intel Wildcat Lake processors, and the Swift Air 16, set to launch in December (The Verge)
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