Three AI stories landed in the last couple of weeks. On the surface they have nothing to do with each other. A new file format from Google. A small model that runs on your laptop. A frontier model getting yanked off the grid by the US government.
Read them together and they're the same story told three ways. The thing you actually depend on, access to a capable model through someone else's API, is the most fragile part of your stack. Two of these launches let you own more of that stack. The third is a reminder of what happens when you don't.
The model you rent can be taken away
Lets start off with the one that should make every engineering leader pause.
Last week Anthropic suspended all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The models had launched three days earlier, on June 9. The trigger was an export control directive from the US government, which arrived as a letter at 5:21 PM ET on June 12 with no technical detail attached.
