AI in the AM — Week 2 Highlights (June 2026)
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What happened during the Fable launch week and why does it matter?
We could be in a benevolent basin, but I would like to know that
rather than just hope that. That's Daniel Murphy, and that one sentence is the week in miniature. This was Fable Launch Week. Anthropic's new frontier model arrived, booked Thursday's show by itself, took over my Twitter account, and settled at least one argument. AI is not slowing down. This is the AI in the AM weekly highlights, the moments from three live mornings this week that I most want the people closest to this technology to have. Quick context this is still an experiment. We're live most weekday mornings, through June at least, from a studio Prakash videcoded himself, and we publish the skills and artifacts behind the show as they mature. If this cut earns your time or wastes it, tell us. The feedback is the product right now.
First, the launch as we actually lived it. Wednesday morning, day one of Fable in real workflows, and Prakash came in with a field report you will not find in the model card. The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by Mercury, the fintech that more than 300,000 ambitious companies and individuals trust to run their finances. Over the last few months, I have made tremendous strides with my personal AI infrastructure. Today, I've got high-context instances of both Claude Code and OpenClaw running on a Mac Mini, and it's amazing what they can do. However, until getting started with Mercury, I didn't have a great way for them to pay for things. I didn't want to give them unrestricted access to my money, but my old bank didn't give me any other options.
With Mercury, I can create as many virtual cards as I want, each with its own daily, weekly, or monthly spending limit. And I can lock any card to a single category of purchase or even a single merchant. Now I have a card that my agent can use to buy our family's groceries, and only our groceries, and I can create another anytime I want to give an agent a random one-off project that might require making a purchase. This is honestly just the start of Mercury's AI friendly offerings. Does your bank offer API keys, an MCP, or a CLI tool? If not, check out Mercury at Mercury.com. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA members, FDIC,
Thank you to Mercury for supporting the cognitive revolution. And now? On with the show.
So one thing to note about the nerfing. So what what has happened with m um Fable? Is We have a lot of rejections. Um and whenever Fable decides to reject you, it drops from uh Fable uh to Opus four point eight. So there's a natural, natural downgrade. In experiments overnight. I tried to uh fix uh make a number of bug fixes on this on this very studio app. And what I found was Fable would always consistently drop to Opus four point eight. whenever it was asked to do anything in production. So touching the production database, touching the um touching any of the security keys, touching um you know, asking it to review production directly. In every case I've had three or four times it's dropped out. Every time it's dropped out, I've basically restarted the conversation.
added back the context that we were using, but excluding the parts about going into production or you know addressing the production database. And it has continued work. So I think there are a number of triggers there. Online, people are saying, hey, it's not gonna do machine learning research for me. I think that's just tip of the iceberg. Uh you're seeing that because the people who are testing it intensively right now are machine learning researchers. Uh if you were, I think, to test it on uh finance or your budgeting process and you told it you're going to be directly addressing my QuickBooks or or Salesforce, I think you would might see similar results. Fable right now, I would say is a research release, almost a preview.
It is There so that I think they can judge the demand because they don't have a sense of how intense the demand is going to be. And they're gonna judge whether or not it's safe to release, which are the they've started off with the most constrained version of it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What happened during the Fable launch week and why does it matter?
0:00–12:42
2
How are safety gates and API refusals shaping the use of Fable?
12:42–26:28
3
Why do Geoffrey Irving and Daniel Murfet argue for alignment theory before recursive self‑improvement?
26:28–39:25
4
What is hybrid authorship and how is it changing the workflow?
39:25–51:44
5
How do token economics and Mercury’s virtual cards affect AI‑driven workflows?
51:44–1:07:19
6
What does Prince’s legal‑reasoning benchmark reveal about model behavior?
1:07:19–1:19:07
7
How is power concentration emerging among frontier AI labs and what are the risks?
1:19:07–1:31:13
8
What are the biggest takeaways from this week’s discussion on AI progress and safety?
1:31:13–1:44:02
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from "The Cognitive Revolution"
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