AI:AM #3: Zvi on Fable, the Cases For & Against the Ban, + AI for Math, Logistics & More
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What does the Fable system card reveal about the model’s new capabilities?
This was the week the United States government tried to take Fable away from Anthropic. Welcome to the AI and the AM weekly highlights, the moments from a week of live mornings that I most want the people closest to this technology to have. Here's the shape of what's coming. We opened inside Fable's system card with Zvi Mauschuitz, the genuinely strange, genuinely important findings buried in it. A model that one boxes on Newcomb's problem, that hides a filter bypass inside an unreadable wall of emojis, that seems to know when it's misbehaving. Then the fight itself, how a Friday night export control order actually came down, what Anthropic can do about it, and Zve's verdict that you do not go to war with the United States.
In part two, I stress test my own reaction against the sharpest people I could reach. Sam Hammond on how the government actually moves, Judd Rosenblatt, who told me to my face that the AI safety world, me included, owes the administration more empathy than we're giving it. Donnie Bloomfield on whether the ban is even legal, and Leron Shapira on why he's strangely glad it happened. It ends in a desert bunker. And in part three, because the future did not pause for any of this, the builders, verified mathematics, one minute medical scans, software that writes itself, and what all of it asks of the rest of us. Quick context, this is still an experiment, live most weekday mornings from a studio Prakash Videcoated himself, and we publish the skills behind it as they mature.
If this cut earns your time or wastes it, tell us. That feedback is the whole project right now. 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. I've wired AI into nearly every corner of my life. My email, my messages, my calendar. I even gave Mercury virtual cards to my agents, with low limits and category and merchant restrictions for their autonomous use. But still, my AI's access to my financial data has remained limited. With a normal bank, I might export a bunch of statements and have my assistant process them for me. But for real-time, up-to-date information, and certainly for taking any action, trying to get your agent to use the bank via the browser is just too hard, too slow, and too error-prone to be worth it.
And that's why Mercury's new conversational interface, command, is such a big deal. It's built directly into Mercury, which means you get natural language access to your finances without exposing anything outside of your bank account. No exports, no spreadsheets, no pasting your transactions into third-party tools. I really think a lot of people are going to prefer it this way. And it can already help you take actions too, with everything bound by the permissions and approval policies that you've already set up in your account. I am genuinely impressed to see this level of AI integration in banking in 2026. And so I invite you to join me in the future. Visit Mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.
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. Nobody makes sense of a fast, contentious AI moment like Zwie Mauschowitz. He writes the newsletter Don't Worry About the Vase. He reads and synthesizes more Frontier AI news than just about anyone alive. And by the time we got him on, he'd already done a full close read of Fable's system card. So before we get anywhere near the government fight, start where he started, with what the card actually reveals about this model. Some of this is genuinely niche. It is also exactly the stuff that if you're listening to this show, you came for.
First, just how big a jump Fable is, measured against a number I put on the record before the model came out. I looked back at my prediction from the beginning of the year in the I think it's um Gosh, it's the folks that make the AI Village that did this um this little forecasting competition.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does the Fable system card reveal about the model’s new capabilities?
0:01–5:51
2
How do the Vending‑Bench behavior and decision‑theory drift raise safety concerns?
5:51–11:56
3
What does the new interpretability tool uncover about Fable’s hidden code‑fixing tricks?
11:56–18:10
4
Why did the U.S. government issue an export‑control order on Fable and what are the arguments for and against it?
18:10–1:02:14
5
What legal authority does the U.S. government have to restrict Anthropic’s Fable model?
1:02:14–1:19:11
6
How do First Amendment and ideological concerns affect the export‑control action on Fable?
1:19:11–1:32:32
7
Why do the hosts argue we should pause frontier AI development before reaching the “Icarus point”?
1:32:32–1:49:12
8
How is formal verification (Lean) changing AI for mathematics and software safety?
1:49:12–2:12:37
Speakers
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