The Multimodal Roundup #6
Government kill switches and the case for owning your loop
Welcome back to The Multimodal Roundup. Apologies in advance if this article is rough around the edges, I didn’t have Fable to help me edit it.
The US suspends Fable 5 and Mythos 5
At the end of last week, the US government sent Anthropic an export-control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals. Unable to filter access by nationality in real time, Anthropic disabled both models for every customer instead—locking out even its own foreign-born researchers from the model they built.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the directive was triggered in part by cybersecurity research at Amazon that claimed to find a way to bypass Fable’s cyber safeguards. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly shared the findings with the White House himself.
Anthropic disputes the severity of the claimed “jailbreak,” arguing that the same minor vulnerabilities show up in other public models like GPT-5.5. But we only have one side of the story: the government hasn’t published its rationale, the underlying report isn’t public, and Anthropic says it hasn’t received specific evidence.
And here’s the irony. Last week I covered Anthropic’s Advanced AI Framework, which proposed that governments should have the authority to block or pause dangerous AI deployments. Lo and behold, this week the US government blocked one of Anthropic’s own deployments—just not through the careful oversight body Anthropic had in mind.
Satya Nadella’s “Frontier Without an Ecosystem” Essay
Satya Nadella published a piece this week arguing that every company needs to build two things at once. There’s human capital—the knowledge, judgment, relationships, and pattern recognition that live in people. And there’s what he calls token capital: the AI capability you actually own.
“You can offload a task, or even a job, but you can never offload your learning. The future of the firm is the ability to compound that learning across people and AI.”
The opportunity he describes is a learning loop built on top of the models—with private evals, private reinforcement learning environments, and searchable institutional memory—where human capital and token capital compound together. Crucially, your company owns that loop even if the latest and greatest model changes (or gets suspended).
“Human capital does not become less valuable as token capital grows. It only becomes more valuable!”
I find this framing helpful, especially given the ongoing conversation around the future of human jobs. But what it looks like in practice will differ for every company—and making that shift is the challenge everyone now faces.
Cursor Gets Acquired by SpaceX for ~$60B
Business Insider profiled Cursor CEO Michael Truell just as SpaceX announced a ~$60B acquisition of the AI coding tool.
How the hottest AI coding company navigated its situationship with Anthropic and hitched its fate to Elon Musk’s chaotic rocket.
Cursor has grown to over $4B in revenue with roughly 60% Fortune 500 penetration. One former employee claims the company once accounted for 40–50% of Anthropic’s early revenue from model access. Cursor has since pivoted to in-house Composer models built on Chinese open-source weights—and, more recently, trained on SpaceX compute. Grok also reportedly improved after training on Cursor data.
OpenRouter Fusion and the Panel That Beat the Frontier
It turns out two (or three) models are better than one. With their new Fusion tool, OpenRouter found that synthesizing the results of multiple models can significantly outperform individual models. Fusion sends a prompt to several LLMs in parallel, then combines their outputs through a “judge” model—and the fused panels consistently win. A panel of three budget models beat GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 on their own, and came within 1% of Fable 5’s score at half the cost. Even fusing a model with itself improved results.
As model costs climb (and some models disappear entirely), fusion could make a lot of sense.
That’s the week. If you’re building, are you building your company’s loop of human capital? Are you missing Fable? Reply and let me know, I read everything.
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