Anthropic pays $1.5B for piracy, Fable 5 stalls at 8%, Ox Alpha is Zhipu

Sources

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive simonwillison.net

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from “people with knowledge of the matter”: Anthropic’s “annualized revenue” for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected more historic numbers here . Anthropic expect Q3 to be profitable according to the same model they used to declare Q2 profitable. “It also told investors that it had 6,000 customers that spend $100,000 annually or more.” As for Op…

Who’s behind the new ‘stealth model’ Ox Alpha? techcrunch.com

A mysterious new AI model called Ox Alpha has driven certain corners of the internet into a frenzy of speculation.

Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated techcrunch.com

Most published authors have, without their knowledge or consent, contributed to the development of the same AI tools that threaten to undermine their livelihoods. That seems illegal, right?

Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash techcrunch.com

Flock Safety’s chief executive is pushing for a middle ground as public outcry grows over the company’s license-plate reader network and fears of misuse. The pitch lands as civil-liberties groups and local governments increasingly challenge deployments of the surveillance hardware.

Linkdaze’s smart calendar is built to run a household, not just track a schedule techcrunch.com

Linkdaze positions its smart digital calendar as a household operating system rather than a scheduling tool, bundling an AI meal planner and other features with no subscription tier. The free-feature approach contrasts with rivals that gate AI extras behind monthly fees.

References

StartupFortune on Judge Alsup’s Bartz v. Anthropic ruling startupfortune.com

using copyrighted books to train large language models like Claude was ‘quintessentially transformative’… However, the court drew a hard line at the ‘inputs’ side of the process… downloading and maintaining a permanent library of pirated works from ‘shadow libraries’ like Library Genesis (LibGen) was not fair use.

Wolters Kluwer Copyright Blog on the $1.5B Anthropic settlement legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com

Anthropic agreed to a historic $1.5 billion settlement—the largest in U.S. copyright history—to resolve claims regarding the unauthorized acquisition of nearly 500,000 works… approximately $3,000 per work, which the court noted was four times the statutory minimum.

Authors Guild statement on Kadrey v. Meta ruling authorsguild.org

a ‘technical win’ based on the specific evidence presented rather than a broad legal precedent… the plaintiffs failed to provide sufficient evidence that Meta’s specific use had already caused such market harm… a better-developed record of ‘market dilution’ could lead to different outcomes.

National Law Review on OpenAI discovery order natlawreview.com

Judge Stein affirmed a discovery order compelling OpenAI to produce 20 million anonymized ChatGPT conversation logs… essential for authors to determine how often the models reproduce or summarize copyrighted content in the ‘real world’.

StoryWriter.pro on 2025-26 publisher licensing deals storywriter.pro

HarperCollins offered authors a flat fee of $2,500 per title for a three-year training license, typically split 50-50 with the publisher… author Daniel Kibblesmith publicly rejected the offers, labeling them ‘abominable’.

Garrigues analysis of EU AI Act TDM opt-out garrigues.com

The EU AI Act… mandates that providers of general-purpose AI models must comply with the 2019 DSM Directive, which permits TDM for commercial purposes unless rights holders explicitly ‘opt out’ using machine-readable means… a coalition of 40 creative organizations formally protested that the EU’s implementation guidelines were too vague.

Financial Times (original article) ft.com

Miles Clements, a partner at Accel [an Anthropic investor], said ‘most people don’t need to operate at the frontier’… describing the period where flagship models were the primary choice as ‘not a durable era.’

PYMNTS coverage of FT report pymnts.com

Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp, noted that Fable 5 has established a ‘new upper bound’ for what companies are willing to pay, with many finding the performance gap between it and cheaper models insufficient to justify the premium.

r/Anthropic developer PSA reddit.com

Opus 5 spending 43 minutes spinning up sandboxes and testing suites for a simple config-file patch that its predecessor completed in two minutes… a new tokenizer that generates approximately 30% more tokens for the same text, effectively acting as a stealth price hike.

Startup Fortune startupfortune.com

Anthropic has since pivoted its commercial focus toward Claude Opus 5, which has already surpassed Fable 5 in total enterprise spending due to its superior performance-per-dollar ratio… sources framed the low adoption not as a failure, but as an ‘intentional’ strategy.

Incrypted / analyst roundup incrypted.com

The Trump administration initially forced a withdrawal of the model in early June due to national security concerns… Although it was relaunched on July 1 with federal approval, analysts believe this regulatory uncertainty, combined with strict [30-day] data-retention requirements, further discouraged early enterprise adoption.

ExplainX critique of Ramp AI Index explainx.ai

Ramp’s customer base disproportionately consists of tech-forward, venture-backed, and knowledge-work-intensive firms… this ‘transaction-first’ view creates a ‘blind spot’ for free tools and ‘shadow AI’ purchased via personal accounts.

local-ai-zone technical analysis local-ai-zone.github.io

Ox Alpha’s tokenizer behavior matches the GLM family with 99% certainty, exhibiting a constant 75-token offset likely caused by a hidden system wrapper… malformed requests triggered a proprietary ‘1214 Incorrect role information’ error and Java stack traces containing the path ‘paas/v4/chat’, which is unique to Zhipu’s official API.

Pandaily pandaily.com

On a 10-task subset of the DeepSWE coding benchmark, Ox Alpha reportedly achieved an 80% Pass@1 rate, notably outperforming Fable (65%) and GPT-5.6 Sol (52%) in the same sample run.

SiliconAngle siliconangle.com

Nobody knows who built AI coding model Ox Alpha or where the code goes — the anonymous provider retains all prompts and completions, prompting warnings against using the model with sensitive or proprietary code.

Digital Applied digitalapplied.com

In January 2025, the U.S. Commerce Department added Zhipu AI to the Entity List, citing its role in advancing military modernization… creates a legal tripwire for US firms sending proprietary code to an anonymous provider that may be a sanctioned entity.

Adam Holter blog (historical context) adam.holter.com

Quasar Alpha and Optimus Alpha were officially revealed on April 14, 2025 as early snapshots of OpenAI’s GPT-4.1; the Sonoma Sky/Dusk pair was later identified as xAI’s Grok 4 Fast — establishing a pattern where ‘Alpha’ stealth models are free previews that get retired once the official model launches.

Business Insider businessinsider.com

When questioned on sensitive topics such as the independence of Taiwan, the model provides responses aligned with Chinese state policy, stating it is an ‘inalienable part of China’.