Anthropic yanks Fable 5, opens Seoul anyway; Google Home Speaker ships buggy

Sources

Anthropic opens Seoul office and announces new partnerships across the Korean AI ecosystem anthropic.com

Anthropic got hit by export rules nobody understands theverge.com

Anthropic has spent much of this week fighting to get its newest AI models back online after the Trump administration abruptly ordered the company to cut access for all foreign nationals, including users inside the US and its own employees, forcing Anthropic to block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone. “To my […]

World leaders want American AI. They just don’t want America to be able to turn it off. techcrunch.com

French President Macron and Indian PM Modi raised alarms at the G7 summit that the U.S. could cut off access to American AI overnight — a fear the Anthropic blackout just made real.

Vibe-decoding the White House-Anthropic fight over Fable theverge.com

Hello and welcome to Regulator, an email for Verge subscribers about technology, politics, and what happens when science crashes headlong into self-interest. Not a subscriber? Sign up here today! Got the scoop on a petty feud that’s going to somehow fundamentally reshape the entire field of frontier AI development? Send ‘em over to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com. Back […]

Bye bye Fable bensbites.com

another benchmark for real swe work

Google’s first smart speaker in six years arrives next week theverge.com

Google’s first new smart speaker in six years starts shipping on June 25th, narrowly missing its promised spring launch window. Preorders for the Google Home Speaker open today, June 17th. Nothing has changed hardware-wise in the nine months since the $99 speaker was announced. It has the same slightly squished round design, with touch-capacitive buttons […]

Google bets on Gemini to reinvent the smart home speaker techcrunch.com

Google is betting generative AI can breathe new life into the smart speaker. The company’s new $99.99 Google Home Speaker replaces the rigid commands of the Google Assistant era with more conversational Gemini interactions.

Ten months later, the $100 Google Home Speaker is finally available for preorder arstechnica.com

Google’s new smart speaker is more about Gemini than audio quality.

Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress arstechnica.com

The Department of Defense is now leaning on generative AI to produce reports it owes Congress, and says 1.5 million personnel across the agency are using genAI tools, including Google Gemini, in their daily work.

Two-thirds of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly theverge.com

Chatbot adoption has jumped from 33% in 2024 to 49% in 2026, with ChatGPT usage doubling since 2023. Yet only 16% of Americans expect AI to have a positive impact on society, a sharp split from Wall Street’s enthusiasm.

Only 16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society, a new study shows techcrunch.com

Although Wall Street loves AI, every day Americans are significantly less optimistic about the industry, a new report from Pew Research shows.

Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans theverge.com

The bootstrapped image-generation lab is launching its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner, which uses a ring of ultrasound sensors for vertical full-body scans. CEO David Holz also plans a San Francisco spa to house it.

(AINews) Midjourney Medical: scan your organs like you step on a scale latent.space

The only bootstrapped frontier lab announces its second product and second

World model maker Odyssey nabs $1.45B valuation backed by Amazon and other big names techcrunch.com

The world-model startup’s new round, backed by Amazon among other big names, positions Odyssey as a frontrunner in the post-LLM race to build AI systems that simulate physical environments rather than just generate text.

Pramaana Labs raises $27M seed round from Khosla Ventures to bring formal verification to AI techcrunch.com

Khosla Ventures led the seed round for Pramaana, which applies formal verification methods to AI in high-stakes verticals like law, drug discovery, and tax preparation, where a single hallucination carries real cost.

Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it. techcrunch.com

Backed by a16z and Thrive Capital, XDOF is one of a crop of startups tackling the unglamorous chore of collecting real-world manipulation data, the missing ingredient if physical AI is to repeat the scaling wins of LLMs.

The next humanoid robot might not look human at all theverge.com

The French robotics startup argues humanoid robots don’t need to look human. Its new Eno robot skips the head and legs, sitting on a wheeled base that folds down like a deck chair for storage.

Why do South Koreans love AI so much? technologyreview.com

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 12-hour flight from San Francisco, I walked through an unmanned immigration checkpoint, where a machine scanned my face and passport. On the subway home,…

Pinterest launches an experimental AI shopping app called ‘Ask Pinterest’ techcrunch.com

Pinterest has launched ‘Ask Pinterest,’ an experimental AI-powered shopping app that lets users seek recommendations and inspiration through a conversational interface.

DeepL acquires Mixhalo for live-event audio streaming and translation techcrunch.com

With this acquisition, DeepL is opening an office in San Francisco to expand its U.S. business.

AI search grounded in Facebook posts? What could go wrong? theverge.com

AI is pretty reliable at putting things on your calendar these days, but it hasn’t quite cracked answering the related and all-important question of “What should I do this weekend?” Meta’s new AI Mode in search could be a useful tool - if it ever learns to stop getting stuff wrong. AI Mode is a […]

Can anyone look cool wearing Snap’s $2,000 glasses? theverge.com

Yesterday, Snap debuted its new $2,195 Specs glasses. In an interview with CNBC, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel described the Specs as something the company had been working on for more than 12 years, an attempt to “bring computing into the world” and “make it more human.” He positioned them as a device to help people […]

After unveiling ridiculously expensive AR glasses, Snap’s stock takes a dive techcrunch.com

Snap’s long-awaited smart glasses debut hasn’t exactly done wonders for the company’s stock.

(AINews) Satya on Loopcraft: Building Frontier Ecosystems latent.space

a quiet day lets us report on Satya’s hit essay

Want to get a data center online quickly? Give it some flex. technologyreview.com

At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however, caused a different…

NEA’s Tiffany Luck on AI IPOs, personal agents, and the ROI reckoning techcrunch.com

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between […]

NEA’s Tiffany Luck says enterprises are still figuring out their AI ROI techcrunch.com

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. This tension between […]

Canadian pension giant joins race to fund India’s AI-fueled data center boom techcrunch.com

The Canadian pension giant will acquire an 8.2% stake in CtrlS, a tech giant that operates more than 15 data centers across India.

We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support. blog.google

Google has announced a $1.5 billion investment for 2026 and 2027 to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama. Operating since 2019 on a repurposed former…

🔬 The Self-Driving Lab — Joseph Krause, Radical AI latent.space

Radical AI’s Joseph Krause on why the moat in materials is the lab, not the model

Social media’s next evolution: user-controlled algorithms techcrunch.com

Social media feeds are becoming more customizable as platforms like Threads, Instagram, and TikTok introduce tools that let users directly influence the algorithms powering their recommendations.

State of the blog, mid-2026 interconnects.ai

About 3 years since I started writing weekly.

The slowtech revolution is here to kill your phone addiction and rescue your attention span techcrunch.com

“People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention… They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”

Anthropic becomes first AI startup to join the Frontier carbon removal coalition techcrunch.com

Anthropic has joined the Frontier coalition, which received another $915M in pledges to fund carbon removal projects.

Roelof Botha joins SpaceX’s board of directors techcrunch.com

The former Sequoia Capital leader is filling an “existing vacancy” on SpaceX’s board, days after the company went public in the largest IPO ever.

References

Hindustan Times hindustantimes.com

90-min ultimatum, tense calls, wellness retreat: how White House, Amazon got Anthropic to disable its top AI model Fable 5

Lawfare — ‘A Kill Switch for Frontier AI’ lawfaremedia.org

Applying the Export Administration Regulations to remote API access redefines ‘deemed export’ for the SaaS era — the US now possesses a functional kill switch for the global AI stack but lacks a coherent legal framework to govern its use.

Eastern Herald — ‘Free Fable’ open letter coverage easternherald.com

Over 100 cybersecurity experts including Alex Stamos and Katie Moussouris argue the ban ‘handcuffs defenders’ while Fable 5’s capabilities can be replicated by GPT-5.5 and Chinese frontier models like Kimi 2.7; Zhipu AI immediately launched GLM-5.2 using the restriction as marketing.

Semafor — White House feud with Anthropic semafor.com

Sacks contends Anthropic strategically used ‘fear-mongering’ to influence the 2023 Biden AI executive order, effectively ‘cartelizing’ the industry; the rift widened when Amodei skipped a White House tech summit to attend Davos.

Daily Jagran — LeCun ‘regulatory theater’ thedailyjagran.com

LeCun characterized the Fable outcome as ‘self-inflicted,’ noting the irony of a company lobbying for government oversight only to have that same authority shut down its most advanced product.

Trilogy AI Substack — enterprise impact trilogyai.substack.com

Enterprise demand has surged for sovereign architectures based on Llama 4 and Mistral Medium 3.5; a ‘transparency paradox’ has emerged where labs that publish detailed safety disclosures may now be more vulnerable to regulatory takedowns than those that remain opaque.

Chosun Biz chosun.com

The Trump administration identified a South Korean partner on Anthropic’s access list that officials alleged had concerning ties to China… the U.S. Department of Commerce issued emergency export controls on June 15, 2026, imposing a blanket ban on foreign access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5.

TheNextWeb — Upstage CEO Sung Kim thenextweb.com

Sung Kim, CEO of the local startup Upstage, argued that the Anthropic ban serves as a ‘blunt lesson’ that Korea must achieve technological self-reliance to avoid being at the mercy of foreign policy shifts.

LG CNS / Sogang University study lgcns.com

A year-long study of 26 real-world projects revealed that a proprietary tool integrated with high-performing models (like Claude) delivered a 26.1% productivity boost, nearly doubling the 14.1% improvement seen with general-purpose tools like GitHub Copilot.

BusinessKorea — LG EXAONE 4.5 businesskorea.co.kr

LG AI Research recently unveiled EXAONE 4.5, a multimodal model that the company claims outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet in visual reasoning and STEM-related benchmarks.

Korea JoongAng Daily — labor coverage koreajoongangdaily.com

Employment rates for computer engineering graduates at elite institutions like Seoul National University and KAIST dropped by over 10 percentage points between 2023 and 2025 as firms reduced entry-level hiring in favor of AI-augmented senior teams… developers are reporting ‘AI brain fry’.

SamMobile sammobile.com

A joint project between OpenAI and Samsung to develop a custom inference chip had stalled due to strategic differences, leading Sam Altman to cancel a scheduled visit to Seoul in June 2026.

TechRadar techradar.com

It’s almost worthless — Google Home users slam ‘painfully slow’ Gemini Assistant, but it’s getting a global rollout no matter how much you dislike it.

PCWorld pcworld.com

Gemini for Home’s daily briefings are getting spooky, users say — fabricating events like a person by a playset who wasn’t in the footage, or family members putting out Halloween decorations being described as ‘committing a gruesome crime’ with a hammer.

r/googlehome (‘Upgraded to Gemini for Home and instantly regret’) reddit.com

Users report there is no straightforward way to revert to the classic Assistant once a home has been migrated, leaving them ‘pigeonholed’ into a buggier experience.

r/googlehome (hardware comparison thread) reddit.com

The 2026 Home Speaker uses a single 58mm full-range driver in a 3.4-inch sphere — Nest Audio’s dedicated 75mm woofer + 19mm tweeter still delivers roughly 50% more bass; the new model ‘falls squarely between the Nest Mini and the Nest Audio.’

Google Home Support (Premium tier page) support.google.com

Google Home Premium Standard is $10/month (30 days event video history); Advanced is $20/month (60 days plus 10 days of 24/7 recording). Home Brief, Ask Home, and Gemini Live are gated behind the subscription.

BGR (Gemini privacy) bgr.com

Conversations selected for human review are retained up to three years and cannot be deleted via Gemini Apps Activity controls or even by deleting your Google account.