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Jul 01, 2026
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Happy Wednesday! The White House lifts export restrictions on Anthropic’s Fable 5. Nvidia invests in security firm Verkada. Amazon Web Services creates a unit of staffers who will help business customers use AI.
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The White House lifted export restrictions on Anthropic’s Fable 5, according to a U.S. official. In a post on X, Anthropic said the U.S. government notified it that it has lifted export controls on its Fable 5 model, along with Mythos 5. The company said it will begin restoring customer access to the models on Wednesday. The government’s move, first reported by Politico, was confirmed by a U.S. official. On June 12, the federal government forced Anthropic to withdraw Mythos 5 and Fable 5, a version of Mythos with extra cyberattack safeguards, from the market over national security concerns. The government partially eased the restrictions on Mythos on Friday. To address government concerns, Anthropic implemented a new safeguard to Fable that targets and blocks behavior described in a reported bypass of its protections that triggered the administration’s move, a person close to the company said. The person added that researchers from the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation have validated both the prior and new safeguards. The lifting of the restrictions comes as the administration balances frontier-model security risks against pressure to keep pace with China’s AI development. OpenAI faced similar treatment last week, agreeing to a limited rollout of its GPT-5.6 model despite CEO Sam Altman’s objections. Industry figures hope a forthcoming executive order will replace ad hoc decisions with a predictable evaluation process.
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Verkada, which makes security cameras and accompanying software, said Wednesday that Nvidia is investing an unspecified amount of capital in the 10-year-old company at a $5.8 billion valuation. It’s the same valuation as Verkada’s December financing led by Alphabet’s growth investment arm, CapitalG. With technical help from Nvidia engineers, Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan said the average precision of its video AI model for searching security footage for items like “pickup truck that’s green with a dent in the back” rose 70%. Verkada, based in San Mateo, Calif., has discussed a potential public listing within the next year or so. The Information previously reported it told investors it expects to generate $700 million in revenue this year. Kaliszan said Verkada’s revenue is growing by about 30% annually. Nvidia’s involvement with Verkada is part of its bet on AI that’s applied to the physical world, which CEO Jensen Huang has called a $50 trillion opportunity and includes humanoid robots.
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Amazon Web Services said it would invest $1 billion to create a unit of staffers with the title of forward deployed engineers, which would help business customers use AI. Francessca Vasquez, vice president of AWS’ Frontier AI Engineering and Services, said in an interview that the FDEs will help customers test new AI products and AWS will educate outside companies on how to talk about AWS services. Vasquez said the organization will work alongside staff from other companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic, and help implement both AWS AI products and products from outside providers. AWS has been training salespeople who have the title of “solution architects” to be FDEs, a title popularized by Palantir to apply to consultants who help companies implement new technology such as AI. Vasquez said the FDE organization is an evolution on AWS’ Generative AI Center, which the company first announced in 2023. She said that industries with a particular demand for FDEs include healthcare, government and financial services. Vasquez noted firms are increasingly turning to open source models. “Open-source and the use of open-weight models is definitely gaining traction for customers for a variety of different reasons: price performance, but also they service the task,” Vasquez said. “Customers for closed models, we also see their continued use of things like model distillation to be able to also get value from the models.”
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Anthropic is backtracking a spyware rolled out covertly to track users’ location and whether they are based in China or affiliated with Chinese AI labs, after the move sparked controversies on social media. A Reddit post earlier this week said Claude Code covertly tracks and transmits information on whether the user is in China and affiliated with a Chinese lab. International Cyber Digest, a cybersecurity newsletter, said in an article that Claude Code is sending info like timezone, proxy and possible AI lab connections into the system prompt in ways Chinese users can’t notice” On X, many Chinese-speaking users discussed Anthropic’s move and criticized the Claude developer. In reply to the International Cyber Digest post, Anthropic employee Thariq Shihipar said it was “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized sellers and protect against distillation.” He also said that the team has been meaning to take down the function and it “should be fully rolled back” soon. Shihipar is a member of Anthropic’s technical staff who works on Claude Code, according to his X and LinkedIn profiles and his own website. Anthropic has previously accused several DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Alibaba Group, of illicitly using Claude models’ answers to train the Chinese companies’ own large language models in large-scale distillation attacks. Even though Anthropic doesn’t offer its models and services in China due to national security reasons, many developers in China have found ways to access Claude by using overseas phone numbers and credit cards.
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Jefferies has hired Alex Tingle from Goldman Sachs to lead the investment bank’s efforts in digital infrastructure deals, according to people familiar with the matter. Tingle was most recently a managing director at Goldman’s digital infrastructure investment banking group. Tingle will join Jefferies later this year as global head of digital infrastructure investment banking. At Goldman, Tingle worked on SpaceX’s | | | |
