Hey, Want Some Models?

Anthropic shipped Claude Fable and Mythos 5.1 with a 75% cache-price cut, Google countered with Gemini 3.8 Flash, OpenAI teased Astra's public release, a judge spared Google's ad exchange from a sale, and the FBI probed a 153M-license leak.

• Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5.1, which is generally available, and Mythos 5.1, for trusted partners and with cybersecurity and life sciences safeguards (Anthropic)
• Fable 5.1 cuts cache-read pricing 75% to $0.25/1M tokens, lowering effective costs ~25% for typical workloads and up to ~45% for agentic ones, and debuts Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (VentureBeat)
• Google launches Gemini 3.8 Flash, three weeks after 3.7 Flash launch, for an introductory price of $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens until December 31 (9to5Google)
• OpenAI says it plans to publicly release a version of Astra "soon", but will give access to "its most advanced cyber capabilities" only to testers and partners (Wired)
• Sources: Astra's "recurrent depth" technique obscures chain-of-thought reasoning, sparking concerns inside OpenAI and across the industry, though OpenAI limited its use so Astra's thinking stays legible and monitorable (The Information)
• A US federal judge rules that Google does not have to sell off its ad exchange and instead must make its ad tech tools work with those operated by rivals (Bloomberg)
• The FBI is investigating Nexus, a new ID theft service on the dark web claiming to sell digital scans of 153M+ drivers licenses from people in the US and Canada (Krebs on Security)
• The leaked licenses, including SecDef Pete Hegseth's, trace back to ID-verification provider IDScan, used by Hertz and Planet13; the FBI's New Orleans office has opened an investigation (Tom's Hardware)
• Acer unveils the Swift Blade 14, an ultralight laptop weighing 1.76lbs with Intel Wildcat Lake processors, and the Swift Air 16, set to launch in December (The Verge)

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