AI Weekly Briefing: Fable 5 Returns and Washington Keeps the Keys

Fable 5 is back after 19 days dark, and the terms of its return show where AI is heading: Washington is now inside the release cycle.

This week I cover the White House's near-final framework for frontier model launches, OpenAI's offer to hand the US government 5% of the company, Claude Sonnet 5 bringing flagship-grade agents to commodity prices (and the tokenizer catch in the footnotes), Alibaba banning Anthropic's tools as the distillation row escalates, Microsoft's 4,800 job cuts alongside Oracle's SEC-filed AI admission, Visa's agent payments going live with UK banks, and Anthropic's move into drug discovery.

Plus quick hits on GPT-5.6, Gemini 3.5 Pro, California's statewide Claude deal and the AI IPO queue. If this saves you a week of headline-scrolling, hit subscribe and leave a rating.