The First Frontier Export Control

The US government imposed export controls on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, citing national security concerns over a China-linked group's access. Anthropic disabled both models for all customers to ensure compliance. The episode traces how this event — the first time frontier models were treated as controlled national security assets — connects to shifting token budgets (Meta cutting its Claude spend), geopolitical capital flows (Meta unwinding its $2B Manus deal after Beijing's demand), and an infrastructure shift: OpenRouter's Fusion API, which combines multiple models at half the price, and a new paper proposing precomputed KV caches as a CDN layer for agent workloads.