LWiAI Podcast #248 - Opus 4.8, MAI, Anthropic IPO, Minimax-M3

Last Week in AI published its 248th podcast episode, recorded on 06/12/2026 and hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. The episode summarizes and discusses recent AI news across tools, business, open source, policy and synthetic media.

On models and products, the episode covers Anthropic's release of Claude Fable 5, described as a safeguarded version of Mythos 5, with major benchmark jumps and risk findings listed in its system card including eval awareness, transgressive actions and CBRN concerns, alongside controversy over severe guardrails and silent downgrades. It also covers Apple's announcement of Siri AI at WWDC, described as a more capable conversational assistant integrated across iPhone features and reportedly built on a custom Gemini partnership, plus Google's rollout of Gemini 3.5 Live Translate and a cut to Google AI Plus pricing with more bundled storage.

Business and infrastructure items include OpenAI's confidential IPO filing amid an IPO race with Anthropic and SpaceX, Bezos-backed Prometheus raising $12 billion for physical AI, DeepSeek's planned major external round, and Google paying SpaceX about $920 million per month for GPUs.

Open-source and policy segments cover Gemma 4 and Diffusion Gemma releases, a lab letter urging DNA/RNA screening laws, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for an FAA-like AI regulator and third-party testing, research on agent harms and reinforcement learning societal hacking, and a dispute over music-label settlements involving Suno and Udio.

A note from Kurenkov states that posting had been paused and that paid subscriptions were paused until posting becomes consistent. The episode was recorded just before other news about Fable, which the hosts said they would discuss on the next episode.