Anthropic ships Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper agentic workhorse just as Washington restores export access to its top models; Visa, Stripe, and over 100 firms line up behind a new stablecoin; and OpenAI now eyes a 2027 IPO trailing Anthropic’s October debut. Noah Smith rounds up the week’s oddities, Denver’s housing math stretches to 93 years, and placebo pills work even on patients who know they’re fake.

Anthropic · Jun 30

Anthropic’s new agentic model targets near-Opus 4.8 performance at lower cost, with improved safety over Sonnet 4.6.

Simon Willison · Jun 30

Tests Sonnet 5’s new tokenizer, finding it uses about 30% more tokens than Sonnet 4.6, offsetting price gains.

CNBC · Jun 30

Commerce Department lifts export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after a two-week suspension.

Bloomberg · Jun 26

OpenAI is now leaning toward a 2027 IPO, after Anthropic’s expected October Nasdaq debut.

Bloomberg · Jun 30

Visa, Stripe, BlackRock, and over 100 other firms form Open Standard to launch a dollar-backed stablecoin.

Colin Matthews · Jun 30

Guest post outlining a three-rung framework for how product managers use AI to increase leverage.

Simon Willison · Jun 30

Reviews Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite image model, the fastest and cheapest in the Gemini image lineup.

Noah Smith · Jul 1

Weekly link roundup covering consumer sentiment surveys, AI and hiring data, and other economic topics.

Alayna Alvarez · Jun 25

Report finds Denver’s pace of housing construction would take about 93 years to close its affordability gap.