361: Beep Beep: AWS Ships an ACME Product That Actually Works

Welcome to episode 361 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! It’s a full house tonight – Justin, Ryan, Jonathan (and eventually) Matt are all in the studio this week to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including a greenlight for Mythos, an ACME product that *doesn’t* involve an anvil, and a couple of new models from Anthropic and OpenAI. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week Azure EU Capacity Is Full. Please Try Another Continent OpenAI Names Models After Planets, Charges Like a Rocket Gemini Spark Now Watches Stocks While You Touch Grass Three Tiers Walk Into a Bar, Sol Picks Up the Tab Anthropic Drops Sonnet 5 and Bugs Fix Themselves Now Your Mac Has a New AI Overlord Named Spark CloudFormation Finally Stops Waiting Around Like Your CI Pipeline AI Agents Finally Get Their Own Office Space No Room at the Cloud Inn for EU Workloads A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info. Follow Up  02:02 U.S. government gives Anthropic green light for limited re-release of Mythos 5 The U.S. government invoked export control authorities to force Anthropic to take two of its most capable AI models offline, citing national security concerns, which marks a notable use of trade law as a mechanism for AI oversight. Mythos 5 is being restored to roughly 100 organizations for defensive cybersecurity purposes, including infrastructure providers and government agencies, reflecting a tiered access model where use case and organizational trust level determine availability. The export control angle is worth noting for cloud and enterprise customers because foreign nationals at partner organizations triggered the shutdown, which could make workforce composition a compliance consideration for companies accessing advanced AI systems. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are now operating under ad hoc government vetting processes before model releases, with no formal framework yet established, creating uncertainty for developers and enterprises planning around AI capability timelines. The situation highlights a tension between AI safety guardrails and commercial availability, as Fable 5 was pulled in part because officials were not confident that its consumer-facing restrictions could prevent misuse in the cyber and biology domains. 02:34 Anthropic test found vulnerabilities in classified US systems in hours  Anthropic’s Mythos model, tested through Project Glasswing in partnership with US intelligence agencies, identified vulnerabilities in classified government systems within hours, though the model did not necessarily exploit those vulnerabilities in that same time...