5.29.26: The week that Anthropic asked to be watched.

This was the week Anthropic positioned itself as the responsible AI lab in product, posture, and price. The most capable Claude model yet, marketed on honesty. The co-founder at the Vatican calling for external oversight. The largest private AI funding round in history closing. Three moves, one week, connected.This episode covers Claude Opus 4.8 and the same-day launches of Dynamic Workflows, Fast Mode pricing, and the effort control slider, plus the quieter change that folded Claude Design into the shared usage pool. We cover Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, dedicated entirely to AI, with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah on the stage beside him. We cover the IPO race: SpaceX's S-1, OpenAI's confidential filing, and Anthropic's $900 billion round. Plus the OpenAI reasoning model that cracked an 80-year-old open math problem.You can find everything we covered, plus the deeper read, over at intelligencedistilled.io.