Claude Fable 5 Returns, China's GLM 5.2 Runs 15x Cheaper, and AI Labs Turn on Open Weights

Claude Fable 5 came back from the first AI export ban, for three and a half days, then $200 an hour. China's GLM 5.2 does the same work 15x cheaper. Anthropic pulled Claude Fable 5 after the US government placed the first export restriction ever put on an AI model. This week it returned: three and a half days of included access, usage limits cut in half, and a price of roughly $200 an hour after that. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop walk through what actually changed, including the Reddit-fueled discovery that Claude Code appears to watermark output when traffic looks like it comes from China, a VPN, or a rival research lab, and Hunter's theory that Anthropic simply kissed the ring at the White House. OpenAI, meanwhile, delayed its own GPT-5.6 launch so the government could take more time to evaluate it, which raises a strange new standard: is a model even worth using if nobody tried to ban it? Then it's the fight over open weights models. The leading Western AI labs, Anthropic loudest among them, have shifted from "our model is too dangerous to release" to "nobody should run open weights models at all," a pitch Daniel compares to a McDonald's CEO warning that homemade hamburgers will end civilization. That fight lands right as the Chinese AI models arrive: GLM 5.2 now completes the same real-world benchmark tasks as the frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic at 15 to 16 times cheaper, and DeepSeek runs cheaper still, if you can live with its limits. Also covered: Sonnet 5's cost-per-task problem versus Opus 4.8, the full Claude lineup from Mythos down to Haiku, AI model tourism (fly to Canada, come home with the weights), whether training on copyrighted books is any different from training on another model's output, and a tease for Episode 200, when Gary may finally call in live. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open (Gary's Intro) 1:31 Claude Fable 5 Returns 4:28 Sonnet 5 vs Opus 4.8 7:06 Fable's Export Ban 11:21 OpenAI Delays Its Launch 12:57 Open Weights War Drums 16:36 Chinese AI Models 20:42 GLM 5.2 Runs 15x Cheaper 22:32 DeepSeek's Limits 24:14 Episode 200 Tease LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc 🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLUR Follow: @TheBlurAI COMMENT What are you actually running this week: Fable at $200 an hour, Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, or GLM 5.2? Defend your pick. You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur. New episodes Monday and Thursday. #AI #TMBSA #ClaudeFable5 #GLM52 #OpenWeights