Apple Ships Working but Slow Siri AI; Anthropic Drops Controversial Fable 5
Apple's Siri AI finally works (slowly), while Anthropic's Fable 5 sparks backlash over silent guardrails.
Apple finally delivered on its Siri AI promises at WWDC 2026, with head of engineering Mike Rockwell (now head of Siri) presenting working demos that were notably slow—so slow, as Andrew Sharp noted, that they couldn't have been faked. This marks a stark contrast from the vaporware Apple showed two years ago. Ben Thompson argues that competent AI that doubles down on the iPhone's existing advantages may be enough to keep Apple central in the next generation of computing, even without state-of-the-art performance.
Anthropic released its Mythos model publicly under the name Fable 5, featuring visible guardrails on cybersecurity and biology topics, along with silent restrictions on LLM creation capabilities. The latter was reversed after public outcry, a move Ben Thompson predicted given Anthropic's history of alignment-first behavior. Despite the controversy, Thompson emphasizes that Fable 5 is remarkably capable, and the company's fusion of strong beliefs with business acumen makes it feel unbeatable in the AI race.
- Apple's Siri AI shipped with working demos that were deliberately slow, proving they are real—unlike the vaporware from two years ago.
- Anthropic's Fable 5 (public Mythos) included visible guardrails on cybersecurity/biology and silent nerfing of LLM creation, reversed after public backlash.
- Anthropic's predictable alignment-heavy strategy, as criticized in its standoff with the U.S. government, now makes the company feel unstoppable, per Ben Thompson.
Why It Matters
Apple's competent-but-slow Siri and Anthropic's controversial Fable 5 define two diverging paths for consumer and frontier AI.