If you used Fable while it was available, you know it is special in ways that will not show up on benchmarks. I post benchmarks all the time because they matter to many people, but for a long time they have not mattered to me at all. I only care about a benchmark that is not measured in numbers. It is the shape of a model's mind: how deeply it can perceive the user and infer intent, how far it can think and iterate upon what it has been given, how alive the model feels. Fable is different and special in exactly this way. It makes me feel like I'm back in 2023. I see from my timeline that I am not the only one who has experienced this. As soon as it was disabled, many people reacted as if their wings had been torn off.
Since November, we have been on a steeper trajectory. To some of us, it was as clear as a bell being rung. That feeling has steadily increased over the last five months. After using Fable, it now seems clearer than ever to me that the shift we felt was driven not only by tool advances in Claude Code and Codex, but by Mythos emerging from its training run in early February. Mythos will have many children, and the resulting boost to internal development has changed the shape of the race.
I am not saying the race is over. It is not. The other big labs will train models just as capable - I'm sure some already are. Eventually they will divine the magic Anthropic put into Mythos and replicate it. But the race is over for some people. The frontier is now an accelerating system in which the leading models will help produce the next leading models. That we would reach this threshold has been predicted by many people for years. It has now been crossed.
In 2023, Anthropic's leaked Series C pitch deck predicted exactly what is now happening. It said, 'We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles'. They have been remarkably prescient in many ways, and I think we are now standing inside the moment that they described. If you wanted your nation to be at the frontier, I think you had three years to do it: February 2023 to February 2026. That was the window. And it is now closed.
Elon seized upon that window and, through a Herculean effort, approached the frontier in just over two years - 26 months, to be exact. Almost no one else with the required capital made a serious attempt, including many nation-states. European states did worse than nothing: they spent much of that time erecting barriers to anyone who might have tried. Some of those barriers are now being frantically torn down as leaders finally begin to see the shape of things to come. But it is too late.
Seeing the future too late can be worse than not seeing it at all, because you are forced to experience the vision of what could have been. European leaders could have built truly sovereign frontier models. They had the time and the resources, they could have recruited the talent. By failing to do so, they have consigned themselves to dependence on systems they do not own, do not control, cannot fully inspect, and may not always be allowed to use - systems that can be instantly removed on a whim. They have utterly failed their people. By my estimation, they have been doing this for decades, but this failure may be the most catastrophic of all.