Week 2026-26

Summer is here again, and that usually means fewer news. Then again, why not? We all need to unplug once in a while. @vlkodotnet

Week’s Highlight: Anthropic news

It took over 4 months to get a new version of the Sonnet model. In AI time that feels like years, so after version 4.6, which shipped back in February, here comes Sonnet 5. It shares a lot with Fable 5 — at least the version number, and on top of that a protective layer that’s meant to prevent it from being used for various shady purposes.

So what’s new? Sonnet 5 is more agentic, so it handles tool calls better and more often. It has a new tokenizer that can generate up to 30% more tokens, but above all it comes with an adjustable effort mode, much like Opus. The price is the same as the previous model, and until the end of August it’s even a third cheaper. According to tests floating around online, it does better with visual content and physics models than Opus 4.8. In everything else it sits below it, so the choice is yours.

Fable 5 also made its return on July 1st. It’s available within your flat limits until July 12th, after which you’ll spend the free credit that comes with your subscription. Once that runs out too, you pay full price.

Anthropic rolled out one more interesting product: Claude Science, an AI-native scientific environment. Think of it as Jupyter crossed with Claude Cowork.

PlayStation is done with physical games

Games are increasingly becoming digital goods. That can mean that once a game’s content provider shuts down, so does your ability to own a game you legally purchased. PlayStation has of course offered the option to buy games on physical media for quite a while, but it recently announced that this option will end in January 2028. Even today it’s been happening that even when you bought a physical copy of a game, what you actually got was a DVD/Blu-ray with nothing but a launcher, and the game’s content downloaded from the internet anyway. Simply put, that’s the era we live in, and the only way to truly own something physically is to buy a vinyl record.

BIZ Insights

OpenAI is considering offering the US government a 5% stake in the company. On top of that, Sam Altman suggests that other American AI firms should offer the same kind of ownership. The goal is to give the government a stake in the growth of AI companies, since bigger firms mean higher share value. The only thing that comes to mind is whether OpenAI is trying to buy itself indulgences for the fact that the data it trains on isn’t entirely in line with copyright law.

Spain put Palantir on its blacklist of companies the state can’t do business with. The reason is concern over the classified information that would be stored in such systems — especially given that this is a US company whose government can order it to disclose that information. The catch with this decision is an existing contract held by Spain’s military intelligence service, which is refusing to give it up.

Infineon opened its Smart Power Fab plant in Dresden. It’s partly funded under the EU Chips Act, and its goal is to secure the EU’s technological autonomy.

AI Insights

Google introduced the Nano Banana 2 Lite model for faster and cheaper AI image generation.

Agents-A1 from InternScience is a 35B agentic model that’s meant to match the performance of 1T-sized models. It achieves excellent results thanks to its ability to break a task down into smaller steps and call tools exactly where they’re needed.

Leanstral 1.5 is a model from Mistral that can translate your code into the Lean mathematical language. You can then apply so-called formal verification — a mathematical method for proving that software works exactly according to spec, so you don’t end up with a null exception or some other critical bug somewhere.

.NET Insights

Union types also bring so-called closed class hierarchies. These are classes that can only be declared within a single assembly, which then lets the compiler work with them and check at build time that a switch condition covers all of their descendants.

.NET 8 and .NET 9 reach the end of their life cycle on November 10th. The upgrade isn’t complicated, and you gain a bunch of little touches that make development easier.

Links Drop

TownSquare is an interesting project. It embeds at the bottom of your page and lets people visiting your site talk to each other.

Build your own robot vacuum, assembled from the parts of other robot vacuums.

Or you can build Sesame, a small walking robot that’ll cost you less — around 60 dollars. It also comes with Sesame Studio, where you can animate its movements, or integrate it with Google Gemini.

If you want to test how your Windows computer will behave with less RAM, there’s a way to limit it.

The third version of Immich, the software for managing your photos, is out. It adds non-destructive photo editing, the ability to create workflows, sorting by import date, and faster photo browsing.

Closing Visual

When a robot demo doesn’t quite go to plan.