So basically since US stopped OpenAI and Anthropic for 4 weeks, it allowed all other AI Labs to almost catch up.
GLM 5.2 caught up, Cognition RL'ed Kimi 2.7, Grok 4.5 is out, DeepSeek v4 GA is out in a few days...
What is the moat? and why should we pay for the expensive tokens today instead of just waiting a few months/weeks and getting AI for significantly cheaper?
I must say, I feel like companies spending Millions on Anthropic tokens are just negative capex'ing and wasting money, even OpenAI is barely ok pricing...
This is the bind of an arms race. Any lab that tries to pump the breaks quickly becomes second rate. Regulatory capture doesn't work either because the technology crosses jurisdictions.
just because one model is stopped from being released publicly doesnt mean they completely stop. Anthropic has moved on to training the next gen model months ago.
Non-US Anthropic employees had to stop using mythos/fable though, so that may have slowed them down a bit
But they sure have less incentives in doing it quick.
"Almost" is doing a lot of work there; there is no alternative to Fable.
You can get fable-ish performance with gpt 5.5 watching over opus output. Although it fundementally cannot work as well because gpt 5.5 doesn't see the thinking process behind opus 4.8 unlike fable which presumeably self-steers and is natively trained for it.
See more: https://omp.sh - turn on advisor and set advisor role to gpt 5.5 xhigh thinking.
I have been using GPT 5.5 to review Opus implementation and vice versa.
This does not require any special tools, the skill creators in Claude Code or Codex can set this up for you in five minutes.
It is good for catching bugs, particularly edge cases, and it often suggests abstractions.
It does noting to make Opus deliver the more usable results Fable gives me for user facing features, where the UI typically looked and worked better out of the box with Fable. With Opus, I have to test it myself and give it my feedback first.
Advisor is such a killer hidden feature
Also burns through token budgets