TBPN

Facebook gets a Movie, Anthropic gets a Fable

June 10, 2026

Happy Wednesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is the SpaceX IPO will turn 4,400 employees into millionaires.

Today’s lineup

Clicky Founder Farza Majeed at 11:30 AM
Sidetalk Co-Founder Trent Simonian at 11:45 AM
Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy at 12:00 PM
Cloudflare Co-Founder & CEO Matthew Prince at 12:30 PM
Khosla Ventures Founder Vinod Khosla at 1:00 PM
Pramaana Labs Co-Founder Ranjan Rajagopalan at 1:15 PM
Poetic Founder & CEO Markie Wagner at 1:30 PM
Sierra Co-Founder Bret Taylor at 1:50 PM

Run of Show

The Social Reckoning

The trailer for the Social Reckoning dropped. It’s the sequel to the Social Network and instead of chronicling the birth of Facebook, the story is based on the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen. It’s going to be dramatic, it’s not going to make people like Facebook more, and it’s probably going to make Americans even more distrustful of tech.

Movies are important, but they can’t completely turn the tide for the long term prospects of a company. Market structures, execution, and many other aspects of business are more important, but this film will have impacts in a few ways:

Short term: This was great timing that the trailer dropped the same time as Fable 5. Tech insiders won’t really see or talk about Social Reckoning this week. (Case in point the trailer is not the main story in this newsletter.)

Medium Term: Jeremy Strong is going to drag Mark into the “bad” group of AI leaders while he’s on his Oscar tour with lots of emotional soundbites and viral moments. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the next version of a Bernie Sanders press release be: Dario, Sam, Mark. (Historically it has been Sam, Dario, Demis). It’s always based on perceived industry power + negativity around personal brand.

Long term: I think The Social Reckoning is unlikely to matter much for Meta. People will complain about Meta’s data centers, AI plans, and political decisions directly on Meta’s family of apps. There won’t be churn. Mark won’t be singled out by the regulatory hammer should it come down hard. Only Dario and Sam have true scapegoat risk because they run pure-play labs and have been so noisy about AI (and have the biggest revenues in the category). There might be data center regulation but it won’t unfairly target Meta. — John

Fable Debates

Massive debate on the timeline yesterday, bleeding into today, around Anthropic’s latest model, Fable 5, their first “Mythos-class” model that both seems remarkably good at long horizon tasks like software development and knowledge work, but rejects requests related to biology, cybersecurity, and frontier LLM development. This aligns with Anthropic’s focus on safety, but as many people have pointed out, is also just good business. You don’t want competitors using your products to directly create competitors and you also don’t want financial liability or negative headlines from bad actors using your models for nefarious purposes. Ben Thompson called it “true alignment” - the “take safety seriously” culture aligns with business value creation.

What is so fascinating about Anthropic, however, is that while I am sure some executives at the company are thinking this way, I also totally believe that they — and the employee base broadly — also happen to believe that they are doing the right thing. It’s fascinating to observe: me, the rational business analyst, sees a hard-nosed but understandable business decision to cut off would-be competitors; Anthropic employees and advocates, the true believers, see a regrettable but understandable safety decision that ensures that responsible and thoughtful people — themselves, of course — will be the ones guiding our AGI future. This is true alignment, and it’s an incredible accomplishment.

Rare. Facebook has tousled with this a bunch, as we’ll talk about later in the newsletter today. To be clear, the Fable 5 rejection threshold really does feel way too low. Tons of examples on the timeline of a biologist just saying “hi” to the model and getting kicked down to Opus. Basic questions about middle school bio get rejected, but again, this is good business. Every rejection is an implicit invitation to hop on the phone with an Anthropic sales rep and get on a Mythos enterprise plan. That’s where the real dollars are too. The timeline is unhappy because the idea of democratizing science, technology, etc. is so alluring, but the pool of dollars available from all the biohackers in the world probably isn’t close to the budgets available from big pharma.

The real tricky part is how frontier AI research is handled. Instead of outright rejecting the query and bumping the user down to Opus, the model appears to answer, but quietly gives a degraded answer. Again, this is a reasonable business decision, you don’t want competitors using your products to create direct competitors, and there are good geopolitical reasons for not allowing near-peer competitors to catch up. But the odd thing is that the model does respond, and Anthropic disclosed this behavior. Outright rejecting requests for AI research and just saying “Hey user, sorry, but this model doesn’t work for that type of project, please use another model or contact sales if you want help with this.” would have been much more in line with the bio and cybersecurity strategies. And then they also could have not disclosed this functionality at all. They could have just released a model that was intentionally nerfed on AI research, it would have shown up in the benchmarks, and that might have been a little bit of a brand hit, but users might never know that the model was intentionally degraded around this category of work. This leaves a third, more worrying position, intentional degradation without disclosure in the model card. There’s no evidence of this, but it’s possible that other workflows might be nerfed and there’s no law or even convention around disclosure. Again, maybe good business, but a weird situation to be in. Probably bullish for evals if you’re building a business on top of a big lab. A legal AI company will want to really be sure that the models they use aren’t degrading unexpectedly. — John

The Pentagon vs. Unitree

The Pentagon has added Chinese robotics company Unitree to its list of companies allegedly assisting China’s military. Other companies added to the list include Alibaba, BYD, and Baidu. Here’s the Pentagon’s reasoning:

Unitree is indirectly owned by and indirectly affiliated with SASAC. Unitree is a military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base because it knowingly received assistance from the Government of China through science, technology, or industrial efforts initiated, granted, or created by, or provided under, or related to, the Chinese military planning apparatus or in furtherance of Chinese military industrial planning objectives through its designation as a “Little Giant”.

The timing is hard to ignore. Just as Unitree is beginning to emerge as a potential global leader in robotics, the company is now facing increased scrutiny from the Pentagon. According to a recent SemiAnalysis blog post about Unitree, “We are witnessing the birth of another Chinese hardware giant.” SemiAnalysis argues that Unitree is following the same playbook that helped DJI dominate the drone market. Unitree’s cost structure is what’s really helping it stand out, with the robotics company cutting prices for its flagship G1 humanoid robot from $50k to $27k. They are also nearing shipment of their 10,000th humanoid robot, while many Western robotics companies are still lagging behind. — Jackson

Clip Spotlight: RJ Scaringe says Rivian plans to roll out fully autonomous driving by 2028.

"Getting to Level 4, which is the idea of the vehicle driving empty, you sitting in the backseat, picking up groceries for you, or dropping you at the airport, the car won't ask you to take over in any situation. It's fully on its own. Our timeline for that is 2028.”

Headlines

WSJ: Anthropic Releases New ‘Mythos-Class’ Model to General Public With Guardrails

The Social Network sequel releases its first trailer

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FT: German start-up Neura raises $1.4bn in humanoid robot push

The Information: Exclusive: OpenAI Preps New AI Model, Expects To Go Public ‘Within the Next Year’

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WSJ: Anti-Nvidia Data-Center Startup Is Valued at $1.55 Billion in New Funding Round