The Government Gate Opens: Why Anthropic Shipped Three Things at Once
Five days ago, OpenAI announced GPT-5.6 Sol as a "government-gated limited preview." The company said the quiet part out loud: "At their request, we are starting with a limited preview... We don't believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default." This morning, the Department of Commerce lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Five days. That's how long the government-gated frontier lasted. And in the same breath, Anthropic shipped three things at once. The Three-Card Play Anthropic didn't just announce one thing this morning. They announced three: Card One: Claude Sonnet 5. The most agentic Sonnet model yet. Close to Opus 4.8 but at lower prices ($2/M input, $10/M output intro). It makes plans, uses tools, runs autonomously at a level that "just a few months ago required larger and more expensive models." Brownfield code, multi-step workflows, unstashing bugs to verify fixes. "An…