Fable 5.1 Launch, Meta $18B Settlement, AWS DuckLabs Deal

AI

Anthropic Ships Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1

Anthropic released Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on September 1. Fable 5.1 is the general-availability model. Mythos 5.1 is a restricted-access variant tuned for cybersecurity and life-science research. Both share the same underlying weights with different safety configurations.

Pricing stays at $10 input and $50 output per million tokens. Cache reads drop 75% to $0.25 per million tokens. The models are available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

According to the system card, Fable 5.1 produced a high-resolution elevation map of Venus from NASA Magellan radar data. Mythos 5.1 wrote custom GPU kernels that sped up seven open-source computational biology models by up to 2.5x. Anthropic calls the pair its most advanced models for coding and knowledge work.

Zhipu Releases GLM-5.3-Flash, a 320B MoE Model

Chinese AI company Zhipu AI open-sourced GLM-5.3-Flash under the MIT license. The model has 320 billion total parameters with 18 billion active, using a Mixture of Experts architecture. It is the first natively multimodal model in the GLM-5 series.

Before the official launch, Zhipu tested it anonymously as “Ox Alpha” on a public platform. It drew 50 trillion tokens of traffic in five days. It scored 57 on the AA Comprehensive Intelligence Index, matching Claude Opus 4.8.

The model runs on a cluster of 100,000 domestically manufactured chips. API pricing is $0.075 input and $0.25 output per million tokens during a promotional window through September 9, then $0.15/$0.50. It demonstrates that Chinese AI firms can serve frontier-scale models on domestic semiconductors.

Lasso Security Launches GPU-Free AI Guardrail LEAP

Israeli AI security startup Lasso Security announced LEAP, a transformer-free guardrail that runs entirely on CPUs. It delivers sub-5ms decisions and thousands of times the throughput of existing GPU-based guardrails.

Alongside the product launch, Lasso disclosed a $30M Series A led by ClearSky. Entree Capital, iAngels, Singtel Innov8, and others participated. Total funding now exceeds $37M.

Removing the GPU dependency makes AI safety easier to deploy at scale. As agentic AI proliferates, the demand for real-time guardrails is growing. Lasso counts the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, BMW, eToro, and Fiverr among its customers.

Big Tech

Meta Pays Up to $18 Billion in Child Safety Settlement

Meta reached a settlement of up to $18 billion with 48 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. The lawsuit alleged that Instagram and Facebook were deliberately designed to hook young users. This is the largest tech-company settlement over child safety to date.

Under the terms, teen users face a two-hour daily time limit. Notifications will be muted during school hours, and a non-algorithmic feed option becomes mandatory. $12.7 billion goes to an online-safety fund. An additional $5.3 billion is contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting similar protections.

Morgan Stanley analysts say the settlement removes a legal overhang that could clear the way for new AI products. Meta projects up to $145 billion in capital expenditure for 2026 as it accelerates AI investment.

Aesto Health Breach Exposes 9.5 Million Patient Records

Alabama-based healthcare IT vendor Aesto Health disclosed that 9,540,683 patient records were compromised. Unauthorized access to its AWS infrastructure occurred between December 2 and 18, 2025. Medical, insurance, financial, and government ID data were exposed.

Aesto Health provides data migration and archiving services for multiple healthcare organizations. A single vendor breach therefore cascades across many providers and their patients. According to HIPAA Journal, this is the second-largest healthcare data breach of the year, behind DentaQuest’s 15 million records.

The incident was formally reported to the HHS Office for Civil Rights. It underscores how the security posture of a healthcare data archiver directly affects millions of patients.

Open Source

DuckDB Stays MIT-Licensed Despite AWS Acquiring DuckLabs

AWS signed an agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind DuckDB. The team of over 30 engineers will join AWS. However, DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack remain MIT-licensed under the independent DuckDB Foundation.

AWS acquired the team, not the code or intellectual property. Co-founders Hannes Muhleisen and Mark Raasveldt will continue leading the project’s technical direction. According to the AWS blog, the two organizations have collaborated since early 2025 on Amazon S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse integration.

The structure is notable: code lives in a Foundation while the team joins a cloud provider. It could serve as a reference model for open-source governance in future acquisitions.

Firefox 155 Brings Faster Networking and Remains the Only uBlock Origin Browser

Mozilla released Firefox 155 on September 1. Happy Eyeballs v3 now tries multiple connection methods in parallel and picks the fastest one. QUIC v2 support improves HTTP/3 performance.

Starting with Firefox 155, the release cadence shifts from four weeks to two. Developer tools gain a JSON Lines document viewer and a keyboard shortcut for disabling breakpoints.

Firefox is now the only major browser that fully supports uBlock Origin. After Google removed the extension from Chrome, Mozilla publicly committed to keeping it supported.

VoiceStudio: A Local-First Alternative to ElevenLabs

VoiceStudio has been climbing the GitHub Trending charts. It supports voice cloning, voice design, video dubbing, dictation, transcription, and audiobook creation in 646 languages. Everything runs locally with no accounts, API keys, or cloud connections required.

The Model Catalogue feature manages TTS, ASR, and LLM engines in a single workspace. Engine switching is available from the status bar. The project has 9.8K GitHub stars and over 221,000 downloads.

VoiceStudio is released under the AGPL-3.0 license. It offers a privacy-first alternative to cloud-based voice AI services, processing all audio locally without sending data to external servers.

References

Anthropic’s new Fable release is cheaper, less restrictive — TechCrunch
Claude Fable 5.1 & Mythos 5.1 System Card — Anthropic
Zhipu identifies Ox Alpha as GLM-5.3-Flash — TechNode
Zhipu AI shares jump as viral Ox Alpha model revealed — South China Morning Post
Lasso Security Announces Future of AI Security with CPU-based Guardrails — GlobeNewsWire
Meta settles for $18 billion — TechCrunch
Meta’s $18 billion settlement clears way for new AI products — CNBC
Aesto Health says data breach affects over 9.5 million patients — BleepingComputer
Aesto Health Data Breach — HIPAA Journal
AWS to acquire DuckLabs — Amazon
AWS and DuckLabs: Building the future of analytics together — AWS Blog
AWS to Acquire DuckLabs, DuckDB Project Stays Open Source — Linuxiac
Firefox 155 release notes for developers — Mozilla MDN
Firefox new release cadence — Mozilla Blog
Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin — PCWorld
VoiceStudio — GitHub