US lifts Anthropic export controls as Claude Sonnet 5 ships

The Commerce Department removed the export freeze it imposed on June 12, when Amazon researchers found a jailbreak that could coax Claude Fable 5 into producing cyberattack guidance. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said his department spent two weeks working with Anthropic to approve the model; Anthropic agreed to proactively detect and report security risks and began restoring public access on July 1. It closes a standoff that had forced the company to pull both frontier models offline on 90 minutes' notice.

Separately, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, its most agentic mid-tier model yet — the company says it approaches Opus 4.8 on cost-performance curves while planning and self-verifying multi-step tasks in fewer steps. Introductory pricing runs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, then rises to $3 and $15. Sonnet 5 becomes the default model on Free and Pro plans and is available in Claude Code and the API.

Google launched Nano Banana 2 Lite, its fastest and cheapest image model — four-second generations at 3.4 cents per thousand images, aimed at high-volume developer pipelines. It slots below the generalist Nano Banana 2 and the pricier Nano Banana Pro, and rolls out across the Gemini API, AI Studio, Search, the Gemini app, NotebookLM, and Google Photos. Alongside it, the new Gemini Omni Flash turns images into ten-second videos at 10 cents per second of output.

Amazon Web Services launched a $1 billion forward-deployed engineering organization — teams that embed on-site with customers to build custom AI agents, then hand off the skills so clients can keep going on their own. It follows the forward-deployed model Palantir pioneered and the joint ventures OpenAI and Anthropic recently spun up, valued at $4 billion and $1.5 billion. The move is a bet that most enterprises stall not on model quality but on getting AI into production.

Etched, the startup building chips specialized purely for AI inference rather than general-purpose GPUs, said it has booked $1 billion in contracts for its frontier inference clusters and carries a $5 billion valuation. Backed by Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, and angels including Andrej Karpathy and Geoffrey Hinton, the Harvard-dropout-founded company is chasing the inference bottleneck that dominates AI costs at scale — where it takes on Nvidia, Cerebras, and Groq.

Wayve, the nine-year-old British self-driving company, opened an $85 million tender offer letting employees cash out at an $8.5 billion valuation — its second liquidity event, four months after a $1.2 billion Series D. Rather than mapping roads in advance, its software is an end-to-end neural network that learns to drive from data. Wayve plans robotaxi pilots with Uber later this year and will feed its AI into Nissan driver-assist systems from 2027.

Meta and Spain's Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language published Brain2Qwerty, a deep-learning system that decodes typed sentences from non-invasive brain scans — reaching 61 percent word accuracy, and 78 percent for its best participant, versus roughly 8 percent for earlier non-invasive methods. It still needs a room-sized brain scanner, so it is a research milestone rather than a product, but it points toward communication tools for people with brain injuries that skip surgical implants. Meta released the code and dataset.

The Godot game engine updated its contribution rules to forbid AI-written code, autonomous-agent pull requests, and AI-generated text in maintainer discussions — allowing only menial help like code completion, with disclosure required. The open-source project said a surge of machine-generated submissions overwhelmed its small pool of volunteer reviewers and broke the mentorship pipeline, because — in its words — AI cannot take responsibility and heavy AI users often can't understand their own code well enough to fix it.