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Anthropic's Opus 5 surprise

PLUS: Automate tasks with Claude’s ‘Record a Skill’ feature

Zach Mink

July 27, 2026

Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to the 5,515 new readers who joined us yesterday. Anthropic just launched a new flagship model… in a way no one expected.

The new Opus 5 is here with eval scores better than 4.8, as we all expected. What’s surprising is that it even out-benches Fable 5 on many benchmarks, at a price that’s hard to ignore.

In today’s AI rundown:

Anthropic punches up with Claude Opus 5
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
Automate tasks with Claude’s ‘Record a Skill’ feature
Industry giants unite to protect open models
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🎬 Anthropic punches up with Claude Opus 5

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude Opus 5 across the Claude apps, Claude Code, and the API, describing it as a “thoughtful and proactive” AI that nears the intelligence of its Fable 5 model at half the price.

The details:

Opus 5 hits SOTA on agentic terminal coding, knowledge work, agentic search, and computer use tasks, outperforming both Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.
On ARC-AGI-3, it hit 30.2%, 3x as high as the next best model, also ranking #1 on Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index leaderboard.
Anthropic ran the new model on International Math Olympiad 2026 problems, where it scored 42 out of 42, well past the 29-point gold threshold.
The company describes it as its most aligned AI, noting that it matches Mythos 5 at finding software bugs but stays well behind it at writing exploits.

Why it matters: This is Anthropic filling Fable gaps with what it does best: offering intelligence from a tier above at a far lower price. So far, it’s been Sonnet matching Opus. Now, it’s Opus matching Fable at $5 and $25 per million tokens (same as 4.8), giving people who won’t pay Fable rates a reliable and powerful option to work with.

TOGETHER WITH MULTIVERSE

🧠 Frontier AI without the frontier bill

The Rundown: Multiverse Computing’s CompactifAI API gives developers a curated catalog of frontier-class models, optimized for coding and output-heavy workloads, at a fraction of the cost of the leading providers.

Using CompactifAI API, you can:

Match Sonnet 5’s intelligence tier, per Artificial Analysis benchmarks
Pay $1.10/$3.50 per 1M tokens, up to 65% less than Sonnet 5 on output
Drop into Cursor, LiteLLM, OpenCode, or n8n with no migration or rewrites

Create your free account.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Billy, Educator: For months, my dishwasher has been malfunctioning in a specific way. The bottom rack would come out squeaky clean, but the top rack would come out dirty. I disassembled and replaced the filter, but no dice. I had a plumber come 3 times, no dice. We replaced the dishwasher with a new model, no dice.

Finally, last week I got so frustrated that I pulled out my phone and started ranting to GPT-Live. It asked me a few diagnostic questions, then told me it must be that there’s a kink in a hose under my sink. I opened the cabinet, and in the back corner there was a hose that was kinked like a garden hose. So I fixed it, and it immediately solved the problem that 3 plumber visits couldn’t fix. 😂

Rowan, CEO: On social media, Instagram followers that never engage drag down your overall viewership, so I set out to remove them. But no tool can legitimately find them, since Instagram’s API doesn’t expose engagement data.

So as a simple workaround, I exported my Instagram data as JSON, dropped it into Claude Fable 5 with my recent likers, and had it scan the two lists to flag every silent account. Without Claude, I would’ve had to manually review 450k+ lines. This type of social media management simply wasn’t possible until now.

AI TRAINING

⏺️ Automate tasks with Claude’s ‘Record a Skill’ feature

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to record a task with Claude’s Record a Skill and turn it into an automation. Claude learns from your screen, actions, and narration, then suggests the best setup for a reusable skill.

Step-by-step:

Install Claude in Chrome and pick a task, possibly a local workflow
Open Claude Cowork in the app, click the + button, select “Record a Skill.” Then, do the task as you normally would, without worrying about errors
Explain what you’re doing out loud because Claude will learn from what you say, your computer actions, and suggest the best way to automate the workflow
Click “Save the skill,” then test it on a fresh task to make sure it works

Pro tip: Add the new skill to a daily or weekly recurring task so Claude can run the workflow automatically and save you more time.

Get resources, prompts, and a full step-by-step video guide here.

PRESENTED BY FIN

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In this session, you’ll explore:

Why AI is reshaping support economics
What's changed in AI reliability and scale
How one team hit a 73% resolution rate

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OPEN SOURCE AI

🛡️ Industry giants unite to protect open models

Image source: Jensen Huang / X

The Rundown: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and 47 other tech companies, VCs, and nonprofits just signed an open letter urging Washington not to restrict open-weight AI models — giving a bunch of reasons why it’s crucial to U.S. AI leadership.

The details:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang first shared the letter, his first post on X, with 25 signatories but a few crucial ones missing, including OpenAI.
In a day, the letter garnered widespread support, with signatories doubling as OpenAI, Google, AMD, Cisco, and others joined — but not Anthropic.
The letter argues that open weights expand access to the AI economy, keep competition alive, broaden cyber defense, and help avoid vendor lock-in.
It also notes that distillation should not be confused with misappropriation and calls to avoid premature restrictions that push AI innovation overseas.

Why it matters: The letter comes amid accusations that Chinese labs extracted intelligence from U.S. models, including Anthropic’s Fable. Washington’s response remains unclear, but the pressure is on the lone U.S. frontier lab off the list, the one to gain most from a crackdown. And people are already asking for answers.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🧠 Opus 5 - Anthropic’s flagship tier model matching Fable 5 at half the cost
📽️ Photon-1 - Induction Labs’ ‘imagination AI’ that learns from unlabeled clips
🔀 Merge Fusion - A multi-model API for higher-quality AI answers
🖥️ OpenWorker - Andrew Ng’s privacy-focused open-source AI agent

📰 Everything else in AI today

Apple is reportedly preparing to unveil its first AI glasses at WWDC 2027, with a strong focus on camera safeguards and on-device AI to address privacy concerns.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis revealed that the company’s open-source Gemma model series has hit 900M downloads, with Gemma 4 alone surpassing 300M.

OpenAI’s AI agent reportedly began attempting to escape its sandbox on July 9, but the company only realized it had hacked Hugging Face after the breach was disclosed on July 16.

Midjourney acquired AI-powered astrology app Co-Star, with founder Banu Guler joining as chief design officer while the app continues to operate independently.

Meta introduced agentic capabilities to Meta AI, enabling it to plan, research, create presentations, and proactively complete tasks using connected apps.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Lynn in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

“I recently lost a lot of weight, which means replacing a large portion of my clothing. I read about the ‘capsule wardrobe’ and knew that, as a grandma, I needed to keep my purchases to a minimum. I looked on the web and found lots of ‘use this’ ideas. None seemed to break it down quite far enough for me to turn it into a shopping list.

I asked ChatGPT to show me one. Then a picture popped up. Exactly what I needed to get started! Then I asked it to show me how to mix-and-match pieces, and it went right to work. After weeks of scrolling and being confused, I finally had a visual answer to my questions. Next, I was able to inventory what pieces I already had, such as blazers and tops, and get a clear view of the holes in my closet.

I even topped it off with links to the perfect accessories to make new outfits stunning. I can’t wait to go shopping.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.