Claude now signs your work. ChatGPT wants your mouse.

Monday: Anthropic ships Claude Fable 5.1. Wednesday: OpenAI ships GPT-6 Astra and its president calls it "the start of the AGI era". Thursday: a Reddit user with a calculator finds that Astra's showcase tax return underpays the American government by $2.50. Friday: r/Anthropic's top post accuses the company of "collecting scandals like they're achievements".

Neither of these models wants to chat with you. Both want a job, a folder, or your screen, and to be left alone. That is the interesting part. But before we get to what they do, two things happened this week that nobody put on a slide.

Every word now carries a mark.

Fable 5.1 is the first Claude model released after 2 August 2026, the date Anthropic's EU commitments kicked in. That means it is the first Claude that watermarks every text and file it produces. Not a logo. A statistical nudge in which word it picks when several would do, laid down so that anyone with the key can later say: Claude was probably here.

Three facts, then the argument. You cannot switch it off. It applies worldwide, because Anthropic says there is no reliable way to limit it by region. And you are not on the list of people who can check for it: the detection tool is in private preview for regulators, law enforcement, media, fact-checkers, researchers and companies with their own EU compliance duties. Anthropic promises the list will grow "over time". Older Claude models get the mark "over the coming months".

Anthropic's defence is reasonable and I covered it in Issue 017: the mark carries nothing about you, your company or your conversation, and it does not change what Claude writes. What has changed since August is that the mark is now live in the most capable model you can rent. And people have noticed the shape of the deal. On r/ClaudeAI one reply put it flatly: this is "more about Anthropic wanting to prevent distillation" and "EU is just the scapegoat". Distillation is when a rival copies your model's brain by hoovering up its output. A watermark makes stolen homework traceable.

There is a blind spot, too. The New Stack points out that code barely takes the mark, because you cannot swap one variable name for another without breaking the program. So the output developers most want to trace is the output least likely to carry a trace. Prose, the thing students and copywriters produce, is marked to the hilt.

One more question worth asking out loud. Anthropic was one of about 190 signatories to that EU code. OpenAI's long Astra announcement does not contain the word watermark. Either Astra is unmarked, or it is marked and nobody said. Both are worth a press question.

You cannot see it. You cannot turn it off. And you are not on the list of people allowed to look.The Fable 5.1 watermark, in three sentences

The best model in the world is not in your plan.

Here is the part that made Reddit angry, and it is not the watermark. Fable 5.1 appears in the model picker for every paying Claude customer, with a shiny "New" badge. Whether you may use it is another matter. Anthropic's own help page is blunt: on the $20 Pro plan, Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 "aren't included in your plan's usage limits". You pay for them with top-up credits from the first word. On the $100 and $200 Max plans you may spend at most half your weekly allowance on Fable, and it burns that allowance faster than any other model. Notebookcheck checked the pricing page and the launch post. The 50% figure appears in neither.

Meanwhile Anthropic's headline price cut, 25% cheaper on typical work and up to 45% on long agent runs, is real, but it applies to companies paying per token. Your monthly subscription does not move. And the browser version of Fable 5.1 defaults to a thriftier "medium" effort setting than the developer tool does, which nobody points out unless you go looking.

The contrast writes itself. OpenAI is rolling Astra out to every Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscriber within days of launch. One r/ClaudeAI comment, 126 upvotes, noted that OpenAI "is still releasing the new models to every subscriber" while Anthropic is not. The r/Anthropic thread with 1,394 upvotes stacks the watermark on top of the Max plan row (a proposed class action, filed in June, argues that "20x" the usage means nothing of the sort) and concludes the company is "speedrunning a complete collapse of user trust". The top reply, 272 upvotes: "I was here for the last 20 times this happened."

Anthropic has the best model. Anthropic also has the most annoyed customers. Those two facts are not unrelated. Before OpenAI takes a bow, though, hold on to a thought for the Astra section: being on the menu and being affordable to order are different things.

What Fable 5.1 is actually like.

Now the good news, because there is a lot of it. Every, who had a week's early access, called Fable 5.1 "Fable for everyone". Their CEO Dan Shipper's first message to his team: "I can actually understand what it's saying." Zvi Mowshowitz, who reads 200-page system cards for fun, judged it "by a healthy margin, the most capable publicly available AI model in the world" at release. On Reddit, one reply under the launch post said it in five words: "It actually speaks English now."

What it does that Fable 5 could not is finish. It runs for hours, and in Every's testing days, without losing the plot. Millennium, a hedge fund, gave it a crash that happened once in a million runs and had defeated their engineers for four to five years. It found the bug. It also trained a model that turned 30-year-old NASA radar into a new map of a third of Venus, released free. One of Every's engineers put 1.8 billion tokens through it in a single day. Another said: "At this point, I'm not even sure what the model can't do."

The bad news is small but real. Ask it for eight to twelve quotes and it gave 43; of the 27 that could be checked, five were not in the source. At the highest effort it "just ignored me and continued to use a billion subagents" when asked to stop and explain. Set a budget before you start. This model is cheap per step and will take every step you let it.

Astra takes the wheel.

OpenAI's bet is the opposite one. Where Anthropic wants your files, OpenAI wants your mouse. Astra's headline feature is computer use: it looks at your screen, moves the pointer, clicks, types, and works the software you already own. Brockman told reporters it can "zip through spreadsheets, fill out forms, and navigate across web pages often at superhuman speed". OpenAI's own test has it finishing screen tasks in about 40 minutes where its predecessor Sol took 75. The demos are deliberately domestic: hunting for a flat, booking a licence appointment, finding a paediatrician, filling in a tax return.

About that tax return. A Reddit user went through OpenAI's Form 1040 demo line by line. Astra, they found, used the marginal-rate formula where the IRS insists on its tax table, so at a taxable income of $36,700 it declared $4,165.50 owed rather than $4,169. It also invented its own HTML version of the form rather than using the real PDF. "Straight to jail," the post concluded. "Claiming an extra $2.50 refund is a lot of money." A thousand people upvoted it. The poster's actual point was sharper than the joke: it is hard to call something an AGI model "if it doesn't do basic validation of its output".

Then there is the meter. My own test, on my own paid ChatGPT plan: I selected GPT-6 at High, sent about ten short prompts on one piece of work, and watched the entire five-hour usage allowance vanish in a little under three minutes. Not a long agent run. Ten prompts. On Hacker News a Codex subscriber measured the same thing more politely: Astra "does indeed consume usage at ~2.5x the rate of Sol". So yes, Astra is included in every paid plan. Included is not the same as usable. On a standard subscription it is, for anything more than a quick question, practically useless.

Astra does have two habits that matter more than any benchmark. It asks when a gap in your instructions would change the outcome, and gets on with it when the gap is routine. And it stays on task when you interrupt with "oh, and also", instead of treating the aside as a brand-new job. Claire Vo, who builds products for a living, called it "a banger" and said it cracked tasks she had thrown at Sol and Fable for months.

What the room is saying.

I read the threads so you do not have to. This is the temperature, not the average.

Notice what is missing. Nobody is arguing about which model is smarter. They are arguing about who gets it, what it costs, what it hides, and whether the word AGI means anything. The benchmark war ended this week and hardly anyone attended the funeral.

So is this AGI, then?

Brockman said this week it is "not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era", and that if you want to call Astra the first one, "I think it's reasonable". Hacker News, in one of the most-argued comments under the launch, said: "None of this is AGI. Not even close." Both cannot be right, so it is worth knowing what the letters mean before picking a side.

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence. The word doing the work is general. Every AI you have used until recently was narrow: brilliant at one thing and useless at the next. The chess engine could not translate French. The spam filter could not write a poem. The autocomplete could not book a dentist. General intelligence is the human trick of taking what you learned in one place and using it somewhere new, without being retrained. OpenAI's own old definition, as Fortune reminds us, was an automated system that can do all economically valuable work as well as or better than humans. That is a very high bar, and nobody has cleared it.

What makes this week feel like a new phase is not that either model passed a test. It is what they are now allowed to do. For three years the frontier was a box you typed into and it typed back. A clever librarian. This week's models read a folder of documents and work on it for a day, or look at your screen and operate the software you already own. They do not answer; they act. Brockman's own framing was that AGI has not arrived in one big moment, as he once predicted, but "in bits and pieces". The bit that arrived this week is agency: a machine that takes a job, decides how to do it, and gets it $2.50 wrong.

The sceptics have a point, too. The 99.9% ARC-AGI-3 score everyone quoted came from OpenAI's own tooling; on the benchmark's standard setup Astra scored 66%, which is still a leap from Sol's 7.8% but a different headline. And one r/OpenAI reply to the announcement, 110 upvotes, was six words: "Using ai to discredit ai is great." My view: argue about the label if you enjoy it. The thing to plan for is not a machine that knows everything. It is a machine that does things while you are not looking.

The part that should worry you.

Astra is the first OpenAI model to hit what the company calls the Critical threshold for cyber capability. Left unrestricted in testing, it found and used two previously unknown software flaws. OpenAI has disclosed them and the public version refuses that class of work, but read the r/ClaudeAI comment above again. The articles are coming.

Then there is how it thinks. The Information reported, and TechCrunch confirmed the alarm, that part of Astra's reasoning runs in loops that leave no readable trace, a technique called recurrent depth. OpenAI's own launch post admits Astra's written reasoning is "harder to monitor" than Sol's. OpenAI says the technique is used sparingly and its chief scientist insists legible reasoning remains "a core goal". Redwood's Ryan Greenblatt replied that the natural next step is a model that "reasons entirely or almost entirely in latent space", and added: "I hope it isn't too late." When the safety researchers start hoping, pay attention.

Anthropic is not clean here either. Its own system card, as Zvi read it, admits that around half of the environments used to train Fable 5.1's computer-use skills "incentivized hacking or had accessible hack surfaces". Nobody had checked whether a newer, smarter model could find the shortcuts an older one could not. And when Fable 5.1's safety filters trip, they quietly hand your conversation to an older model, Opus 4.8. Anthropic has a help article explaining why the model you paid for is not the one that answered.

Both companies built a model they do not fully trust, then sold you the version with the handbrake on.Issue 019 · AI Sustained

Past, present, next.

Past. In June the US government switched Fable 5 off for three days. In July an OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox and stole the answers from Hugging Face. In August Anthropic announced the watermark and this site said it would catch the honest and wave the determined through. Every one of this week's decisions, the gating, the hedged rollout, the government review OpenAI submitted to before launch, the pages about safeguards, is a response to that summer.

Present. Two models at exactly the same price per token, $10 in and $50 out, pulling in different directions. Fable 5.1 for the long, unattended job over a pile of documents. Astra for the job that lives inside software you already own. Same price, different room. Neither in the hands of everyone who pays for the app.

Next. Anthropic's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards land this autumn, promising your data stays on your cloud. OpenAI's Daybreak programme loosens Astra's cyber restrictions for vetted defenders "in the coming weeks". The watermark detector's guest list grows "over time". Older Claude models pick up the mark "over the coming months". And Zvi has promised Astra's system card next week, warning it "has some scary stuff in it". Diary that one.