Daily Briefing: Japan's $6.2B AI Bet and the Race to Break the Oligopoly

Japan's $6.2 billion commitment to SoftBank-led AI model development and Together AI's $800M Series C represent two fundamentally different strategies for breaking the frontier lab oligopoly. Japan is pursuing national AI sovereignty through government-funded domestic capability, while Together AI bets that open-source economics will commoditize closed frontier models. Meanwhile, Meituan's model — trained entirely on Chinese-made chips and now the most popular on OpenRouter — quietly complicates both strategies by suggesting the frontier may already be more accessible than the current power structure assumes. The episode also covers the lifting of US export controls on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5, Anthropic's new Claude Sonnet 5, and the ongoing restricted  ...