Andrew Singleton's satirical parable describes a crematorium owner who receives a $20 billion investment from a propane company owner for 5% of her business. She burns $10 billion in cash, then pays the investor $10 billion for propane to incinerate it, allowing him to report $10 billion in revenue and claim ownership of a $100 billion enterprise. A journalist profiles them with a glowing but financially vague story. The tale mocks how AI ventures can fabricate massive valuations through circular spending without genuine productivity, while media overlooks substantive scrutiny.
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 alongside the unguarded Claude Mythos 5, both with 1M context, 128K max output, and Jan 2026 knowledge cutoff. Priced at $10/M input and $50/M output tokens, it is twice the cost of Opus 4.8 and notably slow but performed impressively on code-heavy tasks. Simon Willison found it spontaneously re-implemented his micropython-wasm project with full CPython, and via Claude Code it autonomously added human-in-the-loop tool approval to LLM and Datasette Agent, producing LLM 0.32a3. Its factual recall of niche open-source details suggests a very large model size. Daily usage cost reached $110.42 under a $100/month plan.
Uber is capping employee usage of AI coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor to $1,500 per month per tool. This policy comes after the company blew through its 2026 AI budget in just four months. The limits apply only to agentic coding software, not other AI tools. The cost cap per engineer per year is roughly 11% of their median compensation package. Simon Willison notes this is a rational response to overspending and provides a benchmark for the value Uber gets from these tools.
The May 2026 newsletter covers recent trends in AI, including rising costs and Anthropic's strong performance. It mentions disappointing model releases, conference highlights, and the launch of Datasette Agent. The author shares progress on Datasette and personal tools. The newsletter is available to sponsors with a preview of the previous issue.