Head of Strategy, Custody & Staking at Kraken. Previously co-founded Staked, acquired by Kraken in 2021. 1st GM at Vimeo. UPenn alum. Chargers & Heat fan.
Yesterday, @Saronic was in the news because in a first-of-its-kind operation, a Saronic Corsair ASV rescued two US soldiers from the Strait of Hormuz.
Today, we're thrilled to share the first feature from Arena 008: At Sea. @juliasteinberg goes to Austin to visit the startup building autonomous boats and ships.
I looked into the U.S. Navy's Corsair drone boat that just rescued two American pilots in the Strait of Hormuz, and the engineering is remarkable.
Built by Texas-based Saronic Technologies, the Corsair is a 24-foot autonomous surface vessel powered by AI. It hits 40 mph, carries 1,000 pounds of payload, and can sail more than 1,000 miles without a human aboard. Each unit costs roughly $1 million to produce, which is a fraction of what comparable manned naval assets cost.
The platform runs on Saronic's autonomy stack, which fuses real-time sensor data, computer vision, and AI decision-making to navigate, identify targets, and execute mission objectives without remote piloting. It's part of the Navy's Task Force 59, the unit dedicated to AI-powered unmanned vessels operating in the Middle East.
Saronic stood this up in 12 months from prototype to production. The company is on track to build more than 20 vessels per year by 2027.
This is what American AI looks like in the field. 🇺🇸
Fable 5 is the biggest step up I’ve felt in our models since Opus 4.5 back in November. After 4.5 came out I uninstalled my IDE when I realized that I’d been doing 100% of my coding in a terminal for a few weeks. With Fable, it’s felt like Claude has stepped up from being a coding agent to a thought and design partner in building the product. Fable has judgement, taste, and dimensionality in a way that previous models didn’t, leading me to trust it more with the most complex work.
I think the first time I had this realization was when I asked Fable to debug something. It is the first model I have used that was so methodical and precise, taking measurements and adding logs then verifying that it truly fixed the issue before declaring victory.
There’s nothing in claude code’s prompting telling the model to do that, it’s just part of its personality. It really has this “big model smell” that I haven’t felt before.
BREAKING:
Anthropic just dropped Claude Fable 5—this is Mythos, made safe for public release. It is the best coding model in the world.
We've been testing it internally @every for the last week or so across coding, writing, marketing, editing, and more—here's our vibe check:
- It broke our benchmarks. Fable scored a 91/100 on our Senior Engineer benchmark—this is human senior engineer level. The previous high score was Opus 4.8 at 63. GPT-5.5 is a 62.
- It's a one-shot wonder. You can set it and forget for hours or overnight on huge coding tasks, and come back to completed work. It cleared entire production bug backlogs, built a playable 3D, and even made a 2-minute animated film—all one-shot.
- Taste and attention to detail. In coding and knowledge work tasks, it has much better taste and attention to detail than we've ever seen. It gets subtle things right, adds little features you might not have thought of, and generally understands the assignment in ways that surprised us.
- Great use of context. We set it loose analyzing customer feedback surveys and our website data and it came back with a crisp, clean report that identified a. our biggest problem and b. a concrete testable solution—and then we sent it off to build that.
- It's best for power users. If you're already used to orchestrating multiple agents in your work, this model can do things that you've never seen before. If you're a knowledge worker or vibe coder with a more basic setup, you're not going to notice a huge difference—in fact, it probably isn't the right model for you.
- It's very slow, token-hungry. Using this thing for regular knowledge work is like squashing an ant with a rocket launcher. It also routinely uses 500k to 1M tokens on tasks. That's why it's best for your heaviest jobs—but not as good for tasks like collaborative writing.
- It's expensive. It's about twice as expensive as Opus, and it's also incredibly token hungry—so expect it to be something you'll use sparingly unless your company pays for it.
Overall, I think of it like a warp drive for coding: It can get you across the galaxy in a few hours, when it used to take months or years. But it's not appropriate for getting around town—you need something faster, cheaper, and more maneuverable.
The ceiling is extraordinarily high on this model though. Even our most advanced testers like @kieranklaassen felt like they were only scratching the surface of it.
Want our full vibe check with all of our testing and benchmarks? Read it on @every: https://t.co/MgJLZszJUB
Two US aviators went down near the Strait of Hormuz. DoW used an autonomous @Saronic Corsair to find and bring them home - the 1st drone rescue at sea in military history.
This is why we build: to keep our troops safe. This was science fiction. American builders made it real 🇺🇸.
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness has grown to more than $20B in assets, per WSJ.
The fund gained about 270% after fees this year through May and is up more than 1,000% since inception.
Anthropic now represents about 20% of the fund’s assets, while investors include Jane Street, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, Daniel Gross, and Nat Friedman.
NVIDIA $NVDA AND SK HYNIX JUST ANNOUNCED A MULTIYEAR TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIP
SK Hynix will codevelop memory for four specific NVIDIA platforms: Vera Rubin AI supercomputers, Vera CPUs, RTX Spark-powered PCs, and Jetson Thor robotic computing platforms.
SK Hynix will apply AI to semiconductor chip design and manufacturing itself, using NVIDIA's CUDA-X libraries and PhysicsNeMo framework to accelerate chip simulations and engineering workflows.
SK Hynix will build factory digital twins using NVIDIA Omniverse, targeting fully autonomous fab operations.
"AI factories are the engines of the next industrial revolution, and advanced memory is essential to their performance." - Jensen Huang
California is very obviously stealing the elections for Mayor and Governor. Time to hold this criminal enterprise accountable, and send them all to jail 🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
Uhhh… your memory is failing, my friend. And this was sent after the dinner, not before. Have the receipts. I don’t begrudge you in any way, but let’s be truthful.
Oh Wow.
Trump ended an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker mid-conversation in Wisconsin, calling her a liar to her face before walking off.
Trump: "The elections are like a 3rd world country. You're Crooked...let's call it Quits . I've had enough."
Welker asked him to stay, saying she had traveled to Wisconsin for the sit-down.
Trump: "I've sat in the rain with you for an Hour! I've given you enough time. You ought to straighten out your press. You know what? A country can never be great with a dishonest press. Let's GO."
If an Anthropic employee got $500k/year in equity over 4 years in 2024, they are now worth $125M.
At $1M/year equity for 4 years, they are worth about $250M.
The scale and speed of wealth creation are incomprehensible.
$500k/year equity is not a lot for an early-stage startup. I don't think the Bay Area has seen this type of wealth creation in history.
Dot com boom probably feels like a speck of dust.
Two of our worst VC stories:
1. A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company. Seriously. 🙄
2. I got introduced to @pmarca. Meeting got scheduled for a Monday, which should have been a clue. I thought it was just a casual meeting. He thought it was a pitch and brought the whole @a16z partnership team. Hilarity ensued. 🤪 At one point one of them said: “You don’t seem very prepared.” Which was true because I wasn’t. I framed the rejection letter they sent.