Good morning. Andrew Nusca here, back in the saddle after two weeks off. Many thanks to Alexei Oreskovic for the backup while I was away.
I did my best to ignore tech news while I was on family vacation, but you know what I couldn’t avoid? Robot videos.
There’s a new, algorithm-jacking crop of clips depicting record-breaking (and just, uh, breaking) humanoid Chinese robots thanks to the recent World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. For all the robots’ amazing (if unsettling) feats, let’s be real—their hijinks are too funny not to watch on repeat.
So if you need a little levity on a Tuesday morning, by all means set aside a few minutes to crash and burn with the ‘bots. That upcoming budget meeting doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
P.S. A hundred Whose Line Is It Anyway? points to the reader who can come up with the best name for a humanoid robot olympiad. The Clanker Championship? The Rust Bucket Bowl? Reply with your best shot and I might run it in a future edition.
Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.
Anthropic’s costly Claude Fable 5 hits a wall
One of the world’s mightiest AI companies released its mightiest model and adoption has been…well, less than mighty.
Don’t get me wrong: Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, one member of its feared and revered Mythos-class model family, is surely raking in the dough, already representing 11% of corporations’ Anthropic spend two months after its release. (Fable costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.)
But that share of spend has stalled, according to data by payment processor Ramp—a sign that clients aren’t so keen to automatically switch to the latest and greatest AI.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, companies seem to be saying. Especially in this economy.
“If sustained, the shift could radically alter the business model of frontier labs, which have until now funneled the bulk of their multibillion-dollar development spending towards training ever larger, more sophisticated models,” notes the Financial Times. (Bingo.)
By Anthropic’s own admission, its Claude Opus 5 comes close to Fable 5 at half the cost—$5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The extra layer of sophistication that Fable offers? Not a game-changer for most, it seems.
Rival AI shop OpenAI seems to have come to this realization. That San Francisco company, which like Anthropic is on track for a record IPO, cut developer pricing by 20% for its frontier AI model GPT-5.6 Sol, which now costs $4 per 1 million input tokens and $20 per 1 million output tokens.
Let the AI pricing wars begin. —AN
iPhone price hikes are a-comin’
‘Twas only two months ago that Apple raised prices on an array of products, finally succumbing to rising component prices, namely memory chips.
But iPhones—which drive half the company’s annual revenue—were left untouched.
No longer, according to a new report. The folks in Cupertino, no doubt watching Google and Samsung raise prices by about $100 on their latest mobile gadgets, are reportedly preparing to hike iPhone prices in a bid to relieve profit margin pressure and maintain its preferred place amid the competition.
“Matching [Google and Samsung] would put the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,199, up about 9%,” reports Bloomberg. “Given the severity of the memory crunch, that would be a fairly modest bump and suggest Apple is absorbing some of the added costs itself.”
Apple Upgrade, the company’s revamped device-leasing program, could also help ease the pain. The new offering, which replaces the old iPhone Upgrade Program, features lower monthly payments than its predecessor by making it a true lease (rather than an installment plan to own) and dropping AppleCare+ as a bundled offering.
In the meantime, questions abound for Apple’s highly anticipated foldable iPhone. Format novelty aside, how will an ultra premium device with an expected $2,000-or-more price tag play in a market where price sensitivity seems to be a top priority?
We’ll find out soon enough when Apple announces the date of its annual fall hardware event, a fast follow to incoming CEO John Ternus’ first day in the gig. —AN
Trump backs data center buildout as U.S. voters lose the faith
The American public may have mixed opinions about the impact of data centers on their communities, according to various polls and surveys about the topic, but the country’s top executive is all for it.
In an interview published over the weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump said that communities that “don’t take a data center” are “making a mistake” by rejecting “tremendous amounts of jobs and money.”
Trump made similar remarks at the White House last week. “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center,” he said then, “I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.”
Those opposed to data centers cite rising electricity rates, substantial water use, and myriad environmental issues (heat, noise, emissions) as reasons for concern. According to Pew, the more Americans hear about data centers, the less likely they are to feel positive about them.
That matters in an election year. Trump isn’t on the ballot in November, but 36 states will hold midterm elections, creating a sort of national referendum on the issue.
The objections to data centers run across the political spectrum. In recent weeks, states including New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas have imposed restrictions on cloud and AI data center buildouts. Meanwhile Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Virginia have either proposed or taken steps to slow down data center developers. —AN
More tech
—Taiwan indicts nine people, including Nvidia and Super Micro employees, for allegedly helping illegally export AI servers to China.
—AMD’s x86 CPU share crosses 30% for the first time, per Mercury Research.
—Shein will make its market debut in Hong Kong on Sept. 1. The retailer hopes to raise some $1.8 billion.
—Alibaba shares plummet 10% as the Chinese tech giant plans to raise another $10 billion to fund AI investments.
—Iran-linked hackers shut down a U.K. power plant. It’s the latest in a wave of related attacks.
—Luke Metz reportedly joins Meta. The noted AI researcher left Thinking Machines for OpenAI earlier this year.
—Expect Nvidia prices to jump 15% on Rubin and Blackwell AI systems in 2027.