This was Anthropic's week almost from end to end, spanning a major model release, a resolved export-control standoff, and a fresh string of enterprise and infrastructure moves.
The headline release was Claude Sonnet 5, which Anthropic bills as its most agentic Sonnet yet, closing in on Opus 4.8 on reasoning, tool use, and coding while undercutting it on price. It is now the default model for Free and Pro users and is live in Claude Code, Cowork, and the API at introductory pricing of $2/$10 per million input/output tokens through August 31. Running alongside the launch was the resolution of a tenser story: the US Commerce Department, under Secretary Howard Lutnick, had suspended export access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after Amazon researchers found a way around Fable 5's safeguards. Washington first allowed partial restoration of Mythos 5 to "trusted partners," then on July 1 lifted the directive entirely once Anthropic shipped an improved safety classifier targeting the bypass — restoring both models globally across the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Cowork.
Anthropic didn't stop there. It struck a deal with California Governor Gavin Newsom giving state and local government agencies access to Claude at half price with training support, launched Claude Science — a research environment bundling literature review, scientific databases, and protein structure visualization for pharma and academic users ahead of a planned IPO — and opened early talks with Samsung about a custom AI chip, an early but notable step toward controlling more of its own silicon rather than leaning solely on Nvidia. Elsewhere, Google introduced Gemini Omni Flash, a multimodal model for text-, image-, and video-driven video generation and editing, rolling out immediately to Gemini app and Flow subscribers with API pricing at $0.10 per second of output. Microsoft launched Frontier Company, a new enterprise-deployment business backed by a $2.5 billion commitment and roughly 6,000 specialists aimed at closing the gap between AI pilots and production use.
Rounding out the week, Cursor shipped a public-beta mobile app for guiding coding agents from a phone — the first companion mobile experience in agentic coding — and Meta began building a cloud business to sell its surplus AI compute, a pivot from its historically in-house infrastructure stance.
To watch next week: whether Anthropic's Samsung chip talks firm up into an actual deal, and how rivals respond to the Sonnet 5 price-performance bar Anthropic just reset.