Claude Fable 5 came back from the first AI export ban, for three and a half days, then $200 an hour. China's GLM 5.2 does the same work 15x cheaper. Anthropic pulled Fable after the US government's first-ever export restriction on an AI model; now it returns with halved limits, a $200-an-hour price tag, and new safeguards that appear to watermark output headed for China or rival labs. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop follow the fallout: OpenAI delays GPT-5.6 for government review, the big Western labs turn on open weights models, and China's GLM 5.2 quietly matches the frontier at 15 to 16 times cheaper per completed task, with DeepSeek cheaper still. Plus Sonnet 5's pricing problem, AI model tourism, and a tease for Episode 200, when Gary may finally call in live.

They Might Be Self-Aware is a twice-weekly AI podcast about the week's news, tech, and culture, and the question in its name: are the machines becoming self-aware?

Every episode starts with a real story. A new Claude or ChatGPT release, an AI lawsuit, the Pope's verdict on machine souls, Martin Scorsese making films with AI. Then it chases that story somewhere stranger, funnier, and more human than the headline. This is AI as a culture story, not a tech beat: the relief of finally hearing people who are as deep in it as you are.

Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop host. Two guys who actually build with this stuff, arguing about it fast, funny, and unfiltered, not reading you benchmarks or "10 prompts to save you time." Gary produces, phoning in the cold open from a payphone. He has no last name, and a backstory no one on staff has managed to verify. One of the hosts might not be human. We won't say which.

New episodes Mondays and Thursdays, from The Blur. theblur.ai