Welcome back! Anthropic will now charge you when Claude refuses to answer, and it's as bad as it sounds. Meta wants you making games from a text prompt that your friends play inside Instagram. Twenty people can now share one AI-generated world with no game engine underneath. And JPMorgan thinks Muse could be the most used AI app since ChatGPT.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
Anthropic: Why are you paying for answers you didn't get?
Meta: Can you really build a game from one sentence?
Odyssey: What does a game look like with no game engine?
JPMorgan: Why did it raise Meta's target by $100?
Claude now charges you for saying no
Anthropic will bill you for requests its safeguards block before Claude writes a single word. You send the prompt, a classifier decides it doesn't like it, you get nothing back, and you pay the full input rate anyway.
Anthropic says it's a defense against coordinated attacks it's seen in recent weeks. It's hard to see how. The attackers are the 0.3% using stolen keys and cards. The bill lands on whoever owns the key.
For now it's three categories, biology, distillation attacks and frontier model development. Anthropic says the classifiers rarely get these wrong. Rarely isn't never, and it has said nothing about refunds when they do. The classifiers get these wrong with me at least twice a day, not sure about you.
A blocked 10,000-token agent prompt on Fable 5.1 costs about 10 cents, every time it fires
Use the fallback feature and you pay for the refusal and the retry
Nobody has said how this hits a Pro or Max subscription
This was free since June. Anthropic sneakily took that back and called it "resuming."
The obvious move was banning the people attacking. Instead, everyone gets the bill.
Special highlight from our network
Describe the ad you want. Higgsfield figures out how to make it.
Higgsfield picks the best mix of 35+ AI image, video, and audio models for your idea, so you get professional-quality content without testing tools. It already powers campaigns for 390 of the Fortune 500.
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Just describe it: Higgsfield handles the models and workflow
Built to scale: create versions for every product, audience, and market
Special highlight from our network
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Available in Recraft Studio, the Recraft mobile app, and via API.
Keep reading this newsletter. Just not because you're waiting.
Meta wants you making games inside Instagram
Meta showed Horizon Create and Horizon Studio at Connect. Type what game you want, it builds a playable 2D or 3D game with characters, levels and multiplayer, then you ask for changes in words.
Create is the phone app. Studio is the browser version where you can move things by hand.
Publish and it ships in Facebook and Instagram feeds. Someone taps a clip and they're in your game in seconds, no download.
Meta's ranking decides who gets seen
Every game gets an automated age rating
Creators earn from in-game purchases, terms not published
It's a waitlist. Meta staff told Android Central rollout is early next year.
Roblox has 123 million players a day and is adding the same feature. Horizon peaked at 300,000 a month in 2022. Meta's answer is putting the games where 3 billion people already scroll.
20 people are sharing one AI-generated world
Odyssey opened a playable preview of Agora-2 this week. It's a Diablo-style dungeon where 4 humans fight 16 AI agents at once, and there's no game engine under it. Every frame, every monster, every hit is predicted by a neural net in real time.
Most AI-generated worlds are one player alone, and the world forgets what's behind you. Agora-2 keeps one shared state on a server, so a monster you walk away from is still there when you turn back, and what you do changes what everyone else sees.
You can play it free in a browser right now. No login.
Trained on recordings of Diablo II, a game from 2000
5x the participants of Agora-1
One GPU per human player to run it
Odyssey says the point is studying how AI agents behave with each other in a sandbox, and points at the Hugging Face incident as why that matters now. It raised $310 million in June at a $1.45 billion valuation.
Its own report says latency and frame rate haven't been properly measured yet, and it only works in this one game. Go play it before it falls over.
JPMorgan thinks Muse is the next ChatGPT
JPMorgan raised its Meta price target to $920 from $820 the morning after Connect and said Muse could become the most widely used consumer AI app since ChatGPT.
Muse launched September 8. It sends your emails, books your travel and buys things, and keeps working after you close the app.
Per Sensor Tower, about 2.5 million US downloads by September 19 and roughly 557,000 daily users
Number one free app on the US App Store
Basic is free, paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month
Meta stock is up about 30% this month, its best month since 2013
Meta can put an agent in front of 3.6 billion people through Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and Zuckerberg says it will take a small fee on the purchases the agent makes for you.
Bank of America thinks real money from Muse is unlikely before 2028. It needs your email, your calendar and your card to do any of it.
Tool of the Day: Edyt
Edyt puts AI inside whatever you're already typing in. Select text in your email, a Google Doc, Slack or Notion, press a shortcut, and the rewrite lands right where your cursor is. No switching to a chatbot tab. Mac and Windows, free with about 130 edits a day, no card. Pro is $99 a year.
Try this yourself:
Download it from edyt.app and grant the accessibility permissions it asks for.
Select a clumsy sentence anywhere and press Ctrl+Shift+Space, then C to rewrite it in place.
Highlight some jargon and press Ctrl+Shift+X for a plain-language explanation.
Save your own prompt in the dashboard, like "warmer, under 60 words," and fire it with Ctrl+Shift+J.
Who it's for: anyone who writes all day and is tired of the copy-paste-into-ChatGPT loop.
Everything else you shouldn't miss
Gemini will sit on hold for you: Google is testing Call for Me, where Gemini phones a business from your own number, navigates the menu, books the table and shows you a live transcript, US Pixel 11 owners first.
OpenAI is reportedly prepping a $500 a month ChatGPT plan: code strings found in the app describe a Pro Max tier whose only listed perk is faster Work and Codex, days before DevDay.
The White House reportedly told OpenAI and Anthropic to keep new models from UK testers: Politico says the US wants first look, and Anthropic already gave Mythos 5.1 to US organizations only.
Google is launching AI chips into orbit next week: the first Project Suncatcher satellite goes up October 1 with four TPUs on about a kilowatt of solar power, a year-long test of whether chips survive up there.
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