Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you. Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet. The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations. This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year. Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m. To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)

Reading a novel changes how your brain responds to other people for days after you put it down. A 2013 study at Emory University found changes in brain wiring that lasted at least five days after the book was done. Gregory Berns gave 21 students a thriller, Pompeii by Robert Harris, and assigned a chunk each evening. Every morning they came in for a scan. During the reading period, the scans showed stronger wiring in the part of the brain that handles language and places you inside a story. The brain was acting as though it were living the events of the book. The changes did not vanish overnight. They persisted into the mornings after the reading was done, even when the students were not thinking about the book. The researchers called it shadow activity, a kind of neural residue left behind by the experience of inhabiting another person's perspective. A separate 2013 study in Science tested whether reading fiction made people better at reading emotions from someone's eyes. Across five experiments, people who had just read a short story scored higher on a standard test of emotional perception than people who had read nonfiction or popular fiction. The effect was immediate. The two studies together say something simple: spending time inside a made-up person's head makes you better at understanding the people around you, and the change is not a feeling. It shows up in a brain scanner and on a test. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2398…

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…