A Weekly Upskill for Yourself, Your Data, Your Team

June 18, 2026

Issue 116

How is your Organization's Technical Debt?

Think of technical debt like credit card debt for your codebase. Every time your team takes a shortcut (quick fixes, skipping tests, messy architecture) you “borrow time” to move fast now. But just like financial debt, you eventually have to pay it back with interest: debugging takes longer, adding new features gets harder, and maintenance becomes a slog.

Some examples:

• Copy-pasting code instead of writing a reusable function.
• Skipping documentation to meet a deadline.
• Building on outdated libraries because “it still works.”

Done occasionally and paid back quickly, it’s fine. But left unchecked, debt piles up. Suddenly, one bug fix takes days instead of hours because pulling one thread unravels the whole sweater, so to say.

Now layer in AI: AI tools can help you crank out code at lightning speed. But if your base is already shaky, AI widens the cracks. More code, generated faster, means the interest on your debt compounds.

If you read the section above and thought, "yes, let's improve internal processes with AI," make sure you aren't scaling broken systems.

Remember what we talked about last week: if you cannot measure AI, you cannot trust it. Go to last week's newsletter if you need a refresher!​

Claude Fable 5

After being live for only 3 days, Fable 5 was de-deployed due to a U.S. Export-Control Order.

On June 12th, Anthropic posted:​

"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."

​After failing to stop the model from being released in the first place, the US government resorted to using an export control order to force Anthropic to take the models down.

This move comes just three months after the Pentagon banned Anthropic, labeling it a "supply chain risk" after Anthropic refused to give the "U.S. military unrestricted access to its AI models."

However, White House AI adviser David Sacks claims the two actions are unrelated. ​

Which leads to the question, are the US government's claims of Fable as a security threat legit?

According to Anthropic, no, and according to a group of 100 cyber security experts, also no.

It's hard to say for sure, because according to Anthropic, the administration has not "provide specific details of its national security concern" and it is still unconfirmed who reported the concern.

Anthropic goes on to say, "We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass."

This sentiment is shared by 100 cyber security experts who penned a letter to the US government to lift the export control directives on Anthropic. ​

SpaceX struggles to use its own data center

After SpaceX engineers had technical difficulties connecting their Memphis data center, Colossus 1, to their other sites, they have decided to rent it out instead.

The tenants?

Anthropic for $1.25 billion per month and Google for $920 million per month.

​Keep reading on Perplexity. ​

Would AI choose to use nuclear warfare?

Kenneth Payne, a researcher at King's College London, published a study where he pitted today's leading frontier AI models against each other in nuclear crisis simulations.

Two fictional Cold War-era powers. Real models making real strategic decisions. 760,000 words of reasoning logged across 21 games ("roughly three times the total recorded deliberations of Kennedy’s ExComm advisors during the Cuban Missile Crisis.")

Models could signal their intentions publicly, take different actions privately, and remember what their opponent had done before. Classic game theory terrain.

​Each model (Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini) developed a distinct strategic personality. ​

However, tactical nuclear weapons were deployed in nearly every game. De-escalatory options went completely unused across all 21 simulations. When a model used nukes, opponents de-escalated only 25% of the time.

Nebraska Data and Analytics Forum

The Data Journey That's Powering OPPD's Future

Thursday, June 25th at Omaha Public Power District

OPPD will be sharing about how they are leveraging data to Power Omaha's future. This will cover the creation of their first data strategy, the launch of a formal data governance council, and the implementation of a data catalog and data platform.

​RSVP on Meetup​

OMA x AI

By UNO

Tuesday, June 30th

"At OMA x AI, we're focused really on the intersection of different industries with small businesses, with the education sector and nonprofits. Because that's really where innovation happens." - Jason Coleman, UNO's associate vice chancellor for Innovative and Learning Centric Initiatives on the TEN Podcast. ​

​Get Your Ticket Today​