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Walmart has a 26-piece set of storage bins that help organize junk drawers in seconds for just $15

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

TheStreet aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.Why we love this dealThere are tons of storage solutions for the bigger items in your life, but what about the small ones? How do you neatly organize the miscellaneous writing utensils that always seem scattered in your desk drawer? Or the compacts for your foundations, powders, and brushes in your vanity area? What about the plastic bags for snacks and leftovers that always seem to overflow out of your kitchen drawers? It’s often the smaller items, knick-knacks, and trinkets that we struggle to find an organized place to store which leads to us feeling overwhelmed with clutter and mess in our homes — but it doesn’t have to be that way. With the Sindcom Stackable Organizer Bins, every item has a proper storage place. Right now, Walmart is selling the 26-pack of organizers on sale for just $15 — which means that each organizer is just 57 cents.Sindcom Stackable Organizer Bins 26-Pack, $15 at Walmart

Shop at WalmartWhy do shoppers love it?Designed to fit in the small crevices and crannies of your drawers, these bins are perfect for storing all kinds of items. Made of plastic, these organizers are perfect for kitchen utensils, office supplies, cosmetics and makeup brushes, toiletries, and other miscellaneous items that often fall victim to the classic junk drawer. The clear plastic material makes it easy to find what you’re looking for by simply opening the drawer, and the durability allows it to withstand your heavier products without cracking or breaking.The set includes 26 different bins in four sizes, so you can create a unique layout in each drawer that works best for your needs. For $13, it includes three trays each measuring 9 inches long, 6 inches wide, and 2 inches high, along with five trays, each measuring 9 inches long, 3 inches wide, and 2 inches high. You also get nine trays, each measuring 6 inches long, 3 inches wide, and 2 inches high, and an additional nine trays, each measuring 3 inches long, 3 inches wide, and 2 inches high.Thanks to the included silicone pads, the organizers stay secure and in place, even when there’s movement from opening and closing drawers. The organizers are also designed to be stackable, which saves space in areas where space is more limited. Related: Walmart’s $73 heavy-duty garage organizer that clears clutter is 55% offThis simple addition does wonders for cleaning up your drawers and cabinets that can succumb to mess quickly. And when they get dirty, a damp wash rag quickly cleans them and makes them look good as new.Details to knowIncludes: The set includes 26 trays of varying sizes. In the set, you get 9 inch x 6 inch x 2 inch trays (3), 9 inch x 3 inch x 2 inch trays (5), 6 inch x 3 inch x 2 inch trays (9), and 3 inch x 3 inch x 2 inch trays (9). Non-slip: Included silicone pads keep the trays in place and secure. Material: Plastic. Easy to clean: Simply use a damp wash rag to wipe down dirty organizers.Shoppers love the variety of sizes the pack of organizers comes with. The silicone bumpers keep the trays from slipping and sliding when the drawer moves, but they aren’t so secure that you can adjust the layout or move them around. Shoppers say they feel very sturdy, and are perfect for drawers, closet shelves, and countertops. One shopper shared that they “make so many things around my home feel less cluttered.”Shop more deals Scidweet Under Bed Shoe Storage Organizer, $19 (was $36) at WalmartPhancir Under Sink Organizer Storage, $29 (was $45) at WalmartBaodeli Plastic Pantry Organization and Storage Bins, $27 (was $40) at Walmart It might seem like a small purchase, but these storage trays make a big difference when it comes to home organization. Get your very own pack of the Sindcom Stackable Organizer Bins for just $15 before this great deal is gone!

How To Invest a Lump Sum or Cash You’ve Left Uninvested

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Clark Howard, SUCCESS

Maybe you just inherited money, sold a house, cashed out a pension or received a sizable bonus. Or maybe you’ve had cash sitting in a savings account for months, or even years, waiting for the “right time” to invest.

Whatever the reason, you’re holding money that could be working harder for you. The key questions are where to invest it, when to put it to work and what to buy.

One note before we start: If your lump sum is a pension buyout offer, the first decision isn’t how to invest it — it’s whether to take it at all. Run the numbers with our Pension vs. Lump Sum Calculator to see if the monthly pension payments are the better choice.

Before You Invest a Dollar

Two of these steps apply to everyone. The other two only matter if the money is new.

For Everyone

Pay off high-interest debt. If you’re carrying credit card balances at 20% or more, paying them off is a guaranteed return no investment can match.

Fill your emergency fund. Money expert Clark Howard recommends keeping three to six months of expenses in a high-yield savings account. If your cushion is thin, use the money to fully fund your emergency savings.

If the Money Just Arrived

Understand the tax bill. Some lump sums arrive with strings attached. Distributions from an inherited traditional IRA are taxable income, and most non-spouse beneficiaries must empty the account within 10 years. Proceeds from a home sale may include taxable gains above the exclusion. A pension payout needs to be rolled over correctly to avoid a huge tax hit. Know what you owe before you decide what to invest.

Spend a little of it. If the money is a true windfall, Clark has a rule that lets you enjoy some of it.

“What I like you to do is take 10% of the money and spend it however you want. Have a blast,” Clark says.

Spend the 10% guilt-free. The remaining 90% is what you invest.

Decide Where Before You Decide When

The timing question gets all the attention, but where the money goes is just as important.

You should consider the three most tax-advantaged places for your money first:

Your 401(k) match. If you’re not contributing enough to get your full employer match, raise your contribution rate and use the lump sum to cover the gap in your paycheck. The match is free money.

A health savings account. If you have a qualifying high-deductible health plan, the HSA is the only account with a tax break going in, growing and coming out.

A Roth IRA. If your income allows it, you can contribute up to the annual limit. Money grows tax-free forever.

After that, you face a judgment call. Do you max out the 401(k) beyond the match, or put the rest in a taxable brokerage account?

The 401(k) offers tax deferral, but it’s locked-up money. With a few exceptions, you can’t touch it before 59½ without a penalty, your investment choices are limited to the plan’s menu, and some plans carry high fees. A taxable brokerage account gives up the deferral but keeps the money available for anything, whether that’s a business opportunity, a house or retiring earlier. Long-term capital gains rates soften the tax cost.

Which one you choose depends on your plan’s quality, your tax bracket now versus in retirement, and how much you value access to the money. If you’re weighing this on a six-figure sum, it’s a good question to take to a fee-only fiduciary advisor.

All at Once or a Little at a Time?

Now the question everyone asks. Should you invest the whole amount today, or spread it out over months through dollar-cost averaging?

The math favors investing it all at once. Research from Vanguard found that lump sum investing beats dollar-cost averaging about two-thirds of the time. Markets rise more often than they fall, so money invested earlier has more time to compound. Every month your cash sits on the sidelines is a month it isn’t working.

But Clark doesn’t tell everyone to do the mathematically optimal thing, because investing isn’t only about math.

“I love dollar-cost averaging because of the psychological harm if you put in a lump sum and all of a sudden the market has a big decline,” Clark says.

That psychological harm is real, and it’s expensive. The worst outcome isn’t earning slightly less than you could have. The worst outcome is investing everything on Monday, watching the market drop 15% by summer, panicking and selling at the bottom. An investor who dollar-cost averages and stays invested will beat an investor who lump-sums and bails.

So here’s the practical answer. If you can invest it all today and sleep fine, do that. The odds are on your side. If a big immediate loss would genuinely rattle you, dollar-cost average, but do it with rules:

Set a fixed schedule. Equal amounts, every month, automated.

Set an end date. Six to 12 months is plenty. Longer than that and the cash drag starts to cost you real money.

No discretion. You don’t skip a month because the market feels high or double up because it dropped. The schedule is the schedule.

Dollar-cost averaging with no deadline can become an attempt to time the market if you aren’t careful.

What Should the Money Buy?

The specific investments you make depend on your personal situation and goals. There isn’t one right ETF or Fund to buy.

If you are managing your own portfolio, Clark recommends a low-cost, diversified portfolio built from index funds, with a stock-and-bond mix that fits your age and timeline, held across your 401(k), IRAs and taxable accounts as one portfolio.

If you aren’t comfortable managing your own portfolio, a fee-only fiduciary advisor can help you with how this decision fits into your larger plan.

Final Thoughts

There isn’t a perfect day to invest a lump sum, and there isn’t one investment that’s right for everyone. The important thing is to make a plan, put the money to work and stick with it. Time in the market almost always matters more than trying to find the perfect moment to invest.

The post How To Invest a Lump Sum or Cash You’ve Left Uninvested appeared first on Clark Howard.

Your retirement math may have a surprising flaw

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Stress-test your retirement plan against late-life healthcare and housing shocks.

S&P 500 surge triggers critical 401(k) pivot

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

S&P 500 index valuations pushing past 7,400 points on July 24 — nearing the all-time high of 7,609 on June 2 — highlight a widening disconnect with depressed consumer economic confidence, creating a challenging climate for workers managing long-term retirement accounts.The gap between strong corporate equity returns and strained household budgets leaves middle-aged workers struggling to reconcile everyday expenses with portfolio growth.This macroeconomic divergence presents emotional barriers alongside high-yield wealth-building opportunities for retirement account holders attempting to secure their financial futures.”In forty years as a financial advisor, I have never seen a market this confusing to investors,” wrote Kahler Financial Group founder Rick Kahler, CFP, MS, ChFC, CCIMer.University of Michigan index tracks market splitMeasuring household economic sentiment reveals persistent underlying anxiety across broad income groups despite strong broad market returns.The University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment recorded a reading of 54.4 in July. While reflecting a modest monthly rebound, the index remains down nearly 12% compared to 2025 and sits near historical recessionary levels.In contrast, broad market equities maintain strong momentum, with the S&P 500 trading near historic record levels on the S&P Dow Jones Indices database.A leading expert addressed the ongoing inflation pressure on household budgets, despite minor month-over-month sentiment gains.”With prices remaining frustratingly high, consumers are hardly ebullient about the economy; sentiment is down 12% from a year ago,” explained the University of Michigan surveys of consumers director Joanne Hsu.Fidelity 401(k) savings rates hit new recordsRetirement account balances reflect the underlying resilience of broad equity market expansion despite widespread public pessimism regarding economic conditions.Data from Vanguard’s institutional research database indicates that the median 401(k) balance for Americans aged 45 to 54 sits at approximately $60,000, while the average account balance reaches $142,000.Average total worker retirement contribution rates reached a record high of 14.4%, according to workplace investor data from Fidelity Investments.More on personal finance:Charles Schwab, Fidelity alert workers to forced 401(k) ruleDave Ramsey warns Americans on 401(k)s, IRAs (he’s not wrong)Congress research arm warns Americans on 401(k), IRA penaltyOne expert noted that individual investors are successfully looking past short-term economic anxieties to preserve long-term wealth building.”While it can be tempting to make changes to retirement savings during market volatility, it is positive to see participants stay the course with their contributions,” emphasized Fidelity Investments VP Sharon Brovelli.Fidelity explains its approach for essential benchmark savings that target necessary requirements for middle-aged workers to maintain financial stability into retirement.”Aim to save at least 1x your income by age 30, 3x by 40, 6x by 50, 8x by 60, and 10x by 67,” urged analysts at Fidelity.

The current S&P 500 surge runs counter to consumer sentiment, causing retirement savers to re-evaluate their 401(k) planning strategies.Shutterstock

401(k) retirement growth scenariosAs a reporter covering retirement security and consumer economics, I decided to calculate the following wealth projection models to provide real-world context for readers seeking to evaluate the impact of market growth on a late-stage portfolio. These calculations assume a starting capital base of $20,000 at age 50, a target retirement age of 67, and tax-deferred growth within a traditional 401(k) or IRA framework across 204 monthly compounding periods — representing the 17 years spanning ages 50 to 67.Option A (conservative cash allocation): Holding $20,000 in a traditional savings account yielding a 2.0% annual return, accompanied by $500 monthly contributions, yields a total account balance of roughly $151,000 by age 67.Option B (moderate fixed-income allocation): Allocating funds into a conservative bond-heavy portfolio generating a 4.5% net annual return with $500 monthly contributions yields approximately $196,000 at retirement.Option C (aggressive equity index allocation): Investing in broad stock index mutual funds with an average historic net yield of 8.5% alongside $500 monthly contributions generates a final portfolio value of approximately $311,000 by age 67.Option D (maximum catch-up contribution strategy): Utilizing growth stock index funds averaging an 8.5% net return while maximizing monthly contributions at $1,000 per month pushes the total accumulated nest egg to roughly $537,000 over the same 17-year timeline.
(Source: Jeffrey Quiggle, TheStreet)
Long-term equity exposure overcomes sentiment dragThe mathematical modeling I have outlined here confirms that retreating from equity allocations due to depressed consumer confidence runs the risk of severe long-term wealth loss for late-stage retirement planning. Maintaining consistent monthly contributions into broad equity growth funds ensures that investors capture essential compound market growth, successfully insulating household retirement security from temporary economic anxiety.This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute individual financial, investment, or legal advice..Related: Dave Ramsey has these blunt words about your 401(k) and IRA

Jensen Huang has a high-stakes message for AI policymakers

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

As Washington considers tighter restrictions on open-weight AI over concerns of intellectual-property theft, Nvidia and other tech companies are pushing back.

Walmart’s bestselling canopy tent offers 100 square feet of shade and is 47% off

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

TheStreet aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.Why we love this dealAs good as the sun can feel, those strong rays can cause you to overheat quite quickly, and long-term exposure to sun isn’t always great for your skin. While a little Vitamin D can help calcium absorption, regulate your immune system, and boost your mood, it’s best to take sun exposure in moderation, and ensuring that you have the proper shade to get out of the sun once you soak up a solid 30 minutes is an easy way to make sure you can still enjoy the outdoors even when the sun is at its strongest. Umbrellas are always a good go-to option, but tents, gazebos, and canopies, like the Gojooasis Outdoor Canopy Tent, provide more coverage compared to the standard umbrella and can even be sturdier long term especially with how unpredictable the weather can be.Although that extra shade coverage can come at a cost, right now, Walmart is selling the $160 Gojooasis Outdoor Canopy Tent on sale for 47% off. The bestselling gazebo is only $85 with a limited-time sale, and with tons of the summer season left as well as an impending autumn where the weather is perfect for relaxing outside, there’s no better time to add one to your outdoor area. Gojooasis Outdoor Canopy Tent, $85 (was $160) at Walmart

Courtesy of Walmart

Shop at WalmartWhy do shoppers love it?Although umbrellas are more ideal when you’re working with a limited yard or deck, canopies are the ideal option when you don’t have to worry about space. This tent measures 10 feet by 10 feet and provides 100 square feet of shade coverage. The four-legged frame evenly distributed the weight of the canopy, so no one area is receiving too much strain, and it is that design that provides an evenly shaded area for the folks sitting underneath it.The metal framework is made with powder-coated steel, which not only ensures sturdiness and strength during windy or rainy conditions, but it provides long-lasting durability that will last you multiple seasons and years. The powder-coating protects the metal from the elements, and makes sure that moisture and humidity don’t deteriorate the framework over time. It prevents chipping, scratching, and fading, and it resists rust and corrosion. The canopy overhead itself is made with 160g polyester fabric with a polyacrylate (PA) coating that, although super light and air, is waterproof and UV-blocking, and it’s built to withstand wind. It has a special ventilation design that allows wind to flow smoothly in and around the canopy, maintain air circulation so that you stay cool when you’re sitting underneath but also providing stability when conditions pick up. It can withstand winds up to 10.8 miles per hour. You won’t have to worry about shaking or wobbling thanks to the special ventilation design, and thanks to the extra drainage holes, you don’t have to worry about water weighing down the top. Rain quickly drains, preventing an extra pressure or strain on the canopy in wet conditions. Related: Amazon’s ‘easy to set up’ 10-foot pop-up canopy tent is on sale for $94Perfect for patios, pool decks, and large grassy areas, another nice extra feature is the removable sidewalls which provide protection against bugs and insects and also offer more privacy. You can attach them or remove them with easy-to-use zippers. What to expect from a $85 outdoor canopy Pros and consProsWind-resistant: The special ventilation design ensures proper air circulation and allows the canopy to remain sturdy and upright in winds up to 10.8 mph. Waterproof and UV-resistent: The fabric canopy top protects against water and UV rays without deteriorating the quality of said fabric. Protects against bugs: The removable side panels provide privacy and protection against gnats, flies, mosquitos, and other insects. ConsAssembly can be difficult: Some shoppers say that the tent can take hours to put together. Many shoppers have found that the canopy exceeds their expectations, and it provides a really relaxing space even when the sun has set and shade is not an issue. The side panels are helpful at keeping flies and mosquitos away, especially when there is food around, and it holds up tremendously well in stormy conditions. Shop more deals Clouddwell Wall-Mounted Gazebo, $160 (was $250) at WalmartAinfox Outdoor Patio Pop Up Canopy Gazebo, $90 (was $190) at WalmartLausaint Home Outdoor Patio Gazebo, $200 (was $226) at WalmartEnjoy the warmth of the sun as well as the cooling shade thanks to the Gojooasis Outdoor Canopy Tent. Whatever the weather, it can stand up strong and protect you no matter what.

Podcasters Are Also The Stars Of The San Diego Comic Con

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

San Diego Comic-Con 2026 is experiencing a notable shift, with podcast hosts now prominent personalities alongside celebrities. This trend underscores the growing mainstream appeal of live podcast shows

LeBron James’ Signing With Sixers Signals He Cared Most About Winning

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

LeBron James makes the Philadelphia 76ers a championship contender and appears willing to sacrifice his role.

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5, a cheaper AI model for coding, agents and enterprise workflows

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on Friday, a model the company says delivers nearly all the intelligence of its top-of-the-line Claude Fable 5 at half the cost — a launch that signals how the AI race is shifting from raw capability to the economics of daily use.The model, available immediately on all of Anthropic’s platforms, is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, unchanged from its predecessor, Opus 4.8. It becomes the new default model on Claude Max, Anthropic’s premium consumer tier, and the strongest model available on Claude Pro.The positioning is deliberate. Anthropic is not claiming Opus 5 is its smartest model — that distinction still belongs to Fable 5, and rival systems retain an edge in certain domains. Instead, the company is making a subtler argument that may matter more to enterprise buyers: that the most economically important AI work happens in a middle band of difficulty, where near-frontier intelligence delivered efficiently and cheaply beats frontier intelligence delivered expensively.”Opus 5 as your daily driver, the model you hand complex work to and review when it’s done,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in an interview with VentureBeat, describing how the company’s lineup now stratifies. “Fable 5 for your most ambitious work, the days-long autonomous projects nothing could take on before… Sonnet 5 for work you run at scale, where speed and cost per call decide what ships. Haiku 4.5 for subagents and instant answers.”How Claude Opus 5 benchmark results stack up against Fable 5 and rival AI modelsOn paper, the results are striking. Anthropic says Opus 5 sets new state-of-the-art marks on coding and knowledge-work evaluations including Frontier-Bench and GDPval-AA. On Frontier-Bench v0.1, an agentic terminal coding benchmark, Opus 5 scores 43.3 percent — more than double Opus 4.8’s 18.7 percent and well ahead of Fable 5’s 33.7 percent — at a lower cost per task, according to the company. On ARC-AGI 3, an evaluation of novel problem-solving, Anthropic reports Opus 5 scored three times as high as the next best model. On OSWorld 2.0, a computer-use benchmark, the company says the model surpasses Fable 5’s best result at just over a third of the cost.The numbers come with honest caveats that are themselves notable in an industry prone to superlatives. Anthropic acknowledges Opus 5 remains behind Mythos 5, a competing model, on cybersecurity tasks and biology research, and an OpenAI-family model still leads on one agentic coding benchmark.The more revealing caveat came from Anthropic itself, when asked where Opus 5 still falls short of Fable 5. The spokesperson’s answer amounted to a candid admission about what benchmarks do and don’t capture.”The evals where Opus 5 wins are bounded tasks with a specific outcome, which is where it’s strongest. What those evals don’t measure is duration,” the spokesperson told VentureBeat. “One way to put it: Opus 5 is the best tool for the jobs benchmarks can see, and Fable 5 is what you reach for when the job outruns the benchmark.”Fable 5, by contrast, “is for the longest, most autonomous jobs, where the model has to stay coherent across many connected steps over hours or days with dense source material,” the spokesperson said, advising customers to “run both on a representative workload, one bounded task and one long-horizon job.” That framing — bounded tasks versus long-horizon autonomy — may become the defining axis of model differentiation in 2026, as benchmarks saturate and the hardest remaining problems involve sustained, multi-day agentic work rather than discrete puzzles.Why token efficiency is becoming the real battleground for enterprise AI spendingThreaded through the launch is a theme Anthropic clearly wants buyers to absorb: Opus 5 doesn’t just score well, it scores well per dollar. The model ships with an adjustable “effort” setting that lets customers trade intelligence for speed and token savings, and Anthropic’s charts emphasize performance at a given cost rather than peak performance alone.Early customers echoed the point with unusual specificity. Harvey, the legal AI company, said Opus 5 achieved similar performance to Opus 4.8’s maximum-reasoning mode “while generating 26% fewer tokens on average,” according to Niko Grupen, its head of applied research. Richard Pham of Fundamental Research Lab said that on hard financial-modeling tasks, the model averaged nine percentage points higher accuracy “while using roughly one-third fewer turns and tool calls and 60% less time.”Wade Foster, chief executive of Zapier, said Opus 5 topped his company’s AutomationBench leaderboard “without spending more tokens than prior Claude models,” running a full churn-prevention workflow from start to finish. “Previous models didn’t pass; Opus 5 hit 100%,” he said. Scott Wu, chief executive of Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent, said that on FrontierCode 1.1, “Claude Opus 5 approaches Fable-level performance at half the cost,” with particular strength in debugging and root-cause analysis.The efficiency emphasis reflects commercial reality. Enterprise AI spending is no longer experimental, and inference costs — the price of actually running these models at scale — have become a board-level line item. Anthropic’s business skews heavily toward API and enterprise usage; according to a February 2026 analysis by Contrary Research, Claude held roughly 40 percent of the enterprise large language model market by usage as of late 2025, and Claude Code alone had reached about $1 billion in annualized revenue. For a company whose customers pay by the token, a model that does more with fewer tokens is not a nice-to-have. It is the product.Self-verifying AI agents and what they mean for the hidden costs of automationBeyond the numbers, Anthropic is selling a behavioral story: that Opus 5 verifies its work and iterates until it succeeds. The company offered several examples from testing that read like small parables of machine stubbornness.In one Frontier-Bench task, the model was asked to reconstruct a machine part as a 3D CAD model from a drawing it was intentionally given no way to view. Rather than fail, Anthropic says, Opus 5 wrote its own computer vision pipeline to extract the geometry from raw pixels — and did so repeatedly, while no competing model solved the task in five attempts. In another case, given a real bug in a popular open-source package manager, the model found the root cause and fixed an edge case the community’s own patch had missed; a competing model patched only the symptom and declared victory. An engineer at a trading firm, the company says, used Opus 5 to build a market data feed for a new exchange in a single session and, finding no live feed to validate against, watched the model build its own test harness to check its parsing code.Customers described similar behavior in the wild. Cristian Rivera, a staff software engineer at Stripe, said he gave the model “a chief-of-staff role over my dev environments” for a weekend: “it built its own monitor, drove each box, and pulled me in only for the judgment calls.”This is the capability enterprises actually care about, and it is worth dwelling on why. The gap between a model that produces plausible output and one that verifies its output is the gap between a demo and a deployable system. Most of the hidden cost of enterprise AI today is human review — engineers checking the machine’s work. A model that reliably checks its own work compresses that cost, which is precisely why customers keep citing fewer turns, fewer passes, and less time rather than higher raw scores.Inside Anthropic’s safety strategy: capability gaps, classifiers, and model fallbacksThe launch also showcases Anthropic’s increasingly intricate approach to safety — one that now involves deliberately not teaching its models certain skills. The company says its automated behavioral audit found Opus 5 to be its most aligned model to date, scoring 2.3 on overall misaligned behavior, lower than Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, or Fable 5, with the lowest rates of deceptive behavior and the least susceptibility to being tricked into misuse.On the capability side, Anthropic says it intentionally avoided training Opus 5 on cyber tasks, as it did with Opus 4.8. The model improved on them anyway — a side effect of general capability gains — and now nearly matches Mythos 5 at finding software vulnerabilities. But it remains far behind at exploiting them: on Anthropic’s OSS-Fuzz evaluation, Opus 5 identified vulnerabilities at a 79.4 percent rate, close to Mythos 5’s 80 percent, but succeeded at developing exploits in only 4 challenges versus Mythos 5’s 13. That asymmetry — strong at defense-relevant discovery, weak at offense-relevant exploitation — appears to be by design, and the safeguards follow the same logic. Anthropic expects Opus 5’s cyber classifiers to intervene about 85 percent less often than Fable 5’s.When a classifier does trigger, requests in Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork fall back to Opus 4.8 by default — raising an obvious question: if a request is too risky for one model, why is it acceptable for another? “The model it falls back to has lower capability levels making the risk of harmful use lower as well,” the spokesperson said, adding that “there is a message that lets the user know when this occurs and is visible in the chat.”The logic is defensible, but it reveals how AI safety actually works in 2026: risk is not a property of the question alone, but of the question multiplied by the capability of the system answering it. On biology, the calculus runs the other way. Opus 5 is now Anthropic’s most capable generally available model for scientific research — scoring 10.2 percentage points higher than Opus 4.8 on the company’s internal chemistry benchmark — though the spokesperson acknowledged that “Mythos 5 remains the stronger model for long-horizon, open-ended work like autonomous drug design campaigns.”The business stakes behind the launch: a $380 billion valuation and massive compute betsThe launch lands at a moment of extraordinary commercial momentum — and extraordinary obligations — for Anthropic. Reuters reported in February that the company was valued at roughly $380 billion in its latest funding round, following a period in which, per Contrary Research’s analysis, its annualized revenue climbed from about $1 billion at the end of 2024 to a projected $9 billion by the end of 2025, with internal targets reportedly reaching $20 to $26 billion for 2026. Those targets are underwritten by enormous infrastructure commitments, including a reported $30 billion Azure compute deal alongside arrangements with Google Cloud and Nvidia — spending that only pencils out if enterprises keep expanding usage.That is the context in which Opus 5’s pricing strategy makes sense. Holding the price at Opus 4.8 levels while roughly doubling performance on key agentic benchmarks is effectively a steep price cut per unit of capability, designed to widen the funnel of workloads that are economical to automate. Every task that was marginal at Opus 4.8’s cost-per-success becomes viable at Opus 5’s — and every viable task is recurring token revenue.The regulatory backdrop has grown more complex as well. A U.S. judge gave final approval this week to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement with book authors, Reuters reported, closing a chapter of litigation over the company’s early training data. And in June, Reuters, citing Axios, reported that the U.S. government had moved to block foreign access to Anthropic’s most advanced models — a reminder that frontier AI is now entangled with export policy in ways that shape which customers can buy what.Also shipping Friday: a Fast mode running at roughly 2.5 times default speed at twice the base price, automatic fallback routing on the API, and mid-conversation tool changes that no longer invalidate the prompt cache — a small feature that agent developers may appreciate more than any benchmark. Consistent with prior Opus models, Opus 5 carries no data retention requirements for general access, a point the spokesperson flagged unprompted for customers with “a hard zero data retention requirement.” Developers can access the model as claude-opus-5 on the Claude API starting today.Two questions will determine whether the bet pays off: whether Opus 5’s efficiency claims survive contact with production workloads at scale, and whether enterprises embrace a world where safety classifiers, not users, sometimes decide which model answers. But the deeper message of Friday’s launch is that the AI industry’s center of gravity has moved. For three years, the labs competed on what their best model could do on its best day. With Opus 5, Anthropic is competing on something less glamorous and far more lucrative: what a very good model can do every day, for half the price. In a market where the frontier keeps moving, Anthropic is wagering that the real fortune lies just behind it.

SpaceX is banking on a successful Starship launch to stem the stock’s bleeding

July 24, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

The newest timeline has Starship due to take flight on Friday.

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