Podcast
5 Ways to Make Money From an AI the Government Fears - Ep.
The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
- Government Treated Fable 5 As A Weapon
- Anthropic released Fable 5, a Mythos-tier model that unlocked a class of AI previously kept in a locked vault.
- The U.S. Commerce Department used export controls to force a global shutdown because it couldn’t restrict access by nationality otherwise. (Time 0:00:55)
- Regulators Are Targeting The AI Brain Not Just Hardware
- The government skipped hardware controls and moved straight to controlling the AI “brain,” signaling a new regulatory frontier.
- Export controls have previously targeted chips and manufacturing machines but now target models themselves. (Time 0:03:51)
- History Shows Software Weaponization Backfires
- This is the second time software was legally treated like a munition after PGP in the 1990s, and that fight reshaped internet security law.
- PGP’s creator printed code in a book to claim protected speech, forcing the government to back down and enabling encryption’s spread. (Time 0:03:57)
- Fable Runs End-to-End Tasks Without Babysitting
- Fable’s key advantage is long-running autonomy: it can plan, execute multi-step tasks, self-check, and run for hours or days without babysitting.
- It can spawn copies, split work, and review results, enabling trustable end-to-end outputs. (Time 0:07:15)
- Real World Tests Show Fable Solved Massive Tasks Fast
- Stripe tested Fable on a 50 million line codebase and Fable completed a rewrite in one day that normally takes months.
- A physics researcher also nearly matched a top model’s four-day result in 36 hours on a frontier problem. (Time 0:08:31)
- Unfiltered Fable Doubled Hacking Test Performance
- A safety-free version of Fable scored roughly double on a hacking skills test versus top models, highlighting security risks that likely triggered the ban.
- That performance gap is why Anthropic built a locked-down safety version called Mythos. (Time 0:09:54)
- Start A Legacy Code Rescue Service
- Build a legacy code rescue service targeting companies on ancient systems and charge what modernization firms do today.
- Start local (QuickBooks desktop to online) to get customer wins before tackling larger enterprise migrations. (Time 0:10:43)
- Offer Overnight Bookkeeping Cleanups
- Launch an overnight bookkeeping turnaround shop that reconciles messy books by morning and charges $3k+ per cleanup.
- Use existing AI models now for pipelines and offer 48-hour or overnight delivery to bookkeepers’ overflow market. (Time 0:12:41)
- Productize Design Services With AI As Your Team
- Productize a single design or agency service and use Fable as the never-hire team to scale delivery.
- Charge recurring retainers like top solo design studios and let AI handle the workload to scale revenue without more hires. (Time 0:13:50)
- Sell Hyper Personalized Email Campaigns
- Deliver deeply personalized sales or email campaigns at scale by adding 8–12 specific personalization tokens per recipient.
- Target businesses with existing email lists like gyms or med spas and improve reply rates 2–3x. (Time 0:14:12)
- Create Digital Assets That Improve Themselves
- Build and optimize portfolios of small revenue websites and let Fable autonomously test, fix analytics, and improve winners.
- Train it to log into Google Analytics, Search Console, and iterate on winners to scale passive income sites faster. (Time 0:15:16)
- Use The Blackout To Prepare And Diversify Tools
- Prepare now by picking one niche, one offer, and one landing page while using available models like Opus 4.8 to prototype.
- Test multiple AI tools and never tie your business exclusively to a single model that can be switched off. (Time 0:16:02)
- Regulatory Bans Are A Buy Signal For Entrepreneurs
- Government regulation is a bullish signal: export controls reveal the tool’s strategic importance and market potential.
- The ban is effectively market research proving Fable-class models are transformative and worth preparing for. (Time 0:16:43)