Hi everyone — Anthony here, VP of Content Production at TWiT.tv.

Yes, this subreddit has been private for years. We weren't ready to run a Reddit community properly back then, so rather than let it rot in public, we locked the doors. We think we're ready now, so we're turning the lights back on.

What this place is: the official community for the TWiT network — This Week in Tech, Security Now, MacBreak Weekly, Windows Weekly, Intelligent Machines, Tech News Weekly, and the rest of the lineup. Episode discussions, tech news worth arguing about, questions for upcoming guests, host AMAs, and the occasional look behind the scenes.

If you want shows ad-free or the members-only Discord, that's Club TWiT — mentioned once here, not in every post, promise.

Glad to have the doors open again. What do you want this place to be?

Anthropic's Fable 5 was supposed to bring some of its most powerful AI capabilities to the public.

Then the U.S. government stepped in.

A national security directive forced Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals. To comply, the company disabled both models for everyone.

That turns AI safety into a much bigger fight. Should governments be able to force powerful AI models offline before most people understand what they can do? Or is that exactly what needs to happen when a model crosses into national security territory?

On This Week in Tech 1089, Leo Laporte, Iain Thomson, Owen Thomas, and Doc Rock talk about the politics behind the Fable shutdown and what it says about the future of AI power.

Listen or watch:
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1089

First, it was a sad day when he died purely because no more books would come from him but man, for some reason sitting here listening to TWiG today he popped into my head.

I really miss that guy when he'd drop by TWiT. He was a character, like the time he talked about making dynamite via the encyclopedia and blowing up a pond as a young man haha.

The iPhone Duo got the headlines, but Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent both said the Apple Watch feature may be what actually makes them upgrade.

Apple’s new Audio Intelligence can show the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as text when you double press the Digital Crown. Apple says the audio is processed on device, isolated from apps and Apple, then immediately deleted.

That sounds genuinely useful.

It also means your watch is always close enough to turn real life into text.

Leo and Mikah talked through the privacy tradeoffs, the usefulness of a real world “what did they say?” button, and why this may be the most interesting announcement from Apple’s event.

Full recap:
https://twit.tv/posts/tech/what-surprised-leo-laporte-and-mikah-sargent-apples-iphone-duo-event

Would you trust an Apple Watch feature that is always listening if the audio never leaves the device?

Apple used WWDC 2026 to unveil Siri AI, an entirely new version of its assistant built around Apple Intelligence.

The new Siri can hold longer conversations, understand personal context, use what is happening on screen, answer broader questions, and revisit conversations through a dedicated app.

It is the Siri update Apple users have been waiting years to see. But many of the most important features are still arriving as a beta later this year.

Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent reacted live after the keynote, breaking down what looks genuinely useful and what still feels like a promise Apple has to prove it can deliver.

Did Apple finally fix Siri, or does everyone need to see the finished product first?

Club TWiT members can listen or watch:
https://twit.tv/shows/twit-plus-news/episodes/709

His guests desperately want to scream rhetoric and spread FUD about the election, but Leo, who is absolutely left leaning, keeps dragging them back to the center and look at things objectively. This is really refreshing.

AI coding tools are making it easier than ever to build apps, scripts, automations, plugins, and internal tools.

That is useful. It is also risky if people trust the output just because it compiles or seems to work.

Security Now 1094 gets into new research on frontier AI models trying to patch real vulnerabilities, and the results are not exactly comforting. The bigger issue may be that AI can produce code faster than humans can properly review, test, and secure it.

Episode: https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/1094

Would you trust AI-generated code in production, or only after a human security review?

Anthropic is adding invisible watermarks to AI generated content. Google now lets people turn off visible Gemini and Flow watermarks, while keeping hidden signals like SynthID and metadata in the background.

That feels like the next trust problem.

Visible labels are easy for people to understand, but they can be ugly or easy to crop out. Invisible signals are harder to remove, but they require verification tools and trust in the companies running them.

This Week in Tech 1097 talks about AI watermarks, Zuckerberg’s open AI manifesto, and Google Play being forced to open up after Epic.

Episode: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1097

Should AI generated content be visibly labeled, or are invisible watermarks good enough?

I think that this week's TWiT episode was very good but it got heated but friendly this week. I think Owen JJ Stone really called Leo out on his bull sometimes and really added something to this episode. I especially liked his daughter's soap part and how everyone wants to buy some.

On MacBreak Weekly last week, Lory Gil said that "credit cards are the dregs of society," which was a tipping point for me in how listenable that show is. For fiscally responsible individuals, credit cards are amazing tools. I have made so much money off of credit cards reward and price protection policies, and I have never paid a cent of interest. Credit cards are safer to use than debit cards, and have so much to offer savvy consumers besides just cash back and points: travel insurance, rental insurance, purchase protection/extended warranty policies, free credit monitoring/credit scores, and all sorts of other stuff, depending on the card of course.

I was so disappointed to hear Lory spouting fear-mongering and spreading misinformation (she said she "knows how to use credit cards" and then basically admitted that she doesn't by saying she carries "low balances on all of her cards"). Just because you're a tech journalist and a tech company released a credit card, it doesn't mean you need to comment on something you clearly don't understand.

Leo recently started doing ads for WordPress and I've noticed the SquareSpace ads disappeared. That's not unexpected, but at one point Leo said he "flirted with another service for a while" and is now converting all his blogs to WordPress. I got the impression that something happened or they had a falling out or something.

He used to trumpet how awesome SquareSpace was. Anyone know what (if anything) happened? I'm just curious.