Anthropic pulled Fable and Mythos from the market following US intervention, a frustrating move considering Fable was performing for me like Opus was six months ago, before the steady performance degradation across versions 4.6+. So where does LLM proliferation need to go so we aren’t tied to these frontier labs?
A way out looks realistic, with consumer hardware like the new Apple M-series paired with MLX getting better, the Apple foundation models announced at WWDC 2026, and more and more open-source coding harnesses, local agent platforms like OpenClaw and Hermes, and tools like Ollama and LM Studio. Real independence from the frontier labs is a matter of time.
I’ve been doing simple tasks locally on my MacBook Air M5 (10C, 32GB) using LM Studio with Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT and Zed editor, and it’s close to using an Anthropic model from a year ago, with performance and thermals within my low expectations, the MacBook gets quite hot and throttles. If self-hosted LLMs on consumer hardware are only 12 months behind the frontier labs, I’ll be running something comparable to Opus 4.8 or Fable 5 right on my desk within the next 12 to 24 months, at least that’s my hope. Not having to think about token consumption and usage limits is a relief.
