The Days When Fable Got Hit by a Bus and Disappeared: Gene Kim Live with Tim O’Reilly
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Operational lessons learned when models become unavailable
The shutdown of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model in June jolted the AI tech ecosystem, abruptly breaking workflows, automated coding pipelines, and countless applications. Preparing for such a cutoff was essentially futile because it happened so quickly.
Following his compelling session at O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, award-winning CTO, researcher, and author Gene Kim joins Tim O’Reilly to share his personal experience of navigating the shutdown and his takeaways for how to prepare for future disruptions. Gene will give a reprise of his lightning talk, followed by an interactive discussion with Tim, where they’ll address your questions in real time.
The Fable 5 shutdown serves as a stark warning about our reliance on Big Tech AI and the decision to build critical infrastructure on top of centralized closed-source models, which introduces a single point of failure. It also highlights the importance of changing regulatory environments, corporate safety policies, and geopolitical maneuvering.
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Monday, July 20, 2026, at 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET
Interactive discussion and Q&A (60 minutes)
Your Hosts and Guests
Tim O'Reilly
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. He has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. He’s played a key role in shaping our understanding of the early commercialization of the internet, open source software, big data, and Web 2.0. He believes that the current AI moment is more significant than any of those. His 2017 book, WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, raised many of the concerns and opportunities about AI that we are wrestling with today. He writes regularly for O’Reilly Radar and on Asimov’s Addendum, his Substack about AI governance.
Gene Kim
Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. His books have sold over a million copies—he is the WSJ best-selling author of The Unicorn Project, and coauthor of Wiring the Winning Organization, The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate. His latest book, Vibe Coding, was released in October 2025.
In 2025, he received the Philip Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) for his contributions to the 2023 book Wiring the Winning Organization. Since 2014, he has organized the DevOps Enterprise Summit, which evolved into the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit and later the Enterprise AI Summit, where he has studied and shared the technology transformation journeys of large, complex organizations.