Weekly digest
Claude Code gets most of the developer-facing news this week. A screen reader mode turns the terminal interface into labeled linear text for VoiceOver and NVDA. On desktop, Claude Code can now drive the iOS Simulator in a panel next to the chat, in public beta on macOS with Xcode. Anthropic also says it cut about 80% of the Claude Code system prompt for Opus 5 and Fable 5.
On the model side, giving Fable 5 a zoom tool raised its Chartography score from 29% to 73%. The hardware news comes from two directions: AMD's investment of up to $5 billion, and SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won saying Anthropic asked SK Hynix for supplies to build its own chips.
Per ClaudeDevs, when Claude Code builds and runs an iOS app, the Simulator opens in a panel next to the chat. Claude can see the running app, interact with it, and keep iterating until the result is done, and you can tap the screen yourself at any point.
It works in Claude Code on desktop, macOS only, and requires Xcode. It's in public beta today.
Anthropic says it trimmed about 80% of the Claude Code system prompt for its newest models, Opus 5 and Fable 5. The company's post on X links to a breakdown of what the change means for writing system prompts, skills, and Claude.MD files.
We covered some of those takeaways in our piece on the updated context engineering rules for the Claude 5 generation. The post went up July 2; Anthropic introduced Opus 5 on July 24.
Run claude --ax-screen-reader and the terminal's visual interface drops away, leaving plain linear text that screen readers like VoiceOver and NVDA can follow.
The mode labels every line (you:, claude:, tool:), turns menus into numbered lists where you type a digit to pick an answer, and plays a sound when Claude is waiting on you. To keep it on permanently, either add "axScreenReader": true to ~/.claude/settings.json or set the CLAUDE_AX_SCREEN_READER=1 environment variable.
Anthropic shared numbers from the Chartography benchmark, a set of 100 questions on dense charts built from real data. Give the model a zoom tool and Fable 5 jumped from 29% to 73% accuracy, while Sonnet 5 went from 13% to 44%.
Shrinking large images loses fine detail. The tool lets Claude request a specific region and get that slice back from the original at full resolution. The updated recipe is in Claude Cookbooks on GitHub.
Anthropic wired the Anthropic Economic Index directly into Claude. It's a public dataset tracking how AI is used across the economy.
Ask which occupations lean on AI the most or which tasks people are automating, and the answers come straight from the Index data. The dataset covers labor-market impact: occupational exposure and how far AI has penetrated specific tasks. It's published on Hugging Face and on Anthropic's site.
AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, according to Reuters citing The Wall Street Journal.
Under the deal, Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD Helios rack systems built on AMD Instinct MI450 accelerators.
Anthropic approached SK Hynix about supplies for manufacturing its own semiconductors, according to SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won. He said it on July 25 on stage at an AI event in San Francisco, seated next to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and called the AI developer's chip ambitions remarkable. SK Group controls SK Hynix, one of the world's largest memory chip makers.
Anthropic has been lining up hardware and compute elsewhere too. The New York Times previously reported talks to rent compute from Meta in a deal worth up to $10 billion, and Reuters, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported that AMD would invest up to $5 billion in the company.
