June 19, 2026: Anthropic&#x27;s Fable 5 shutdown appears to be tied to SK Telecom, Project Glasswing, Amazon researchers, the White House, David Sacks, and a dispute over whether Anthropic should fix or de-deploy the model. Fortune 500 companies just hit record revenue, profit, revenue per employee, and profit per employee while shrinking headcount for the second year in a row, raising a bigger question about productivity gains without job growth. New data from LV8 founder Griffin Hadrill shows AI-generated creative ads are underperforming human-made ads by 3 to 5 times, which is a reminder that originality, emotional connection, and human judgment still matter.

More Info on Anthropic's Fable 5 Shutdown, Fortune 500 Headcount Shrinks, and Why AI Ads Are Losing to Humans

Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Hello everyone, welcome to Future Ready Today, the number one podcast focused on the future of work. It is Friday, June 19, 2026, and as I am recording this, the United States is playing Australia. So literally the game just started, and instead of watching it, I am recording this podcast. This is a tough game for me to watch. Obviously I live in the United States. I was born in Australia, in Melbourne.

My grandmother, my aunt, my cousin, they still live there. So this is going to be, you know, who to root for. Ultimately I think I'm still going for Team USA here, but I'm going to be watching that as soon as I wrap up with this episode. So there are going to be three topics that I'm going to be covering today. The first one, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the Fable 5 ban.

It's actually a really interesting story, and there was an article that came out today that really pieces more of the puzzle together around why this happened. Story number two is going to be looking at the Fortune 500 companies out there. So there was some data that just came out which shows record profits, record revenue per employee, but also the second straight year of shrinking headcounts. So we're going to unpack the data, the research behind that.

And then lastly, there is a founder of a company who has real performance data showing that AI generated creative ads are underperforming when compared to human creative ads by a factor of three to five. So we're going to unpack that a little bit as well. So those are going to be the three stories of the day. Really quick programming announcement for next week.

More Info on Anthropic's Fable 5 Shutdown, Fortune 500 Headcount Shrinks, and Why AI Ads Are Losing to Humans

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

More Info on Anthropic's Fable 5 Shutdown, Fortune 500 Headcount Shrinks, and Why AI Ads Are Losing to Humans

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.