Diamonds are forever: But what about the diamond mining industry? Can it survive lab-grown diamonds?

5/4/21 8:00PM

Diamonds are forever. Perhaps one of the most famous marketing taglines of all time, first penned by Frances Gerety in 1947, has stuck in the diamond industry ever since. But, the diamond industry as we know it, may be under threat.

‍Opening Pandora's box

‍This week Pandora, which is the world's largest jewellery company, announced that from now on they would no longer offer mined diamonds — instead only sourcing diamonds that are created in a laboratory. This is a big deal for lab-grown diamonds, which only accounted for 6-7 million carats of global diamond production last year (according to a report from Bain).

The ability to create a diamond in a lab is not new. In fact, the first synthetic diamond was reportedly created in 1954 — just 7 years after Frances Gerety wrote her famous marketing slogan. So far then, the mined-diamond industry has been doing just fine, with lab-grown alternatives gaining little traction before the last decade.

However, recent advances in technology, coupled with increasingly ethically focused consumers, has meant that both the demand and supply of lab-grown diamonds has increased significantly in the last decade. Pandora's announcement this week is likely to accelerate that trend.

‍The diamond mining industry might need another slogan.

‍P.S. Decent video explanation of how lab-grown diamonds are made can be found here.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5