Real momentum: Buzzy app BeReal is starting to struggle

2/9/23 7:00PM

**\!/ Time To BeSafe \!/**‍

‍Damien Kieran, Twitter's ex-chief privacy officer who left the company when Musk took over, has been recruited by BeReal — last year’s official iPhone app of the year. BeReal has been challenged on privacy issues in the past, particularly over concerns about real-time location sharing, but privacy might be just one of its worries at the moment.

The pic-sharing platform, which gives users the same 2-minute window to capture whatever they are up to when the notification hits, may have already had its 15 minutes of fame, as downloads have quickly dropped off.

‍Building on the buzz

‍The Paris-based company seemingly emerged out of nowhere, one app in a buzzy new set of stripped-back social media that threatened to upheave the established powerhouses, as younger generations sought authenticity in the carefully-curated world of Instagram and Facebook.

‍BeReal, which raised $60m last year, properly took off in the summer of 2022, with global downloads peaking in Q3 when the app welcomed more than 40m simultaneous-snappers. Extrapolating from the figures in January, BeReal's downloads are set to drop to just 16m in Q1 this year, according to data from Apptopia via Sifted. And, despite the aforementioned plaudit from Apple itself, BeReal has dropped out of the top 100 on the App Store in recent weeks, per Sensor Tower data.

Like Clubhouse, Vine, Yik Yak, Periscope and many, many other social media apps that briefly caught lightning in a bottle, BeReal may be finding out just how hard it is to maintain the buzz.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

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.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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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