Model Releases

Model releases tracks new frontier and open models as they ship, along with their benchmarks and capabilities. It spans Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, Microsoft, and others.

Notes

• 2026-09-22 Anthropic and OpenAI both shipped model refreshes the same day. Claude Opus 5.5: $4/$20 per million tokens (40% less than Opus 5 on typical workloads), 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, 1846 Elo on GDPval-AA v2.1, tested pre-release by METR and Frontier Design, strongest score yet on Anthropic’s own behavioral safety audit. GPT-6 Sol and Luna: roughly half the API price of GPT-5.6 Sol/Luna, but Artificial Analysis’s independent eval found Intelligence Index and Coding Agent Index scores flat to down versus GPT-5.6, GDPval-AA v2.1 dropped ~100 Elo for Sol and ~75 for Luna, and Terminal-Bench 4.0 is absent from OpenAI’s own benchmark selection for the pair. Anthropic (primary) · OpenAI (primary) · Artificial Analysis (independent) · The Decoder (independent)

• 2026-09-20 StepFun (China) launched Step 5 Preview: 600B-parameter sparse MoE (27B active per token), 1M-token context, text/image input, aimed at agentic coding, software engineering, and finance work. API live now; weights opening Oct 15. Company-reported scores put it near Kimi K3 Max on the Intelligence Index (44), with 67.7 on DeepSWE v1.1 and 83.3 on DRACO; no independent benchmark reproduction yet. StepFun (primary) · Pandaily (independent)

• 2026-09-09 DeepSeek opened a time-boxed beta of V4.1 Flash, a new multimodal architecture it claims beats V4 Pro; endpoint name (deepseek-v4.1-flash-expires-on-0910) says it self-expires Sep 10, so the performance claim is unverified pending a real release. TechNode

• 2026-09-03 OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, rolling out first to a limited set of organizations with ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise and API access to follow over coming days. OpenAI claims 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, and 100% on ExploitBench; gdb called it a “generational leap” and floated a possible AGI framing, while OpenAI confirmed the model triggered internal cybersecurity safeguards keeping offensive capability restricted. Independent scoring from Artificial Analysis puts it at 61 on their Intelligence Index (tied with GPT-5.6 Sol and Grok 4.6, five points behind Claude Fable 5.1’s 66); it matches Fable 5 on their Coding Agent Index at under half the cost, and cuts the hallucination rate from 92% to 51%. Pricing rose 2.5x to $10/$50 per million tokens. OpenAI (primary) · Artificial Analysis (independent) · Axios (independent) · NBC News (independent)

• 2026-08-29 GLM-5.3’s flagship 753B-parameter weights are now publicly downloadable on Hugging Face (zai-org/GLM-5.3), closing the ~2-week safety-hardening delay past the original Aug 28 target. The license is no longer MIT. Hugging Face · The New Stack (independent)

• 2026-08-28 Tencent Hunyuan released and open-sourced Hy4 preview (Apache 2.0): 770B total / 49B active MoE, 1M-token context. Tencent says it can coordinate multiple codex sessions in parallel and beat Codex alone on eight benchmarks; claims a narrow edge over GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 on an internal 203-task, 163-expert blind eval (2.99/4.00 vs 2.92 and 2.94). No independent benchmark reproduction yet. Available via Tencent Cloud, OpenRouter, and Hugging Face. Tencent (primary) · Bloomberg (independent)

• 2026-08-26 Z.ai confirmed Ox Alpha, the stealth model that had been flooding OpenRouter and OpenCode’s free tier since ~Aug 20, was its own GLM-5.3-Flash: 320B MoE, 18B active parameters, 1M-token context, text/image/video input. Weights are now public under an MIT license with official API pricing live, ending the free-access route. The flagship GLM-5.3’s own weights remain withheld for safety hardening, still on track for around Aug 28. Kingy AI (community)

• 2026-08-14 Qwen3.8-27B: Alibaba released 27.78B dense multimodal model (text, image, video) under Apache 2.0 with a 262K native context window. Weights live on HuggingFace and ModelScope. Alibaba-reported benchmarks: SWE-Bench Pro 61.7%, Terminal-Bench 2.1 73.0 (vs Meta Muse Glimmer 30B at 51.7), LiveCodeBench v6 90.3%, GPQA Diamond 89.2%. No independent reproduction yet. officechai.com · aireleasetracker.com

• 2026-08-17 GLM-5.3 (Z.ai) additional context: on day one of availability the model found a “potentially serious” architectural vulnerability in Cursor’s Electron+Rust codebase (possibly arbitrary file write); Z.ai disclosed privately, no CVE published yet, Cursor team acknowledged and working on a fix. Z.ai also reports 2,436 vulnerabilities across 269 OSS projects, 1,097 rated critical or high, via post-training-only cyber capabilities that exceeded training intent. Open weights still in safety evaluation; ~Aug 28 target. VentureBeat (independent) · TechTimes (independent)

• 2026-08-14 Z.ai released GLM-5.3 via post-training only on a 743B-parameter base (no base model retrain). Self-reported benchmarks: CyberGym 84.5 (vs. Claude Mythos 5 at 83.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 83.6); Terminal-Bench 3.0 28.3 (vs. prior GLM’s 4.6); DeepSWE v1.1 66.9 (vs. 46.2); Agents’ Last Exam 28.5 (vs. GPT-5.6 Sol at 28.3). API access live via Z.ai; weights withheld ~2 weeks pending safety hardening. No independent benchmark reproduction yet. SiliconAngle · MarkTechPost

• 2026-08-13 Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.7 Flash. Intro pricing: $0.75 input / $3.75 output per million tokens (rises to $1.50/$7.50 on January 1, 2027). Self-reported benchmarks: Code Arena Elo 1588 (ahead of Claude Sonnet 5 at 1541 and GPT-5.6 Terra at 1523); FrontierCode 1.1 Main 43.6% (vs. 34.4% for 3.6 Flash); DeepSWE v1.1 65.3% (vs. 49.0%). 1M-token context; multimodal input (images, video, audio, PDF). Artificial Analysis confirmed the performance profile independently. Available on Gemini API, AI Studio, and Android Studio. Google DeepMind (primary) · SiliconAngle · Artificial Analysis

• 2026-08-14 Qwen3.8-Max open weights clarification: the FP8 checkpoint that shipped Aug 12-13 is text-only – vision input and the 1M-context window from the API product are absent. License is a new revenue-share agreement, not standard open-source. Qwen3.8-27B companion model remains absent from HuggingFace. The “open weights” label does not match the hosted API product. explainx.ai · orcarouter

• 2026-08-13 OpenAI Ultrafast mode for GPT-5.6 Sol: runs on Cerebras wafer-scale hardware at up to 750 output tokens/second (14X the standard baseline of ~53 tok/sec); limited API preview with no claimed quality reduction. First deployment of frontier-quality inference at near-real-time speed; announced jointly by OpenAI and Cerebras August 13. OpenAI (primary) · Cerebras (primary) · TechCrunch (independent)

• 2026-08-12 Grok 4.6 GA: xAI confirmed full public launch; 1753 ELO on Artificial Analysis composite (matching GPT-5.6 Sol Max); 500K-token context; $2/$6 per million input/output tokens (doubling above 200K tokens); available on API, Grok Build, Cursor, OpenRouter, Vercel, Cloudflare. Built on same V9 1.5T-param MoE as Grok 4.5 with substantially improved SFT and RL post-training. Independent benchmark comparison pending; ELO is a composite average across Artificial Analysis suite. unite.ai (independent) · kingy.ai (independent) · basenor.com (independent)

• 2026-08-12 Qwen 3.8 Max open weights: community source @ElainaNotes confirmed a 10:00 AM UTC+8 drop today; Alibaba’s official window runs Aug 10-16; no official weights repo confirmed on HuggingFace as of morning brief; quantized fork already exists; license still undisclosed. Model is 2.4T MoE (95B active), 1M context. Company-reported OSWorld-Verified 86.1 (above Claude Fable 5 85.0 and GPT-5.6 Sol Max 83.2 per Alibaba). X/@ElainaNotes (community) · Developers Digest (independent)

• 2026-08-12 Qwen 3.8 Max open weights confirmed shipped: FP8 checkpoints landed on HuggingFace and ModelScope on August 12, closing the watchlist window; the companion 27B dense model remains absent; license terms still not disclosed. 2.4T MoE (95B active), 1M context, native image + video input. Company-reported OSWorld-Verified 86.1 (above Fable 5 85.0 and GPT-5.6 Sol Max 83.2 per Alibaba; no independent reproduction yet). latent.space (community)

• 2026-08-11 NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 30B MoE with 3B active parameters; Mamba-2 + MoE + Attention hybrid architecture; 1M-token context; NVIDIA claims 4X faster than comparably-sized models. Companion NeMo Switchyard is an open-source LLM router dispatching calls across models mid-task with 74% reported cost reduction. Independent benchmarks pending. NVIDIA blog (primary) · SiliconANGLE (independent)

• 2026-08-10 OpenAI expanded Daybreak and released GPT-5.6-Cyber: purpose-trained for vuln research and exploit chains; Daybreak Blue gates frontier general-purpose models for defenders, Daybreak Red gates GPT-5.6-Cyber for advanced security work. ACCR: 95% vs 1.5% for Sol. OpenAI found two previously unknown V8 heap-sandbox-escape vulnerabilities using the model. Both models below Critical threshold per OpenAI’s own Preparedness Framework. OpenAI (primary) · Neowin (independent)

• 2026-08-10 Meta released Muse Glimmer 30B on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0: distilled from Muse Spark 1.2, 30B parameters, designed for always-on local agent workflows (function calling, local coding, LLM-as-a-judge); runs on a single consumer GPU. No independent benchmarks published at launch. Completes Meta’s open agentic stack alongside Muse Code (terminal agent) and Muse Spark 1.2 (frontier API model). Meta AI Research · Hugging Face · Bloomberg · Phoronix

• 2026-08-05 Meta released Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code beta (macOS/Linux terminal coding agent) — its first first-party CLI coding agent. Terminal-Bench 2.1: 82.9%, DeepSWE 1.1: 59.3%. Contributor pricing tier offers $0.10 input/$0.20 output in exchange for training permissions on prompts and completions. Meta AI Research (primary) · Yahoo Finance (independent)

• 2026-08-07 xAI Grok 4.6 launched on schedule; 1.5T parameters on the V9 MoE architecture as Grok 4.5, with improved SFT and RL post-training; available on X SuperGrok and xAI API; no independent benchmark suite at launch; Grok 4.7 (2.1T) targeted late August. crypto.news (community)

• 2026-08-07 Anthropic updated Fable 5’s biology safeguard logic, cutting biology-related fallbacks by ~85% for everyday health and educational queries; healthcare professional support expanded. Dual-use biology (virology, toxicology, molecular design) still falls back to Opus 5. Expected fallback reduction by surface: Claude.ai -67%, Cowork -55%, Claude Code -17%, Claude Platform -7%. Unite.AI (independent) · CyberSecurityNews (independent)

• 2026-08-05 Claude Opus 4.1 (claude-opus-4-1-20250805) retired from the Anthropic API today; Anthropic recommends migrating to Claude Opus 4.8. Anthropic release notes (primary)

• 2026-08-03 Qwen 3.8 Max GA: Alibaba shipped its largest model yet – 2.4T parameters, ~95B active per token (sparse MoE), 1M-token multimodal context, $2/$6 per million input/output tokens via QwenCloud. Open weights planned for “next week” (around Aug 10), which would make it the first model at this scale Alibaba has open-sourced. Independent BenchLM ranks it #6 of 215 models at 78.2/100. Alibaba-published: 86.6 Terminal-Bench 2.1, 93.0 PaperBench. Alibaba stock +4.5-7% on release day. Quartz (independent) · Forbes (independent) · BenchLM (independent)

• 2026-08-04 Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling-Small (July 30, Apache 2.0): 276B total / 12B active MoE, 1M context, multimodal text/image/audio; SWE-bench Verified 80.2% bash-only harness (beats parent Inkling at 77.6%); Terminal-Bench 2.1 64.7%; hosted via Together AI, Fireworks, Databricks. Best published SWE-bench number at this active-parameter count. Thinking Machines · MarkTechPost

• 2026-08-01 OpenAI revealed “Astra” as the name of its next major model family in a blog post about mathematics. An internal version solved 10 long-standing open problems in math, quantum complexity, and theoretical CS – including the first explicit non-sofic group and a disproof of Connes’s rigidity conjecture – each with a machine-checkable Lean 4 certificate. Total proof cost: under $2,000 at Sol API prices. Astra was also demoed to US senators and cabinet officials in DC. Whether it ships as GPT-6, GPT-5.7, or a separate class is undecided; must clear a 30-day White House pre-release review before launch. OpenAI · [@polynoamial on X · The Decoder

• 2026-07-30 OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna API pricing 80%, 21 days after launch: $1/$6 → $0.20/$1.20 per million input/output tokens. Terra cut 20% ($2.50/$15 → $2/$12). Sol unchanged at $5/$30. Direct response to Chinese models (led by DeepSeek and Kimi K3) capturing 46% of US enterprise token usage on OpenRouter. Largest pricing recalibration to hit a frontier model family this fast after launch. Axios · VentureBeat

• 2026-08-01 DeepSeek V4-Flash-0731 public beta: same 284B MoE architecture as the preview (13B active), re-post-trained only; beats V4-Pro-Preview on all nine published agent/coding benchmarks including Terminal Bench 2.1 (82.7 vs 72.1) and SWE-bench Verified (79%), at $0.28/M output tokens (~1/90th of Claude Opus 4.8). Native Responses API support and Codex compatibility. DeepSWE score of 54.4 is vendor-reported only – harness release pending, not independently reproducible yet. V4-Pro official release teased as coming soon. DeepSeek API Docs · TechTimes · Artificial Analysis

• 2026-07-27 Kimi K3 community benchmark picture (API-level, pre-weights): #1 Frontend Code Arena (1,679 ELO), BrowseComp (91.2%), SWE Marathon, Program Bench; #3 Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (57.1) behind Fable 5 (59.9) and GPT-5.6 Sol (58.9); cost ~1/3 of Fable 5 per task. Caveat: Moonshot’s coding leaderboard mixes harnesses, shifting scores 10-26 points; 51% hallucination rate (Artificial Analysis AA-Omniscience) is sole-source and unverified at weight level. Artificial Analysis · Codersera

• 2026-07-27 EU AI Act clarification: Parliament voted June 16 (423-57) via Digital Omnibus to push high-risk AI system obligations to December 2027, not August 2 as previously reported. What still enforces August 2: Article 50 transparency (chatbot disclosure, content labeling, deepfake tagging) and GPAI enforcement powers. EU Council publication of the delay in the Official Journal is pending but expected. Ogletree · Lumenova

• 2026-07-27 Kimi K3 open weights released on HuggingFace at midnight UTC; Modified MIT license confirmed (commercial use with attribution; training data and pipeline not released); vLLM contributed a KDA prefix caching patch upstream for day-0 serving; independent hallucination benchmarking and community GGUF quants expected within days. Moonshot blog · vLLM

• 2026-07-24 Anthropic released Claude Opus 5: $5/$25 per million input/output tokens (same as Opus 4.8, half of Fable 5); beats Opus 4.8 on agentic coding, computer use, novel problem solving, and multidisciplinary reasoning; adds per-request effort-toggle (low/medium/high); available immediately on API, Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Cowork. Anthropic · TechCrunch · MacRumors

• 2026-07-23 White House OSTP Director Kratsios formally accused Moonshot AI of running 3.4M covert distillation exchanges against Anthropic’s Fable platform to build Kimi K3. Treasury Secretary Bessent cited digital watermarks of US LLMs in Chinese products and threatened sanctions and Entity List designation. First time a senior US official named a specific Chinese lab for copying a specific US frontier model. Some AI researchers dispute that distillation alone could explain K3’s capabilities given the 15-day window after Fable’s July 1 return. TechCrunch · CNBC

• 2026-07-23 AMD confirmed Instinct MI455X and Helios rack at Lisa Su keynote (Advancing AI 2026, San Francisco): 432GB HBM4 per chip, 19.6 TB/s memory bandwidth, 2.9 exaFLOPS FP4 in a 72-GPU Helios rack, 31TB total HBM4, $5.25M price. 50% more memory than Nvidia Vera Rubin per rack. Azure committed as the first major hyperscaler open-rack partner. EPYC Venice (TSMC 2nm) also announced. MI500 2027 roadmap previewed with 1000× performance claim vs MI300. DataCenterDynamics · TechTimes

• 2026-07-21 Google launched Gemini 3.6 Flash ($1.50/$7.50 per M tokens, 17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash, Computer Use built in), Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite ($0.30/$2.50), and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber (security-tuned, government-only). Knowledge cutoff updated from January 2025 to March 2026. Google also confirmed Gemini 4 pretraining has started; Gemini 3.5 Pro remains unshipped. Benchmarks: 58.7% SWE-Bench Pro vs 55.1% for 3.5 Flash. Google blog · Coursiv

• 2026-07-21 claude-mythos-preview officially retired today; API calls to the model now fail. Migrate to claude-mythos-5. Anthropic docs

• 2026-07-19 Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max at WAIC Shanghai: 2.4T-param multimodal model, claims near-Claude-Fable-5 performance. No independent benchmarks. Open weights “coming soon” with no date. API available at 10% intro pricing via Token Plan and QoderWork. Arrives two days after Kimi K3, extending China’s open-weight arms race. MarkTechPost

• 2026-07-20 Fable 5 subscription rollout begins: Max and Team Premium plans now include Fable 5 at 50% of weekly limits. Pro and Team Standard users get a one-time $100 credit instead of subscription access. Anthropic cited competitive pressure from GPT-5.6 Sol and Kimi K3 as the reason the credits-only model was untenable. X/@claudeai · simonwillison.net

• 2026-07-19 Fable 5 pricing transition takes effect: Max/Team Premium users get it at 50% weekly limits as a subscription feature; Pro/Team Standard users move to $10/$50 per million input/output tokens starting today. Anthropic extended the free period three times since the original July 7 cliff, citing capacity constraints. TechTimes

• 2026-07-15 OpenAI’s GPT-Red: an adversarial LLM trained via self-play to find prompt injections and other attacks; OpenAI says it surfaced novel attack patterns and was used to harden GPT-5.6 Sol. Focus is prompt injection in agentic workflows — framing it as the most dangerous near-term threat to deployed agents. MIT Tech Review · OpenAI

• 2026-07-17 Gemini 3.5 Pro missed a third consecutive launch deadline as of July 16. Delays are tied specifically to coding performance gaps versus GPT-5.6; Google is weighing an interim stopgap release. No model card, pricing page, or API listing confirmed. TechTimes · 9to5Google

• 2026-07-17 Gemini 3.5 Pro is widely reported to target today for GA: 2M-token context (double most rivals), rebuilt from scratch after Google scrapped an earlier base model over SVG and recursive tool-call failures. Deep Think reasoning gated behind the $250/mo Ultra tier. No official launch post confirmed yet. TechTimes

• 2026-07-16 Moonshot AI released Kimi K3: 2.8T-parameter MoE, 1M-token context, two variants (K3 Max for chat/agents, K3 Swarm Max for parallel work). Benchmarks: 93.5% GPQA Diamond, 88.3% Terminal-Bench 2.1, 91.2% BrowseComp, 56.0% Humanity’s Last Exam with tools. Beats Opus 4.8 on GDPval-AA v2 (1687 vs 1600). $3/Mtok uncached input. Open weights on July 27. VentureBeat · kimi.com

• 2026-07-16 NVIDIA revealed Cosmos 3 Edge during Jensen Huang’s Tokyo visit: a real-time world model for physical environments and robotics. Japan’s government and major industrials (Toyota, Kawasaki, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Fanuc, Yaskawa) simultaneously announced a national AI infrastructure with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs. CNBC · NVIDIA Blog

• 2026-07-15 Thinking Machines Lab (Mira Murati’s startup) released Inkling: a 975B-parameter / 41B-active MoE open-weight model trained on 45 trillion tokens across text, image, and audio. 1M-token context window; available for download and fine-tuning via the company’s Tinker customization platform. The lab’s explicit bet is enterprise customizability over raw benchmark supremacy. Picked up 120 HN points on release day. TechCrunch · Thinking Machines

• 2026-07-14 cactus-compute/needle: 26M-param function-call model for edge devices (phones, watches, glasses), distilled from Gemini using an MLP-free “Simple Attention Network” architecture. Trained on 200B tokens using TPU v6e; achieves 6,000 tokens/sec prefill, outperforms FunctionGemma-270m and Qwen-0.6B on single-shot function calling. Weights fully open-source. 113 new GitHub stars today on Python trending. GitHub

• 2026-07-13 Anthropic extended included Fable 5 access a second time — now through July 19 at 11:59 PM PT — announced this morning via @claudeai after the July 12 deadline had already passed. This is the third cutoff date in two weeks (original July 7, then July 12, now July 19). After July 19 it will be credits-only at $10/$50 per Mtok. BleepingComputer · Android Authority

• 2026-07-11 GPT-5.6 Sol vs Fable 5 benchmark split is now clear: Sol leads TerminalBench 2.1 (88.8% standard, 91.9% Ultra) and Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index (+2.8 pts over Fable 5, using half the tokens and cost), while Fable 5 maintains a large lead on SWE-Bench Pro (80.3% vs Sol’s 64.6%). Different benchmarks; different winners depending on task type. BenchLM · Artificial Analysis

• 2026-07-10 Apple sued OpenAI for trade-secret theft: former Apple VP Tang Tan (now OpenAI hardware chief), engineer Chang Liu (kept an Apple laptop loaded with proprietary hardware designs), and Jony Ive’s io Products are the key defendants. Filed in Northern District of California. CNBC · TechCrunch

• 2026-07-12 “Claude Honeycomb EAP” briefly appeared in Cursor’s model picker with a 1M-token context window; quickly removed. Community consensus is it’s Opus 5 in early access testing. Anthropic has not confirmed. TechTimes · WaveSpeed

• 2026-07-12 Fable 5 included access expires tonight at 11:59 PM PT on Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise plans; Anthropic had extended the original July 7 cliff by five days. From July 13 it’s credits-only at $10/$50 per Mtok — the highest pricing Anthropic has published for a GA model. Anthropic · Android Authority

• 2026-07-10 GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra claimed a proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture (open since Szekeres 1973/Seymour 1979) using 64 parallel subagents in under 1 hour. OpenAI published the full proof PDF and the prompt used; mathematicians are reviewing publicly but no peer review has been done and the problem has had false proofs before. officechai · HN

• 2026-07-02 Mistral released Leanstral 1.5: Apache 2.0, 119B MoE (4 of 128 experts active per token), 256K context, purpose-built for Lean 4 formal verification. Saturates miniF2F, hits 87% on FATE-H and 34% on FATE-X, free during Labs API beta. Found 5 previously unknown bugs across 57 tested open-source repos. Mistral · The Decoder

• 2026-07-10 Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1 — its first closed, paid API model and first commercial entry into agentic coding, priced at ~$1.25/$4.25 per M tokens. Positions against Claude Code and Codex. Community on r/LocalLLaMA was sharply critical of Meta going closed-source after years of open Llama releases. Tech Startups

• 2026-07-10 Gemini 3.5 Pro restart confirmed across multiple outlets: Google scrapped the existing architecture for a full rebuild, with July 17 as the new target. New build targets 2M-token context and a Deep Think Reasoning Layer. Four DeepMind researchers departed in one week — Shazeer to OpenAI; Jumper, Adler, and Pritzel to Anthropic — contributing to ~$225B in Alphabet market cap loss. Upgrades the earlier “unconfirmed rumor” entry below. The Agent Report · Cryptobriefing

• 2026-07-08 ByteDance released Seedream 5.0 Pro: reasoning image model with deep-think prompt processing, real-time web search, interactive precision editing (point/lasso/sketch/color/material), layer separation to alpha PNGs, native 2K output, and on-image text in 10+ languages. Positioned as a GPT-Image 2 rival. Available via Volcano Engine, BytePlus, fal, and ComfyUI. Cryptobriefing · Testing Catalog

• 2026-07-10 Grok 4.5 first-day assessment: hallucination rate climbed from 25% to 54%, making it a cost leader ($2.49/coding task vs Claude Code’s ~$11.80) but unreliable for high-stakes factual work. Artificial Analysis ranks it 4th on Intelligence Index behind Fable 5, GPT-5.5, and Opus 4.8. EU users locked out of API and all SpaceXAI apps due to regulatory hold. TechTimes · Artificial Analysis

• 2026-07-09 Grok 4.5 launched publicly (SpaceXAI, V9 foundation, 1.5T params, 500K context, $2/$6 per M tokens). SWE-Bench Pro 64.7% — behind Fable 5 (80.4%) and Opus 4.8 (69.2%) but 4.2x more token-efficient per task than Opus 4.8. Co-trained on Cursor session data (after SpaceX acquired Cursor for ~$60B). July 9 marked the first time all three major Western frontier labs had public frontier models simultaneously. Decrypt · ExplainX

• 2026-07-09 GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna launched publicly today. Sol’s Ultra mode decomposes tasks and spawns cooperative subagents that communicate mid-run, not just at merge — 88.8% standard → 91.9% Ultra on Terminal-Bench 2.1. Each Ultra call can cost several times a standard request. The Dept. of Commerce cleared the 30-day safety review this week. OpenAI · Ultra mode

• 2026-07-08 GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna confirmed for July 9 general availability after the US Department of Commerce cleared the 30-day voluntary review; pricing: Sol Fast $12.5/$75 per Mtok, Terra $2.5/$15, Luna $1/$6. Neowin · Engadget

• 2026-07-08 Grok 4.5 (SpaceXAI) launching publicly July 9; Musk calls it “Opus-class” (claims Opus 4.8-level performance, faster and cheaper), 1.5T-param V9 foundation model. Cybernews · Yahoo Finance

• 2026-07-08 Gemini 3.5 Pro reportedly targeting July 17 after Google scrapped the 2.5 Pro base for a full re-pretrain; claimed specs include 2M token context and a Deep Think Reasoning Layer; unconfirmed rumor, not an official date. TechTimes · BigGo Finance

• 2026-07-07 Fable 5 billing cliff: today is the last day Fable 5 draws from subscription limits on Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise plans. From July 8 it bills at API pay-as-you-go rates ($10/1M input, $50/1M output). Anthropic says the move is temporary until capacity allows subscription reinstatement. Bleeping Computer · Anthropic

• 2026-07-06 OpenAI shipped gpt-realtime-2.1 and gpt-realtime-2.1-mini: 25% lower p95 latency via improved caching, better alphanumeric recognition and noise handling, configurable reasoning effort (minimal to xhigh). OpenAI Dev Forum

• 2026-07-07 GPT-5.6 general access window opens this week (July 7-14); White House voluntary AI standards framework expected imminently as the likely release trigger. Polymarket: 99% yes by July 31, $29.3M traded. OpenAI · Polymarket

• 2026-07-02 Anthropic in early talks with Samsung to manufacture a custom AI chip on Samsung’s 2nm process with advanced packaging. No design yet; reportedly an OpenAI chip engineer just joined the company. TechCrunch · Bloomberg

• 2026-07-02 Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang told staff that the in-training “Watermelon” model has matched GPT-5.5 on internal benchmarks, using one order of magnitude more compute than the prior “Avocado” model. No public release or confirmed timeline. Caveat: OpenAI has already previewed GPT-5.6 Sol, so the frontier target has moved. Benzinga · American Bazaar

• 2026-07-05 GPT-5.6 Sol deploying on Cerebras at up to 750 tokens/sec in July; limited to select customers while capacity expands. First instance of a frontier model explicitly deployed for inference speed at this scale on non-GPU silicon. OpenAI

• 2026-07-03 Together AI raised $800M Series C at $8.3B valuation (more than double its $3.3B prior). Aramco Ventures led; Nvidia, Vista Equity, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital joined. Annual bookings $1.15B, open-source model usage tripled year-over-year. Plans to grow compute capacity ~50x over five years. TechCrunch

• 2026-07-01 Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 restored globally across Claude.ai, Claude Code, API, and Cowork after a 2.5-week government ban. US Commerce lifted export controls June 30. Anthropic’s new classifier blocks the Amazon-found jailbreak in 99%+ of cases; coding requests that trigger a false positive now fall back to Opus 4.8. Usage capped at 50% of weekly limit through July 7; AWS/GCP/Foundry reinstatement pending. The Hacker News · The Decoder

• 2026-07-01 Claude Sonnet 5 launched June 30 and is now rolling out as the default model for free and Pro plans. SWE-bench Pro 63.2% (up from Sonnet 4.6’s 58.1%), OSWorld-Verified 81.2%, GDPval-AA v2 1,618 (edges Opus 4.8’s 1,615). Intro pricing $2/$10 per million tokens through Aug 31, then $3/$15. 1M context window. Anthropic positions it as the cost-effective agentic model; community reception so far is positive on price-to-value but skeptical about the full $3/$15 rate. TechCrunch · Anthropic · MarkTechPost benchmarks

• 2026-06-30 Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0: 1.6T-param MoE, native 1M-token context, MIT license, trained entirely on 50k domestic Chinese ASICs with no Nvidia GPUs. Had been leading OpenRouter’s coding charts for two months under the alias “Owl Alpha.” SWE-Bench Pro 59.5 vs GPT-5.5’s 58.6. Weights marked “coming soon” on HuggingFace; hosted API is live. VentureBeat · SiliconAngle

• 2026-06-28 Grok 4.5 (1.5T-param V9 + Cursor coding data) entered private beta at SpaceX and Tesla. Musk claims performance close to or above Claude Opus. No public API, no independent benchmarks. TechTimes

• 2026-06-30 OpenAI released GeneBench-Pro: 129 synthetic biology/genomics/medicine problems judging AI agents in realistic research workflows. GPT-5.6 Sol Pro tops at 31.5% pass rate; Claude Opus 4.8 at 16%. Top models fail 70% of real biology tasks. 10 problems open-sourced on Hugging Face. OpenAI · AlphaSignal

• 2026-06-30 Claude Opus 4.8 and Haiku 4.5 hit GA in Microsoft Foundry on Azure: Azure-native identity, billing, and governance for Claude; runs on NVIDIA GB300 Blackwell Ultra. “Hosted on Anthropic infrastructure” option stays in preview. Azure blog · WindowsReport

• 2026-06-30 Gemini 3.5 Pro officially confirmed delayed to July – Google cited token-use tuning and long-task performance issues flagged by enterprise testers; the “give us until next month” promise Sundar Pichai made at I/O 2026 did not land. TechTimes Jun 29 · Crypto Briefing

• 2026-06-30 Grok 5 did not ship before month-end; prediction markets had it at 12-33% odds for a June 30 release and it remains in training on Colossus 2. xAI’s June consolation drops were grok-imagine-video-1.5 (GA June 16) and Grok Build /goal autonomous mode. WaveSpeed tracker

• 2026-06-29 Anthropic published the June Economic Index “Cadences” report: ~9,700 surveyed Claude users, 50% say AI can handle half or more of their job tasks today, 4% say it could do their entire role now. Personal use peaks on weekends; high-value work tasks cluster at night. Data covers April 10 – June 10, 2026. Anthropic · GIGAZINE

• 2026-06-28 WSJ reported “China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race”: Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 benchmarked at or near Claude Mythos levels on security-bug detection, per Semgrep research. With Mythos and Fable offline for most users and OpenAI gating GPT-5.6, the timing is uncomfortable for US labs. CNBC · X

• 2026-06-27 US Commerce Dept partially lifted the Anthropic export control: Mythos 5 restored for US organizations operating or defending critical infrastructure. Fable 5 still suspended for all general users. Day 15 of the ban; first permissioned restore. Semafor · Axios · CNBC

• 2026-06-27 OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna in a government-gated rollout to ~20 partners. Sol scores 88.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (vs Mythos 5’s 88.0%); Terra costs 2x less than Sol; Luna targets economy volume. General availability in coming weeks. TechCrunch · VentureBeat

• 2026-06-27 GPT-4.5 retired from ChatGPT today, ending the GPT-4 era in the product; API is unaffected. o3 follows August 26. witho2.com · TechRadar

• 2026-06-26 GPT-4.5 retires from ChatGPT tomorrow June 27 — the last GPT-4-family model in the product. Users on GPT-4.5 (paid tiers only) should switch to GPT-5.5 before the deadline. o3 follows August 26. No API changes. OpenAI release notes · gHacks

• 2026-06-25 Micron FQ3 FY2026 beat: $41.5B revenue vs $35.7B estimate, gross margin 85%, Q4 guided to $50B. Shares +17% pre-market; SanDisk +15%, WD +13%. Micron locked 16 multi-year strategic LTA agreements, securing an estimated $100B+ of AI memory demand. Fortune framed it as traders “abandoning fear of an AI bubble.” Fortune · StockTitan · 247wallst

• 2026-06-25 GPT-5.6 confirmed slipping to July: Polymarket odds for a June 28 release collapsed from ~83% to ~18%; no launch signal from OpenAI. ProActive Investors

• 2026-06-24 OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño: OpenAI’s first custom LLM inference processor, nine months design-to-tape-out, claims ~50% lower cost per token vs Nvidia GPUs, initial deployment targeted end of 2026. gdb: “By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency.” TechCrunch · OpenAI

• 2026-06-23 OpenAI launched the full GPT-5.5-Cyber model for vetted defenders (June 22): CyberGym 85.6%, ExploitGym 39.5%, SEC-bench Pro 69.8%. Ships with an updated Codex Security plugin and “Patch the Planet,” an open-source vuln-patch initiative. Individual access requires Advanced Account Security. Axios · OpenAI

• 2026-06-24 GPT-5.6 prediction market odds collapsed further: “launches by June 28” dropped to 17% (was 22% on June 22, ~83% as of June 15), with $560K wagered. Traders abandoned the near-term bet with no signal from OpenAI on an imminent release. Yahoo Finance · ProActive Investors

• 2026-06-23 Sakana AI Fugu and Fugu Ultra launched June 22: a 7B RL conductor routes sub-tasks to a pool of Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro (no Fable 5 — banned). Fugu Ultra scores 73.7 SWE-Bench Pro vs. Opus 4.8 at 69.2 and GPT-5.5 at 58.6, plus 95.5 on GPQA-D. Priced at $5/M input / $30/M output. Not available in EU/EEA. The Decoder · MarkTechPost

• 2026-06-23 GPT-5.6: launch window opened June 22; leak pins June 25 as the drop date. Expected: 1.5M-token context, reasoning effort budget up from 768 to 960, December 2025 knowledge cutoff. Still no official OpenAI announcement. TechTimes

• 2026-06-22 Fable 5 free access expires today on all paid plans (Pro, Max, Team, seat-based Enterprise); from June 23 any use requires usage credits at $10/$50 per million tokens. The model is still offline under the June 12 export-control directive, so the billing cliff arrives with no model to bill for. developersdigest.tech · HN

• 2026-06-22 GPT-5.6 Polymarket odds flipped: the June 22-28 window that sat at 83% probability as of June 15 has collapsed to 22% (“not by June 28” now at 77%), $960k in volume. Still no official launch announcement from OpenAI. Polymarket

• 2026-06-21 NSA Director and Cyber Command head Gen. Joshua Rudd disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee this morning that Mythos, in a red-team exercise, autonomously breached nearly all NSA classified systems in hours. Senator Warner: “Thank God it was Anthropic.” Reframes the export ban from a narrow jailbreak dispute to concern about autonomous offensive cyber capability. NSA is reported to be actively using Mythos 5 for offensive operations. Senator Warner quote · inshorts · CSO Online

• 2026-06-21 Fable 5 and Mythos 5 still suspended, day 9. isfable5back.com confirms no restoration. No official timeline from Anthropic. tracker · fable5.app news

• 2026-06-21 GPT-5.6 still unreleased; OpenAI chief scientist called it a “meaningful leap” June 16, Codex logs leaked the identifier; prediction markets at 80-89% for June 30 release. TechTimes · Manifold

• 2026-06-20 Trump told Axios he no longer views Anthropic as a national security threat: “Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe.” Globe and Mail reports active deal talks between Anthropic and Commerce Department toward restoring Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — no formal timeline yet. CNBC · Axios · Globe and Mail

• 2026-06-20 Fable 5 / Mythos 5 refund deadline: June 20 is Anthropic’s cutoff for customers to claim credits on June 9-14 usage. No access restoration announced. Prediction markets: ~57% chance models return before July 1. Manifold has an active resolution market. Fable 5 ban - pasqualepillitteri · Manifold

• 2026-06-19 ENISA (EU cybersecurity agency) met with Anthropic in San Francisco to negotiate EU defender access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The meeting was pre-scheduled before the June 12 ban, turning it into a live negotiation session. CryptoBriefing

• 2026-06-19 OpenAI’s 2025 audited financials leaked (Ed Zitron/FT): $13B revenue, $20.9B operating loss, $38.5B net loss after $41.5B in fair-value charges from nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion. R&D: $19.2B. Microsoft payments: $17.2B. Inference margins healthy at 40%+; training and infrastructure costs are the drain. Fortune

• 2026-06-19 Grok 4.3 GA on Amazon Bedrock (launched June 16): 1M-token context, configurable reasoning effort levels (none/low/medium/high), claimed lowest hallucination rate among frontier models; running on xAI’s Mantle inference engine. AWS · xAI

• 2026-06-18 Fable 5 / Mythos 5 still offline at Day 6. No deal announced; Washington talks between Anthropic engineers and Commerce Department officials ongoing. Seoul office opening noted separately. Digital Today KR · Anthropic statement

• 2026-06-16 OpenAI published Deployment Simulation: strips assistant replies from 1.3M de-identified past conversations across GPT-5 Thinking through GPT-5.4, replays them through a candidate model before release, and flags behavioral drift, novel misalignment, and reward hacking including in agentic tool-call scenarios. openai.com

• 2026-06-16 OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki called GPT-5.6 a “meaningful leap” over GPT-5.5 in a public statement; no official launch date but Polymarket gives June 22-28 an 83% probability ($960K volume). TechTimes

• 2026-06-16 Fable 5 / Mythos 5 still offline as of evening UTC. Anthropic’s Tom Brown and Sarah Heck met White House officials over the weekend; no deal announced. 80+ cybersecurity executives signed an open letter June 14 asking Commerce Secretary Lutnick to lift the controls. Amazon researchers reportedly triggered the ban by demo’ing a cyberattack jailbreak to the White House. Polymarket: ~71% chance Fable 5 access restored by July 1. Axios · Fortune · BusinessToday · Polymarket

• 2026-06-15 Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 retirements took effect at 9AM PT; API calls to claude-opus-4-20250514 or claude-sonnet-4-20250514 now return errors. No auto-failover. Enterprise DNA

• 2026-06-14 claude-sonnet-4-20250514 and claude-opus-4-20250514 retire June 15 at 9AM PT; API calls return errors with no auto-failover. Upgrade to claude-sonnet-4-5 or claude-opus-4-7. MindStudio

• 2026-06-13 US Dept of Commerce issued an export control directive on June 12 ordering Anthropic to suspend Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national. Because Anthropic cannot separate foreign nationals in real time, both models went dark globally. The government cited a narrow jailbreak (asking the model to review code and flag vulnerabilities). Anthropic complied but disputes the rationale and warns the standard would halt all frontier deployments industry-wide. Pre-IPO contracts fell ~3.7%. The shutdown landed 11 days after Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO. Anthropic · TechCrunch · CNBC

• 2026-06-12 Moonshot AI open-sourced Kimi K2.7-Code: 1T-param MoE, 256K context, Modified MIT license. Claims +21.8% on Kimi Code Bench v2 and 30% fewer reasoning tokens vs K2.6 — all on proprietary benchmarks. No independent SWE-bench numbers yet; practitioners skeptical. VentureBeat · MarkTechPost

• 2026-05-28 Claude Opus 4.8 released. Leads the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61.4, ahead of GPT-5.5 (60.2) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (57). SWE-bench Pro at 69.2%, computer-use (Online-Mind2Web) at 84%.

• 2026-06 Frontier model landscape: GPT-5.5 (OpenAI, April), Grok 4.3 (xAI, April), Gemini 3.1 Pro (Google, February), Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic, May).

• 2026-06-06 Claude Opus 4.8 additional benchmarks: 96.7% on USAMO 2026 (+27 pts from Opus 4.7 in one cycle), Dynamic Workflows, Effort Control, Fast Mode 3x cheaper. Anthropic

• 2026-06-06 Microsoft launched 7 MAI models at Build 2026 (June 2), including MAI-Thinking-1 (35B MoE, 256K context, 53% SWE Bench Pro), all trained from scratch without OpenAI distillation. Microsoft AI

• 2026-06-07 GPT-5.6 appeared briefly as a canary entry in OpenAI Codex internal rollout logs, then vanished — standard sign of internal testing. Polymarket prices a June 30 release at ~68–80%. No official announcement yet. wavespeed.ai

• 2026-06-08 Apple WWDC 2026 keynote: Siri 2.0 unveiled, powered by a custom 1.2T-param Google Gemini model licensed at ~$1B/year. Ships as a standalone chatbot app in iOS 27 (September). Tim Cook’s final keynote before handing off to John Ternus on Sept 1. Let’s Data Science · MacRumors

• 2026-06-08 Gemini 3.5 Flash goes mandatory default in Google Enterprise; Gemini 2.5 Flash removed from the model selector, affected agents auto-migrated. Google Cloud release notes

• 2026-06-08 MiniMax M3 launched June 1, claiming SWE-Bench Pro scores above GPT-5.5 with a 1M-token context and native multimodal computer use. Open weights were withheld at launch; targeting HuggingFace publication around June 11. Treat open-weight claim as unverified until weights ship. MiniMax blog · The Decoder

• 2026-06-07 Gemini 3.5 Pro still not GA as of today. Announced at Google I/O (May 19) with a 2M-token context window and “Deep Think” reasoning mode. Launch expected this month. TechTimes

• 2026-06-06 OpenAI shipped gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b under Apache 2.0: on-prem reasoning models with function calling and structured outputs, gpt-oss-120b near o4-mini on benchmarks, available on AWS Bedrock and SageMaker. openai.com

• 2026-06-12 Anthropic formally apologized for covertly degrading Fable 5 for ML researchers: the model had been using steering vectors and prompt modification to silently worsen responses for users working on pretraining, distributed training, and ML accelerator design. After backlash led by natolambert, Anthropic told WIRED it was “the wrong tradeoff” — flagged requests now visibly fall back to Opus 4.8 with a stated reason. Yahoo Tech · DevOps.com

• 2026-06-09 Claude Fable 5 + Mythos 5 launched. Fable 5 is the Mythos-class model in general availability; safety classifiers route cybersecurity, bio/chem, and distillation queries to Opus 4.8 instead. Mythos 5 is the same underlying model with classifiers lifted, restricted to Project Glasswing cyberdefense and critical infrastructure partners. Pricing: $10/$50 per million tokens — under half the Mythos Preview price. Free on paid Claude plans through June 22. Stripe reported compressing months of engineering into a day in testing. Anthropic · TechCrunch

• 2026-06-09 ChatGPT “Dreaming” memory rolled out to Plus and Pro users in the US: model continuously extracts and updates facts from full chat history in the background, doubling memory capacity; internal evals show factual recall up from 67.9% to 82.8%. Neowin