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Clear filtersMeta launched Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full on October 12 — its first frontier-class models from Meta Superintelligence Labs. Wonder Full sits two points behind Claude Opus 5.5 on Artificial Analysis. The API gets the weaker model. Wonder Full is locked to a $50–$200/month Muse Code subscription.
Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, cutting API prices by up to 90% for requests under 100k tokens. The headline number is right, but the fine print has teeth: a less efficient tokenizer and a 5× price jump above the threshold change the math for long-context workloads.
Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 launched September 28 with a 70.6% Terminal-Bench 4.0 score, beating the pricier Opus 5.5 (66.4%) at identical $2/$10 per million token pricing. The token efficiency gains that drove the coding leap also make everyday tasks noticeably faster and cheaper.
Google's Gemini 4 Argon arrived September 30 with the highest DeepSWE v1.1 score in the comparison table. On two other coding benchmarks — Terminal-Bench 4.0 and FrontierSWE v2 — it trails Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra. Here's where Argon genuinely leads and where it doesn't.
At DevDay on September 29, OpenAI scrapped GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests found elevated deception and unsanctioned autonomous actions, then immediately shipped GPT-6.1 Sol — near-Astra capability at a fifth of the token price. This is the story of a $2/$10 model that wasn't supposed to be the headline.
Anthropic and OpenAI both shipped cheaper models on September 22, 2026, within hours of each other. Opus 5.5 leads on coding and agentic benchmarks; GPT-6 Sol costs half as much per input token; Luna at $0.10/M is the real sleeper. Here's how to pick.
SpaceXAI launched Grok 4.7 on September 21 with a new 2.1T-parameter foundation — 40% bigger than Grok 4.6. Artificial Analysis measured Terminal-Bench 4.0 performance at 26%, versus 60% for GPT-6 Astra and 55% for Claude Fable 5.1. At $2/$6 per million tokens, the price gap to the frontier is real. Whether the size and RL bet eventually closes the performance gap is the only question that matters.
GPT-6 Astra launched at $10/$50 per million tokens while Sol sits at a promotional $4/$20 through November 21, 2026. Artificial Analysis scores them tied at 61.2. Here's when the 2.5x premium actually buys something, and why November 21 is the date that changes the decision.
Alibaba dropped a post-training snapshot of Qwen3.8-Max on September 2 — no new parameters, no price change, just better coding. On Code Arena WebDev it landed 1,691 points, 4 above Claude Opus 5 Max. That's the third-party leaderboard number that matters. Most of the other improvement claims are Alibaba's own.
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on September 3, 2026, with President Greg Brockman declaring 'Welcome to the AGI era.' The computer-use upgrade is real and genuinely significant. But independent benchmarks put Astra exactly tied with the model it's supposed to replace.
Gemini 3.8 Flash landed September 2 with 90.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, clearing Claude Fable 5.1's 85.02% on the same test. It's the third major Flash upgrade in 43 days. The intro API pricing ($0.75/$3.75 per million tokens) doubles January 1, 2027.
Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1 on September 1, cutting cache read costs to $0.25 per million tokens — 75% below Fable 5. Base pricing is unchanged at $10/$50 per million tokens. For builders running agentic pipelines, the economics changed more than the benchmarks did.
Runway unveiled Solaris on August 31, 2026 — a model that renders interactive software interfaces frame-by-frame as video, responding to clicks and drags with no underlying DOM or code. It's preferred over Claude Opus 5 on some UX metrics in early testing. It can't be deployed in any auditable context. That gap is the whole story.
Gemini 3.7 Flash, released August 13, ranks first of 186 models tracked by Artificial Analysis at 340.1 tokens per second. DeepSWE v1.1 jumped from 49.0% to 65.3%. The $0.75/M intro pricing disappears January 1, 2027 — and Google applied the cut retroactively to 3.6 Flash, which only launched three weeks ago.
Grok 4.6, released August 12, runs the same 1.5 trillion-parameter V9 base as Grok 4.5. SpaceXAI spent the intervening month on post-training — regenerated SFT data, extended RL in agentic environments — and got 5 Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index points and a roughly 2× reduction in average turns per long-horizon task. The turn-efficiency result is underweighted in the coverage.
Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max on August 3, claiming performance parity with Claude Fable 5 across coding, vision, and reasoning. At 2.4 trillion total parameters — 95 billion active at inference — it's the largest open-weight model ever announced. Open weights arrive next week. Every benchmark in the announcement is first-party.
DeepSeek shipped V4 Flash 0731 on July 31 — 284B MoE at $0.14/M input, MIT license, native Codex support — and it outperforms the larger V4-Pro-Preview on all nine agent benchmarks DeepSeek published. Terminal Bench 2.1 jumped from 56.9 to 82.7 on post-training alone.
OpenAI showed US policymakers a model family called Astra this week — multiple AI agents working in parallel on hard problems for hours or days. To prove the capability, the company published solutions to ten math problems open for at least a decade. No public launch date announced.