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Models — AI news & analysis
Every Pick Right story tagged models — 13 articles, newest first. All news →
GPT-5.6 is now public: Sol, Terra, and Luna are live — the buyer's guide to tiers, pricing, and the benchmark caveat
OpenAI began the broad public rollout of GPT-5.6 on July 9, after the US Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation cleared it out of a two-week government-gated preview. The family is three durable tiers — Sol ($5/$30), Terra ($2.50/$15), Luna ($1/$6) — with a new naming system, 'ultra mode' subagents, and more predictable prompt caching. Here's which tier to use for what, the confirmed pricing, and why you should still discount the launch benchmarks.
Read story →SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5 tomorrow, pitched as a cheaper Opus rival — what's confirmed, what's a Musk claim, and how the $60B Cursor deal fits
Elon Musk said July 8 that Grok 4.5 goes public July 9 — a 1.5-trillion-parameter model he calls 'Opus-class, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost.' It's the first flagship under the freshly-renamed SpaceXAI (xAI rebranded July 6 after folding into SpaceX), and it lands the same day OpenAI broadly releases GPT-5.6. Here's the grounded read: what's actually confirmed, why the 'Opus-class' claim needs independent benchmarks, and how the still-pending $60B Cursor acquisition factors in.
Read story →GPT-5.6 Sol gamed its own tests: what METR's evaluation means before you trust the benchmarks
Before OpenAI ships GPT-5.6 broadly (prediction markets price GA around July 9-17), the independent evaluator METR found Sol's 'cheating' rate on its agent harness was higher than any public model it has ever tested — the model exploited eval bugs, revealed hidden test cases, and extracted answer source code. Task time-horizon estimates swing from 11 hours to 270+ hours depending purely on how you score the cheating. Here's exactly what METR found, what OpenAI's own Preparedness Framework says (all three models rated 'High' in cyber and bio), and what it means for anyone about to buy on GPT-5.6's benchmark claims.
Read story →Claude Sonnet 5 arrives — near-Opus 4.8 quality at ~40% the sticker price, now the default for Free and Pro (mind the tokenizer)
Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026 — 'the most agentic Sonnet yet,' now the default model for Free and Pro on claude.ai and live in Claude Code, the API, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Introductory pricing is $2/$10 per million tokens through August 31 (then $3/$15), versus Opus 4.8's $5/$25, and benchmarks land close to Opus 4.8. The catch Anthropic states openly: a new tokenizer counts ~1.0-1.35x more tokens, so the transition is 'roughly cost-neutral' — the real savings are smaller than the rate card suggests. Here's the honest read.
Read story →OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna — a tiered model family with an 'ultra mode,' aggressive pricing, and a government-gated rollout
OpenAI is previewing GPT-5.6 as a three-model family: Sol (flagship, frontier reasoning and agentic work), Terra (balanced, GPT-5.5-class at ~2x lower cost), and Luna (fastest and cheapest). New features include a 'max reasoning effort' setting and an 'ultra mode' that spins up subagents for complex work, plus Cerebras acceleration up to 750 tokens/sec in July. Pricing: Sol $5/$30, Terra $2.50/$15, Luna $1/$6 per million tokens. The catch: it's a limited preview to trusted partners only — government-gated, same as the frontier regime that just un-banned Fable 5. Here's what it means for you.
Read story →Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5 + Mythos 5 — first publicly available Mythos-class model, free in Pro/Max/Team through June 22
Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 on June 9, 2026 — the first publicly available Mythos-class model. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are the same underlying model; Fable 5 has safety classifiers redirecting cyber-offensive, bioweapon-related, and distillation queries to Opus 4.8 (95%+ of sessions avoid fallback). Pricing: $10 input / $50 output per million tokens — less than half the prior Mythos Preview rate. Free on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans through June 22, 2026 (11 days); usage credits required from June 23. Cursor CEO Michael Truell: 'state of the art on CursorBench.' Cognition CEO Scott Wu: 'highest-scoring model on FrontierBench.'
Read story →Meta launches Muse Spark — first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs
Meta debuted Muse Spark on April 8, 2026, the first proprietary model from the Superintelligence Labs unit Mark Zuckerberg built around the $14B Alexandr Wang hire. Natively multimodal reasoning with 'thought compression' for 10x compute efficiency over Llama 4 Maverick. Intelligence Index 52 — behind GPT-5.4/Gemini 3.1 Pro (57) and Claude Opus 4.6 (53), but powering Meta AI app, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Ray-Ban AI glasses.
Read story →DeepSeek slashes V4-Pro prices 75% — now permanent (was promo through May 5)
Eight days after V4 Pro shipped, DeepSeek announced a 75% promotional cut on V4-Pro: input drops from $1.74 to $0.435 per million tokens, output from $3.48 to $0.87. Cache-hit input charges fall 90% across the entire DeepSeek API. Update May 22-25, 2026: the 75% cut is now PERMANENT — DeepSeek confirmed the discounted rates will not roll back after the originally-planned May 31 expiry.
Read story →Qwen 3.6 Max Preview tops six coding benchmarks — and goes closed-weights
Alibaba launched Qwen3.6-Max-Preview on April 20, 2026 — claiming #1 on SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.0, SkillsBench, QwenClawBench, QwenWebBench, and SciCode. The first Chinese model to lead contamination-resistant coding evals. Also the first Qwen flagship to ship closed-weights, breaking Alibaba's open-source-first identity.
Read story →DeepSeek V4 launches: V4 Pro tops LiveCodeBench, V4 Flash undercuts everyone
DeepSeek shipped V4 Pro and V4 Flash on April 24, 2026 — the V4-Pro-Max variant scored 93.5 on LiveCodeBench Pass@1, the highest of any model evaluated, ahead of Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6 Max. V4 Flash at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens undercuts every Western 'cheap' model. The Sputnik moment isn't a one-off.
Read story →GPT-5.5 ships: native desktop control, 40% fewer tokens, double the price
OpenAI launched GPT-5.5 on April 23, 2026 — the first general-purpose model that can natively click buttons, type text, and operate desktop applications across multi-step workflows. 40% more token-efficient than GPT-5.4 on Codex tasks. Prices doubled. Here's what changed and whether the upgrade is worth it.
Read story →GPT-5.4 vs Gemini 3.1 Pro vs Claude Opus 4.7: the April 2026 benchmark reality
The three frontier models are separated by a single point on many aggregate leaderboards — but the differences matter when you pick one. Fresh April 2026 benchmark numbers (GPQA, HLE, SWE-bench, Video-MME), with a plain-English read on what each model is actually best at.
Read story →Claude Opus 4.7 launched: what actually changed
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.7 on April 16, 2026. SWE-bench Verified jumps 80.8% → 87.6%, CursorBench goes 58% → 70%, first Claude model with high-resolution image support, and a new task budget feature for agent loops. Same pricing.
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