OpenAI and Anthropic each released new AI models on the same day, continuing a pattern of frequent announcements. Much of this apparent acceleration reflects companies repackaging capabilities from earlier flagship models into new versions at different price points, rather than pure leaps in underlying capability.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-23
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, which it says outperforms its predecessor Opus 5 while responding over 30% faster and costing about 40% less to run. The company also says it improved the model's communication style and added new safety safeguards, and it is raising usage limits for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-22
OpenAI has updated its smaller GPT-6 models, Sol and Luna, following this month's launch of the flagship GPT-6 Astra. The company says API access to the new Sol and Luna models costs half as much as the previous 5.6 series, citing gains in caching and inference, and claims GPT-6 Sol makes roughly half as many factual mistakes as its predecessor while also reducing coding errors.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-22
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, running in Adaptive Reasoning Max Effort mode, scored 58 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index against a median of 25 among comparable models. The model handles text and image input with text output and a 1M token context window, but is priced at $4.00 per 1M input tokens and $20.00 per 1M output tokens, both above the reported medians of $2.00 and $10.00. Evaluating it on the Intelligence Index generated 260M tokens and cost $8,708.20 in total.
artificialanalysis.ai
· 2026-09-22
Analyst Kurnal Insights calculated that at current AI-driven memory prices, the revenue value of DRAM per square millimeter of silicon now surpasses the nominal wafer processing cost of TSMC's advanced N2 and N3 logic nodes. Using an assumed DRAM price of $1.50 per gigabit, the newest 1b DRAM generation works out to about $0.654 per mm², compared to roughly $0.424 per mm² for an N3 wafer.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-22
MiMo-V2.6-Pro is a new open-weight AI model supporting text, image, speech, and video inputs with a 1M-token context window, scoring 46 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index versus a median of 18 among comparable models. It runs at 125 tokens per second, priced at $0.43 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens, with a total evaluation cost of $206.66.
artificialanalysis.ai
· 2026-09-22
U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it will suspend all personal importation of prescription medications beginning October 22, affecting Americans who order drugs from licensed Canadian pharmacies. The Canadian Pharmacy International Patients group is urging affected consumers to join its advocacy effort to preserve access to lower-cost medication.
personalimportation.org
· 2026-09-21
A link-building agency analyzed pricing data from 16,625 publisher sites across 53 languages and found that the most expensive, high-authority publishers increasingly decline to sell traditional dofollow SEO backlinks. Instead, these premium sites charge based on audience size and brand credibility, with prices ranging from under $100 to over $2,500 per placement depending on domain authority and traffic.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-21
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro now starts at $1,200 for 256GB storage, with top configurations reaching $2,400, while Google's Pixel 11 Pro keeps its 256GB starting price at $1,099 after dropping the base 128GB tier. Android Authority argues the Pixel offers significantly better value across storage tiers, saving buyers as much as $200 compared to Apple's equivalent options.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-20
Reviewers testing the new Galaxy S26 FE describe it as a competent mid-tier handset with respectable performance and build quality, but say its price undercuts the value proposition that made earlier 'Fan Edition' phones popular. The consensus points to Samsung positioning the device closer to its flagship pricing than to the budget-friendly tier fans expected.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-18
One More Level, the studio behind Ghostrunner, revealed that its upcoming Soulslike title Valor Mortis will cost $40/€40 when it launches on October 13. The game offers a roughly 20-hour story set in a supernatural reimagining of Napoleon's war in Eastern Europe, and the studio says it spent a year deciding on this price point.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-18
Scry is a new search-over-the-web service built for AI agents, exposed through the Model Context Protocol as well as a direct HTTP API. Developers connect tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to a single MCP endpoint, authenticate via OAuth or an API key, and query a rolling crawl of high-information web pages using a SQL-like interface. The service also introduces congestion-based pricing tied to usage load.
scry.io
· 2026-09-17