101 minutes apart, Anthropic and OpenAI break the 'pace the frontier' pledge with cheaper models

altryne · x · 2026-09-25

The Week AI Broke the Pacing Pledge

Pledge vs. reality: Dario's Sept 12 'pace the frontier' essay was signed by Sam, Elon and Demis — yet one week later, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped major new models just 101 minutes apart, both cheaper.
Claude Opus 5.5 (Sept 22, 09:31 PT): Fable-level capability, 40% cheaper than Opus 5 — $4 input, cache reads cut to $0.20, $20 output. The author calls it the best model he's ever used.
GPT-6 Sol & Luna (same day, 11:12 PT): Sol at half the GPT-5.6 price, Luna 40x cheaper still. Per-token Sol wins on price, but Opus 5.5's 20¢ cache reads matter most for agentic coding workloads — run your own numbers.
Also this week: Meta put Muse at the center of everything at Connect, Grok moved into Tesla, open source cloned Jev in a week, and the show's live producer was an AI (Opus 5.5 doing chyrons, timing and fact-checks).
Guests: Peter Gostev, Nisten, Yam Peleg, Wolfram Ravenwolf, and JevBench creator Florian S.

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