Anthropic and OpenAI ship cheaper models 101 minutes apart after 'pace the frontier' pledge
thursdai_pod · x · 2026-09-26
ThursdAI's Sep 24 episode covers a wild week: just days after lab heads signed a 'pace the frontier' pledge, Anthropic and OpenAI launched new models 101 minutes apart — both cheaper than their predecessors.
The price war
- Claude Opus 5.5 (Sep 22, 9:31 PT): claimed Fable-level quality, 40% cheaper than Opus 5 — $4/M input, cached reads cut to 20¢, $20/M output.
- GPT-6 Sol & Luna (11:12 PT): half of GPT-5.6 pricing; per token Sol is half of Opus 5.5, and Luna is 40x cheaper again.
- For agentic coding, cached reads dominate the bill, so Opus 5.5's 20¢ cache pricing may win — benchmark with your own workload.
Also covered: Meta puts Muse at the center of everything, Grok Connectors arrive in Tesla (order Starbucks, set destination, pay before arrival), open source cloned Jev within a week, and the episode's producer was an AI.
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