Snaxbyte-sized news, on the go
Anthropic hired the founder of Google’s TPU programme. A model lab that already buys chips from three vendors is now building its own. OpenAI cut the price of its top model by a fifth. The frontier price war has reached the model it was supposed to spare. An anonymous model with a million token context appeared on OpenRouter and costs nothing. Its maker has not said who they are. DeepSeek ended the price war it started. The cheapest capable API in the market raised rates by up to elevenfold overnight. Alibaba shipped the Qwen3.8-Max open weights. The commitment was met, two days late and one model short. Anthropic cancelled the Claude Sonnet 5 price rise. The watchlist resolves no, and our implied expectation was wrong. Anthropic hired the founder of Google’s TPU programme. A model lab that already buys chips from three vendors is now building its own. OpenAI cut the price of its top model by a fifth. The frontier price war has reached the model it was supposed to spare. An anonymous model with a million token context appeared on OpenRouter and costs nothing. Its maker has not said who they are. DeepSeek ended the price war it started. The cheapest capable API in the market raised rates by up to elevenfold overnight. Alibaba shipped the Qwen3.8-Max open weights. The commitment was met, two days late and one model short. Anthropic cancelled the Claude Sonnet 5 price rise. The watchlist resolves no, and our implied expectation was wrong.
Model prices /1M out
Qwen3.8-Max $6.00 —
Grok 4.5 $6.00 —
Mistral Medium 3.5 $7.50 —
Gemini 3.6 Flash $7.50 —
Claude Sonnet 5 $10.00 —
GPT-5.6 Terra $12.00 —
GPT-5.6 Sol $20.00 —
Claude Opus 5 $25.00 —
Claude Fable 5 $50.00 —
18BYTE INTELLIGENCE

AI Model News

Model releases, deprecations, pricing moves, and capability changes from the major labs.