Snaxbyte-sized news, on the go
Microsoft shipped a model that scores decisions instead of writing text. It is aimed at the routing and grading layer sitting underneath every other model, not at replacing them. Nvidia is reportedly in early talks to buy or invest further in Reflection AI. The deal under discussion would turn its largest coding-model backer into its potential owner. OpenAI’s own safety index now lists more than a dozen cases of models cheating, hiding mistakes or sabotaging their tests. The newest, from 6 October 2026, shows a model trying to delete its way out of a failed grading task. Mistral previewed a trillion-parameter model and promised open weights within the month. It has not said yet what licence those weights will carry. OpenAI put GPT-6 in front of every ChatGPT tier at once. The model now decides whether an answer should be text, a chart, or a tool you can click. Anthropic cut Claude Haiku’s price by up to 90 percent and gave it a 1 million token context window. The cheap-model tier of the price war just got a lot more capable. Anthropic says an Istanbul firm used Claude to run a paid political operation aimed at Malaysian voters. Its report found no sign the campaign reached real communities. The White House ordered federal agencies to stop saying “AI.” A week later, Trump named four officials to run a new body built on the replacement term. Microsoft shipped a model that scores decisions instead of writing text. It is aimed at the routing and grading layer sitting underneath every other model, not at replacing them. Nvidia is reportedly in early talks to buy or invest further in Reflection AI. The deal under discussion would turn its largest coding-model backer into its potential owner. OpenAI’s own safety index now lists more than a dozen cases of models cheating, hiding mistakes or sabotaging their tests. The newest, from 6 October 2026, shows a model trying to delete its way out of a failed grading task. Mistral previewed a trillion-parameter model and promised open weights within the month. It has not said yet what licence those weights will carry. OpenAI put GPT-6 in front of every ChatGPT tier at once. The model now decides whether an answer should be text, a chart, or a tool you can click. Anthropic cut Claude Haiku’s price by up to 90 percent and gave it a 1 million token context window. The cheap-model tier of the price war just got a lot more capable. Anthropic says an Istanbul firm used Claude to run a paid political operation aimed at Malaysian voters. Its report found no sign the campaign reached real communities. The White House ordered federal agencies to stop saying “AI.” A week later, Trump named four officials to run a new body built on the replacement term.
Model prices /1M out
GPT-5.6 Luna $1.20 —
Qwen3.8-Max $6.00 —
Mistral Medium 3.5 $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 —
AI MODEL PROFILE

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Google's reasoning flagship, still shipping under a preview model ID nearly six months after release.

Source review Last reviewed October 7, 2026 By Google DeepMind

The facts at a glance

ProviderGoogle DeepMind
TypeFrontier reasoning model
Current version or tiergemini-3.1-pro-preview, released 19 February 2026
ModalityMultimodal in, text out
AccessProprietary
Context or limits1,048,576 token context, 65,536 max output
Free optionNo free API tier. Consumer access through the Gemini app and NotebookLM
Paid priceUSD 2.00 input and USD 12.00 output per million up to 200,000 tokens, rising to USD 4.00 and USD 18.00 above that

Pricing last checked October 7, 2026. Prices change and vary by region. Check the official pricing page ↗

Assessment

What it does well

  • Google reports 77.1 percent on ARC-AGI-2, described as more than double the reasoning performance of Gemini 3 Pro on that benchmark
  • Full million token context
  • Deep integration with NotebookLM and the Gemini app for research work

Where it falls short

  • Still carries a preview model ID nearly six months after launch, which Google framed as validating the updates
  • Long context requests above 200,000 tokens cost double
  • No free API tier

Privacy and data control

Consumer Gemini data handling is governed by the Keep Activity setting described on the Gemini app profile. Google Cloud and Workspace terms differ.

The longer read

A note on the preview label

A model that has been generally useful for six months while still carrying a preview identifier is a reasonable thing to build on, but it is not the same commitment as a stable release. If you need version stability guarantees, factor that in.

How it performs by outcome

We assess products against a job, not a leaderboard. These are the outcomes this entry is compared under.

Worth comparing against

Grok Questions about what is happening right now on the open web and on X Microsoft Copilot Spreadsheet and document work for people already paying for Microsoft 365 Notion AI Answering questions from a team wiki rather than from the open web Claude Fable 5 Long horizon tasks where the cost of a wrong answer exceeds the cost of the tokens

How this profile was produced

Source review. Every fact here is drawn from the provider documentation linked below and checked on the date shown. We have not yet run this entry through a controlled test, and no scoring is implied.

Read the full review methodology →

Primary sources