The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on Tuesday, scoring 89.9% on SWE-bench Pro and 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0. It runs at US$4 per million input tokens and US$20 per million output, with Anthropic claiming roughly 40% lower cost per task than Opus 5 and output about 30% faster. The frontier is now moving less on raw capability than on what a given result costs to produce.
Read moreHours after Anthropic's release, OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Sol and Luna, mid-tier and budget models sitting under GPT-6 Astra. Sol costs US$2 and US$10 per million input and output tokens, Luna US$0.10 and US$0.50 — half or less of the GPT-5.6 equivalents. Free and Go users get Luna in the desktop app. If you costed an AI feature more than a month ago, the numbers have moved.
Read moreFrance, which holds the Council presidency this month, convened a session on Wednesday with Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Hugging Face's Clement Delangue and Yoshua Bengio, alongside invited statements from Chinese labs DeepSeek and Moonshot. The agenda covered cyberattacks, election interference and systems slipping past human control. It is the first time the Council has heard directly from US and Chinese frontier developers in the same session.
Read moreAustralia is among more than 20 countries signing a joint statement, released ahead of the UN General Assembly, calling for safeguards that keep AI systems under human oversight. Anthony Albanese said the technology can strengthen the economy and productivity but that "humans need to be in control of it". It follows Canberra's consultation on mandatory AI standards and points to where domestic rules are likely to land.
Read moreIntrinsic, Alphabet's industrial robotics unit, released Intrinsic Core under an Apache 2.0 licence at ROSCon in Toronto. The package covers hardware-agnostic real-time control, 3D object recognition built on Nvidia FoundationPose, motion and grasp planning, and full ROS 2 drivers — the same components Intrinsic says it runs in production. Teams building physical automation now have a free starting point instead of a vendor stack.
Read moreAt Connect this week Meta announced Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 from US$449 and a camera-free audio-only model from US$249, plus Muse Charm, a pocket device for talking to its assistant, due around the holidays. Removing the camera answers the recording backlash that has local councils in Australia debating restrictions on smart glasses. The bet is that people want the assistant, not the lens.
Read moreThe Videos API and every Sora 2 model alias are removed today, six months after OpenAI notified developers in March. The deprecation notice lists no successor endpoint. Anyone running video generation in a production pipeline needs an alternative provider now, not a migration plan for later.
Read moreMcKinsey's 2026 survey found 80% of respondents said AI improved their own productivity, but only 37% could point to any effect on company earnings — essentially unchanged year on year. The share attributing 5% or more of EBIT to AI held flat at about 6%. The gap is a deployment problem rather than a model problem, and that is where most of the practical work still sits.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.