The latest AI models

GPT-6 Astra

3 Sep 2026OpenAI describes Astra as its most intelligent and best-aligned model to date. It launched to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and to the API at $10 / $50, and is also offered through Microsoft Azure and AWS Bedrock. In OpenAI's own results it scores 97.6% on FrontierMath Tier 4, 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 and 72.6% on OSWorld 2.0.

Astra is also the first OpenAI model the company says meets the "Critical" cybersecurity threshold in its Preparedness Framework. Advanced offensive-cyber requests are refused by default, and OpenAI says a separate programme (Daybreak) will give vetted defenders broader access. Read my explainer on Astra.

GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna and GPT-6.1 Sol

22 Sep 2026The smaller siblings arrived three weeks later: Sol at $2 / $10 and Luna at $0.10 / $0.50. OpenAI says this is 50% cheaper than the GPT-5.6 promotional pricing. 29 Sep 2026At DevDay, OpenAI announced GPT-6.1 Sol, which it says delivers "near-Astra intelligence" at one-fifth of Astra's prices.

GPT-6 in ChatGPT

7 Oct 2026GPT-6 became the default in ChatGPT, with Sol for paid tiers and Luna for Free and Go users from 8 October. Answers can now include interactive "Intelligent UI" elements, and OpenAI says web-search answers start 44% sooner.

GPT-6 models on Google Cloud

21 Oct 2026Google Cloud now offers GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna in its Model Garden, in private preview for selected enterprise customers. Usage is billed on the customer's Google Cloud invoice and counts towards existing spending commitments, and OpenAI's Codex tools can connect to it for inference. Google says the models will come to its business Gemini products and Antigravity later, and that it is now the only hyperscaler offering models from all three leading closed-model labs. That is Google's description; Astra was already available through Microsoft Azure and AWS Bedrock.

Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1

1 Sep 2026Anthropic's top tier has a 1M-token context window and costs $10 / $50. Mythos 5.1 is only for participants in Anthropic's Project Glasswing; Fable 5.1 is the more widely available version.

Claude Opus 5.5

22 Sep 2026Priced at $4 / $20, with cache reads at $0.20. Anthropic says it costs about 40% less than Opus 5 on typical workloads and generates output more than 30% faster. METR and Frontier Design tested it before release. Anthropic reports 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0.

It is the first release since Anthropic's chief executive called for "pacing the frontier". It ships with Fable-class cyber and biology safeguards, a Life Sciences Verification Program for legitimate researchers, and output watermarking aimed at EU AI Act compliance.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5

28 Sep 2026Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 is more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and up to 30% cheaper. 7 Oct 2026Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 / $0.50 for prompts up to 100k tokens, which Anthropic puts at about 75% cheaper to run than Haiku 4.5. It is the first Haiku with an adjustable "effort" setting. The same announcement halved Sonnet 5.5 cache reads to $0.10 and introduced monthly API credits for Max and Team subscribers. Read my piece on the Claude 5.5 family.

Gemini 4 Argon

30 Sep 2026Google announced Argon and gave it first to trusted cyber defenders through its Fairwind Program. The output limit rises to 1M tokens, up from 64K. Google reports 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, 51.3% on AutomationBench (first place in Google's comparison) and 91.7% on LVBench. Google also says it monitors Argon's chain of thought for signs of misalignment.

13 Oct 2026Argon became generally available at an introductory price of $2 / $10, rising later to $4 / $20. Google says it ranks first on the Vals Index and describes Argon refactoring roughly 6 million lines of legacy Chrome code.

Meta Muse Wonder and Muse Spark Open

12 Oct 2026Meta launched Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, with features it calls Active Memory and Active Focus, through the Meta Model API and its Muse Code tool. 15 Oct 2026Three days later it released Muse Spark Open with downloadable weights: 816B total parameters, 42B active per token, and a 1M-token context. Meta says it runs on two Apple Mac Studios with M5 Ultra chips. It is released under Meta's own Muse Model License rather than a standard open-source licence.

Mistral Large 4

6 Oct 2026Mistral released a public preview of Large 4 (internal nickname "Le Chonk"). It is a multimodal model with about 1 trillion parameters, 52B of them active, trained on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral's own European data centres. Mistral says weights will follow by the end of October, and the work is funded by a €3 billion Series D. Read my piece on open-weight models.

Inception Mercury 3

19 Oct 2026Inception makes "diffusion" language models, which generate many tokens in parallel instead of one at a time. It says Mercury 3 runs at about 1,068 tokens a second on NVIDIA GPUs, 4 to 8 times faster than GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5, with similar or better benchmark scores. SiliconANGLE reports that Inception's own comparison has Mercury 3 ahead in 8 of 12 tests. The context window rises to 1M tokens from 260K, and the price is $0.20 / $0.70, with 50% off at launch. It works with OpenAI-compatible APIs and is offered through OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel. The speed and benchmark figures are Inception's claims.

Mistral Voxtral 3

20 Oct 2026Mistral's new speech family covers transcription in more than 50 languages, including all 24 official EU languages, and text-to-speech. Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 is a 4B-parameter model priced at $0.0035 a minute, and a realtime version promises responses in under 500 ms for $0.008 a minute. Voxtral Mini TTS 3 costs $13 per million characters and can build a custom voice from 30 minutes of audio. A voice-agent SDK built on LiveKit starts at $0.04 a minute. Mistral says Voxtral 3 beats Whisper, ElevenLabs Scribe v2 and Gemini 3.5 Transcribe on its tests, and offers EU-hosted endpoints or self-deployment.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5

15 Oct 2026NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, an open 120B-parameter vision-language model that NVIDIA says is five times faster than the next best model in its class, plus Nemotron 3.5 Bolt models for PCs. Bolt 74B-A9B fits in 24 GB using native 2-bit quantisation, and a 4 GB Bolt E4B is due on 23 October. NVIDIA publishes the weights, training data and recipes, and says the models were trained on about 26 trillion tokens.