Models

On September 3, 2026, OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra—the first model it says meets Preparedness Critical cybersecurity—plus a $1 billion Daybreak for Frontline Defenders program, after a September 1 Path to Astra post that the designation was met.

On September 2, 2026, Meta Superintelligence Labs released Muse Spark 1.3 in Muse Code and the Model API—about 20% fewer tool calls and 25% fewer tokens than 1.2 on internal coding, with Artificial Analysis Intelligence 61 at xhigh versus Fable 5.1 max at 66.

On September 2, 2026, Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash at the same $0.75/$3.75 intro price as 3.7 through year-end, plus 3.8 Flash Cyber for trusted defenders via the new Fairwind program—its third Flash in six weeks.

On September 1, 2026, Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1 generally and Mythos 5.1 for trusted-access programs, cut cache reads to $0.25 per million tokens, and opened Enterprise Frontier Safeguards so monitoring data stays in the customer’s cloud.

On August 27, 2026, Google launched Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash for developers: scene extension to 40 seconds from 10 seconds of prior context, first/last-frame interpolation, 360p drafts, 4K upscale, and three-second video references, in AI Studio, Agent Platform, Flow, and the Gemini app.

On August 26, 2026, Google launched Gemini 3.5 Transcribe—streaming and file speech-to-text with 4.0%/2.6% Artificial Analysis WER, 70% faster time-to-final than Chirp 3, 85+ languages, and live APIs already in Gboard Rambler on Pixel 11.

On August 26, 2026, Alibaba’s Qwen team open-sourced Qwen3.8-Flash-Next—a 125B multimodal MoE with 6B active parameters, 262K native context, and vendor scores that preview the Qwen4 architecture—at $0.16/$0.47 per million tokens on the production Flash API.

On August 21, 2026, DeepSeek’s API changelog launched experimental DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp (`deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp`): JPEG/PNG/GIF/WebP via base64, URL, or Files API file_id, on Chat Completions, Anthropic-compatible Messages, and Responses. Text-agent scores match official V4-Flash; DeepSeek says multimodal-agent results jump toward Claude Opus 4.8. Distinct from the August 13 V4-Pro GA and price hike.

On August 20, 2026, Google DeepMind said the Gemma open-model family has surpassed one billion downloads, with developers publishing more than 100,000 Gemmaverse variants in two years. The same post launched the Awesome Gemma GitHub directory. Distinct from the Gemini app’s 1 billion monthly users on August 11.

On August 14, 2026, Alibaba’s Qwen team posted Qwen3.8-27B on Hugging Face—a 27-billion-parameter native vision-language dense model with 262K context (extensible to 1M), thinking mode by default, and Apache 2.0 weights—the local companion to July’s 2.4T Qwen3.8-Max preview.

On August 13, 2026, Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash—23 days after 3.6 Flash—claiming large coding and agent gains and an introductory $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens through year-end. Independent Artificial Analysis scores 3.7 Flash (high) at 56 on the Intelligence Index, up 4 points from 3.6 Flash.

On August 13, 2026, OpenAI previewed Ultrafast, a new API service tier that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster than Standard processing—up to 750 output tokens per second on Cerebras hardware—in a limited customer preview for incident response, voice, finance, and other latency-sensitive work.

On August 12, 2026, SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6—a post-training upgrade of Grok 4.5 aimed at long-running agents, coding, and interactive visual work—that ties GPT-5.6 Sol Max at 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, ships at $2/$6 per million tokens, and is live in Cursor, Grok Build, and the SpaceXAI API.

On August 11, 2026, NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning—a 30B open MoE model with ~3B active parameters for high-volume agent execution—and NeMo Switchyard, an open-source model router that sends each agent step to the cheapest capable model, claiming up to 4× throughput in class and large cost cuts when paired with frontier planners.

On August 10, 2026, OpenAI expanded its Daybreak cyber program into Daybreak Blue and Daybreak Red access tiers and introduced GPT‑5.6‑Cyber—a purpose-trained cybersecurity model that completes 95% of advanced dual-use cyber requests in internal tests versus 1.5% for GPT‑5.6 Sol—after using the model to find Chrome V8 zero-days patched as CVE-2026-15903.

On August 10, 2026, Meta Superintelligence Labs released Muse Glimmer—a 30-billion-parameter open-weight model under Apache 2.0 optimized for always-on local agents on a single consumer GPU—alongside CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s essay championing U.S. open-weight AI against Chinese rivals and closed-model concentration.

On August 6, 2026, OpenAI rolled out a ChatGPT-focused GPT-5.6 Sol update with a thinking-effort slider for Plus and Pro, said internal evals cut factual-error rates ~68% vs GPT-5.5 Instant for Sol and ~62% for Luna, and made GPT-5.6 Luna the Free/Go default with unlimited text chats and a Think button on the way.

On August 5, 2026, Meta released Muse Code (beta), a terminal coding agent with persistent background subagents and a replay-exact event log, powered by Muse Spark 1.2—a coding-focused update to Muse Spark 1.1 available in the agent and Meta Model API with expanded global access.

On July 31, 2026, SpaceXAI upgraded Imagine Video 1.5 with text-, image-, and voice-reference conditioning (up to seven image references), native 1080p generation, and text-to-video—rolling out first to SuperGrok Heavy and Plus in the US on grok.com/imagine and iOS, with API support for image refs and 1080p on grok-imagine-video-1.5.

On July 30, 2026, Google DeepMind launched the Gemini Robotics 2 family—whole-body robot control (Gemini Robotics 2), high-level embodied reasoning and multi-robot collaboration (Gemini Robotics ER 2), and an on-device adaptation tier—extending Gemini from tabletop manipulation to full humanoid locomotion and multi-robot teamwork.

On July 30, 2026, Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling-Small—a 276B-total / 12B-active open-weight MoE that beats full Inkling (975B/41B) on SWE-Bench Verified (80.2% vs 77.6%) and ARC-AGI-2 (40.1% vs 36.5%) at roughly one-quarter the size and $0.30/$1.20 per million tokens.

On July 30, 2026, OpenAI cut API prices for GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% (to $0.20/$1.20 per million tokens) and Terra by 20% (to $2/$12), held Sol pricing steady, and added a Fast mode for Sol up to 2.5× speed at 2× standard price—crediting efficiency gains from Sol on its own serving stack.

On July 29, 2026, Google rolled out Lyria 3.5 inside Google Flow Music—its newest music generation model with claimed gains in musicality, lyrics, vocal expression, and direct tempo/duration control for full-song creation.

On July 29, 2026, SpaceXAI released Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0—its next-generation speech-to-speech voice model—claiming 82.9% on Artificial Analysis’s Speech-to-Speech Quality Index, 0.70s time-to-first-audio, $0.08/min pricing, and a default swap for grok-voice-latest on August 5.