Three major model families shipped within 48 hours of each other this week, and Google decided to scrap theirs and start over.
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OpenAI launches GPT-5.6 with Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers — OpenAI’s new three-tier model family went to general availability on July 9: Sol ($5/$30 per 1M tokens) for frontier reasoning and agentic work, Terra at roughly GPT-5.5 performance for half the cost, and Luna as the budget speed option.
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Anthropic redeploys Claude Fable 5 after export-control suspension — Fable 5 came back online July 1 after a 19-day suspension triggered by US export controls; Anthropic added a new cybersecurity classifier that blocks the reported jailbreak technique in over 99% of cases.
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SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5 as a coding-first model — xAI’s first release since acquiring Cursor: a 1.5T-parameter model priced at $2/$6 per 1M tokens with a 500k-token context window, pitched as “Opus-class but faster and cheaper.”
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Meta ships Muse Spark 1.1 and opens the Meta Model API — Meta’s first paid API model ($1.25/$4.25 per 1M tokens) is a multimodal reasoning model built for agentic tasks, with a 1M-token context window and major gains in tool use and coding.
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Google delays Gemini 3.5 Pro to July 17 for a full architectural rebuild — DeepMind scrapped the 2.5 Pro base model entirely after enterprise testers flagged coding performance gaps and long-task reasoning issues, opting for a ground-up redesign targeting math reasoning and a 2M-token context window.
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Anthropic launches Claude Science for drug discovery — A dedicated AI workbench integrating 60+ scientific databases and tools, with an internal drug discovery program targeting neglected diseases and up to $30k in research grants per project.
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Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5 at introductory pricing — Sonnet 5 launched June 30 with near-Opus 4.8 performance at $2/$10 per 1M tokens (introductory rate through August 31), becoming the default model across all Claude plans.