OpenAI released GPT-5.6 in three versions (Sol, Terra, Luna), with Sol clearing government safety evaluations, while also shipping GPT-Live, a voice model with real-time conversational responses. xAI launched Grok 4.5, which Elon Musk termed "Opus-class" and priced at $2 per million tokens, directly preceding GPT-5.6's release. Anthropic brought Fable 5, a coding model, back online after a three-week government suspension and shipped Sonnet 5, offering near-Opus performance at $2 per million tokens, now serving as the new free default. Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a 1.6 trillion parameter model under an MIT license, and ByteDance launched Seedream 5 Pro, an image model nearly matching GPT Image 2 at a quarter of the cost. Ollama also raised $65 million to support running open-source models locally.
The rapid cadence of frontier model releases and aggressive pricing from multiple labs intensifies competition, driving down inference costs and accelerating the commoditization of advanced AI capabilities.