Language Model News

2026/10/13

  1. How much does speech-to-text cost per hour? Comparing the xAI and Mistral APIs
  2. Mistral Large 4 costs $1.36 in and $4.18 out, at half price for two weeks after launch
  3. Claude Managed Agents' web_fetch now fetches only URLs that already appear in the session
  4. xAI's speech-to-text API costs $0.10 an hour in batch, and moved to 2.0 on 2 October
  5. Claude Max and Team plans now include monthly API credits ($100 on Max 5x)
  6. GPT-6.1 Sol charges less than GPT-6 Sol for cached input
  7. Claude Sonnet 5.5 keeps Sonnet 5's price, and its cache reads were halved on 7 October
  8. Claude Haiku 5.5 is priced like GPT-6 Luna up to 100K tokens, and five times higher beyond

2026/09/29

  1. Gemini 2.5 models are now limited to users who have used them before
  2. Grok 4.7 joins xAI's model list at the same price and context as Grok 4.6
  3. Gemini 3.8 Live pricing: audio in at $0.005 a minute and audio out at $0.018

2026/09/28

  1. Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS prices double on 1 January 2027
  2. Claude Opus 5.5 is $4 in and $20 out, and the model Anthropic now recommends first
  3. GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna: Luna costs a twentieth of Sol

2026/09/15

  1. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash takes over from V4 Flash at a lower price
  2. Sakana AI's Fugu Ultra v2 and Fugu Max answer by routing work to other models
  3. Cognition's SWE-2 is a coding model built on Kimi K3
  4. Inception's Mercury 2.5, a diffusion model at $0.75 per million output tokens
  5. GPT-Live 1 bills by the minute, at $0.05, with the reasoning model on top

2026/09/08

  1. Meta sells the same model at two prices, and the cheap one is paid for with your prompts
  2. Grok 4.6 is the flagship, and it holds half the context of Grok 4.3
  3. Kimi K3 holds a million tokens at one flat rate
  4. The same Qwen model costs less from Beijing than from Singapore
  5. On Mistral, Large costs a third of Medium
  6. GPT-6 Astra and the three models that make up GPT-6
  7. GPT-6 Astra prices, and the 272K line that reprices the whole request
  8. Claude Fable 5.1 takes the top of the lineup, and Fable 5 moves to legacy
  9. Cache reads on Fable 5.1 are a quarter of what they cost on Fable 5

2026/09/02

  1. The current Claude lineup: 1M context, 128K output, retirement more than a year out
  2. SWE-bench Verified is at 97, and the top of the table is hard to read
  3. A benchmark number means nothing without the conditions it was taken under
  4. Claude API prices, and the Sonnet 5 increase that did not happen
  5. OpenAI API prices: the GPT-5.6 line has long-context rates too
  6. Gemini API prices, and the two dates that change them
  7. DeepSeek now charges double during peak hours
  8. Perplexity Sonar ends on 27 September 2026, replaced by the Agent API
  9. What prompt caching actually costs, and where the tenth does not hold
  10. Long context: who reprices the whole request, and who does not
  11. Adding an MCP server to Claude Code, and which scope to pick

The current Claude lineup: 1M context, 128K output, retirement more than a year out

The current lineup is four models: Fable 5.1, Opus 5, Sonnet 5 and Haiku 4.5⁠[1].

Context is 1 million tokens on Fable 5.1, Opus 5 and Sonnet 5, and 200K on Haiku 4.5⁠[1]. Maximum output in one synchronous response is 128K tokens on the first three and 64K on Haiku 4.5⁠[1]. On the batch API, Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 reach 300K behind a beta header, and Fable 5.1 is not on that list⁠[1].

Reliable knowledge cutoffs are June 2026 for Fable 5.1, May 2026 for Opus 5, January 2026 for Sonnet 5, and February 2025 for Haiku 4.5⁠[1].

Retirement dates are published as commitments not to retire sooner than a given day: 15 October 2026 for Haiku 4.5, 30 June 2027 for Sonnet 5, 24 July 2027 for Opus 5, and 1 September 2027 for Fable 5.1⁠[1]. Those cover the platforms Anthropic operates⁠[1]. Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud set their own⁠[1].

One million tokens is roughly 555k words on the current tokenizer⁠[1]. On models before Claude Opus 4.7 the same million tokens held about 750k words, so across generations the window grew less than the number suggests⁠[1].

Sources

  1. Anthropic - Models overview