2 October 2026

Anthropic launches Claude Frontier Academy - $100 million to train 10,000 AI deployment engineers

Anthropic launched Claude Frontier Academy and committed $100 million to training 10,000 engineers who deploy Claude in companies by the end of 2027. The program starts with a several-day in-person course that ends with a practical exam. Then, for 12 weeks, the participant leads a Claude deployment in their own organization. Participants must be nominated by their employer, and the first cohorts include engineers from Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Novo Nordisk, among others.

Anthropic ↗

From recent days

A third of the brands at the Paris Motor Show come from China - twice as many as two years ago

At the Paris Motor Show, which opens October 12, 20 of the roughly 60 exhibiting brands come from China, compared with 10 at the previous edition in 2024, Carscoops reports, citing Reuters. Alongside BYD, Geely, Chery, Jaecoo and Leapmotor, already known in Europe, Li Auto, Aito and Aion will also be there, among others; Chinese cars already account for more than 10 percent of new cars sold in Europe. Some of them are hybrids, which are not covered by the EU's anti-subsidy tariffs of up to 35 percent on Chinese EVs. European brands will bring the Audi A2 e-tron, Skoda Peaq, Dacia Striker and Fiat Grizzly, among others, while BMW is skipping the show.

Carscoops ↗

Mistral Large 4 ranks highest in the Artificial Analysis index among models from outside the US and China - but five Chinese open models rank higher

Mistral released a public preview of Mistral Large 4, a trillion-parameter model (52 billion active) trained from scratch on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips in the company's European data centers; open weights are due by the end of October. According to independent firm Artificial Analysis, the model scored 38 points on its intelligence index, the same as GPT-6 Luna, and ranks highest among models from outside the US and China, but at least five Chinese open models score more, and an index task costs $1.13 with it, compared with $0.25 with GLM-5.3-Flash, Tom's Hardware reports. Large 4's strongest result is 82 percent on the CyberGym-E2E-AA test, the highest of all models; according to Mistral, Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra score close to zero there because they refuse to perform the task.

Mistral ↗ Tom's Hardware ↗

OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Pro for $500 a month and resumes sales of the $200 plan

OpenAI added a $500-a-month ChatGPT Pro plan with the highest usage limits and access to Ultrafast mode, which speeds up GPT-6 Astra responses in ChatGPT Work and Codex, The Verge reports. At the same time, the company resumed sales of its $200 plan, which it had paused when demand for GPT-6 Astra overloaded its systems, and changed its usage limits. This confirms the September 24 leak reported by TestingCatalog.

The Verge ↗ The Verge ↗

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