28 September 2026

Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5 - more than 30 percent faster at the same price per token

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family, which according to the company generates responses more than 30 percent faster than Sonnet 5. The price stays the same ($2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens), but the model uses fewer tokens, so most tasks should cost up to 30 percent less. On the Terminal-Bench 4.0 agentic coding benchmark it scored 70.6 percent, compared with 10.3 percent for its predecessor and 66.4 percent for the more expensive Opus 5.5. The model is already available in the Claude apps, via the API and on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and Haiku 5.5 is due in the coming weeks.

Anthropic ↗ CNBC ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

From recent days

OpenAI's annualized revenue is about $50 billion, not $68 billion - AI stocks fell

OpenAI told investors that its annualized revenue at the end of September was about $50 billion, not $68 billion as widely reported at the end of September, CNBC confirmed; the Financial Times reported it first. According to a person familiar with the matter, the higher figure also included gross revenue of OpenAI's partners, a presentation that makes it easier for investors to compare with Anthropic; in the third quarter, the metric rose 77 percent. After the news, Nvidia shares fell 3 percent, Oracle almost 6 percent and CoreWeave almost 8 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite lost more than 1 percent, its worst day since mid-August. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, is aiming for an IPO in 2027.

CNBC ↗ CNBC Morning Squawk ↗

Google will limit model access in free Gemini - only Flash-Lite from October 9

Starting October 9, Google will begin limiting model access in the Gemini app on personal accounts: users without a paid plan will keep only the Flash-Lite model and lose access to the Flash and Pro models, according to a Google help document reported by 9to5Google. Subscribers to the cheapest paid plan, AI Plus, will lose access to the Pro model, and Google is to notify them of the date by email. AI Pro subscribers, on the other hand, will get Deep Think mode, so far reserved for the AI Ultra plan.

9to5Google ↗ Google ↗

OpenAI adds an invisible watermark to ChatGPT and Codex text in the European Union to comply with the AI Act

OpenAI announced on Monday, October 5, that in the coming weeks it will start adding an invisible watermark to text generated by ChatGPT and Codex in the European Union - a response to the AI Act's transparency rules, which have applied since August 2. The textGrain technology doesn't insert any symbol; instead, it steers word choice so that a detector can read the pattern. API customers worldwide can enable it from October 5; it is off by default. In OpenAI's tests, replacing 10 percent of the words with synonyms lowered detectability from about 92 to 66 percent, and replacing 25 percent lowered it to 17 percent, so initially only researchers and institutions approved by OpenAI will get access to the detector.

TechCrunch ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

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