2 October 2026

California: fines of up to $10,000 for a robotaxi that blocks emergency services

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 1246, under which courts will be able to impose fines of up to $10,000 for each autonomous vehicle that blocks emergency services for more than 30 minutes. Companies such as Waymo, Tesla and Zoox will have to send their own technicians to the scene, and remote vehicle operators will have to work in the US and hold a valid California driver's license. The law takes effect on July 1, 2028.

TechCrunch ↗ The Verge ↗ California Legislative Information ↗

From recent days

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 ↗

Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5 - the company's fastest model, about 75 percent cheaper than its predecessor on average

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, a small model in the Claude 5.5 family for high-volume, low-cost tasks: summaries, classification, database queries and working as a coding subagent. According to the company, it is its fastest model ever, and using it costs about 75 percent less than Haiku 4.5 on average: $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. It is the first Haiku with adjustable reasoning effort. Anthropic also halved the price of cache reads for Sonnet 5.5 and is introducing a monthly API credit: $100 for Max 5x subscribers, $200 for Max 20x and up to $500 for Team.

Anthropic ↗ The Verge ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

Google unveils Gemini 4 Argon - initially only for trusted cybersecurity specialists

Google announced Gemini 4 Argon, a new model that according to the company has, among other things, the top score on the DeepSWE v1.1 coding benchmark (77.9 percent, compared with 74.2 percent for Claude Opus 5.5 and 74.1 percent for GPT-6 Astra) and can generate responses up to a million tokens long. For now, it is available only to trusted cybersecurity specialists in the Fairwind program, and without the safeguards that block hacking tasks. The company will open wider access, first in the paid API and for Google AI Ultra subscribers, only after strengthening the safeguards. The launch price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

Google ↗ The Verge ↗ 9to5Google ↗

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