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.
Some US voters are preparing for the midterm congressional elections with the help of ChatGPT and Gemini: they compare candidates, check claims circulating online and look for information about local candidates the media rarely cover, NPR reports. Rafael Batista of Johns Hopkins University warns that chatbots can reinforce views users were already leaning toward and advises not revealing your own preferences to them.
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 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.