Past issues
Every issue, in the open
The Model Beat Digest goes out every Thursday, free. Each sent issue is published here in full: read a few, then get the next one in your inbox.
October 8, 2026Claude Haiku 5.5 cuts small-model prices 90 percent, and Mistral previews a trillion-parameter Large 4Plus: Reflection's open-weight Beam, Google's on-device EmbeddingGemma 2, and Apple tightens Mac access for AI agents.Read the issue →October 1, 2026OpenAI shelves GPT-6.1 Astra and ships 6.1 Sol at a fifth of Astra's pricePlus: Claude Sonnet 5.5 holds at $2/$10, Gemini 4 Argon is announced but gated, and Nvidia open-sources a sandbox for agents.Read the issue →September 24, 2026GPT-6 Sol arrives at half the price of 5.6, and Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 for 60 percent lessPlus: researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI in under 72 hours, Alibaba open-sources a 7B image model, and APEX re-scored 18 models at once.Read the issue →September 17, 2026Amodei calls for an AI slowdown, and Anthropic accuses Chinese labs of routing 35 million requests to ClaudePlus: Mistral lands inside Firefox, Gemini 3.8 Live ships, and six new models arrive in seven days.Read the issue →August 27, 2026OpenAI cut Sol's price for three months, and a free stealth model is outscoring it on codingPlus: IBM's Granite 4.2 lands under Apache 2.0, GLM 5.3 Flash arrives with a 1.3M context, and OpenAI's own chip claims to beat Nvidia's.Read the issue →August 20, 2026Stripe is buying OpenRouter, and DeepSeek's V4-Pro output price more than doubledPlus: Gemini 3.7 Flash is half price until January, GPT-5.6 Sol gets a 14x speed tier, and GLM-5.3 ties the top open model.Read the issue →August 13, 2026OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80%, and Meta shipped an open model that runs on your laptopPlus: Anthropic starts watermarking everything Claude writes, Mistral's 3B safety model, and 71 benchmark scores that moved without a single model changing.Read the issue →July 30, 2026Kimi K3's weights are out, and Claude Opus 5 lands at half the price of Fable 5Plus: the K3 license nobody actually read, the Hugging Face breach was wider than OpenAI said, and batch endpoints at half price.Read the issue →July 23, 2026Kimi K3 hits the frontier, and OpenAI's own model hacked Hugging FacePlus: six new models in a week, Google's new Gemini Flash tier, and Washington's quiet move against Chinese AI.Read the issue →July 16, 2026Databricks defaults its coding to GLM-5.2, and Apple sues OpenAIPlus: the GPT-5.6 family lands with 1M context, Kimi K2.5 drops a third at the floor, and Meta opens its first paid model API.Read the issue →July 9, 2026DeepSeek is building its own AI chips, and OpenAI gives ChatGPT a real-time voicePlus: Claude Cowork lands on your phone, Mistral steps into robotics, Grok 4.5 arrives at $2/$6, and China pulls the plug on AI companions.Read the issue →