pricing

DeepSeek's peak/off-peak billing takes effect today: V4-Pro output up 4.5x at peak, cache-hit input up as much as 12x. It lands a fortnight after OpenAI cut Luna 80%. The price war was never a race to zero — it is convergence toward the true marginal cost of intelligence, approached from both directions at once.

Grok 4.6, Gemini 3.7 Flash, DeepSeek V4-Pro-0813, and GLM-5.3 shipped within three days of each other — and not one of them is a new base model. The frontier is advancing by post-training, harness, and serving efficiency while every next-generation base stays in the oven.

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% three weeks after launch and said the cut was funded by Sol rewriting OpenAI's own production kernels. The coverage called it a blink at China. The better story is who did the optimizing — and what it means when a model becomes a line item on both sides of its own P&L.

In twelve days, Chinese labs pushed the capability floor toward zero, Anthropic halved the price of the frontier, and Google cut Flash tokens again. Read together, the fortnight says one thing: the capability premium is over, and margin is the only battleground left. A ledger of who pays.

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 as near-frontier intelligence at half the cost of Fable 5. The launch reads as good news for buyers. Read from the P&L, it is a margin admission — the clearest signal yet that the race has moved from raw capability to cost-per-task, and that nobody expects customers to pay the old premium for the top of the curve.

Google's July 21 drop cut Flash token prices 17% and added a security-tuned Cyber variant. The tell is the model that didn't ship: Gemini 3.5 Pro, promised for June, is still partner-only while compute moves to Gemini 4.

In 72 hours in early July, SpaceXAI shipped Grok 4.5, Meta shipped Muse Image and Muse Spark 1.1, and OpenAI shipped GPT-Live — while GPT-5.6 Sol sat behind a government review. The gate that dominated the headlines applied to exactly one capability class. The real competitive frontier, agentic coding at $2 a million tokens, routed straight around it.

Google shipped Nano Banana 2 Lite at $0.034 per image and Gemini Omni Flash at $0.10 per second of video on the same day. The news is not the models. It is that Google set a public floor price for high-volume generative media, and the floor is now low enough to change who can afford to run it.