Anthropic spent this year at the top of the leaderboard. It’s a lonely place to be right now.
In four days, OpenAI shipped a model that nearly matches its best one for a third of the price. Musk shipped a coding model at less than half.
Nobody landed a knockout. But the crown is starting to look expensive.
Lead Story
Everyone Is Coming for Anthropic
Start with OpenAI. Its new flagship, GPT-5.6 Sol, scored 59 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Claude Fable 5 scored 60.
One point. And Sol runs $1.04 per task against Fable’s $2.75.
That’s the whole story in two numbers. See the benchmark charts for yourself →
Sol also topped the new Coding Agent Index. OpenAI paired it with ChatGPT Work, an agent that runs for hours across Slack, Drive, and Salesforce and hands you a finished document.
Then came Musk. Grok 4.5 arrived two days earlier, built by SpaceXAI and Cursor after SpaceXAI bought the coding startup for $60 billion.
It’s priced at $2 and $6 per million tokens. Opus 4.8 charges $5 and $25.
Independent benchmarks rank it fourth, but its real edge is thrift: about 60% fewer output tokens than Opus 4.8 for the same work.
There’s a caveat, though. Cursor admitted an old snapshot of its own codebase slipped into Grok’s training data, flattering it on Cursor’s own benchmark. The honest fine print is here →
Now zoom out. Chinese open models undercut from below, Meta’s Muse joined in, and this week OpenAI and Musk both aimed straight at Anthropic’s flagship. Anthropic will have to answer.
Cheap intelligence is wonderful for you. It is considerably less wonderful for the people selling it.
Interesting Read
Microsoft’s AI Boom Has a Carbon Problem
Microsoft’s 2026 sustainability report landed Thursday, and the headline number isn’t flattering. Emissions rose about 25% in a year, to roughly 20 million metric tons.
The cause isn’t mysterious: data centers, built fast, to run AI. Microsoft promised to go carbon negative by 2030. Four years out, it’s heading the wrong way.
It isn’t slowing down either. A record $180 billion goes to capital projects this year, and the company’s own report admits sustainability solutions aren’t scaling fast enough to keep up. Read More →
It’s time for trivia
Top Tweet of the Week
The future is trotting in - on four robotic legs.
Also Read
1. Nvidia lost a trillion dollars. Its market value has dropped roughly $1T since May 14, the cheapest the stock has been since 2019, as investors rotate into memory chipmakers like Micron. Read More
2. Google is liable for what its AI says. A landmark German ruling declared AI Overviews to be Google’s own words, making the company answerable for false answers. Read More
3. Meta’s first Canadian data center. A C$13 billion build in Alberta, another marker of how much land and power the AI race now consumes. Read More
4. Google will label AI-made ads. Ads built with generative AI get disclosed to viewers, a small transparency step with big implications for what you trust on a screen. Read More
5. ChatGPT Voice grew up. OpenAI’s new GPT-Live listens and talks at once, waits when you pause, and stops interrupting you mid-thought. Read More
Worth a Try
1. LemonLime - Connect your tools (Gmail, Drive, Slack, HubSpot), and it learns how your business runs, then builds agents to handle the repetitive parts. No code. YC-backed.
Why try it?
Ask “what’s causing the support ticket spike?” and get an answer, not a search. Try it here →
2. Seedream 5.0 Pro - ByteDance’s new image model built for design, not just pretty pictures. Point at one object to change it, split a result into layers, render text in 10+ languages.
Why try it?
Turns dense data into a real infographic in one pass. Try it here →
Before You Go
Microsoft’s emissions rose 25% so a machine could say “mhmm” more convincingly. Progress is rarely as tidy as its press releases.
See you next week.
Trivia answer: B is AI-generated.