The Hallway Track
10 tracked signals on llm-pricing.
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5, topping the Artificial Analysis leaderboard at Opus 4.8 pricing
“On one Frontier-Bench task, Opus 5 was given a drawing of a machine part and asked to write code to rebuild it as a 3D FreeCAD model. However, in this task, the model was intentionally given no way to directly viewthe drawing. Opus 5 responded by writing its own computer vision pipeline to pull the geometry from the raw pixels, then reconstructed the full machine part.”
OpenAI previews the GPT-5.6 series (Sol, Terra, Luna) with lower pricing and government-coordinated limited release.
“We previewed our plans and the models' capabilities ahead of today's launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly.”
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, first of the Claude 5.5 family, launches on Amazon Bedrock.
“Claude Opus 5.5 does more with fewer tokens than Claude Opus 5, and new pricing passes those gains straight to customers.”
Anthropic reverses Fable 5 removal, making it permanent in Max and Team Premium plans due to competition.
“Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits.”
Uber caps employees at $1,500/month per AI coding tool like Claude Code to control runaway costs.
“The rideshare giant is limiting all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool, an Uber spokesperson said in response to a Bloomberg News inquiry.”
Fable's high cost ends the era of relying on new models to cheaply solve engineering problems
“Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies. A new model would arrive at the same price (or cheaper!) and paper over most of your problems.”
Meta launches Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2, a co-trained coding agent and model pair.
“Muse Spark 1.2 was extensively trained on long-horizon coding tasks, including whole-repository generation, large end-to-end projects, and auto-research.”
A shadow market resells stolen or abused LLM API tokens at discount, primarily in China.
“there's now an entire ecosystem that can profit from finding a new unprotected endpoint to exploit”
Claude Fable 5 launched, but isn't yet in AgentsView's pricing database, requiring a custom-price workaround.
“Claude Fable 5 came out today and wasn't yet included in the pricing database AgentsView uses.”
Simon Willison's September newsletter covers Fable-class model growth and an LLM pricing war