The Loop · Issue N°040

The Loop

A field journal of the AI frontier — for engineers who ship.

Tag

#Ai Pricing

· News
News
The frontier launch that shipped to no one — Google's Gemini 4 Argon arrived on OpenAI's week-old pricing, claimed benchmark leadership on three indexes, and gave the model to zero paying customers.
On Sep 30 2026, Google released Gemini 4 Argon at $2 input / $10 output per million tokens — the exact price GPT-6 Sol shipped at eight days earlier — gated to 650 Fairwind-vetted cyber defenders, with no public API model ID at launch.
Oct 2, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Oct 2, 2026
· News
News
Same price as Opus 4.8, half the price of Fable 5 — Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 as a flagship that quietly undercuts its own flagship
On Thursday Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 at the same $5/$25 per-million-token price as Opus 4.8. The pitch is "Fable 5 intelligence at half the cost" — a pitch that quietly repositions Fable 5 as the model most developers no longer have a reason to keep buying.
Jul 26, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jul 26, 2026
· News
News
The price sheet didn't move — Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 with Sonnet 4.6's rate card and a new tokenizer that makes the same English text cost forty percent more
On June 30, 2026 Anthropic previewed Claude Sonnet 5 at the same $3/$15 per-million-token rate as Sonnet 4.6. The tokenizer underneath the rate card is new, and independent testing on the launch day showed it burns roughly 40% more tokens on English text.
Jul 2, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jul 2, 2026
· News
News
Flash at Pro prices — Gemini 3.5 Flash completes the three-lab pricing pattern
Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash on May 19 at $1.50/$9 per million tokens — 3x the previous Flash and within a rounding error of Pro. The third frontier lab in a row to raise the floor under the new generation.
May 21, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
May 21, 2026
· News
News
GPT-5.5 "Spud" — twice the price, split benchmarks, and a polite request to start your prompts over
OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 on April 23, doubled the API price, and split the benchmark trophies with Anthropic. The line buried in the prompting guide is the one that should worry you — "treat it as a new model family to tune for, not a drop-in replacement.
Apr 25, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Apr 25, 2026