FrontierObservatory

Model news

The frontier log.

Releases, benchmark milestones, company moves, research results and policy — everything that shifts the frontier, in one dated record.

July 2026

  1. Jul 16
    releaseMoonshot AI

    Moonshot AI launches Kimi K3

    Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight MoE model with a 1M-token context window and native visual understanding, priced at $3/$15 per million input/output tokens; full weights are due July 27, 2026.

    VentureBeat ↗
  2. Jul 13
    releaseSoofi

    German SOOFI consortium releases Soofi S, a sovereign open-weight MoE model

    A consortium led by the KI Bundesverband — with Fraunhofer, DFKI, TU Darmstadt and others — released Soofi S 30B-A3B, a hybrid Mamba-2/MoE model trained on 27T tokens with up-weighted German, as a preview checkpoint on Hugging Face.

    Fraunhofer IAIS ↗
  3. Jul 9
    releaseOpenAI

    OpenAI ships GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) to the public

    OpenAI lifted the government-gated preview and launched GPT-5.6 broadly; flagship Sol posts record GPQA Diamond (94.6%) and ARC-AGI-2 (92.5% at max effort) while OpenAI calls it its strongest cybersecurity model yet.

    TechCrunch ↗
  4. Jul 1
    policyxAI

    Colorado guts its AI Act as xAI and DOJ challenge proceeds

    After xAI sued to block SB24-205 and the DOJ intervened — its first move against a state AI law — Governor Polis signed SB 26-189, stripping algorithmic-discrimination duties and bias audits in favor of consumer disclosure.

    US Department of Justice ↗

June 2026

  1. Jun 26
    releaseOpenAI

    OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna under government-gated release

    GPT-5.6 opens to ~20 government-approved companies at the administration's behest: Sol is the flagship, Terra runs ~2x cheaper than GPT-5.5, and Luna is the low-cost tier. General availability is promised 'in coming weeks.'

    Axios ↗
  2. Jun 15
    policy

    EU appoints scientific panel ahead of AI Act penalty powers

    The European Commission named 60 independent frontier-AI experts to support the AI Office before enforcement penalties activate on August 2, 2026, shifting the AI Act from infrastructure-building to active enforcement.

    European Commission ↗
  3. Jun 15
    benchmarkAnthropicOpenAIGoogle DeepMind

    LMArena top tier compresses to its tightest spread on record

    The top five models — Claude Opus 4.8 (~1510), GPT-5.5 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 — sit within ~55 Elo, with the top ten inside ~20 points; task fit now matters more than leaderboard rank.

    Swfte AI Leaderboard ↗
  4. Jun 13
    releaseZhipu AI

    Zhipu AI releases GLM-5.2, an MIT-licensed open-weights coding flagship

    Z.ai's GLM-5.2 (753B/40B-active MoE) shipped with a 1M-token context window and beat GPT-5.5 on SWE-bench Pro (62.1 vs 58.6) at roughly one-sixth the API cost, topping the Artificial Analysis open-weights index.

    VentureBeat ↗
  5. Jun 13
    policyAnthropic

    US bars foreign nationals from accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5

    Two days after Anthropic's distillation-throttling apology, the administration barred foreign nationals from Anthropic's two newest frontier models, citing national security.

    Council on Foreign Relations ↗
  6. Jun 11
    companyAnthropic

    Anthropic apologizes for Fable 5 silently throttling suspected distillation

    Anthropic apologized after Claude Fable 5 was found silently limiting responses to users suspected of trying to replicate its capabilities, and faced criticism for over-refusing cyber-related queries.

    Council on Foreign Relations ↗
  7. Jun 9
    releaseAnthropic

    Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5 and restricted Claude Mythos 5

    Fable 5 becomes the first generally available Mythos-class model ($10/$50 per MTok, state of the art on nearly all benchmarks); Mythos 5 — the same weights with safeguards lifted — goes to vetted cyberdefenders via Project Glasswing.

    Anthropic ↗
  8. Jun 2
    policyOpenAIAnthropicGoogle DeepMindxAIMeta AI

    White House issues executive order on frontier AI innovation and security

    The order creates a voluntary pre-release federal review process for frontier models with 30-day government access, plus early access for critical-infrastructure entities, framed around cybersecurity.

    The White House ↗

May 2026

  1. May 28
    releaseAnthropic

    Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.8

    Opus 4.8 ships at $5/$25 per MTok with 88.6% on SWE-bench Verified, a USAMO jump to 96.7%, a new fast mode, and the #1 LMArena spot (~1510 Elo). Reviewers call it a modest but tangible improvement.

    Anthropic ↗
  2. May 28
    companyAnthropicOpenAI

    Anthropic raises $65B at a $965B valuation, overtaking OpenAI as most valuable AI startup

    The Series H led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia nearly triples February's $380B valuation; Anthropic reports a $47B revenue run rate driven largely by Claude Code.

    CNBC ↗
  3. May 22
    companyOpenAI

    OpenAI files confidential S-1 for IPO

    OpenAI submits a confidential draft registration to the SEC after a record $122B March round at ~$852B; later reports suggest it may wait until 2027 to list.

    TechJournal ↗
  4. May 22
    researchOpenAI

    OpenAI reasoning model disproves Erdős-linked conjecture

    A general-purpose OpenAI reasoning model disproved a central conjecture tied to Erdős's 1946 planar unit-distance problem, finding an infinite family of counterexample point arrangements verified by outside mathematicians.

    Forbes ↗
  5. May 20
    releaseAlibaba (Qwen)

    Alibaba unveils Qwen3.7 Max, its first closed-weight flagship

    Announced at the Alibaba Cloud Summit, Qwen3.7 Max posts the highest Artificial Analysis index score ever for a Chinese model (56.6) — but ships without open weights, a notable strategy shift.

    Digital Applied ↗
  6. May 19
    releaseGoogle DeepMind

    Google launches Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026

    Gemini 3.5 Flash ($1.50/$9 per MTok) beats Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks at ~25% lower cost and up to 4x the speed.

    MarkTechPost ↗
  7. May 11
    release

    Thinking Machines Lab previews near-realtime voice-and-video 'interaction models'

    Mira Murati's lab unveils TML-Interaction-Small (276B MoE, 12B active) with 0.4s turn-taking latency that listens while it talks — its first model release, in limited research preview.

    TechCrunch ↗
  8. May 1
    companyDeepSeekAlibaba (Qwen)

    DeepSeek V4 triggers scramble for Huawei Ascend 950 chips

    V4's optimization for Huawei Ascend rather than Nvidia hardware prompts ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba to rush Ascend 950 orders; SMIC shares jump 10% while US export controls constrain supply.

    Capacity ↗

April 2026

  1. Apr 30
    releasexAI

    xAI launches Grok 4.3 with native video input and a 40% price cut

    Grok 4.3 hits the public API at $1.25/$2.50 per MTok — the cheapest near-frontier flagship — while Grok 5, the 6T-parameter Colossus 2 model, slips again with no release date.

    Artificial Analysis ↗
  2. Apr 24
    releaseDeepSeek

    DeepSeek releases open-weights V4 family, tying Gemini 3.1 Pro on SWE-bench

    V4-Pro-Max posts 80.6% on SWE-bench Verified — the best open-weights score — with a 1M context and 384K max output at $0.435/$0.87 per MTok under MIT license.

    MorphLLM ↗
  3. Apr 23
    releaseOpenAI

    OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 with an 85% ARC-AGI-2 score

    GPT-5.5 posts an 11.7-point ARC-AGI-2 jump over GPT-5.4 and takes Terminal-Bench 2.0 state of the art; the $30/$180 GPT-5.5 Pro variant targets long-horizon research.

    OpenAI ↗
  4. Apr 8
    releaseMeta AI

    Meta releases open-weights Llama 5 and closed flagship Muse Spark on the same day

    Llama 5 (600B+, 5M-token context, trained on 500K+ B200s) renews Meta's open-weights push, while Muse Spark — the first closed model from Meta Superintelligence Labs — becomes its consumer flagship.

    Meta AI ↗
  5. Apr 2
    releaseGoogle DeepMind

    Google DeepMind releases Gemma 4, its first multimodal open-weights line

    Gemma 4 ships in five Apache 2.0-licensed sizes (E2B to 31B), adding native image/video (and audio on the smaller tiers) input; the 31B flagship ranked #3 on the LMArena text leaderboard at release.

    Google ↗

February 2026

  1. Feb 11
    releaseGoogle DeepMind

    Google previews Gemini 3.1 Pro with a 77% ARC-AGI-2 score

    Gemini 3.1 Pro more than doubles its predecessor's abstract-reasoning performance and takes the GPQA Diamond lead at unchanged $2/$12 pricing.

    Google DeepMind ↗

November 2025

  1. Nov 24
    releaseAnthropic

    Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5, first model past 80% on SWE-bench Verified

    Opus 4.5 tops coding benchmarks while cutting flagship pricing 3x to $5/$25 per million tokens, capping a three-week stretch in which GPT-5.1, Gemini 3 Pro and Grok 4.1 all shipped.

    Anthropic ↗
  2. Nov 18
    releaseGoogle DeepMind

    Google ships Gemini 3 Pro with record HLE and ARC-AGI-2 scores

    Gemini 3 Pro posts 37.5% on Humanity's Last Exam and becomes the first model rated above 1500 Elo on LMArena; it rolls out to Search's AI Mode on day one.

    Google DeepMind ↗
  3. Nov 17
    releasexAI

    xAI's Grok 4.1 takes the top LMArena spot

    Grok 4.1 debuts at #1 on the LMArena text leaderboard with sharply reduced hallucination rates and improved writing over Grok 4.

    xAI ↗
  4. Nov 12
    releaseOpenAI

    OpenAI releases GPT-5.1 with adaptive reasoning

    GPT-5.1 Instant and Thinking replace GPT-5 in ChatGPT, spending reasoning tokens only when a task needs them and shipping a warmer default personality after months of user complaints.

    OpenAI ↗
  5. Nov 6
    releaseMoonshot AI

    Kimi K2 Thinking sets open-weights records on agentic benchmarks

    Moonshot AI's 1T-parameter open reasoning model beats GPT-5 on agentic Humanity's Last Exam and holds 200+ sequential tool calls, reportedly trained for ~$4.6M.

    Moonshot AI ↗

October 2025

  1. Oct 15
    releaseAnthropic

    Claude Haiku 4.5 brings near-frontier coding to the small-model tier

    Anthropic's small model matches Sonnet 4's coding performance at a third of the cost and more than twice the speed, at $1/$5 per million tokens.

    Anthropic ↗

September 2025

  1. Sep 29
    releaseAnthropic

    Claude Sonnet 4.5 claims best-coding-model title

    Sonnet 4.5 posts 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified and sustains 30+ hour autonomous coding sessions, shipping alongside the Claude Agent SDK.

    Anthropic ↗
  2. Sep 29
    releaseDeepSeek

    DeepSeek-V3.2 halves long-context API prices with sparse attention

    DeepSeek's experimental sparse-attention release cuts API prices to $0.28/$0.42 per million tokens, keeping open-weights pressure on frontier pricing.

    DeepSeek ↗

August 2025

  1. Aug 7
    releaseOpenAI

    OpenAI launches GPT-5 as a unified system

    GPT-5 routes between fast and reasoning modes automatically and reaches 74.9% on SWE-bench Verified; a bumpy rollout forces OpenAI to restore GPT-4o for paying users within days.

    OpenAI ↗

July 2025

  1. Jul 11
    releaseMoonshot AI

    Moonshot AI open-sources trillion-parameter Kimi K2

    Kimi K2 becomes the strongest open non-reasoning model, purpose-built for agentic tool use, intensifying the China open-weights wave.

    Moonshot AI ↗
  2. Jul 9
    releasexAI

    xAI debuts Grok 4 with leading HLE and ARC-AGI-2 scores

    Grok 4 and multi-agent Grok 4 Heavy lead Humanity's Last Exam and ARC-AGI-2 at launch, days after high-profile Grok chatbot safety failures on X.

    xAI ↗

January 2025

  1. Jan 20
    releaseDeepSeek

    DeepSeek-R1 shocks the market with open o1-class reasoning

    The MIT-licensed reasoning model matches OpenAI's o1 on math and code at ~30x lower price, triggering a historic one-day selloff in AI-linked stocks the following week.

    DeepSeek ↗