OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground

xAI launches a $120/seat autonomous browser agent the same week DeepSeek gives away a free MIT-licensed agent framework, exposing a closed-vs-open fork in the agentic tooling race.

• xAI's Grok Bot runs on a dedicated cloud instance, logs into browser-based tools like a human (no API needed), and works autonomously 24/7 — $120/seat/month, no free tier, available now on all platforms.
• DeepSeek released Harness v0.1, a free, MIT-licensed, plugin-first agent framework for coding agents — every component (model, tools, memory, UI) is swappable, fully commercial-use allowed.
• OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast via Cerebras hardware: 750 tokens/sec (up to 14x faster) with no intelligence trade-off, enabling real-time voice apps and fast multi-step coding agents.
• OpenAI shipped 'Computer History,' giving ChatGPT persistent memory of your work across different apps.
• A new study shows small, cheap model runs can reliably predict scaling laws if hyperparameters are tuned correctly — useful for budget-constrained model planning.
• Microsoft's Dion3 optimizer cuts training step time 6x versus Muon, a meaningful efficiency gain for anyone training custom models.

CORS Chat

• <p><strong>Tool:</strong> <a href="https://tools.simonwillison.net/cors-chat">CORS Chat</a></p> <p>I built this today (<a href="https://gist.github.com/simonw/92a1d97773744b45bf259e003013cf36">with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh</a>) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an

Google undercuts nobody but still ships Gemini 3.7 Flash as enterprises revolt against premium AI pricing, per new Ramp data.

• Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash at the same price as 3.6 Flash ($0.75/$3.75 per million tokens), still pricier than OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna ($0.20/$1.20), but with 10-15pp gains on FrontierCode and DeepSWE coding benchmarks
• Ramp's August index shows Anthropic leads enterprise AI spend (43.5% vs OpenAI's 39.7%), but its priciest model Fable 5 gets only 6% of token usage — businesses are capping spend on frontier-tier models
• OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol now has an 'ultrafast' variant running 14x faster, and open-source/Chinese model usage via platforms like Hugging Face grew to 6.1% of Ramp AI spend, alongside xAI's fastest growth since July 2025
• Runway added native integrations with Figma, Dropbox, and Notion to its agent — directly relevant for creative production pipelines
• Perplexity cut cost-per-task by ~10% on its deep research tool via 'Search as Code' optimizations, signaling broader industry pivot toward efficiency over raw capability
• Google's Android chief Sameer Samat outlined a shift from app-tapping to agent-driven task completion across phones, cars, and glasses — a longer-term signal for how creative/consumer interfaces may evolve

Don't classify. Hallucinate!

• <p><strong><a href="https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/08/10/hypothetical-classifications">Don&#x27;t classify. Hallucinate!</a></strong></p> I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has <a href="https://simonwillison.net/">1,856 tags</a> - like