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New Anthropic, OpenAI models make same promise: A little more for a lot less money
Confirmed
In Short: Anthropic announced Opus 5.5, its latest mass-market model, aimed at tasks like coding and complex knowledge work.
OpenAI, meanwhile, introduced GPT-6 Sol and Luna, focusing on efficiency and speed.
Hacktron researchers demonstrated the vulnerability of OpenAI's community forum using Claude models, highlighting the risks posed by advanced AI.
The Hacktron team used Claude Opus 4.8 to find flaws in the code of a third-party service called Discourse, used for the OpenAI community forum.
OpenAI responded by narrowing permissions on community sign-in tokens and revoking affected tokens and sessions.
Both companies are targeting enterprise customers, competing with open-source models as organizations seek to reduce costs.
UnderstandingAI.org noted that while new models excel in math and coding, they still struggle with image understanding, suggesting general intelligence remains elusive.
The release of Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 by Anthropic marks significant advancements in coding abilities, though other capabilities like image understanding have seen less progress.
The new models aim to balance performance with cost, addressing the growing concerns over AI's impact on cybersecurity and ethical considerations.
What's confirmed
- OpenAI, meanwhile, introduced GPT-6 Sol and Luna, focusing on efficiency and speed.
- Hacktron researchers demonstrated the vulnerability of OpenAI's community forum using Claude models, highlighting the risks posed by advanced AI.
- The Hacktron team used Claude Opus 4.8 to find flaws in the code of a third-party service called Discourse, used for the OpenAI community forum.
- OpenAI responded by narrowing permissions on community sign-in tokens and revoking affected tokens and sessions.
- Both companies are targeting enterprise customers, competing with open-source models as organizations seek to reduce costs.
- UnderstandingAI.org noted that while new models excel in math and coding, they still struggle with image understanding, suggesting general intelligence remains elusive.
- The release of Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 by Anthropic marks significant advancements in coding abilities, though other capabilities like image understanding have seen less progress.
- The new models aim to balance performance with cost, addressing the growing concerns over AI's impact on cybersecurity and ethical considerations.
What's still developing
- Anthropic announced Opus 5.5, the latest version of its main mass-market workhorse model, used for tasks like coding and other complex knowledge work.
- Opus 5.5 is at the higher end of the models announced today, but the wider context here is that Anthropic is playing a bit of catch-up in its race with OpenAI.
- OpenAI earlier this month released GPT-6 Astra, which has sometimes been modestly beating Opus 5 in benchmarks and user sentiment. (By price and capability, Astra is competing with both Opus and Fable.) Benchmarks by Anthropic and its partners now show Opus 5.5 performing better at coding and knowledge work than GPT-6 Astra in some cases, albeit modestly.
- Opus 5.5 is said to be notably capable in “high risk areas” like cybersecurity and biology, so the same protections that applied to Fable 5.1 will also apply here—your requests might be automatically and transparently routed to an older model if they get flagged as treading into protected territory.
- You have people on social media declaring that it’s possible to one-shot complex 3D video games with models like GPT-6 Astra, but you also have news of security breaches and other alignment issues, calls for slowdowns and regulation, and so on.
- As both OpenAI and Anthropic target enterprise customers, they’re racing to compete with open-weight models as organizations have explored changing their practices and using model routers to use these pricey frontier models less in favor of cheaper alternatives.
- Anthropic and OpenAI argue that these new releases push the envelope at the frontier (albeit mostly in modest ways), while bringing costs substantially down.
- Cache reads (which make up the majority of agentic and coding work costs) are $0.20 per million tokens, 60% less than Opus 5.
- Mohan Pedhapati, one of the three researchers from a company called Hacktron who broke into OpenAI, said that more advanced AI models allow veteran hackers like him to do their work much more easily — and raise the risks of criminals doing the same.
- "As the models progress, they become very capable in cyber," he said.
- In a report published last week, Hacktron detailed how, in late July, they used Claude models to infiltrate users of OpenAI's community forum.
- The Wall Street Journal first reported on Hacktron's OpenAI report.