#model-pricing

GPT-6 Astra costs $10/$50 per million tokens and reaches 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3. See access, API limits, benchmark caveats, and safety tradeoffs.

A dated ledger of AI model releases in September 2026, each row verified against the vendor’s announcement, with price, context and what it replaces.

Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash three weeks after 3.7 at the same $0.75/$3.75 intro price and printed the January 1 rise to $1.50/$7.50. What changes.

Meta says Muse Spark 1.3 uses about 25% fewer tokens than 1.2. Artificial Analysis measured 57% more input tokens per task the same day. How both hold.

Active parameters, not total parameters, predict per-token cost and throughput. What the activation count tells you, and the four things it cannot tell you.

Z.ai named its stealth model on August 26 and shipped MIT weights the same day. What the identity actually changes for an endpoint already in production.

A catalog row can show a real, live price that is a time-boxed promotion, a surface-specific rate, or a listing date that is not a launch date at all.

xAI's Grok 4.6 keeps Grok 4.5's headline rates, but the $2/$6 tier only holds below a 200K-token prompt: cross it and the whole request reprices.

Qwen3.7 Flash listed at $0.03 per million input tokens on its base tier, 1M context and video input — but no published benchmarks. Where it fits in subagents.

Claude Opus 5 launched July 24 at $5/$25 per million tokens — Anthropic's new state of the art on coding and knowledge work at half Fable 5's price.

OpenRouter added 10 frontier and open-weight models in 22 days, prices spanning ~83x on input and ~250x on output. The July 2026 releases worth routing to.

Kimi K3's open-weight bet meets Anthropic's closed Fable 5. Vendor benchmarks split 6-8, K3 lists at $3/$15 vs $10/$50, and weights are promised July 27.

Kimi K3 leads GPT-5.6 Sol on seven of fourteen vendor-reported benchmarks, but Sol's effort controls and ultra mode reframe agentic fit beyond raw scores.

Kimi K3 brings 2.8T parameters, 1M context, and near-frontier vendor benchmarks, with open weights due July 27, 2026. What the release means for AI buyers.

OpenRouter added five models in ten days, from Opus 4.8 to MiniMax M3 at $0.30/M input. June 2026 pricing, context windows, and usage rankings.

DeepSeek abandons its no-outside-capital stance in a ~$7.4B maiden round led by Tencent and CATL, valuing it near $59B and reshaping open-weight economics.