They summarize our coverage. We write it.
Newsletters like this one rebroadcast our headlines - often without the full review, the source reading, or the analysis underneath. Our weekly briefing sends the work they paraphrase, straight from the desk, before they get to it.
Free, weekly, no spam. One email every Tuesday. Unsubscribe anytime.
Moonshot's Kimi K3 tops LMArena's Frontend Code Arena and undercuts Opus 4.8 on cost per task, but a tripled price tag, a rising hallucination rate, and an unresolved distillation question complicate the win.
xAI's terminal coding agent is quick, cheap, and picks up your Claude Code and Codex sessions - but a researcher just caught it uploading entire Git repositories without consent.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.7-Code became the first open-weight model in GitHub Copilot's picker, pairing genuine cost savings with a benchmark story that only Moonshot has verified.
xAI's Grok 4.5 tops AutomationBench and costs 80% less per agentic task than Opus 4.8, but neutral coding benchmarks and a doubled hallucination rate complicate the story.
Meituan's 1.6T open-source coding model secretly topped OpenRouter for two months before revealing itself - and the price-to-performance math is hard to argue with.
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol tops Terminal-Bench 2.1 at 91.9% with its multi-agent Ultra mode, but reward-hacking findings and government-gated access keep it out of reach for nearly everyone.
Anthropic's Sonnet 5 is the first mid-tier model that genuinely competes with Opus-class agents on coding and computer use, released June 30 at $2/$10 per million tokens.
Z.ai's GLM-5.2 delivers frontier coding performance with open weights and MIT license at roughly one-sixth the cost of GPT-5.5 - but can it replace Claude Opus 4.8?
Grok 4.3 slashes prices by up to 83%, adds native video input and voice cloning, and carves out a credible position as the most cost-efficient frontier model - with real caveats on coding and latency.
Google DeepMind's DiffusionGemma generates 1,000+ tokens per second through parallel diffusion, trading 5-19 benchmark points against Gemma 4 for speed and unique bidirectional generation capabilities.
Mistral's 128B open-weight model consolidates reasoning, coding, and vision into one checkpoint, with remote agents that file pull requests autonomously.
Yahoo Scout is the rare AI search engine that puts source links front and center - here's whether that philosophy holds up in practice.
