Saturday edition_
The week in tech and AI, and the bigger shifts behind it.
- Haiku 5.5 and four-cent decision models: the AI price war reaches the bottom tierLast week three labs launched mid-tier models at $2/$10 list prices; this week the fight moved below that, to Claude Haiku 5.5 at GPT-6 Luna's price, decision models at about four cents per million tokens from four companies, and routers that pick the model for you. Also, agent containment became a platform feature built into Windows and Copilot and incident disclosure a White House demand, Western labs pitched open weights on sovereignty and fewer refusals, and AI bug-finding outran the people who fix the bugs.
- Containing agents stopped being the labs' private problemIn the week OpenAI launched its most autonomous agent and shelved its next model over safety, containing agents became a product, a legal demand and an operating-system rule. Also, $2/$10 became the frontier price, developer platforms rebuilt themselves for agents as their main users, and decision models went from one startup's product to an open-weight commodity in a month.