THE ADVANCE: THE PRICE WAR
On Tuesday, Anthropic and OpenAI launched new models within about an hour of each other, and the real news wasn’t capability. It was price.
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 runs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, down from $5 and $25, answers 30% faster, and cut the price of cache reads, the discount for reusing context, by 60%.
OpenAI answered with GPT-6 Sol ($2 in, $10 out) for coding and agent work, and GPT-6 Luna ($0.10 in, $0.50 out) for high-volume routine jobs like summarization. Both are roughly half the price of their GPT-5.6 predecessors.
xAI went the other direction: Grok 4.7 doubles the rate for prompts over 200,000 tokens.
Translation: the frontier fight has moved from whose model is smartest to whose intelligence is cheapest. If you buy AI by the token, this was the best week of the year.
CHIPS & IRON
Reuters reported September 16 that SK Hynix is in early talks with Intel to manufacture memory chips at the New Albany, Ohio fab, either by leasing space or through a joint venture with the big cloud companies. It would be SK Hynix’s first manufacturing on US soil. Neither company confirmed anything; Intel’s stock jumped anyway.
Ohio One’s first fab is now targeted for 2030, the second for 2031. A tenant like SK Hynix would put that delayed, expensive asset to work.
Meanwhile, the money behind data centers got nervous. Reports this week said the loans behind Oracle’s New Mexico data center are trading at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar after local opposition and a blocked gas pipeline, and Oracle sent a force majeure notice on its 2.45-gigawatt site there. Not everyone is nervous: Akamai rose 20% on an $11.6 billion compute deal with Anthropic.
THE DEBATE: WHO SLOWS DOWN, AND WHO DECIDES
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay September 12 calling for a deliberate global slowdown in AI development, warning that AI could soon coordinate swarms of agents capable of taking over the internet. Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk and Satya Nadella all backed the idea. President Trump called it a hoax: “the robots are not going to be taking over the world.”
Then came Wednesday’s UN Security Council session, the first devoted to AI loss-of-control risk. Altman, Amodei, Hugging Face’s Clément Delangue and scientist Yoshua Bengio all spoke. Bengio proposed licensing frontier AI the way we license aviation and nuclear power, with mandatory liability insurance. The US answer came from White House science adviser Michael Kratsios: America “totally rejects” centralized international control. A day earlier at the General Assembly, Trump had called global AI oversight a “globalist scheme.”
The same week, Bill Gates warned that AI is powerful enough to cause events killing a billion people and said industry self-regulation isn’t enough. Senators Sanders and Casar introduced a bill to create a Department of Artificial Intelligence and pause covered development.
So: the labs say slow down, Washington says no global rules, Congress has a bill. Nobody is in charge. That was the week’s real story.
(Also at the Trump-Xi summit: no AI breakthrough, but the two sides agreed to keep talking, next round in November, plus a channel for AI incidents. And both presidents agreed AI should maybe be renamed “SI,” for superintelligence. Sure.)
PREDICTION WATCH
A new standing feature. Predictions are free; accountability isn’t. I’ll keep score.
Dario Amodei (Sept 12): agent swarms able to “take over the entire internet” within 6 to 12 months. Check-in: March 2027.
Sam Altman (to Fortune, Sept 26): OpenAI’s stock sale likely next year, not this one. Check-in: December 2027.
ONE NUMBER
42%. That’s the share of developers who say AI now writes half their code, up from 12% a year ago, per a survey circulating this week. (Anthropic says Claude writes 80% of its own.)
WORTH YOUR TIME
Amodei’s slowdown essay, the document the entire week argued with.
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klaatu barada nikto: the safe phrase to prevent world domination.