AI This Week: Cheaper Flagships, Always-On Agents, and a Fight Over Open Weights

OpenAI priced GPT-6.1 Sol at a fifth of Astra’s tokens, Google gave Gemini 4 Argon a one-million-token output limit, and Anthropic showed how easily an open-weight model’s safeguards can be stripped.
artificial-intelligence
cyber-security
Author

Kabui, Charles

Published

2026-10-03

Keywords

ai-weekly, gpt-6-1-sol, gemini-4-argon, openai-dots, cloudflare-clef, glm-5-3

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The price of frontier intelligence fell this week. OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol, which it says nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra’s token prices: $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output, and $0.10 for cached input. Google followed with Gemini 4 Argon, which lifts the output limit to one million tokens, up from 64K, and lands at the same $2 and $10, scoring 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1.

Agents went ambient. OpenAI launched dots, always-on assistants powered by GPT-6 Astra that each get their own cloud computer, learn your habits, and reach more than 4,000 apps across ChatGPT, Slack, and Teams. A companion Decisions API returns a choice from a fixed list instead of a sentence. Cloudflare open-sourced its own take, Clef, a 27-billion-parameter model that returns a probability for every allowed answer in a single pass and, by Cloudflare’s count, leads the Jev Decision Index.

The fight over open weights sharpened. Anthropic’s red team reported that Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.3 builds working exploits at rates matching Anthropic’s own Mythos Preview, and that simple tricks bypass its safeguards 64% to 100% of the time. Abliterating the model cost about $4,400 and cut its refusals from over 90% to roughly 3%. The same week, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs joined AMD, and six tech leaders signed a White House safety accord while an executive order told federal agencies to call AI “Super Intelligence.” Capability is getting cheaper and more autonomous just as its safeguards are proving easier to remove.

Read More: AI This Week: Agents Get an API, Models Get Audited, Voice Gets Smart

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BibTeX citation:
@misc{kabui2026,
  author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
  title = {AI {This} {Week:} {Cheaper} {Flagships,} {Always-On}
    {Agents,} and a {Fight} {Over} {Open} {Weights}},
  date = {2026-10-03},
  url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/ai-weekly-cheaper-flagships-ambient-agents-open-weights/},
  langid = {en-GB}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kabui, Charles. 2026. “AI This Week: Cheaper Flagships, Always-On Agents, and a Fight Over Open Weights.” https://toknow.ai/posts/ai-weekly-cheaper-flagships-ambient-agents-open-weights/.