AI News Roundup — Week of October 12, 2026

AI News Roundup — Week of October 12, 2026

A busy week for smaller, cheaper models and a notable funding round for an AI agent startup. Details below come from third-party reports and vendor announcements; items we could not confirm against a primary source are marked "reported".

New models

• Claude Haiku 5.5. Claude maker Anthropic released Haiku 5.5 this week, positioned as its fastest and lowest-cost model. Listings show a 1M-token context window and reported pricing of $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens, with higher rates above that. Anthropic reportedly claims it outperforms OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna; we have not independently verified that.
• Mistral Large 4 (public preview). Mistral opened a hosted public preview on October 6 of a multimodal mixture-of-experts model with a 1M-token context window, aimed at coding and agentic work. Downloadable weights are reportedly planned for the end of October after additional safety work, so the open-weight release is not yet confirmed.
• GLM 5.3 Fast. Z.ai's model appeared on aggregator listings on October 7 with a 1M-token context window and 128K output limit.
• Image and video models. Google's Gemini Nano Banana 2.1 image model (Gemini), Tencent's Hy Image 3.5 Preview, and xAI's Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite all appeared on model listings between October 5 and 8.
• Smaller releases. Reka Edge 2603 (a compact vision model) and InclusionAI's Ling 3.1 Flash (a 560B-parameter mixture-of-experts model, reportedly free via some hosts) also surfaced.

Pricing & product updates

• OpenAI API price cut (reported). One secondary report says OpenAI cut GPT-6 API prices by about 50% on October 7, with the paid-tier model at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, and the lighter model used for free and Go tiers at $0.10 and $0.50. The report is a single source, so check OpenAI's pricing page before relying on these figures. Model naming (GPT-6 Sol versus GPT-6.1 Sol) also differs between sources.
• Intelligent UI in ChatGPT. The same report says ChatGPT began rolling out an "Intelligent UI" feature on October 7 to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise accounts, with Free and Go users reportedly following on October 8.
• Model retirement. A pricing-change tracker lists GPT-5.5 as retiring from ChatGPT and Codex on October 14 across all plans, replaced by the GPT-6 models. The API is reportedly unaffected.
• Haiku pricing. Haiku 5.5's entry price is reported to be roughly 95% below Sonnet 5.5's for comparable short prompts, which may matter for high-volume agent and support workloads.

Money

• Manus raises more than $500 million. The Singapore-based agent startup's parent company announced the round on October 8, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital with participation from existing backers including Tencent. It is the first raise since the planned $2 billion acquisition by Meta was unwound earlier this year. Valuation was not disclosed; earlier reports mentioned talks at around $4 billion, and a Hong Kong IPO is reportedly under consideration.
• Earlier acquisitions to watch. Deals announced in recent weeks (for example Databricks' purchase of Row Zero and AMD's agreed acquisition of World Labs) have not come with confirmed sunset dates for the acquired products.

Tool shake-ups worth knowing

• Manus relaunches independently. Following the split from Meta, Manus has reportedly shipped Manus 2.0 and a standalone app, Cue, which gives AI agents their own email addresses, phone numbers, and digital wallets. Users should note the company said some user data had to be deleted as part of the separation.
• Mistral's staged release. Mistral described the Large 4 launch as staged rather than a full open release; teams planning self-hosting should wait for the weights.
• GPT-5.5 retirement. Anyone pinned to GPT-5.5 inside ChatGPT or Codex should expect it to move to a newer model after October 14.
• No new shutdowns confirmed. We did not find a credible, verifiable shutdown announcement dated within the past seven days. Earlier closures are tracked in our directory notes.

Figures in this roundup come from third-party sources and vendor announcements and change quickly. Verify pricing and availability with the vendor before making decisions.