Daily AI brief, Sept 29: Sonnet 5.5 ships, Astra reportedly cancelled
A roundup of the day: Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5, OpenAI's DevDay teaser points to Codex features, and the WSJ says GPT-6.1 Astra was pulled over safety and alignment.
DAILY AI BRIEF 🗞 — Sept 29 ANTHROPIC 🔥: - Claude Sonnet 5.5 is live everywhere, including the Platform and Claude Code. Second model in the 5.5 family; Haiku 5.5 is still weeks out. - Same list price as Sonnet 5: $2/$10 per 1M tokens, cache reads $0.20. Official line: 30%+ faster and up to 30% cheaper per task. - First Sonnet with Opus-class cyber safeguards. Cursor already has the slug. OPENAI 🔥: - DevDay keynote is today. The teaser promised 20+ launches; the agenda points to Codex plugins, a 1,000-hour internal agent run, and multiplayer Codex. - Pro $200 reopens to new subscribers tomorrow. Usage math nets to about half the old plan’s API dollars. No 5h cap coming back. Extra subscription features tomorrow will not draw usage. - WSJ: GPT-6.1 Astra will not ship. October target pulled over safety and alignment. - Build strings name “Dots”: text, call, Slack, email, buy with approval, plus a custom-shaped character. “Spaces” also showed up separately. XAI 🔥: - Team Bots are in public beta for Teams and Enterprise. Shared teammates with skills, plugins, and credentials in Slack or Grok Bot. NVIDIA 🔥: - Open Agent Safety Platform is out with 100+ partners. OpenShell plus Sentry; BlueField-4 and DOCA sit outside the agent’s reach. ELEVENLABS 🔥: - v4 and v4 Turbo shipped. Turbo median latency ~100 ms. 90+ languages. - Two-week API promo: $22 / $11 per 1M characters. Instant clones from 10 seconds of audio. KLING 🔥: - 4.0 Flash is live for Ultra Yearly. Full 4.0 is October: 4K HDR, 15 references, 10 keyframes, native 30-second clips. MANUS 🔥: - 2.0 adds persistent cloud workspaces and Cue, an agent with email, phone, wallet, and a Cloud Computer. * Used Grok to compose this brief, cherry-picking the news and doing some post-editing. ** This daily brief also arrives in the daily email format; subscribe on the blog.
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