Anthropic’s mid-tier model punches up

Good morning, { AI enthusiasts }. Anthropic spent the last two weeks shipping its best-ever models. The twist is that the cheaper one might matter more.

The brand new Sonnet 4.6 goes toe-to-toe with Opus 4.6 across coding, finance, and computer use benchmarks at 1/5 the fee — cutting the gap between what the perfect AI can do and what most firms can actually afford to deploy.

In today’s AI rundown:

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

The Rundown: Anthropic just rolled out Claude Sonnet 4.6, its latest mid-tier model that matches or beats the flagship Opus 4.6 across finance, computer use, coding, and office benchmarks at 1/5 of the worth — while featuring a 1M token context window.

The small print:

Why it matters: Anthropic is running a trickle-down playbook at warp speed, shipping near Opus-caliber capabilities to its cheaper line just weeks after the flagship upgrade. With strong Chinese models continuing to undercut everyone on price, Sonnet 4.6 looks like Anthropic’s bid to higher compete for the amount layer of the agentic boom.

The Rundown: HubSpot’s free, comprehensive  “The best way to Use ChatGPT at Work” guide provides 100+ ready-to-use prompts to assist professionals boost efficiency and adopt AI-driven workflows.

Inside, you’ll find:

Get your free copy and join 10,000+ professionals leveling up with AI.

The Rundown: Apple is reportedly fast-tracking three camera-equipped AI wearables, in keeping with Bloomberg — including smart glasses, a pendant, and latest AirPods all designed to offer Siri real-time visual awareness through the iPhone.

The small print:

Why it matters: AI wearables from Apple (that really feature a working model) would immediately shake up the mainstream hardware landscape and vault the tech giant into the AI highlight. But these devices depend upon a Siri overhaul that we still have to see to really trust after years of absolutely brutal delays and underdelivering.

The Rundown: On this guide, you’ll use Suno AI to create a custom jingle, background music, and sound effects on your brand. The perfect part is that they’re all royalty-free and may be created from basic text prompts.

Step-by-step:

Pro tip: You too can go to → Suno Create → Sounds tab to create short “stings” for transitions in your content.

The Rundown: Bland AI automates phone calls for over 250+ enterprise customers. No phone trees. No hold music. Just faster, smarter customer conversations.

Listed here are a few of the outcomes they’ve driven for businesses:

Book a demo today to see how they’ll work for your corporation.

The Rundown: Figma just introduced a brand new “Code to Canvas” integration with Anthropic that lets developers capture interfaces in-built Claude Code and convert them into fully editable design files on Figma’s canvas.

The small print:

Why it matters: This generation of AI coding tools has made it trivial to construct a working UI, but Figma is hoping to be the polished, shippable design layer on top of raw vibe-coded prototypes. But with model capabilities only improving, that polishing layer might also soon be automated — something the markets appear to note as well.

QUICK HITS

xAI began rolling out the long-awaited Grok 4.20 in a public beta, featuring a brand new agent workflow that uses 4 agents working in parallel to research and handle tasks.

Meta and Nvidia announced a brand new multiyear AI chip deal spanning thousands and thousands of GPUs and CPUs to assist power the tech giant’s AI infrastructure buildout.

Cohere Labs open-sourced Tiny Aya, a 3.35B parameter multilingual model that handles 70+ languages with strong gains for typically underrepresented dialects.

French AI startup Mistral made its first-ever acquisition, with serverless platform Koyeb joining to spice up its Mistral Compute cloud infrastructure arm.

WordPress launched a brand new AI assistant able to editing layouts, generating images, and rewriting content directly contained in the editor for streamlining web site design.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Yilin Q. in Australia:

“I exploit Gemini like my personal basketball assistant — I record our games, throw the video at it, and it magically breaks every part down for me.

It tells me where I tousled, what I actually did well, and even spots the opponents’ bad habits, like who all the time forgets to change or which corner they leave wide open. It’s like having an excellent nerdy assistant coach who never gets drained, never lies to make me feel higher, and helps me plan learn how to play smarter next game.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

See you soon,