Three Labs, One Price, One Asterisk
Claude Sonnet 5.5: $2 input, $10 output per million. GPT-6.1 Sol: $2 and $10. Gemini 4 Argon: $2 and $10.
That looks like the mid-tier price settling at a number. It mostly is — but Argon's rates are introductory, and the standard price is $4 and $20. Google has not said how long the trial runs.
So if you are building a cost model this week, two of those three numbers are real and one is a discount. Price the migration at $4 and $20 and treat anything cheaper as upside.
Gemini 4 Argon
Google's new frontier model leads on the coding benchmark everyone is watching: 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, against 74.2% for Claude Opus 5.5 and 74.1% for GPT-6 Astra. Also 68% on CWE-bench v1 (tied first), 51.3% on AutomationBench (first), and 91.7% on LVBench for video.
The specification that matters more than the benchmarks: output goes from 64,000 tokens to one million. Input context stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. Output is where the chunking and stitching happens, and this removes it.
Access is gated — trusted testers and cyber defenders through the Fairwind Program, with Google AI Ultra subscribers and paid API customers next. That is now three labs in four weeks shipping frontier capability through vetted access first: Fairwind at Google, Daybreak Blue at OpenAI, and Anthropic routing higher-risk cyber work away from its newest Sonnet. Gated release became the default without anyone calling it a policy change.
California Banned AI-Only Firings
Newsom signed SB 947, the No Robo Bosses Act, on 30 September. Automated systems can no longer be the primary driver of a decision to fire or discipline. Human review must corroborate the finding against personnel files, manager evaluations and peer reviews. The worker must get written notice of what AI data was used, and a named human who can explain it.
Two things are being underreported. The version that passed removed protections for gig workers — the people most managed by algorithm in the first place. And it was signed one day after the White House gave its science adviser 60 days to draft a federal definition of "super intelligence", including whether it should replace existing legal definitions of AI.
California legislated into the path of that clock, from the state where most of the affected companies are based. The next 60 days decide whether the law survives as written.
Also Moving
- Meta reports Muse at 3 million weekly active users and 1 million daily prompt-senders since its September launch — its first adoption figures since the agent launched, though the numbers come via a roundup rather than a Meta release.
The Week in One Line
Capability is converging, price is converging, and access is tightening. Three labs now sell comparable models at the same number through vetted programmes — which is a stranger combination than any individual launch, and nobody announced it.