OpenAI and Anthropic Cut Model Costs as AI Expands Into Phones

OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, moving some advances from GPT-6 Astra in professional work, factual accuracy, coding and computer use into faster, cheaper models. OpenAI said API prices for both were cut 50% against GPT-5.6 promotional pricing. Sol costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens; Luna costs $0.1 and $0.5. OpenAI said Sol made about half as many factual errors as the previous generation and scored 68.8% on DeepSWE 1.1, with Luna at 66.6%. The models are available to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex; Free and Go users can use Luna on desktop.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in the Claude 5.5 family. Anthropic said it matches Claude Fable 5.1 in most work, cuts typical workload costs by 40% under standard settings compared with Opus 5, and produces output more than 30% faster. Pricing is $4 per million input tokens, $20 per million output tokens and $0.2 per million cached read tokens. Early testers completed a 680,000-line code migration in less than a day, and the model succeeded in 39 of 40 attempts in a web load optimization test, according to Anthropic. Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 are due in coming weeks.

Apple CEO John Ternus said in an interview on Canal+ program Clique that Siri AI is not designed to be a friend and that Apple does not want AI to replace human relationships, which he called the basis for learning, growth and happiness. He also discussed the iPhone Duo, saying Apple began from a large-screen, iPad-like experience rather than joining two phone screens. Hinge and screen reliability remain main engineering issues, including unfolding angle, screen continuity and software animation. Ternus said he would not make radical changes as CEO and would keep products, innovation and users at the center.

OPPO launched Find X10 Pro Max, Find X10 and Find X10 E, plus Watch S2, Enco X4 earphones and the AI Energy Ball. All three phones go on sale Sept. 24 at 10:00. Find X10 Pro Max uses a 2nm Dimensity 9600 Pro and 200MP main, ultra-wide and periscope telephoto cameras, costing 6,799 yuan for 12GB + 256GB. Find X10 has a 200MP main camera, 200MP periscope telephoto, Dimensity 9600M, an 8,000mAh battery and 80W wired plus 50W wireless charging, starting at 5,499 yuan. Find X10 E has three 50MP rear cameras, a 7,025mAh battery and IP66, IP68 and IP69 protection, starting at 4,999 yuan. Watch S2 starts at 1,599 yuan, Enco X4 costs 1,199 yuan, and the AI Energy Ball has a pioneer price of 499 yuan with purchases opening Oct. 15.

Qualcomm announced the sixth-generation Snapdragon 8 Ultimate and Snapdragon 8 platforms, emphasizing on-device AI, gaming and imaging. The Ultimate version's Oryon CPU peaks at 5GHz and adds new GPU and NPU architectures for AI workloads. Xiaomi, vivo, OPPO, Honor and RedMagic will adopt the platforms, with iQOO 16, iQOO Pad Ultra and RedMagic 12 Pro+ confirmed for the Ultimate version. Qualcomm also worked with StepFun, Wulianghuo and Longsys to deploy the StepEdge-Omni 30B-MoE model on the platform, cutting memory needs by more than 50% and reaching prefill throughput above 330 tokens per second and decode above 28 tokens per second for local agent tasks.

Honor and Alibaba said at the Yunqi Conference that they will build five vertical models and solutions for next-generation AI phones based on Qwen Intelligence and MagicOS. The Honor Magic9 series, to launch Sept. 28, and the Honor Robot Phone will be the first devices to carry the solution. The companies said the system-level Agent Harness architecture includes on-device multimodal, VLM, GUI Agent, Agentic Fast and Agentic Pro components. Test data showed 91.8% task accuracy, 3.6-second GUI operation, support for long-horizon tasks over 100 steps and an end-to-end service closure rate above 90%.

Meta's personal AI agent Muse, launched Sept. 8, topped the U.S. App Store free app chart, according to Sensor Tower data reported Sept. 22. Muse handles email, appointments, shopping and long-term plans; Sensor Tower said it exceeded 2.5 million downloads in 13 days. Meta shares rose 11.43% on Sept. 21, and Forbes estimated Mark Zuckerberg's wealth increased by $25 billion in one day to $253.6 billion. Separately, security researcher Patrick Wardle found a local privilege vulnerability in Muse's macOS client: any app or terminal command already running on a Mac could rewrite an undisclosed dictation service address and intercept Muse account authorization tokens. An attacker would need local code execution, and a purely remote request could not directly trigger the flaw; a token could allow high-privilege file operations or camera access, the report said.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has begun using an air traffic management platform called SMART, unifying 200 data streams including weather, routes, real-time traffic and controller schedules into one interface and using AI to help generate capacity, congestion and flight scheduling recommendations. The U.S. Department of Transportation said the system aims to reduce information gaps among separate tools and help controllers reflow traffic faster during weather or communications failures. The platform offers recommendations, while operational decisions remain with air traffic controllers.

Seres Chairman Zhang Xinghai said at the company's half-year results meeting on Sept. 22 that cooperation with Huawei has been upgraded to a dedicated AITO operation model. Zhang said the new model will concentrate resources through dedicated channels, service teams and brand operations to improve channel efficiency. Seres described the change as an upgrade of systems and coordination mechanisms and denied that the partnership had changed.

BYD's Xi'an base has released more than 8,000 job openings across its Gaoxin, Caotang, Jixian and Xixian plants, according to recruitment information published by the Xi'an Human Resources and Social Security Bureau and the Xi'an High-tech Zone Human Resources Industry Association. The jobs are mainly front-line roles in welding, painting, final assembly, stamping, quality inspection and equipment maintenance. Ordinary operators have a combined monthly salary of 5,500 to 8,000 yuan, some technical roles pay up to 10,000 yuan per month, and joining bonuses reach 6,000 yuan. The recruitment coincides with a second-half capacity recovery and growth in export orders after line switching and production cuts in the first half.

Chen Long, former head of Xiaomi Auto's autonomous driving foundation model and XLA large model, has gone to Silicon Valley to start a business and is developing a self-evolving embodied large model with former Google DeepMind scientists, according to 21 Auto Yijian Auto, citing multiple independent sources. The project has received funding and begun commercial cooperation, the report said. The company name and other details were not included in the provided excerpt.

Other announcements included Alibaba's preview of Qwen4 and an open-source architecture preview, Tencent's Hy Image 3.5 preview supporting up to five reference images, and Alibaba's plan to train Zhenwu V900 models with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI were invited to brief the UN Security Council on AI risks. Googlebook began pre-sales with Android and ChromeOS combined at $899, while Tom Cruise said AI will enter film but audiences still want to see real people and events.

Editor's Summary

OpenAI and Anthropic released cheaper frontier models on Sept. 22, intensifying price and performance competition in AI. Apple, OPPO, Qualcomm and Honor advanced AI features into phones and devices, while Meta faced a macOS security issue in its Muse agent. The same day also brought labor, aviation, automotive and partnership developments in China and the U.S.