1. Key takeaways from the week
Between Oct 17 and Oct 23, 2026, the window produced two model releases, both Chinese "Flash" models, while the closed frontier moved through prices and access rather than launches. Five conclusions explain the week; each is supported in the chapter named in brackets, with every status judged against Oct 24.
1. No closed model launched in the window; the closed-model news is Google's price schedule. The newest closed releases are Meta's Muse Wonder (Oct 12) and the general availability of Gemini 4 Argon through the paid API on Oct 13. Argon costs $2 / $10 per 1M tokens until Nov 30 and $4 / $20 from Dec 1; a 60M-input, 15M-output month rises from $270 to $540. Until Nov 30 Argon is 50% of Opus 5.5's $4 / $20 list rate, and from Dec 1 the two are level. [Chapter 2][Chapter 5]
2. Only DeepSeek shipped usable open weights; MiniMax's are a promise. DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 arrived on Oct 17 with MIT weights, and its Search and Fetch APIs cost $0.75 per 1,000 calls. MiniMax M3.1 Flash went live on Oct 19 at $0.15 / $0.60, but its weights, announced for Oct 23, are unconfirmed and the licence is unpublished. Open-weight no longer means permissive: Kimi K3 and Muse Spark Open carry $20M revenue triggers. [Chapter 3]
3. Anthropic's September models still top the independent boards. On the Artificial Analysis (AA) Intelligence Index v4.3.2, Opus 5.5 scores 57.6, Sonnet 5.5 56.0 and Muse Wonder Full 55.8. Argon leads LMArena text by 1525.4 - 1507.1 = 18.3 Elo, which is within noise. Between the two window models, DeepSeek leads on AA, 45 against 43, but MiniMax costs less per task, $0.22 against $0.26. [Chapter 4]
4. The rate card is a poor guide; cost per task and peak hours decide the bill. Kingy's check found no Western list-price change among 17 tracked models since Sept 20. DeepSeek charges $0.30 / $1.20 at peak and $0.15 / $0.60 off-peak. Gemini 3.8 Flash costs about $1.24 per index task, 5.6 times MiniMax's $0.22 for one point less. [Chapter 5]
5. Developer feedback is about trust. AA found MiniMax M3.1 Flash correct on 56.2% of questions, but 92.8% of its misses were confident errors, or 40.6% of all questions. AI/ML API's own tests passed 49 of 51 runs at 109 tokens/s, against MiniMax's "above 200". Evidence on DeepSeek is a three-task test. All of this is anecdotal except the AA numbers. [Chapter 6]
1.1 Models at a glance
| Model | Vendor | Type | Release date | Status (Oct 24) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MiniMax M3.1 Flash (window) | MiniMax | Open-weight (announced); licence unpublished | Oct 19, 2026 | Shipping; weights promised Oct 23, unconfirmed | MiniMax |
| DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 (window) | DeepSeek | Open-weight, MIT | Oct 17, 2026 | Shipping; weights public | The Decoder |
| Gemini 4 Argon (context) | Closed | Announced Sep 30; API Oct 13 | GA, paid tier only; price doubles Dec 1 | Towards Data Science; AionX | |
| Meta Muse Wonder (context) | Meta | Closed, no public weights | Oct 12, 2026 | Shipping; Wonder Full in Muse Code plans only | DevX |
| Claude Opus 5.5 (context) | Anthropic | Closed | Sep 22, 2026 | GA | Anthropic |
| GPT-6 Astra (context) | OpenAI | Closed | Sep 3, 2026 | GA | BenchLM |
| Meta Muse Spark Open (context) | Meta | Open-weight, custom licence | Oct 15, 2026 | Shipping | CometAPI |
| Reflection Beam 1.0 (context) | Reflection | Open-weight, Apache 2.0 | Weights Oct 16, 2026 | Shipping | Data Studios |
| Kimi K3 (context) | Moonshot | Open-weight, custom licence | Jul 16, 2026 | Shipping | Fello AI |
2. New models at a glance: closed models
Chapter 1 summarises the week; this chapter takes the closed models one by one and applies the window test (released, made generally available or materially updated between Oct 17 and Oct 23, 2026) before anything is called "new".
2.1 Closed models at a glance
All rows are context (released before the window) and are judged against Oct 24, 2026. No vendor discloses a parameter count for any of them: size is not disclosed in the material.
| Item | Key figure | Date | Status (Oct 24) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Gemini 4 Argon (closed) | Unified window 1,048,576 tokens; output 65,536 default, up to 1,048,576 with long decode; text, image, audio, video, PDF in, text out; $2 / $10 per 1M until Nov 30, $4 / $20 from Dec 1 | Announced Sep 30; API Oct 13 | GA (gemini-4-argon, "Stable"); paid tier only |
LLM Data Hub quoting Google pages; Towards Data Science |
| Meta Muse Wonder (closed, no public weights) | About 1M context; text, image, audio, video, PDF in, text out; API $4 / $20, cached $0.20 | Oct 12 | Shipping on Meta Model API; Wonder Full only in Muse Code plans ($50, $200), no API price | DevX |
| Anthropic Claude Haiku 5.5 | 1M context, 128K output; text and image in; $0.10 / $0.50 (prompts up to 100K), $0.50 / $2.50 above | Oct 7 | GA | Anthropic; BenchLM; Fello AI |
| Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5.5 | 1M context; $2 / $10 | Sep 28 | GA | Anthropic; BenchLM |
| Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5 | 1M context, 128K output; $4 / $20; cache read $0.20 | Sep 22 | GA | Anthropic; BenchLM; vakati-tech |
| Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 | 1M context; $10 / $50; Mythos 5.1 is the same model with fewer safeguards, vetted users only | Sep 1 or Sep 15 (see 2.3) | GA; Mythos limited access | Anthropic; BenchLM |
| OpenAI GPT-6.1 Sol | 1.05M context; $2 / $10; cached $0.10 | Sep 29 | GA | BenchLM; Puter |
| OpenAI GPT-6 Sol / Luna | 1.05M context; Sol $2 / $10; Luna $0.10 / $0.50 up to 272K, $0.20 / $0.75 above | API Sep 22; ChatGPT rollout Oct 7 | GA | LLM Gateway; Puter; Shattered |
| OpenAI GPT-6 Astra | 1.05M context; $10 / $50; cached $1 | Sep 3 | GA | BenchLM; CloudZero |
| xAI Grok 4.7 (closed) | $2 / $6; context not stated in the material | Sep 21 | GA on xAI API | Fello AI; Activepieces |
No closed model in the material was first released between Oct 17 and Oct 23. The newest are Muse Wonder (Oct 12) and Gemini 4 Argon's general availability (Oct 13). The week's closed-model news is about prices, access and retirements.
Anthropic's own announcements listing runs to Oct 21 and shows no model after Haiku 5.5 on Oct 7. We found no newsroom page from OpenAI, Google, xAI or Meta in the material, so the price and context cells for those vendors come from aggregators and are labelled that way.
2.2 Google and Meta: the newest flagships, still gated by price and plan
Google announced Gemini 4 Argon on Sep 30, 2026, initially only to vetted cyber defenders in its Fairwind Program, and opened it on Oct 13 through the paid Gemini API, AI Studio and Antigravity, plus the Gemini app for paid subscribers. One source, Shattered, still described Argon as gated in a page updated Oct 19. We follow the five pages that date general availability to Oct 13, including Revolgy on Oct 21. Access is narrower than "GA" suggests. There is no free tier, and core Workspace plans do not include it by default.
The price schedule is the live story. Google's pricing page, revised Oct 19 according to AionX, doubles every Argon rate on Dec 1: standard $2 / $10 becomes $4 / $20, batch $1 / $5 becomes $2 / $10, cache $0.10 becomes $0.20, priority $3.60 / $18 becomes $7.20 / $36. The schedule was already public on Oct 13, so the revision is not a new change. LLM Data Hub could not confirm batch or priority rates on Oct 21; we use AionX's Oct 22 listing and mark those two rows as secondary. AionX's example of 60M input and 15M output tokens a month costs 60 × $2 + 15 × $10 = $270 now and 60 × $4 + 15 × $20 = $540 from Dec 1 (illustrative, assumed usage). Until Nov 30 Argon costs 2 ÷ 4 = 50% of Opus 5.5's list rate. From Dec 1 the two are level.
Meta released Muse Wonder and Wonder Full on Oct 12. Only Wonder is on the API, at $4 / $20, the same as Opus 5.5. Wonder Full sits behind the $50 and $200 Muse Code plans with no per-token price. By value only (Chapter 4 owns the benchmarks), Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2 puts Opus 5.5 at 57.6, Wonder Full at 55.8 and Argon at 52.6. Artificial Analysis ran Argon at High and Opus 5.5 at Max, so the gap is not a controlled comparison.
2.3 Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI: ladders and price floors
Anthropic's 5.5 family arrived in three steps: Opus 5.5 on Sep 22, Sonnet 5.5 on Sep 28 and Haiku 5.5 on Oct 7. All three share a 1M-token window. List prices fell against the prior generation. Opus 5.5 at $4 / $20 is (5 − 4) ÷ 5 = 20% below Opus 5 at $5 / $25, and Haiku 5.5's $0.10 input is (1.00 − 0.10) ÷ 1.00 = 90% below Haiku 4.5. Anthropic states different figures for typical workloads: Opus 5.5 "costs 40% less to run than Opus 5", and Haiku 5.5 is about 75% cheaper once a tokenizer that counts roughly 30% more tokens is included. We cannot reproduce either from the material, so treat them as company claims. Prompts above 100K tokens cost 0.50 ÷ 0.10 = 5× more on Haiku 5.5.
Dates for Fable 5.1 conflict between two Anthropic pages. The release notes say Sep 1 and the news listing says Sep 15. We follow Sep 1, the dated changelog entry, which Fello AI also uses.
OpenAI's GPT-6 ladder runs from Luna to Astra. Astra is 100× Luna on both rates ($10 ÷ $0.10 and $50 ÷ $0.50). Sol and Luna reached the API on Sep 22, while Shattered dates the ChatGPT-wide rollout to Oct 7. Both are right; they describe different surfaces. Context shows as 1.05M in two sources and 922K in LiteLLM. 1,050,000 − 128,000 output = 922,000, so 922K is probably the input ceiling (our inference). Shattered says Astra's price is unconfirmed, but BenchLM, CloudZero and LiteLLM all list $10 / $50.
xAI's Grok 4.7 reached the API on Sep 21 at an unchanged $2 / $6, and has been in the Grok app's Expert mode since Oct 3.
2.4 What the window did change
- Argon price page: revised Oct 19 (reported), covered in 2.2.
- Retirements dated inside the window. QCode's calendar, last checked Oct 10, lists GitHub Copilot dropping six models on Oct 19, Google's earliest shutdown date of Oct 22 for several Veo 3.1 previews and
gemini-omni-flash-preview, and OpenAI shutting down 17 older entries on Oct 23, none of them a GPT-6 model. These were scheduled, and the material does not confirm they happened.
For buyers, the closed tier is stable. The decision this week is Argon's Dec 1 doubling, not a new model.
3. New models: open-weight and Chinese models
Chapter 2 covered the closed models; on the open-weight side only two models count as window releases (Oct 17–23), and the rest are context shipped earlier.
| Item | Key figure | Date | Status (Oct 24) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MiniMax M3.1 Flash (window) | 1M context; size not disclosed; $0.15 / $0.60 per 1M in/out | Oct 19 | Shipping; weights announced for Oct 23, unconfirmed | MiniMax |
| DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 (window, MIT) | 1M context; 552B or 763B; $0.15 / $0.60 off-peak, $0.30 / $1.20 peak | Oct 17 | Shipping; weights public | The Decoder; CodePick |
| DeepSeek Search and Fetch (window) | $0.75 per 1,000 calls | Oct 17 | Live | The Decoder |
| Meta Muse Spark Open (context) | 816B / 42B active; 1M context; $1.25 / $4.25 hosted | Oct 15 | Shipping | CometAPI; TechPilot |
| Reflection Beam 1.0 (context) | 501.3B / 23.4B active; 1M; Apache 2.0 | Oct 16 (weights) | Shipping | Data Studios |
| Kimi K3 (context) | 2.8T / 104B active; 1M; $3 / $15 | Jul 16 | Shipping | Fello AI |
Only DeepSeek shipped usable open weights in the window. MiniMax's open-weight status is a promise dated Oct 23, and both Chinese Flash models list input at $0.15 to $0.30 per 1M tokens.
3.1 Window models: MiniMax M3.1 Flash and DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017
MiniMax M3.1 Flash went live on Oct 19 (release post 11:56 UTC). MiniMax says the anonymous OpenRouter model "Space Bunny", which processed over 200 trillion tokens, was an early version. It takes text, image and video, returns text, allows 524,288 output tokens and always reasons, at five effort levels. Access is the MiniMax API, M Plan, MiniMax Code and OpenRouter. List price is $0.15 in, $0.60 out, $0.015 cached per 1M tokens, half of M3's $0.30 / $1.20 on OpenRouter (0.15 / 0.30 = 50%). OpenRouter's free window ended Oct 22 at 12:00 UTC, so list price is in effect. MiniMax's "70% lower agent cost" is a vendor claim about cost per task, not per token. Artificial Analysis found a 93% hallucination rate (see Chapter 4).
Three conflicts. Vals AI lists $0.60 / $2.40 and Oct 20; we follow MiniMax's post and OpenRouter, Oct 19 and $0.15 / $0.60. Some pages say 428B parameters, but AI/ML API says that is M3's size, so size is not disclosed. MiniMax's post says weights come "later", while its X post, relayed by others, says Oct 23. The material shows no weights or licence yet, so the status is announced.
DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 shipped Oct 17 as a "minor update" to the Sept 10 V4.1-Flash, with MIT weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope. DeepSeek's pages, read by CodePick on Oct 18, give 1M context and 384K max output. They disagree on size: a 552B backbone with 8B active on input in the Sept 10 post, versus 763B on the Hugging Face cards, unexplained.
The headline $0.15 / $0.60 is the off-peak rate. Peak (weekdays 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC) is $0.30 / $1.20, twice as high. MiniMax's flat price equals DeepSeek's off-peak and is half its peak. DeepSeek reports 77.0 on DeepSWE v1.1, up from 74.2, with no independent confirmation yet.
The Search and Fetch APIs cost $0.75 per 1,000 calls each, capped at 5 QPS per account. Server-side calls through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex are free until Oct 31 at 16:00 UTC. AI Weekly says "November 1", the same moment, since Nov 1 00:00 Beijing time is Oct 31 16:00 UTC. An agent making 1,000 searches and 1,000 fetches adds 2 × $0.75 = $1.50 before token costs.
3.2 Context models: Muse Spark Open, Reflection Beam and Kimi K3
These shipped before Oct 17, so they are baselines.
Muse Spark Open (Meta, Oct 15) is a sparse mixture-of-experts with 256 experts, 8 routed per token, taking text, image, audio and video. Its Muse Model License requires a "Built with Muse Spark Open" credit and a separate agreement for model-as-a-service businesses above $20 million revenue. Meta does not serve it on its own API; OpenRouter, Together, Fireworks and Baseten list $1.25 / $4.25, cached $0.15. Together's free promotion ended Oct 18, the one in-window change. Self-hosting needs about 530 GB even in NVFP4.
Reflection Beam 1.0 was announced Oct 5, with Apache 2.0 weights on Oct 16. The active share is 23.4 / 501.3 = 4.67%. Reflection's own API is a free beta with no official price; Together lists $0.40 / $1.20. Its "3 to 4 times less compute than GLM-5.2" claim is vendor-reported and counts only generation compute.
Kimi K3 (Moonshot) launched Jul 16 with weights on Jul 27; one aggregator says Jul 17, and we follow the three that agree. The download is 1.56 TB. Its licence has a $20 million model-as-a-service threshold. No new Kimi release appears in the material.
On Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, checked Oct 19, one source lists DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 at 45, Kimi K3 44, Muse Spark Open 39 and Beam 30. The material has no window release for Qwen, and nothing on Fibo-2.0.
3.3 Licence and access risk
Open-weight no longer means permissive. DeepSeek is MIT and Beam is Apache 2.0, but Kimi K3, Muse Spark Open and Qwen3.8 use custom licences with revenue triggers of $20M, $20M and $50M, and MiniMax's licence is unpublished. Internal use is exempt, so the triggers bite hosting businesses.
Policy is a second risk, both items reported. A DHS order bars federal civilian agencies from buying DeepSeek products (notice published Oct 20, per PYMNTS) and names no other lab. A Chinese draft export-control list dated Oct 16 covers large models, and weights already released are reportedly exempt. The Decoder separately reports Beijing may tighten rules on publishing new open-weight models.
For builders, DeepSeek is the only window model you can download today, but price a daytime Beijing workload at the peak rate.
4. Benchmark comparison
Chapter 3 listed the open-weight and Chinese releases of the week. This chapter separates vendor claims from independent results.
4.1 Who leads which board (snapshots to Oct 22, 2026)
| Item | Key figure | Date | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2: #1 Opus 5.5, #2 Sonnet 5.5, #3 Muse Wonder Full | 57.6, 56.0, 55.8 | board updated 2026-10-22 | Independent; all context models (Sep 22, Sep 28, Oct 12) | Artificial Analysis via AICoder |
| #4 Fable 5.1, #5 GPT-6 Astra | 53.4, 52.7 | same | Independent; context | AICoder |
| Gemini 4 Argon | 52.6 | page of Oct 13 | Independent; context | Fello AI |
| LMArena text: #1 Gemini 4 Argon, #2 Opus 5.5 | 1525.4, 1507.1 | mirror updated 2026-10-22 | Human-vote Elo | AICoder |
| LMArena Code (WebDev): #1 Opus 5.5, #2 GPT-6 Astra | 1813, 1786.1 | fetched 2026-10-12 | Human-vote Elo | AICoder; Fello AI |
No window model (Oct 17-23) tops a headline board. The Artificial Analysis (AA) Intelligence Index, an independent composite, is still led by Anthropic's September models. Meta's Muse Wonder Full is only 57.6 - 55.8 = 1.8 points behind Opus 5.5, but it is limited to Muse Code subscribers on $50 and $200 plans. Argon is 57.6 - 52.6 = 5.0 points back, though AA ran it only at "high", the top setting available (FutureSearch). It is first on LMArena text by 1525.4 - 1507.1 = 18.3 Elo; a swfte guide treats shifts under 25 as noise, so read that as a tie.
Previous generation (modelgrep, one AA-fed table): Opus 5.5 57.6 against Opus 5 at 50.8 and Opus 4.8 at 41.8; Sonnet 5.5 56.0 against Sonnet 5 at 38.2 (+17.8); GPT-6 Astra 52.7 against GPT-5.6 Sol at 47.0. That table omits Muse Wonder and Argon, so we follow for the top five.
Two conflicts. A swfte table shows Claude Mythos 5 at 1531 and no Argon Elo, and Metatext has Opus 4.6 (Fast) first at 1500; we follow and, which agree Argon leads text. On the Vals Index, Argon leads at 68.90% against Sonnet 5.5 at 67.04% and Opus 5.5 at 66.97% (date not stated). Another Vals board has Sonnet 5.5 first at 70.8%; we do not mix the two.
4.2 Window models: MiniMax M3.1 Flash and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017
| AA measure (as of Oct 21) | MiniMax M3.1 Flash | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 | GLM-5.3 Flash | Gemini 3.8 Flash | MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence Index | 43 | 45 | 42 | 41 | 29 |
| Cost per index task | $0.22 | $0.26 | $0.28 | $1.24 | $0.51 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 48.0% | 43.3% | 39.9% | 48% | 39.0% |
| Hallucination rate (lower is better) | 92.8% | 66.8% | 27.6% | n/a | 18.4% |
Source for all cells: Artificial Analysis via aimlapi.
MiniMax M3.1 Flash went live Oct 19, 2026 (shipping); DeepSeek posted V4.1-Flash-1017 weights on Oct 17 under MIT (shipping). AA's headline score for MiniMax is 42, up 13 from M3. OpenRouter's AA listing shows 42.7, which the table rounds to 43; this is one measurement rounded two ways. Cost per task fell (0.51 - 0.22) / 0.51 = 57%. MiniMax used about 189M output tokens on the index against 324M for GLM-5.3 Flash (kie.ai says 180M; we use 189M, quoted from AA).
The 93% figure is easy to misread. It is the share of non-correct answers that were wrong rather than abstentions or partial answers. With 56.2% correct, 43.8% were not, and 0.928 x 43.8 = 40.6% of all questions got a confident wrong answer. OpenRouter's non-hallucination rate of 7.2% equals 100 - 92.8. If the index is correct minus incorrect (our assumption), 56.2 - 40.6 = 15.6, which fits AA's reported score of 16.
Vendor and independent numbers diverge. MiniMax claims output above 200 tokens/s; AA measured 93. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 MiniMax's own run gives 38.1 against AA's 25.8, 12.3 points apart; DeepSeek's card gives 42.3 against AA's 33.8, 8.5 apart. Harness differences explain part of this, so vendor tables are claims, not rankings. DeepSeek's own card (via MarkTechPost) shows 1017 gaining on the September build: DeepSWE v1.1 74.2 to 77.0, Terminal-Bench 4.0 31.2 to 42.3. MiniMax's self-run DeepSWE 73.7 trails that 77.0; we use its Automation-Bench 62.2, not the 62.8 in one table. On Vals Index v2.2, MiniMax scores 53.78%, 15th of 22, against 61.26% for DeepSeek and 55.95% for Gemini 3.8 Flash. MiniMax is 2 points ahead of Gemini on AA but 55.95 - 53.78 = 2.17 behind on Vals.
MiniMax M3.1 Flash buys an AA index of about 43 at $0.22 per task, but 92.8% of its misses are confident errors. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 leads it on both independent indexes (45 vs 43 on AA, 61.26% vs 53.78% on Vals).
4.3 Coding and agent boards: same model, different scores
| Model | Mercor extended pass@1 | Original-set score | Change (points) |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4.1-Flash | 82.7% | 82.9% | -0.2 |
| Claude Opus 5 | 82.0% | 93.5% | -11.5 |
| Kimi K3 | 78.7% | 83.3% | -4.6 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | 66.0% | 98.2% | -32.2 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | 57.3% | 96.7% | -39.4 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | 45.3% | 87.3% | -42.0 |
Source: Mercor via BenchLM, Oct 19, 2026 capture, 150 samples per row, display-only.
Mercor's extended set has margins of +/-9 to 13 points per row. Its top three (83.3%, 82.7%, 82.0%) sit within 1.3 points, far inside that margin. The window model V4.1-Flash barely moves from its original-set score while the newest Anthropic and OpenAI rows fall 32 to 42 points. Whether that reflects saturation of the original set is not established.
Scale Labs' SWE-Bench Pro V2 HARD board (Oct 19 snapshot) has Opus 5 (Claude Code, xhigh) at 98% and GPT-6 Astra (Codex) at 90.2%. Rows combine model, scaffold and effort: Sonnet 5 under Claude Code scores 88.2% while Sonnet 5.5 under mini-swe-agent scores 70.6%, so no generation claim is safe.
DeepSWE v1.1 (Datacurve, mini-swe-agent, 113 tasks, results of 2026-09-22) is the cleanest like-for-like view. GPT-6 Astra at extra-high scores 74.1% (+/-2.9 pp) at $4.43 per attempt; Gemini 3.8 Flash at high scores 73.8% (+/-1.4) at $2.36. The scores are tied, so cost decides: $4.43 / 0.741 = $5.98 per solved task against $2.36 / 0.738 = $3.20. Astra's low setting reaches 67.0% at $1.60, so the top setting buys 7.1 points for 2.8 times the cost.
Some claims stay unverified. Shattered.io, citing CodersEra, says Kimi K3 led LMArena's Frontend Code Arena at 1,679 against GPT-6.1 Sol at 1,618 on Oct 12; the LMArena Code mirror has Opus 5.5 at 1813 and GPT-6.1 Sol at 1755.4. We follow the mirror. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, Fello AI gives Sonnet 5.5 63.6% and Shattered.io gives 70.6%; that figure recurs for other tests, so we follow 63.6.
Open-weight models need the same care. One AA table of Oct 19 gives GLM-5.3 45, DeepSeek 1017 45, Kimi K3 44, Meta's Muse Spark Open (Oct 15) 39 and Reflection's Beam (weights Oct 16) 30. The 39 is reproduced by Meta's card, and VentureBeat found no independent listing at launch. Beam's vendor-reported 81.6% on SWE-bench Verified (80.9% in an Oct 8 blog refresh) contrasts with a DeepSWE v1.1 of 44.4 against 74.2 for DeepSeek's September Flash.
Rank on AA index plus cost per task, check coding on boards with matched scaffolds, and treat every vendor table as a claim to reproduce.
5. Price and context changes
Chapter 4 ranked the models on benchmarks; this chapter prices them. Between Oct 17 and Oct 23 prices moved in three places: DeepSeek's new Search and Fetch fees, MiniMax's cheap M3.1 Flash, and a Google pricing page, revised Oct 19, that lists Gemini 4 Argon doubling on Dec 1 (the schedule was already public on Oct 13). OpenAI and Anthropic list prices show no dated change in the window.
5.1 Price and context at a glance
| Item | USD per 1M tokens (input / output) and context | Date | Status (Oct 24) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017, 1M context | Peak $0.30 / $1.20; off-peak $0.15 / $0.60 | Oct 17 (window) | In effect; token prices unchanged | CodePick, reading DeepSeek pages |
| DeepSeek Search and Fetch APIs | $0.75 per 1,000 calls, each | Oct 17 (window) | In effect; free in Harness, Claude Code, Codex to Oct 31 16:00 UTC | The Decoder |
| MiniMax M3.1 Flash, 1M context | $0.15 / $0.60; cached $0.015 | Oct 19 (window) | Shipping | MiniMax release post; OpenRouter |
| Google Gemini 4 Argon, 1,048,576 unified | $2 / $10 intro; $4 / $20 from Dec 1 | GA Oct 13 (context); price page revised Oct 19, schedule public Oct 13 | Intro in effect; rise announced | LLM Data Hub quoting Google; AionX; Shattered |
| OpenAI GPT-6 Astra / GPT-6.1 Sol / GPT-6 Luna, 1.05M each | $10 / $50; $2 / $10; $0.10 / $0.50 | Astra Sept 3; 6.1 Sol Sept 29 | Context; in effect | BenchLM |
| Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 / Opus 5.5 / Sonnet 5.5 / Haiku 5.5, 1M each | $10 / $50; $4 / $20; $2 / $10; $0.10 / $0.50 | Sept 1 / Sept 22 / Sept 28 / Oct 7 | Context; in effect | Fello AI |
| Meta Muse Wonder | $4 / $20; cached $0.20 | Oct 12 | Context; in effect | DevX |
| Meta Muse Spark Open, hosted, 1M | $1.25 / $4.25; cached $0.15 | Oct 15 | Context; in effect | eesel AI |
The cheapest token and the dearest one both made news this week: $0.15 per million input tokens at DeepSeek and MiniMax, and a scheduled doubling to $4 / $20 for Gemini 4 Argon on Dec 1.
5.2 What moved in the window
DeepSeek. V4.1-Flash-1017 arrived on Oct 17 under the unchanged alias deepseek-flash, and DeepSeek did not change token prices. According to CodePick, the official list has run a peak and off-peak split since Aug 16: off-peak is half of peak, and peak covers weekdays 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC (09:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00 Beijing). Sources disagree on the headline rate. AI Weekly and OpenRouter show $0.15 / $0.60, which is the off-peak rate; Novita and Kingy match peak, since Kingy's $0.53 blended equals (3 × 0.30 + 1.20) / 4 ≈ 0.53. We follow CodePick's re-check of DeepSeek's pages and budget Beijing daytime agent runs at peak. The Search and Fetch APIs cost $0.75 per 1,000 calls, with no charge in DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex until Oct 31 at 16:00 UTC. That is the same instant as Nov 1 00:00 Beijing time, when Shattered says billing starts. As an illustration, 20 searches per task cost 20 × $0.00075 = $0.015, about 8% of DeepSeek's chart figure of under $0.20 per DeepSWE task.
MiniMax. M3.1 Flash went live on Oct 19 at $0.15 / $0.60 with cached input at $0.015. OpenRouter lists predecessor M3 at $0.30 / $1.20, so list prices halved: 0.15 / 0.30 = 50% on both sides. MiniMax's own claim of a 70% lower agent cost is a vendor figure. Artificial Analysis measures $0.22 per index task against $0.51 for M3, a cut of (0.51 − 0.22) / 0.51 ≈ 57%. The halved rate explains most of that; M3.1 Flash also used about 189 million output tokens for the full index run, against 224 million for DeepSeek. OpenRouter's free launch window ended Oct 22 at 12:00 UTC.
Google. Gemini 4 Argon is listed at $2 / $10 through Nov 30, with cached input at $0.10 (95% off), Batch at $1 / $5 and Priority at $3.60 / $18. On Dec 1 every rate doubles, so the rise is announced and 38 days away. There is no free tier and caching is implicit only. In AionX's illustrative workload, a 60M-input, 15M-output month costs 60 × 2 + 15 × 10 = $270 now and $540 after Dec 1; Batch at the new rates brings it back to $270. Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.6 Flash double on Jan 1, 2027, from $0.75 / $3.75 to $1.50 / $7.50. Sources date Argon's API opening to Oct 13; LLM Data Hub gives no day. Chapter 2 owns that date.
5.3 Context, long prompts and cost per task
Context windows have converged near 1M tokens: 1M for all four Claude models and 1.05M for the GPT-6 tiers. Argon shares one pool of 1,048,576 tokens across input, thinking and output, with a default output cap of 65,536. The long-decode ceiling of 1,048,576 is 1,048,576 / 65,536 = 16 times the earlier 64K output limit. Surcharges now separate the leaders. Argon lists no prompt-size tiers, and Muse Wonder is flat across context. Haiku 5.5 charges $0.50 / $2.50 past 100,000 prompt tokens, five times its base rate. According to CloudZero, as of its Sept 4 update, GPT-6 Astra reprices the whole request past 272K input tokens at 2 times input and 1.5 times output, so a 300K-token prompt costs 0.3 × $20 = $6.00 for input, not $3.00.
A rate card does not predict a bill. Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna both charge $0.10 / $0.50, yet an Artificial Analysis index task costs $0.21 on Haiku 5.5 and $0.07 on Luna, three times as much, because Haiku writes far more output. Anthropic's "about 75% cheaper" than Haiku 4.5 is a vendor figure that allows for a tokenizer counting roughly 30% more tokens, against a 90% cut in list price ($1 / $5 to $0.10 / $0.50); the material does not reconcile the two.
| Model (Artificial Analysis, via VentureBeat) | Intelligence Index | Cost per index task |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 | 45 | ~$0.26 |
| MiniMax M3.1 Flash | 42 | ~$0.22 |
| Z.ai GLM-5.3 Flash | 42 | ~$0.28 |
| Google Gemini 3.8 Flash | 41 | ~$1.24 |
| MiniMax M3 | 29 | ~$0.51 |
Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $1.24 / $0.22 ≈ 5.6 times more per task than M3.1 Flash for one point less. Fello AI's reading of the same index at v4.3.2 prices Muse Wonder (the API model, not Wonder Full) at $4.52 per task for 52.4 against $0.72 for GPT-6.1 Sol at 51.8: 4.52 / 0.72 ≈ 6.3 times the cost for 0.6 more points.
5.4 Judgement
The window did not cut Western list prices; Kingy's Oct 19 check found no list-price change among 17 tracked models and plans since Sept 20, and Anthropic's release notes end at Oct 7. Its headline fall in the small-model median, $0.53 to $0.26 (−50.0%), came from replacements before the window, such as Haiku 4.5 at $2.00 to Haiku 5.5 at $0.20 blended, not from cuts. The real shifts were at the edges. Chinese Flash models now sit at $0.15–$0.30 input, and Google is the only vendor with a dated increase on a current flagship. OpenAI's older GPT-5.6 Sol sits at a promotional $4 / $20 "through at least November 21", per BenchLM, while CloudZero (Sept 4) lists $5 / $30 and OpenRouter data lists $2 / $10; we follow BenchLM and Puter, which agree on $4 / $20. Buyers should compare cost per task, not the rate card, budget Argon at $4 / $20 from Dec 1, and cap DeepSeek search spend before Oct 31. Reflection Beam, with weights since Oct 16, has no official price during its free beta.
6. Developer and user feedback
Chapter 5 compared list prices and context windows; this chapter asks what people who ran the models found. All of it is anecdotal (small tests, blog posts, comment threads) unless marked "independent measurement", and none of it replaces Chapter 4's benchmark evidence.
6.1 Feedback at a glance
| Model and signal | Key figure | Date | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MiniMax M3.1 Flash (window model, Oct 19): factual reliability | 56.2% correct, but 92.8% of misses were wrong answers, not abstentions | As of Oct 21 | Independent measurement (Artificial Analysis) | AI/ML API; VentureBeat |
| M3.1 Flash: hands-on run | 49 of 51 runs passed; 109 tokens/s vs MiniMax's "above 200" | Oct 21 | Anecdotal test | AI/ML API |
| M3.1 Flash: developer mood | "Split": "benchmaxxing" and context drift vs preferred to rival Flash models; no counts | Oct 21 | Anecdotal | kie.ai |
| DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 (window model, Oct 17): three-task test | Accuracy 3/3, level with GPT-5.4-mini; median latency 2.5 s vs 0.7 s | Date not stated | Anecdotal; build not stated | Activepieces |
| Gemini 4 Argon (context, GA Oct 13): writing test | 180/190 rule checks vs 190/190 for Gemini 3.8 Flash | After Oct 13 | Anecdotal, 140 runs | Puter |
| Argon: comment threads | 518 comments; 29% positive, 55% mixed, 16% skeptical | c. Oct 11 | Aggregator summary | daily.dev |
| Meta Muse Spark Open (context, Oct 15): launch thread | 914 Hacker News points, 477 comments on day one | Oct 15 | Reported | eesel AI |
The week's sharpest complaint was trust, not speed or price: MiniMax M3.1 Flash answers more hard questions correctly than DeepSeek's Flash, yet when it does not know it almost never says so.
6.2 MiniMax M3.1 Flash: right more often, wrong with confidence
Artificial Analysis (AA) is an independent evaluator. Its AA-Omniscience "hallucination rate" is the share of non-correct responses that were confidently wrong rather than partial or refused, so 92.8% does not mean 92.8% of answers were wrong. The last two columns are our arithmetic.
| AA-Omniscience (via AI/ML API) | Correct | Hallucination rate | Wrong, share of all questions | Abstained or partial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MiniMax M3.1 Flash | 56.2% | 92.8% | (100 − 56.2) × 0.928 = 40.6% | 3.2% |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 | 42.9% | 66.8% | (100 − 42.9) × 0.668 = 38.1% | 19.0% |
| GLM-5.3 Flash | 27.5% | 27.6% | (100 − 27.5) × 0.276 = 20.0% | 52.5% |
| MiniMax M3 (predecessor) | 16.7% | 18.4% | (100 − 16.7) × 0.184 = 15.3% | 68.0% |
Source: AI/ML API citing Artificial Analysis. VentureBeat gives the same correct rates, rounded (56%, 43%, 28%), and an overall AA-Omniscience score of 16.
M3.1 Flash gets about 13 points more questions right than DeepSeek but is wrong on a similar share, and on twice GLM-5.3 Flash's share, because it attempts nearly everything. Chapter 4 covers the index scores.
Hands-on reports agree. AI/ML API's own tests (Oct 21) passed 49 of 51 runs, but the model "often invented facts"; it measured 109 tokens/s against AA's 93 and MiniMax's "above 200". Another write-up puts AA's figure near 105. The sources disagree (93 vs 105), but either is about half the vendor claim. According to kie.ai, a developer reading the docs found that disabling thinking returns an HTTP 400 error, so every request pays for reasoning, and developer sentiment is split. Miraflow (blog opinion) advises checkable, high-volume agent steps only, with fact-critical answers routed to a stronger model.
The "Space Bunny" stealth run gives a rough usage signal. OpenCode says it ranked first for 12 consecutive days and served 106T tokens (its own account); a routing marketplace reported 56.7T. That totals 106 + 56.7 = 162.7T, short of MiniMax's "over 200T", and nobody has reconciled the gap. MiniMax also calls Space Bunny only an early build, so this usage does not validate the final model.
6.3 DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017: seamless upgrade, thin evidence
DeepSeek shipped the checkpoint on Oct 17 behind the unchanged deepseek-flash alias, so API users needed no code change. The worry is process: according to AI Weekly, Startup Fortune flagged that DeepSeek ships updates "as a config change" without formal deprecation windows, and KuCoin noted the -1017 listing briefly appeared and vanished without comment. According to Shattered, secondary reports described an outage of about five hours before the release; DeepSeek's changelog does not confirm it. OpenRouter shows 99.56% availability over 24 hours (date not stated).
On quality, DeepSeek's own claim is a DeepSWE v1.1 score of 77.0 at just under 20 cents per task, against about 50 cents before; independent validation was not available. The only outside test is small: Activepieces compared DeepSeek V4.1 Flash with GPT-5.4-mini on three tasks, with equal accuracy (3/3), median latency of 2.5 s vs 0.7 s (2.5 ÷ 0.7 ≈ 3.6×) and cost per task of $0.000358 vs $0.000127 (≈ 2.8×). Simple tasks cannot confirm or refute the 20-cent claim.
6.4 Earlier models, tested this week
Context models (released before Oct 17), tested in the window.
- Gemini 4 Argon (GA Oct 13). Puter's 140-run test found it followed style rules but missed length targets: 1 of 5 articles hit 550–650 words (Gemini 3.8 Flash: 5 of 5), and 9 of 15 replies stayed under 80 words (15 of 15), though Argon was faster on the article (median 16 s vs 85 s). A one-day reviewer rated it best for large inputs and numbers-heavy work, with Claude Opus 5.5 still the coding default. daily.dev says most people could not use Argon 11 days after its Sept 30 announcement; that snapshot predates the Oct 13 opening, so we follow the GA date.
- Cost surprises. NeuralTrust compiles tests: 82 short questions cost $0.220 on Argon vs $0.069 on Opus 5.5 (0.220 ÷ 0.069 ≈ 3.2×), yet a robot-arm task cost $0.72 vs $1.09.
- Kimi K3 vs Opus 5.5. GPT Proto, a reseller of both, recommends Opus for production coding agents and Kimi for cheap, testable first drafts (opinion).
- Muse Spark Open. One Hacker News commenter read the flat hosted pricing as a side effect of separate licensing.
Judgement. Evidence for the two window models is thin: no Reddit, X or Hacker News thread on them is in the material. It supports one narrow rule: use the cheap Flash tier for checkable first passes and pilot on your own workload before switching.
7. What to watch next week
Chapters 2–6 covered the closed models, the open-weight releases, benchmarks, prices and developer feedback. This chapter turns them into implications by reader and a dated timetable. It uses only facts from the earlier chapters and is not investment or procurement advice.
7.1 What changed, and what it means by reader
| Reader | What changed | Implication | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Builders (agents) | DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 shipped on Oct 17 with MIT weights; Search and Fetch cost $0.75 per 1,000 calls, free in Harness, Claude Code and Codex until Oct 31 at 16:00 UTC | Cap search spend before Oct 31; 1,000 searches plus 1,000 fetches add 2 × $0.75 = $1.50 before token costs | — |
| Builders (self-hosting) | MiniMax M3.1 Flash is live, but weights and licence are not confirmed; Kimi K3 and Muse Spark Open carry $20M revenue triggers | Treat DeepSeek as the only window model you can download today; read licences before building a hosted product | — |
| Builders (quality) | AA measured a 92.8% hallucination rate on M3.1 Flash; hands-on tests passed 49 of 51 runs but the model "often invented facts" | Use cheap Flash models for checkable first passes and pilot on your own workload | — |
| Buyers (Google) | Argon is GA at $2 / $10 until Nov 30, then $4 / $20 | Budget $540, not $270, for the illustrative 60M / 15M month from Dec 1 | — |
| Buyers (all vendors) | Western list prices did not change in the window; cost per task varies more than rate cards | Compare cost per task: $0.22 for M3.1 Flash against $1.24 for Gemini 3.8 Flash | — |
| Investors | The window's launches came from Chinese labs at $0.15–$0.30 input; Anthropic still leads the independent index at 57.6 | Watch whether price pressure reaches Western list prices; none has so far | — |
The week's real change was price and trust, not capability: the cheapest models arrived from DeepSeek and MiniMax, the one dated increase is Argon's on Dec 1, and the independent boards are still led by September's Anthropic models.
7.2 Watch-list for the coming week
- MiniMax weights. The Oct 23 date has passed, and the material shows no weights or licence. Until they appear, the model is "announced" as open-weight.
- DeepSeek search billing. Free server-side calls end at Oct 31 16:00 UTC, the same instant as Nov 1 00:00 Beijing time.
- Independent confirmation. DeepSeek's DeepSWE v1.1 score of 77.0 has no independent confirmation, and Muse Spark Open's AA score of 39 comes from Meta's card with no independent listing at launch.
- Argon's schedule. The Dec 1 rise is 38 days away (Oct 24 to Dec 1), so migrations to Batch at the new rates ($2 / $10) should be planned now.
- Gaps. The material has no Qwen or Kimi release in the window and nothing on Fibo-2.0 (Chapter 3).
7.3 Key dates
Dates already past on Oct 24, 2026 are marked "In effect" unless the material does not confirm the event.
| Date | Event | State on Oct 24, 2026 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 16, 2026 | DeepSeek peak and off-peak price split starts | In effect | CodePick |
| Oct 12, 2026 | Meta Muse Wonder and Wonder Full released | In effect | DevX |
| Oct 13, 2026 | Gemini 4 Argon opens through the paid Gemini API | In effect | Towards Data Science |
| Oct 17, 2026 | DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 weights; Search and Fetch fees start | In effect | The Decoder |
| Oct 19, 2026 | MiniMax M3.1 Flash goes live at $0.15 / $0.60 | In effect | MiniMax |
| Oct 22, 2026 | OpenRouter free window for M3.1 Flash ends at 12:00 UTC | In effect | OpenRouter |
| Oct 23, 2026 | MiniMax weights promised; OpenAI shutdown of 17 older entries scheduled | In effect as dates; completion not confirmed | Miraflow; QCode |
| Oct 31, 2026 | DeepSeek Search and Fetch free period ends, 16:00 UTC | Upcoming | The Decoder |
| Nov 21, 2026 | GPT-5.6 Sol promotional $4 / $20 "through at least" this date (sources conflict) | Upcoming | BenchLM |
| Nov 30, 2026 | Argon introductory $2 / $10 rate ends | Upcoming | AionX |
| Dec 1, 2026 | Argon rates double to $4 / $20 | Upcoming | AionX |
| Jan 1, 2027 | Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.6 Flash double from $0.75 / $3.75 to $1.50 / $7.50 | Upcoming | AionX |
8. References
This document draws on the following 73 sources, listed in the order they are first cited.
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