Model Watch — State of the Board
The state of the board, for the week ending Friday, August 21st. What moved. Three releases, and the biggest one shipped without a spec sheet. What it costs. A scheduled price increase just got cancelled. And what to use, strictly by the numbers. This is Model Watch.
The week on the board
The week on the board. Z A I shipped G L M five point two Turbo on Monday, its second release in a week, right behind G L M five point three. Google's Gemini three point seven Flash landed the Thursday before. But the headliner is not a model at all. It is a price. Anthropic's pricing page now says the scheduled September increase for Claude Sonnet five will not occur. Two dollars in, ten dollars out, per million tokens. That was introductory pricing. It is now just the price.
What it costs
What it costs. Claude Sonnet five holds at two dollars in and ten dollars out. The scheduled rise to three and fifteen is cancelled. That is straight from Anthropic's pricing documentation. G P T five point six Luna lists at twenty cents in and a dollar twenty out, down eighty percent since OpenAI's July cut, as listed by CloudZero. And the cheapest listed A P I on the board is DeepSeek V four Flash, at fourteen cents in and twenty eight cents out. The floor keeps dropping.
The board — price against score
The board itself. Three dots to start, all scored by Artificial Analysis, an independent index. Claude Opus five. Sixty three, at twenty five dollars per million output tokens. Claude Fable five. Sixty two, at fifty. G P T five point six Sol at max effort. Sixty one, at thirty. Read it plainly. Of the three, the highest score carries the lowest output price. And the open teal circle is G L M five point two Turbo. Z A I has published no prices and no benchmarks for it yet. On this board, no numbers means no dot.
What to use
So what do you run. For deep reasoning and hard agent work, Claude Opus five. Five dollars in, twenty five out, and the top score on the board. For the default workhorse, Claude Sonnet five. Two in, ten out, and that price is now permanent. For volume, Haiku four point five at one and five, or G P T five point six Luna at a fraction of that. Match the model to the job, not to the headline.
Sources
Every number you just heard is on screen with its source, and the provider listed ones are labeled that way. That is the first board. It updates Monday morning.
