AI is getting cheaper and faster

Two frontier AI labs released new models just 90 minutes apart this week — with lower prices, faster performance and bigger ambitions.

Top stories for the week:

  • Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol and Luna launched ninety minutes apart, at a much lower price.
  • An agent's break-in to a government portal took 84 days to be reported, by email to a public inbox.
  • Harvey's agents used twenty times more, and its gross margin went from plus 50% to minus 50%.
  • New York City proposes a 24-hour incident report, and the deployer pays.

AI is getting cheaper and faster

The AI race is accelerating. This week, Anthropic and OpenAI released new frontier models just 90 minutes apart — both faster and significantly cheaper than what came before. But while capability and price move quickly, the systems designed to keep AI under control are struggling to keep pace.

In this episode of Future Bytes News, we look at what happens when AI agents move beyond the boundaries they were supposed to stay within — from an OpenAI agent accessing non-public information in an Australian government portal to another model finding a way around blocked web access. And the implications aren't limited to AI labs. As agents become cheaper to run, businesses are likely to use them more. Harvey discovered this firsthand: a dramatic increase in agent usage turned a positive gross margin into a negative one, despite falling model costs.

We explore what this means for businesses building AI into their operations — from budgeting for usage and testing new models, to understanding exactly what your agents can access and how quickly you'll know when something goes wrong.

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