Damian Pickett · No. 20
Wednesday 23 September 2026
Anthropic’s new flagship model matches its top-tier Fable 5.1 on most tasks at 40 percent lower cost, arriving hours before OpenAI’s own price cut with GPT-6 Sol and Luna.
Meta says its Muse AI agent was built from scratch but was heavily inspired by OpenClaw, down to some workspace filenames, days after Muse overtook ChatGPT as the top free iPhone app.
Apple’s Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro chips and Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra go on sale today in stores, online and the Apple Store app.
Read · Lenny's Newsletter
Why you should never skip error discovery
Lenny’s new deep dive on catching hidden AI failures lands the same day two more frontier models launched, useful groundwork for anyone shipping AI features.
Listen · Founders
A relentless retail operator’s story fits neatly alongside the study of great product builders.
Listen · David Senra
A VC on what separates the founders worth backing, useful listening for anyone building or marketing products.
Listen · Acquired
A deep dive on a company built entirely around product design and cost discipline, a good companion to today’s Apple and design stories.
Simon Willison rounds up back-to-back launches from Anthropic and OpenAI this week, alongside Grok 4.7 and MiMo v2.6, and reads the flurry as the start of a genuine price war between frontier labs.
OpenAI’s two new models follow GPT-6 Astra and are pitched as cheaper and more accurate, landing about an hour after Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 announcement.
AstroForge’s Autonomy-1 mission will hand a small transformer-based model direct control of a space probe, a step toward AI-piloted spacecraft rather than ground-controlled ones.
Qualcomm says its new top chip can run a 30 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model locally on a phone, pushing more AI processing onto the device itself.
Data centres are starting to swap copper wiring for optical links that move data at the speed of light, a change aimed at cutting power use and adding capacity as AI demand grows.
Waymo is opening its robotaxi service to 13 to 17 year olds in Nashville, its second city to offer rides to minors, as it widens who can use self-driving cars.
Andreessen Horowitz is starting an academy for promising high school graduates, pitched as somewhere between a trade school, Y Combinator and Peter Thiel’s Fellowship Program.
Discord’s new policy offers several privacy-focused options for users who are not automatically confirmed as adults, as the platform moves fully into its age-verification era.
Teardown site Expand Mac mini finds that NAND storage in the new M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini models is soldered to the logic board, unlike the removable storage in the previous generation.
Apple has opened Apple Music Hall, an intimate live venue inside London’s Battersea Power Station, extending its music brand into a physical concert space.
MacStories highlights five independent iOS apps built around Apple’s newest OS features: Bear, Gentler Streak, The Outsiders, DoMarks and Cheatsheet Notes.
Tom Cruise and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu premiered Digger in London’s Leicester Square Gardens, with Prince William and Princess Catherine among the guests at the Warner Bros/Legendary film.
Robert Eggers, director of Nosferatu and the upcoming Werwulf, has won a competitive bidding war to take on a new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for Focus Features.
George Lucas says he had plans for three further Star Wars films but chose to stop directing. His last film remains 2005’s Revenge of the Sith.
David Worth, who directed Kickboxer and shot Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way You Can, died on 4 September in Sunland, California, aged 86.
Neemias Queta missed this year’s ESPN top-100 but is tipped as one to watch for next year’s list, a marker of his development with the Celtics.
New England placed starting right guard Mike Onwenu on injured reserve after an ankle injury, signing punter Mitch Wishnowsky and a tight end to fill out the roster.
The Patriots travel to Jacksonville to face the Jaguars at Everbank Stadium on Sunday 27 September at 1pm ET, looking to build on their Week 2 win.
Two games into the season, cornerback Christian Gonzalez is delivering on his record contract, shutting down opposing receivers including DK Metcalf.
Isack Hadjar returns to Red Bull for this weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix after missing three races with a wrist injury, with Liam Lawson moving back to Racing Bulls.
Motorsport.com notes that each time Ferrari and Leclerc extend their partnership, reports surface about rival offers he is said to have turned down, a pattern repeating with his latest deal.
Formula 1 enters its first triple header of the season this week, starting with Azerbaijan, three races in three weekends that Sky Sports says will shape the title fight.
Garrett Crochet says he has ramped up his intensity in live batting practice and is closing in on a return, boosting Boston’s rotation options for the postseason.
Boston made Chad Tracy its 49th full-time manager on a three-year deal and exercised Craig Breslow’s contract options through 2030, settling its baseball leadership before the playoffs.
Boston went 0 for 9 with runners in scoring position and struck out 12 times in a 3-2 loss to Cleveland, a rough night at the plate heading into the postseason.
This year’s Bird Photographer of the Year drew more than 24,000 entries from photographers worldwide, celebrating striking and unusual animal behaviour caught in the wild.
