Google held per-token pricing flat at $0.75 and $3.75 per million. Artificial Analysis measured cost per task rising from $0.40 to $0.58 — up 40% — because the model emits 30% more output tokens. It is the second launch in three days where the per-token price stayed put and the bill went up. Google's own advice: keep using 3.7 Flash if efficiency matters.
Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 are the same model with different safeguards. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 the restricted version scores 60.9% and the public one scores 55.8%. That 5.8-point gap is the measured cost of the filters, published by the vendor. Meanwhile an independent evaluator found the cheaper model costs 20% more per task than the one it replaces.
Stanford put the US lead over China at 2.7%. That number is from March, it rests on a benchmark Stanford itself calls gameable, and the live August data shows a wider spread. The gap that actually closed is cost — Chinese models now run 60% to 90% cheaper and hold up to 46% of token volume on OpenRouter. Here is how to read both numbers.
DeepSeek V4-Flash runs at $0.14 per million tokens while frontier models average $4. The compression is real — here's the honest math on our choice.
Claude Sonnet 5 launched with near-Opus performance at a fraction of the cost. For anyone running AI agents, the economics just changed.