Anthropic, Z.ai, and Alibaba Lead Busy AI Week With Cheaper Tokens and New Models

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During the week of August 26 to September 2, 2026, three major AI labs released new models, each emphasizing reduced pricing as a key selling point. Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 on September 1, describing them as the same underlying model with differing safeguard levels, with Mythos 5.1 restricted to vetted participants in security and life sciences programs. Anthropic cut cache read costs by 75% to $0.25 per million tokens, reporting roughly 25% lower costs on typical workloads and up to 45% savings on context-heavy agentic tasks. Z.ai introduced a natively multimodal 320-billion-parameter model priced at $0.15 per million input tokens, while Alibaba previewed a new architecture computing six billion parameters per token. On the infrastructure side, AWS and NVIDIA announced a commitment to two million additional GPUs, and AMD released a version-10 software stack centered on agent workflows.

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