Claude Opus 5.5 Launches And Tops Benchmarks, OpenAI Answers With GPT-6 Sol And Luna At Half Price!

Today's AI news: Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, performing at Claude Fable 5.1 level on most tasks and leading Fable and GPT-6 Astra on Terminal-Bench, CursorBench, GDPval and Humanity's Last Exam, at $4 in and $20 out per million tokens and about 40% less than Opus 5 on typical workloads, with higher subscription usage limits and a bankable rate-limit reset. Ninety minutes later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol at $2/$10 and GPT-6 Luna at $0.10/$0.50, permanently half the price of their GPT-5.6 predecessors. Tencent put Hy Image 3.5 into preview at 2.4 cents per image. a16z launched the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a free AI-native school for high school graduates. And Unitree announced the 22-DoF Dex5-S robot hand from $6,500. Chapters: 0:00 Today's AI News 0:33 Claude Opus 5.5 1:26 GPT-6 Sol And Luna 2:20 Hy Image 3.5 3:01 Horowitz Andreessen Academy 3:55 Unitree Dex5-S Blend Roundup 2026-09-22 https://x.com/claudeai/status/2102435511222890900 https://x.com/claudeai/status/2102435538120691886 https://x.com/claudeai/status/2102435517165912464 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2102460975790137662 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2102460984782938221 https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/2102226552310419473 https://x.com/eriktorenberg/status/2102399288307540422 https://x.com/UnitreeRobotics/status/2101996861259395234 Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5.5. Fable-level intelligence on most tasks at forty percent less than Opus 5. Ninety minutes later OpenAI answers with GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half the price of 5.6. Plus, Tencent's Hy Image 3.5 lands at two cents an image. a16z opens a school where every assignment needs AI to solve it. And Unitree sells a twenty-two-joint hand for 6,500 dollars. Here's today's AI news. Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5.5, the first of a new 5.5 family. It performs at Fable 5.1 level on most tasks, and on Anthropic's table it beats Fable on nearly everything: 66.4 on Terminal-Bench against Fable's 55.8 and Astra's 57.9, 57.8 on CursorBench, 1846 on the GDPval knowledge-work Elo and 67.7 on Humanity's Last Exam. Astra keeps AutomationBench and scientific research. Pricing drops to four dollars in and twenty out and typical workloads cost forty percent less than Opus 5. There's a fast mode at 2.5x speed for double the price, a million-token context with no surcharge, and output is thirty percent quicker. And for subscribers: higher five-hour limits on Pro, Max and Team, plus a rate-limit reset you can bank and spend when you choose. Ninety minutes after Opus 5.5, OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, the faster, cheaper tiers of the Astra family. Sol is two dollars in and ten out, Luna ten cents in and fifty out, half the price of their 5.6 predecessors, and OpenAI confirmed these are permanent prices, not promotional. Cached reads get a ninety percent discount. Sol is pitched at repeatable engineering and analysis work; on OpenAI's chart it scores 33 percent on AutomationBench at 27 cents a task, beating Astra at low effort for a quarter of the cost, and comes within a point of Fable on DeepSWE at eighty percent less. Luna is the bulk model for summarising and extraction. Both are in the API, ChatGPT Work and Codex. Two flagship price cuts in one afternoon. If pacing AI means reducing the prices, we're here for it. Tencent's Hunyuan team has put Hy Image 3.5 into preview, with text-to-image, reference-based generation and multi-turn conversational editing in one model, up to 2K. In a blind test by several hundred of Tencent's own designers it won thirty percent more often than Hy Image 3.0, and Tencent claims parity with Seedream 5.0 Pro and a slight edge over Nano Banana Pro and Qwen-Image 3.0 Pro. The price is the point: 2.4 cents per image on Tencent Cloud, with reference images and failed generations free. Two weeks free on Miora and OnSolo. Tencent's own line: try it and tell us where it breaks. a16z has launched the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a free, in-person school in San Francisco for people straight out of high school, with 42 million dollars behind it and a first class in autumn 2027. The pitch is in one line: the internet made it possible to know anything, AI makes it possible to do anything. So there are no problem sets. Assignments are problems too hard to solve without AI, or generating problems AI can't solve yet. Courses include AI Inference Engineering, Designing AI Systems, The Modern Software Developer, Frontier Systems, and Founder-Led Sales. Students run a Pursuit, their own startup or research project, and rotate through co-ops at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Stripe. Instructors include Sam Altman, Fei-Fei Li, Dylan Field and Naval Ravikant. Unitree has announced the Dex5-S, a five-finger robot hand at one-to-one human scale with twenty-two degrees of freedom, every joint motor-driven, backdrivable and protected against impact torque, from 6,500 dollars before tax and shipping. Peak payload is around two kilos, with a tactile version available. The launch video has it winding a watch, opening a can, holding a pen and working scissors. Hands are the bottleneck for every humanoid on the market. Unitree just made a fully actuated one cheaper than a used car.