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The Label Is Not the Bill: Sol's Promo Price, Max's Session Caps and Our Own Corrections
The week's published stories turned on the gap between the headline number and the operative one: GPT-5.6 Sol's $4/$20 rate is promotional through at least November 21 with no successor price, and The Verge reports a refiled class action alleging Claude Max did not make clear that its "5x" and "20x" multipliers cover five-hour sessions under a weekly cap. Our own directory had three figures to fix: Sol's price, DeepSeek V4's peak window, which DeepSeek scopes to weekdays only, and Make's paid tiers, which now list about 25% below our May record.
Three Frontier Launches in 72 Hours, and the Neutral Middle Got Bought
Anthropic, Google and OpenAI all shipped frontier models between September 1 and 3, and OpenAI's own comparison table put GPT-6 Astra third on general intelligence at $10/$50 per 1M tokens. The week's other story was ownership: Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, and the Stripe-OpenRouter deal, confirmed by both parties on August 19, reached us as primary-sourced fact for the first time.
Open Weights Flooded the Frontier — and the Price War Went Structural
Open weights flooded the frontier this week — Qwen3.8-Max became the first Max-class model ever open-weighted and Qwen3.8-27B dropped two days later — while the price war went structural in both directions: Anthropic locked Sonnet 5 at $2/$10, and DeepSeek went GA raising prices up to 1,100%. The cheap-model premise we've run this directory on is dead; Grok 4.6 at $2/$6 is its replacement.