StepFun shipped its flagship Step 5 Preview — 600B total parameters, 27B active, 1M-token context, aimed at coding, finance, and long-horizon agent tasks. The API is live on OpenRouter; open weights expected October 15.
On October 7, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 — the third 5.5-family model in a month, aimed at high-frequency, low-cost tasks. Pricing is 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5, matching OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna directly.
Mistral AI released its flagship Large 4 on October 6, claiming it has "narrowed the gap with the strongest models." The company says it matches GLM 5.3 on long coding tasks, trained on just 4,000 chips, with open weights coming October 27.