ai-news

Claude Opus 5.5 cut prices and added safeguards. What it changes for your AI budget and where to switch.

Runable’s $21M Series A: AI Agents That Grow Businesses ⚡ Expert Summary: Runable, an AI-agent platform led by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, raised a $21M Series A to push AI agents from merely building businesses to actively growing them. Backed by Nexus Venture Partners, the round (announced August 26, 2026, first reported by TechCrunch…

Google Just Slashed Gemini 3.6 Flash Prices — What It Means for Your Business ⚡ Expert Summary: Google cut Gemini 3.6 Flash API pricing by 57% on input tokens and 17% on output tokens in late July 2026, bringing input costs to $1.50 per million tokens — the cheapest per-token rate of any major frontier…

Anthropic Claude Opus 5: Near-Frontier AI for Less Than You Think ⚡ Expert Summary: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 in July 2026, a near-frontier reasoning model priced significantly below OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 enterprise tiers. For US small business owners, Opus 5 delivers advanced reasoning, 200K token context, and multi-step agent workflows at a fraction of what…

GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna — OpenAI’s Tri-Tier Model Means You Don’t Pay for More AI Than You Need ⚡ Expert Summary: OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 in three permanent tiers on July 9, 2026 — Sol (flagship, $5/$30 per million tokens), Terra (balanced, $2.50/$15), and Luna (fast/affordable, $1/$6). This is the first time OpenAI has offered…

DeepSeek Open Sources DSpark — LLM Inference Speed Boosted by Up to 85% ⚡ Expert Summary: DeepSeek open-sourced DSpark on June 29, 2026 — a speculative decoding framework that boosts LLM inference speed by 60-85% for individual users and up to 51-52% aggregate throughput. Released under MIT license with model checkpoints and a training codebase…

Claude Sonnet 5 Launches at 60% Off — What Small Business Owners Need to Know ⚡ Expert Summary: Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026 — their most agentic mid-tier model ever — at introductory pricing of $2/M input tokens and $10/M output tokens (60% below Opus 4.8). It scores 63.2% on SWE-bench…

Perplexity AI vs Google for Small Business Search in 2026 — Is the Switch Worth It? ⚡ Expert Summary Perplexity AI just dropped $25 million in compute credits for small businesses through its SBA partnership, making its agentic search platform available at massive scale. But does that mean small businesses should switch from Google Search…

Meta Just Put an AI Agent Inside WhatsApp — Your Customers Are Already There ⚡ Expert Summary Meta announced the global rollout of its Business Agent on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram at the Conversations 2026 conference in London. The AI agent handles customer inquiries, product recommendations, appointment booking, lead qualification, and sales — all in…

Perplexity Drops $25 Million AI Accelerator for Small Businesses u2014 and It’s Free ⚡ Expert Summary Perplexity AI just launched the Main Street AI Accelerator in partnership with the U.S. Small Business Administration, committing $25 million in compute credits to small businesses across America. Up to 100,000 eligible businesses can receive $250 each in Perplexity…

Fotor Launches Agentic AI Marketing Platform — Why Small Businesses Should Pay Attention to Autonomous Campaign Creation ⚡ Expert Summary: Fotor has launched Vibe Marketing, an agentic AI platform that creates complete marketing campaigns from a single brand brief — generating ad copy, visuals, social posts, and distribution strategies autonomously. For small business owners who…

allO Raises $14M to Deploy AI Voice Agents That Handle Restaurant Phones — What Small Business Owners Need to Know ⚡ Expert Summary: Munich-based startup allO raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Zigg Capital to expand its AI-native operating system for restaurants, starting with a voice AI agent that handles incoming calls,…

Anthropic Files for $965 Billion IPO — What It Means for Small Businesses Using Claude AI ⚡ Expert Summary: Anthropic confidentially filed for its IPO on June 1, 2026, at a $965 billion valuation — the highest ever for an AI company ahead of going public. The company behind Claude has selected Morgan Stanley, Goldman…