Another neo-lab enters the scene, this time from Anthropic's ranks: Mirendil wants to use AI to advance research in fields like biology and materials science. Founders Behnam Neyshabur (CEO) and Harsh Mehta (CTO) left Anthropic in December and are currently negotiating a $175 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation, according to The Information. Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins are reportedly co-leading the round, though terms haven't been finalized yet.
Neyshabur led a scientific AI reasoning team at Anthropic and previously spent more than five years at Google DeepMind. Mehta served as a Senior Research Scientist at Anthropic. The founding team also includes Shayan Salehian (previously at xAI) and Tara Rezaei (previously an intern at OpenAI).
Anthropic is making Claude's extra-large context window a lot cheaper. The Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 models now offer a context window of one million tokens at the standard price. Until now, Anthropic charged a surcharge of up to 100 percent for requests exceeding 200,000 tokens. The context window determines how much text an AI model can process in a single request.
Opus 4.6 still costs $5/$25 per million tokens (input/output), and Sonnet 4.6 runs $3/$15. But whether a prompt contains 9,000 or 900,000 tokens no longer matters for pricing. On top of that, the media limit jumps from 100 to 600 images or PDF pages per request. The new pricing applies to Claude Code (Max, Team, and Enterprise) and is available through Amazon Bedrock (except for the media limit), Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry.
The GraphWalks BFS benchmark measures how well AI models handle logical reasoning across large amounts of text. Opus 4.6 reportedly shows almost no drop in performance even at full context length. | Image: Anthropic
Elon Musk's AI company xAI is going through a major shake-up. Musk acknowledged on X that the company "was not built right first time around" and is now being rebuilt from the ground up. Six of the twelve co-founders have left xAI since January, most recently Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai. Only Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen have stayed on alongside Musk.
Google explains the differences between its three Nano Banana image generation models
A new guide from Google breaks down the three Nano Banana image models and when to use each one. The cheaper Nano Banana 2 reportedly delivers 95 percent of Pro’s capabilities and can search the web for reference images on its own before generating output.
AI chips are pushing everything else off TSMC's most advanced production lines
By 2027, 86 percent of TSMC’s N3 capacity could go to AI accelerators, according to SemiAnalysis. Smartphones are becoming a buffer for overflow demand.
Ukraine opens its battlefield data to allies to train AI models for autonomous drones.
"Today, Ukraine has a unique array of battlefield data that is unmatched anywhere else in the world," Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on Telegram. "This includes millions of annotated images collected during tens of thousands of combat flights."
Fedorov had first announced the plan in January, shortly after taking office. Now, he says a platform has been created that provides allies and companies with constantly updating datasets and large quantities of photos and video footage. The goal is to accelerate the development of AI models that can guide drones to their targets without a pilot or quickly analyze vast pools of data.
Ukraine wants to increase the role played by autonomous systems in the war. Top commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said the war had "entered a new phase" with platoons of drone interceptors are now being created inside the Ukrainian armed forces.
Perplexity AI's "Personal Computer" is an AI assistant that works around the clock - handling emails, presentations, and app control. It runs on a dedicated Mac Mini connected to the user's local apps and Perplexity's servers, controllable from any device. CEO Aravind Srinivas called it a "digital proxy" that never sleeps on X. The service builds on Perplexity Computer, which launched in February and bundles multiple AI models.
Security features include a kill switch and an activity log. Access requires the Max subscription at 200 dollars per month, with only a waiting list available for now. Perplexity is also launching an enterprise version that connects to over 400 tools like Salesforce and Snowflake - the company claims it completed 3.25 years' worth of work internally in four weeks. The concept draws comparisons to the controversial OpenClaw, whose developer now works at OpenAI. Agent-based AI systems dominate the current landscape but face sharp criticism around resource demands and security vulnerabilities.
Meta has reportedly delayed its next AI model, codenamed "Avocado." Originally set for mid-March 2026, it won't ship until May at the earliest, reports the New York Times, citing three people familiar with the matter.
In internal tests, Avocado fell short of leading models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic in logical reasoning, programming, and writing. It beat Meta's previous model and Google's Gemini 2.5 but couldn't match Gemini 3.0. Meta's leadership even discussed temporarily licensing Gemini, though no decision was made. A next-gen model codenamed "Watermelon" is already planned. Meta is also building an image and video generator codenamed "Mango."
