Anthropic shipped Sonnet 5.5 on September 28, 2026 — same $2/$10 as Sonnet 5, same 1M context, 30%+ faster, up to 30% cheaper per task, and on GDPval-AA it sits two Elo points under Opus 5.5. Five jobs Sonnet 5.5 already replaced in its first day on real marketing work, three where Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5 still wins, and the routing principle that matters now that the Sonnet tier can carry real marketing work.
OpenAI shipped GPT Image 2.5 on September 8 with two API variants — Flare (speed, default) and Sunburst (precision) — at the same price as 2.0 ($5 text / $8 image in, $30 image out per 1M tokens), with up to 50% lower latency. The marketing-relevant upgrade isn't raw image quality; it's that the model finally respects what you asked it to leave alone. Five jobs worth rerouting, three to keep on Nano Banana 2, Midjourney V8, or Seedream 5.0 Pro, and the one sentence that captures the split.
