The week · 17–Sep 23
Opus 5.5, GPT-6 and a Fed that didn't stop bitcoin
Anthropic and OpenAI released cheaper models on the same day. China opened an investigation into its own AI labs. The Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023 and bitcoin still rose 13%. And BlackRock published a paper on AI agents paying with stablecoins.
Anthropic and OpenAI cut prices on the same day
Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol and Luna came out on September 22, both cheaper than their predecessors.
According to Anthropic, Opus 5.5 performs like Fable 5.1 on most tasks and costs about 40% less than Opus 5. It also raised usage limits on Pro, Max and Team plans, and announced Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 for the coming weeks.
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half the API price of GPT-5.6. According to OpenAI, Sol nearly ties Claude on DeepSWE, a benchmark of long programming tasks. Both announcements passed 1,600 points on Hacker News.
Source: The Decoder
China investigates its AI labs
China's internet regulator is looking into whether DeepSeek and Moonshot sent user data to Anthropic.
The report, from The Information, sent Z.ai (Zhipu) down 12.4% in Hong Kong, MiniMax 4% and Alibaba 4.4%. Anthropic had previously said some Chinese companies route requests to Claude.
The week also brought launches: Alibaba unveiled the Zhenwu V900 chip, plans for Qwen models with up to 10 trillion parameters and Qwen Audio 3.1. DeepSeek published a paper on training agents at scale.
Source: The Information
The Fed hikes and bitcoin rises anyway
The first rate hike since 2023 did not stop the market: bitcoin ended the week up 13%.
On September 17 the Fed raised rates by 0.25 points, to 3.75–4%. According to CoinDesk, traders were reassured that the Fed expects only one more hike.
Bitcoin came close to USD 87,000 and the crypto market passed USD 3 trillion again. Bitcoin ETFs took in about USD 1.7 billion in two days. On the 23rd it fell to USD 84,000, with hundreds of millions in long positions liquidated according to posts on X.
Source: CoinDesk
Agents that pay with stablecoins
BlackRock published a paper saying AI could be a source of crypto demand the market underestimates.
The argument: an agent buying data or compute runs into traditional payments, which can need a person to authorize them and charge fees that make small payments uneconomic. Stablecoins run around the clock.
Coinbase's x402 protocol has processed about 198.9 million payments worth USD 52.7 million since May 2025. This week Coinbase added stocks to its agent platform, Kakao Pay finished a trial in Korea and Cardano enabled x402 in ADA.
Source: CoinDesk
Stablecoins at a record
There are USD 312 billion in circulation and cross-border transfers grew 78%, according to Chainalysis.
SoFi moved its USD 25 billion card program to its SoFiUSD stablecoin, which settles on the Mastercard network. Circle signed a five-year agreement with Binance, which is investing USD 100 million in the company.
In Europe, central banks want to replace the MiCA rule that requires part of the reserves to be held in bank deposits with liquidity tests.
Source: Cointelegraph
Without the Clarity Act, regulators write the rules
After the Senate stalled the bill on September 15, the SEC and the CFTC are moving on their own.
CNBC reported that regulators are speeding up their own rules. CFTC chair Michael Selig said markets need to prepare for "mass tokenization", and the SEC opened the door to tokenized stocks. The CFTC is also weighing an investigation into Kalshi over repeated trades in its ether futures.
Source: CNBC
AI reaches the UN and the US Senate
Amodei and Altman will brief the UN Security Council, and Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to ban superintelligence.
According to the Global Times, DeepSeek and Moonshot were also invited to the UN meeting. The Sanders bill would also create a Department of AI.
Source: The Seattle Times
Jev
TypeSafe's decision model was one of the most shared topics among developers, with no independent data.
Jev returns decisions with probabilities instead of text. TypeSafe has not published its architecture, its weights or how it measured speed. Nokia released AnyJev, an open source layer that the company says does something similar with any open LLM.
Source: Made with Jev
| +13% | Bitcoin over 7 days CoinGecko |
|---|---|
| 71 | Fear and greed index (greed) Alternative.me |
| 312 B | Dollars in stablecoins, a record DefiLlama |
| −12.4% | Z.ai (Zhipu) in Hong Kong after the probe report The Information |
| −40% | Cost per task of Opus 5.5 vs Opus 5 Claude (X) |
| 198.9 M | x402 payments since May 2025 Stablecoin Insider |