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What's up, everyone? This week, OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 a week after Anthropic shipped Opus 4.7, Florida opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI over the FSU shooting, Anthropic locked in an AWS deal the same week it tried (and failed) to raise prices (I think), and Anthropic launched Claude Design. Let's dive in.
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OpenAI released GPT-5.5 to ChatGPT and Codex paid tiers, claiming state-of-the-art on the Artificial Analysis Coding Index at half the cost of competitive frontier coders. It beats Opus 4.7 on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and loses on SWE-Bench Pro, though OpenAI claims Anthropic showed "signs of memorization" there. API pricing doubles to $5/M in and $30/M out. Both companies are now on a ~7-week release cadence and shipping models that beat the other on whichever benchmark they picked first.
OpenAI is under criminal investigation in Florida over ChatGPT's alleged role in last year's FSU mass shooting. AG James Uthmeier says the chatbot advised the shooter on what to use and what time and location on campus would have higher density. OpenAI's defense: ChatGPT provided "factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet." This is the same "publicly available info" argument Anthropic uses for Mythos cyber capabilities. That defense is now an active legal question.
Anthropic and Amazon expanded their partnership activate new compute, with Anthropic committing an absurd amount of money over ten years to AWS and Amazon investing another absurd amount of money. Anthropic's run-rate revenue is now $30B, up from ~$9B at end of 2025. This is largely inflated by consumer growth, which has hurt reliability for free, Pro, Max, and Team users at peak hours.
They also briefly removed Claude Code from the $20/mo Pro plan landing page, leaving $100/mo Max as the entry point. Anthropic called it an experiment and reverted after the backlash, but Sam Altman still got his drunk tweets in. How I see it: revenue is growing fast enough to justify $100B in compute, and infrastructure is breaking fast enough to require pricing experiments that make it harder to enter for consumers.
Anthropic launched Claude Design, a research-preview product that builds prototypes, slides, mockups, and pitch decks. It reads your codebase and design files for a brand-aware system, exports to Canva/PDF/PPTX/HTML, and ships handoff bundles to Claude Code. This is a direct competitor to Figma Make, v0, and Lovable.
Payload CMS v3.84.0 lets client components be used as custom collection views, adds an email recipient override (huge for staging), locale-aware currency formatting in plugin-ecommerce, multi-part upload support in plugin-form-builder, and server instructions in plugin-mcp. Notable fixes include: Lexical markdown internal links no longer export as undefined, JSON/richText fields no longer expose unsupported WhereBuilder operators, and bulk edit respects fields in named tabs. v3.84.1 was a CI-only retarget as the team prepared for Payload v4 planning.
Also this week:
ChatGPT Images 2.0 released with up to 8 consistent images per prompt, 2K output, and much better non-Latin text rendering.
Railway shipped a Remote MCP server at
mcp.railway.com, arailway agentCLI command, andrailway skills installto drop Railway agent skills into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and OpenCode.shadcn introduced Sera, a typography-first style with serif headings and underlined controls, plus
shadcn applyfor switching presets in existing projects.Tailwind v4.2.3 shipped a big canonicalization batch (collapses border/scroll/overflow utilities, migrates
start-*end-*to logicalinset-s-*inset-e-*); v4.2.4 fixed Vite alias resolution in@importand@plugin.
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The true purpose of Pokemon Go may be a bit more nefarious than we originally thought:
What did I miss? There’s so much happening in modern web dev that I know I missed something. Please share your thoughts in the comments or reply to this email. I want to address your suggestions and may include them in future newsletters.
Thanks for reading. See you next time.