Real Python AI News · Weekly edition · The week of November 7–13, 2026
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The big AI companies spent the week making their best models cheaper and faster to use. Here’s what changed, explained in plain language, plus two cases where AI produced work that a computer could check line by line.
Anthropic’s Top Claude Models Now Cost Less and Answer Faster
Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 are new versions of Anthropic’s most capable AI models, the trained programs inside the Claude assistant. Anthropic says the two share one underlying model. Fable has strong safeguards around cybersecurity and biology, so anyone can use it. Mythos has fewer and is open only to vetted organizations.
Developers connect their apps to Claude through an API, a way for one piece of software to talk to another. They pay by the token, a small piece of text such as a short word. Sending a million tokens costs $8, and a million tokens of replies cost $40. Anthropic says replies come up to 30 percent faster than with version 5.1. An optional fast mode costs double, $16 and $80, and Anthropic says it writes up to 2.5 times faster.
On BenchCAD 2.1, a hardware engineering test, Anthropic reports a score of 83.5 for Fable 5.2 at its highest effort setting, up from 44.4 for Fable 5.1. These are Anthropic’s own measurements.
“A cheaper token doesn’t always mean a cheaper job. A model that thinks longer or writes more uses more tokens, so a finished task can still cost more. Anthropic says Fable 5.2 needs fewer tokens per task than 5.1 at its default setting. Businesses find out the real cost by trying it on their own work.”
— Philipp Acsany, Real Python
Google’s Most Capable AI Model, Gemini 4 Carbon, Opens to Programmers
Read the full article at https://realpython.com/ai-news-weekly-2026-11-13/ »
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