17 AI models went live in October 2026, down from 27 in September. None passed Claude Opus 5.5

ArtificialWatch logged 17 AI models going live on a public API in October 2026, from 14 labs. That is 10 fewer than September's 27, the busiest month since the release log's monthly archive began in July, and two fewer than August's 19. Three of the 17 were frontier models: Meta's Muse Wonder (October 12), Google's Gemini 4 (October 13) and Moonshot's Kimi K3.1 Pro (October 23).

EVERY OCTOBER RELEASE, BY DATE

- October 1: FLUX 3 Image (Black Forest Labs), text-to-image and editing on BFL's API.

- October 6: Mistral Large 4 (Mistral), in public preview on Mistral's API, with open weights added on October 29. Nano Banana 2.1 (Google), an image model, generally available on the Gemini API.

- October 7: Claude Haiku 5.5 (Anthropic), $0.10 / $0.50 per million tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens.

- October 12: Muse Wonder (Meta), Meta's most capable model, in preview on the Meta Model API at $4 / $20.

- October 13: Gemini 4 (Google), generally available as gemini-4-argon at $2 / $10 through November 30, then $4 / $20 from December 1.

- October 14: Grok Voice 3.0 (xAI), speech to speech at $0.08 a minute.

- October 15: Muse Spark Open (Meta), Nemotron 3.5 Bolt and Nemotron 3.5 Super VL (NVIDIA), all with open weights on Hugging Face.

- October 16: Beam (Reflection AI), open weights under Apache 2.0, and Glimpse (Elorian), a visual thinking model for images and video, in research preview.

- October 19: MiniMax M3.1 Flash (MiniMax) at $0.15 / $0.60, and Mercury 3 (Inception), a diffusion language model, at a launch price of $0.10 / $0.35.

- October 21: Flint (Recursive), a coding model built to run locally, with Apache 2.0 weights.

- October 23: Kimi K3.1 Pro (Moonshot), $2 / $10 with a 1M-token context.

- October 26: GPT-6.1 Terra (OpenAI), $1 / $5.

WHO SHIPPED

Google, Meta and NVIDIA released two models each, and 11 other labs one each. OpenAI's and Anthropic's October releases were both lower-priced everyday models, GPT-6.1 Terra and Claude Haiku 5.5, not new flagships. Chinese labs released two (Moonshot and MiniMax), down from six in September and seven in August.

OPEN WEIGHTS

Six of October's 17 had downloadable weights by the end of the month: Muse Spark Open, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt, Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, Beam, Flint and Mistral Large 4. Moonshot says Kimi K3.1 Pro's weights come by November 4, and MiniMax says M3.1 Flash's weights will be released later.

NONE OF THEM TOOK THE TOP SPOT

On ArtificialWatch's bench index of 47 models (refreshed November 3), the highest October release is Gemini 4 Argon at 80, in seventh place. Muse Wonder is eighth at 79.3, GPT-6.1 Terra ninth at 75 and Kimi K3.1 Pro 11th at 69.9. Claude Opus 5.5 still leads at 98.1. Gemini 4 Carbon, second at 96.2, was announced on October 28 but is not on a public API yet, so it is not counted as an October release.

PRICES

The cheapest new text models were Mercury 3 ($0.10 / $0.35, a launch price Inception describes as 50% off), Claude Haiku 5.5 ($0.10 / $0.50) and MiniMax M3.1 Flash ($0.15 / $0.60). The most expensive was Muse Wonder at $4 / $20. Gemini 4's price doubles on December 1.

SEEN BEFORE THE ANNOUNCEMENT

ArtificialWatch's sweep saw Claude Haiku 5.5 live at 17:51 UTC on October 7, about 10 minutes before Anthropic's announcement at 18:01 UTC.

WHAT COUNTS

A model counts in the month it went live on a public API, not the month it was announced, so Gemini 4 (announced September 30) is an October release. The log is limited to the models ArtificialWatch tracks, the major labs and many smaller ones, so a small release can be missing. The full list, with prices and bench ranks for each model, is at artificialwatch.com/releases/2026-10.