Today — March 17, 2026
14:23
New Model
Claude Opus 4.6 — 1M context window now available
Anthropic's most capable model now supports 1 million token context. Pricing unchanged. Available via API and platform immediately.
Anthropic LLM API monitor
11:07
Breaking Change
Vidu API model names silently changed — viduq2 no longer valid
Vidu deprecated bare "viduq2" model name. Must now use "viduq2-pro", "viduq2-pro-fast", "viduq3-pro", "viduq3-turbo", "viduq1", or "vidu2.0". No announcement from Vidu — discovered via our API monitor when requests started failing.
Vidu Video Discovered in production
09:45
New Model
Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Preview — native image generation
Google added image generation to Gemini 3.1 Flash via the standard generateContent endpoint. Supports 4K output, web search grounding, and character consistency. $0.08/image at 1K resolution.
Google Image API monitor
08:12
Insight
Bria AI — the image utility API nobody's talking about
Tested Bria's API: background removal, 2x/4x upscaling, image expansion, background replacement — all synchronous, instant results. No cold starts, no queues. $0.018-$0.04/image. This is what fal.ai should have been.
Bria AI Image Hands-on testing
Yesterday — March 16, 2026
18:30
New Model
Kling 2.6 Pro — new video model, strong motion quality
Kling AI added 2.6 Pro and Standard variants via Together.ai. $0.14/sec. Early testing shows significant motion improvement over 2.5 Turbo, especially for camera movements and character animation.
Kling AI Video API monitor
15:12
Deprecated
Kling Video O1 Pro & Standard removed from Together.ai
Both models return "unable to access model" errors. Removed from our platform. No deprecation notice from Together or Kling — just stopped working.
Together.ai Video Error monitoring
10:01
Insight
The AI wrapper economy: fal.ai, Veed, and HuggingFace all route to the same backends
After extensive testing: Veed.io's API redirects to fal.ai. HuggingFace Inference Providers routes to fal.ai, Replicate, or WaveSpeed. fal.ai itself is serverless GPU with 10+ minute cold starts on less popular models (Beatoven, Cosmos). Direct APIs are faster and cheaper.
fal.ai Veed HuggingFace Production testing
08:30
New Category
Tripo V2.5 — text-to-3D and image-to-3D in 60 seconds
First 3D model generation service integrated. Text or image → GLB model with PBR textures in ~60 seconds. Interactive viewer with auto-rotate. $0.20/model, 3 modes (text, image, multiview).
Tripo 3D New integration
March 15, 2026
16:00
Pricing
Qwen3.5 Plus added — Alibaba's latest, aggressive pricing
New Qwen3.5 Plus model from Alibaba Cloud. Competitive pricing at $0.0008/1K input, $0.002/1K output. 128K context window. Strong multilingual performance, especially CJK languages.
Alibaba LLM API monitor
12:30
Update
Chatterbox TTS — Resemble AI adds multilingual support
Chatterbox model now supports multiple languages beyond English. New chatterbox-multilingual variant available. Voice cloning quality remains best-in-class for conversational TTS.
Resemble AI Audio API monitor
09:00
Weekly Insight
This week: 12 new models, 3 deprecated, 2 silent breaking changes
New: Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, Kling 2.6 Pro/Standard, Qwen3.5 Plus, Chatterbox Multilingual, FLUX 2 Klein 4B/9B, Tripo V2.5 (3 modes). Deprecated: Kling O1 Pro/Standard, viduq2 bare name. Breaking: Vidu model names, Bria enhance sync mode removed for 4MP+ images.
Weekly digest
ESC