Best Microsoft MAI-Thinking-1 Alternatives in 2026

Meta Superintelligence Labs' model family, now four lines deep: **Muse Wonder** (2026-10-12, frontier, $4/$20 per 1M on the Meta Model API; Wonder Full only in Muse Code subscriptions), **Muse Spark 1.3** (2026-09-02, $1.25/$4.25, or $0.10/$0.20 in Contributor mode if Meta may train on your content), **Muse Spark Open** (2026-10-15, 816B/42B-active open weights, 1M context, runs on two Mac Studios with M5 Ultra) and **Muse Glimmer** (2026-08-10, 30B, Apache 2.0, built for local agents). Consumers get it through **Muse**, Meta's personal-agent app (2026-09-08): free with limits, Power $20/mo, Maximum $100/mo

**Claude Haiku 5.5 shipped on 2026-10-07 at $0.10 / $0.50 per 1M tokens for prompts up to 100K ($0.50 / $2.50 above) -- 90% below Haiku 4.5 on most requests -- with adjustable effort for the first time on a Haiku, and the same day Anthropic halved Sonnet 5.5 cache reads to $0.10 and added monthly API credits for Max ($100 or $200) and Team (up to $500 pooled).** **Anthropic expanded the Cyber Verification Program on 2026-10-06 into three access tiers (Defense, Red Team, Specialized) that unlock reduced cyber safeguards on Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Mythos 5.1 and future models for verified security teams -- closing the 'coming weeks' note Opus 5.5 shipped with; generally available Claude keeps its conservative cyber blocks.** **Two Claude 5.5 models in six days: Claude Opus 5.5 (2026-09-22) and Claude Sonnet 5.5 (2026-09-28).** Opus 5.5 performs at Fable 5.1 level on most work and costs 40% less than Opus 5 to run -- $4/$20 per 1M (down from $5/$25) with cache reads cut to $0.20 (from $0.50), fast mode at $8/$40 up to 2.5x speed, output 30%+ faster, and five-hour usage limits raised on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise with a saveable rate-limit reset. Sonnet 5.5 keeps Sonnet 5's $2/$10 but needs far fewer tokens (up to 30% cheaper per task), runs 30%+ faster and jumps Terminal-Bench 4.0 from 10.3% to 70.6%. Both are 1M context, Jun 2026 cutoff, on the Claude Platform, Bedrock, Vertex and Foundry; Haiku 5.5 followed on 2026-10-07. Opus 5.5 launches with Fable-class cyber and bio safeguards (most cyber tasks fall back to Opus 4.8) and cannot run with thinking off.

**Gemini 4 Argon went generally available on 2026-10-13: in the Gemini API (paid tier only), AI Studio, Gemini for business and GitHub Copilot, in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, and in Google Antigravity for Ultra. The API rate card prices it at $2 input / $10 output per 1M tokens with $0.10 implicit-cache reads through November 30, 2026, doubling to $4 / $20 / $0.20 on December 1; there is no free tier and no explicit caching.** Google calls it its flagship reasoning model, with a 1M-token unified input-output limit, #1 on the Vals Index, 87% on the ERQA embodied-reasoning benchmark and 0.7% attack success on Gray Swan prompt injection, alongside the 9/30 numbers (77.9% DeepSWE v1.1, 51.3% AutomationBench, 91.7% LVBench, 68% CWE-bench v1) -- all vendor-reported. Earlier in October: Gemini 3.7 Flash and 3.5 Flash were retired from AI Studio (10/08) with API calls auto-routed to 3.8 Flash and 3.6 Flash, Nano Banana 2.1 went GA (10/06) and SynthID Detector opened to everyone in English (10/07). Late September in the Gemini app: **skills replace Gems** (9/30; slash-command instructions with reference files, Gems removed from November 2026 for personal accounts), **Guided Vision in Gemini Live** for blind and low-vision users on Android (10/01), and the 9/23-9/24 wave still stands: Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS with voice design at $0.50/$9.00 and $0.50/$6.00 per 1M (doubling 2027-01-01), Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar in Gemini Enterprise, free 1080p Omni 1.1 video in Google Vids. Googlebook was scheduled to reach shelves 10/04 (shipment not yet vendor-confirmed).

Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.5 family launched 2026-04-22 -- Pro (1T total / 42B active MoE, 1M context, native vision+audio reasoning), Multimodal base, TTS (3 sub-models: base, VoiceDesign, VoiceClone), and ASR (open-source, English + Chinese + major dialects). Full voice pipeline for the agent era. Extra-charge 1M-context tier removed at launch

Tencent's Hy3 reached GA 2026-07-06 (upgraded from the April preview) -- 295B total / 21B active MoE, 256K context, now Apache 2.0 open weights on HuggingFace + ModelScope with the EU/UK/South Korea restriction lifted. ~90% agent-task completion on Tencent's internal apps; API via Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Integrated into Yuanbao, WeChat, QQ

**The X Subscription (2026-10-12) folds Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor and X Premium into one plan: Free, Plus $8, Premium $30 (what SuperGrok, Cursor Pro and X Premium+ cost $90 for combined), Super $100 and Ultra $200 a month, with one weekly-refreshing usage pool shared across Grok and Cursor; the old SuperGrok, Cursor and X Premium plans are closed to new sign-ups.** **Team Bots launched 2026-09-28 in public beta on Teams and Enterprise plans** -- shared Grok Bots built around a role, with team context (files, instructions, skills), plugins (Salesforce, Notion, GitHub), credentials for APIs without a plugin, and memories, where the bot is shared but each person's conversations and memories stay private; each Team Bot gets its own Slack handle. SpaceXAI runs one per major sales account, and its 9/22 case study says the merged SpaceXAI + Cursor support desk absorbed a 175% ticket increase on Grok Bot with no new hires at $0.20-$0.30 per resolution. **Grok 4.7 (9/21)** remains the flagship at $2/$6 per 1M with chart-only benchmarks; Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 and the corrected $15/1M-character TTS price stand.

**GPT-5.4-Cyber reached its API removal date on 2026-10-01: the gpt-5.4-cyber model page now returns Not found while gpt-5.6-cyber stays live (checked 2026-10-02; OpenAI's deprecations doc had not yet moved the row to Past Deprecations). Its replacement is `gpt-5.6-cyber`**, an alias for OpenAI's most advanced purpose-trained cyber models, gated behind the Daybreak program and priced at $12.50/$75 per 1M (first published price for any OpenAI cyber model). Original page: OpenAI's defensive-cybersecurity variant of GPT-5.4, launched 2026-04-16. Lowered refusal boundary for security-research tasks and native binary reverse-engineering. Access gated via Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program -- thousands of verified defenders, hundreds of teams, no public pricing. On **2026-08-17 OpenAI published its first dedicated post on the Hugging Face incident**, conceding it 'underestimated the real-world cyber capabilities of our AI models' and confirming it now releases cyber capabilities only to trusted defenders. **On 2026-09-01 OpenAI confirmed GPT-6 Astra meets the Critical cyber threshold -- the first model it has ever designated at that level -- and on 2026-09-03 committed $1B to Daybreak for Frontline Defenders**

**Since 2026-10-15 US university labs can apply for the Rosalind Academic Plan: up to 30 ChatGPT Business Standard seats free for up to 12 months, with GPT-Rosalind and Rosalind Workbench behind trusted-access approval.** OpenAI's first domain-specific model -- life sciences, drug discovery, translational medicine. Launched 2026-04-16 as a Trusted Access research preview. Launch partners: Amgen, Moderna, Allen Institute, Thermo Fisher. Paired with a Life Sciences Codex plugin (50+ scientific tool integrations)

**From 2026-10-06 Mythos 5.1 is included in every tier of Anthropic's expanded Cyber Verification Program, and existing Project Glasswing members move into its Specialized Access tier without reapproval -- with the first disclosed Glasswing numbers: at least 129,000 verified vulnerabilities found April-July 2026, more than 33,000 rated critical or high.** Anthropic's trusted-access frontier model. **Mythos 5.1 launched 2026-09-01** alongside Fable 5.1, and Anthropic now states outright that they are **the same model with different safeguards** -- the 5.1-cycle gap is 60.9% vs 55.8% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, which Anthropic attributes to safeguard interventions rather than capability and expects to shrink. Originally launched June 9, 2026 alongside Claude Fable 5. Suspended June 12 by a US export-control order, then PARTIALLY RESTORED July 1, 2026 (US government lifted controls June 30): Mythos 5 is back for a set of US organizations with government approval, while Anthropic works to re-expand the broader Glasswing program. Public Fable 5 returned globally the same day. Gated to Project Glasswing orgs + select biology researchers.