Anthropic launches Claude Science and a new model

Anthropic launched Claude Science, a specialized workbench for researchers connecting 60 scientific databases with pre-built tools for genomics, protein structures, and chemistry. Running on Claude Opus 4.8, it offers $30,000 in free credits to 50 academic projects. The platform enables multi-agent architectures with parallel subassistants for sequence analysis, structural prediction, and fact-checking while maintaining full reproducibility. Anthropic is betting that workflow optimization will drive researcher adoption over raw model capacity.

Base44, owned by Wix and generating $100 million in annual recurring revenue, launched Base1, their proprietary LLM trained on tens of millions of real user interactions. By leveraging user conversation data from their platform, they can fine-tune the model to predict what developers need when building websites and apps, allowing them to cut costs, reduce reliance on third-party APIs, and maintain exclusive training data. This positions Base44 similarly to Cursor's strategy of intercepting code interactions to build proprietary models.

X launched a hosted MCP server opening its API to Claude, Cursor, and Grok, reversing their earlier API restrictions. The MCP provides search, post retrieval, user lookup, and trend analysis capabilities with pricing at $0.015 per published post and $0.20 per post with links. This allows regular users and developers to integrate X data into their AI workflows for applications like sentiment analysis and content curation.

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 at $2 per million input tokens (promotional pricing through August 31st, then $3), undercutting Claude Opus 4.8. Despite being positioned as a lower-tier model, Sonnet 5 performs slightly better than Opus 4.8 on knowledge work benchmarks and shows fewer mid-task stalls in multi-step workflows, suggesting cost-per-task efficiency is now more important than raw reasoning capacity.

Google shipped Nano Banana 2 Light, replacing the original with improved speed and cost optimization while maintaining prompt compatibility, and Gemini Omni Flash, a video generation model at $0.10 per second of output with conversational editing and multimodal input capabilities. Both models will be integrated across nine Google products including AI Studio, Search, Photos, and Google Ads.