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Today: Anthropic makes its mid-tier Claude cheaper and more autonomous, CoreWeave puts a research agent inside Weights & Biases, and South Korea commits more than $1 trillion to AI and chips. Here are five developments worth knowing from the past few days.
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Models & Products
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5, aimed at cheaper autonomous work. On June 30 Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5, an update to its mid-tier model built for agentic tasks — making plans and using tools such as browsers and terminals at a level the company says previously required larger, costlier models. Anthropic reports performance approaching its Opus 4.8 flagship at a lower price, and the model becomes the default for free and Pro users. Introductory API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, after which it rises to $3 and $15; the company also reports lower rates of hallucination, sycophancy, and susceptibility to prompt-injection attacks than Sonnet 4.6. (TechCrunch) (MacRumors)
Research & Tools
CoreWeave launches ARIA, a research agent inside Weights & Biases. On June 29 CoreWeave introduced ARIA (AI Research and Iteration Agent), an agent embedded in the Weights & Biases experiment-tracking platform that reads training runs and metrics to surface patterns and suggest next steps for model development. The company says ARIA can analyze thousands of runs and tens of thousands of metrics in minutes, and released it in public preview alongside general availability of the W&B Weave agent-development toolkit. ARIA builds on CoreWeave's roughly $1.4 billion acquisition of Weights & Biases. (SiliconANGLE) (CoreWeave)
Edison Scientific and Population Health Partners team up on AI-driven drug discovery. Also on June 29, AI-for-science startup Edison Scientific and biotech investment firm Population Health Partners — whose team previously backed Metsera — announced a partnership to use AI research agents to help design and launch new biotech companies. The deal pairs Edison's automated hypothesis-generation and analysis tools with the investors' drug-development experience, with the stated aim of speeding up early-stage discovery work. (STAT News)
Industry & Business
South Korea unveils AI and chip "mega-projects" topping $1 trillion. On June 29 South Korea announced a set of AI and semiconductor investment plans totaling more than $1 trillion. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, together with suppliers, are slated to invest about 800 trillion won (roughly $518 billion) in new memory-chip fabrication sites, while additional commitments cover large AI data centers and a chip-packaging cluster near Seoul. The government framed the effort as a bid to secure the country's position in AI hardware against competition from Taiwan, China, and Japan. (Al Jazeera) (inkl)
Booz Allen expands its OpenAI partnership for national-security work. Consulting and government-services firm Booz Allen Hamilton said on June 29 it has broadened a partnership with OpenAI to deploy AI across national-security and critical-infrastructure missions. The arrangement gives Booz Allen engineers access to OpenAI's model roadmap, technical support, and training resources to speed secure deployments for defense, intelligence, and commercial customers. Booz Allen shares rose about 5% in premarket trading after the announcement. (Booz Allen) (BusinessWire)
That's today's edition of AI Current. Reply with what you're seeing in AI, and forward this to a colleague who would find it useful. See you tomorrow.
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