If you blinked over the weekend, you might have missed the latest salvo in the AI wars. Anthropic just made a power move: the company announced it’s making Claude Sonnet 5’s introductory pricing permanent — that’s $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, scrapping a planned September price hike that would have pushed costs up by 50%. The reasoning? Keep developers locked into their ecosystem ahead of a rumoured IPO and, more importantly, fend off the Chinese AI onslaught.
And what an onslaught it is. In just the past week alone, we’ve seen Grok 4.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM 5.3, and Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B all hit the market in rapid succession. OpenAI has slashed GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80%, while Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its flagship Fable 5. Even DeepSeek — once the undisputed “price” leader — has raised prices fourfold, yet still remains cheaper than most Western competitors.
The message is clear: the AI battlefield has shifted from who has the smartest model to who can offer the best value. And the Chinese players are winning on price.
On the JSE This Week
Thungela Resources (TGA) kicked off the week with a bang this morning, releasing its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2026. The numbers are impressive:
· Revenue rose 2% to R15.17 billion
· Profit for the period surged 461% to R1.39 billion
· Headline earnings per share jumped 150% to 480 cents
· The group declared an interim dividend of R5.50 per share — up 175% from last year’s 200 cents
Also worth watching: Efora Energy (EEL) remains under a cautionary announcement after its board decided to defer court proceedings related to provisional liquidation while it pursues a potential transaction. And the JSE itself welcomed a new actively managed ETF listing today — the PWM Extra Interest Prescient Feeder AMETF (PWMEXI) — bringing the total number of ETFs on the exchange to 141, with a combined market cap exceeding R273 billion.
Trivia Corner: The Weird and Wonderful
A giraffe in a sinkhole? Yes, you read that correctly. Over the weekend, the Democratic Alliance decided to draw attention to South Africa’s pothole crisis by… stuffing a real giraffe’s head and placing it in a sinkhole in Mogale City. The plan backfired spectacularly when wildlife rescuers rushed to the scene believing a live animal was trapped inside. The party has been widely slammed for the stunt. One has to admire the creativity, even if the execution was… questionable.
Sardine mystery solved? Scientists have detected pilchard herpesvirus genetic material in the mass sardine deaths along the West Coast. While the virus appears to be a factor, researchers believe environmental conditions may also have played a role. The first samples were collected off Saldanha Bay on 1 August.
And if you’re in Cape Town, keep an eye out for a giant corn flakes bowl that was reportedly blown off a shipping container in Nyanga by strong winds. It’s become an unlikely social media sensation.
On this day in South African history: 17 August 1920 — Bevil Rudd won the first of his three Olympic medals, taking bronze in the 800m at the Antwerp Games. And in 1969, Dr Philip Blaiberg died in South Africa, 19 months and 15 days after receiving a heart transplant — a survival record at the time.
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