Gemini 4 Carbon opens, Claude Fable 5.2 tops index, Qwen4 previews
The US and China swapped flagships almost simultaneously this week. Google opened Gemini 4 Carbon to paid APIs and Google AI Ultra subscribers on 10 November — its third new model in six weeks, with Ultra tiers from US$99.99 to US$199.99 per month. Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2, cutting API pricing to US$8/40 per million tokens and claiming the top of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with 65. On the Chinese side, Alibaba opened Qwen4-Max preview on its Token Plan, while Meituan open-sourced the 1.6-trillion-parameter LongCat-2.5 under an MIT licence. Meanwhile, a former OpenAI researcher claimed weight-fingerprinting evidence that Chinese labs trained on Nvidia Blackwell chips despite export controls. For developers in Singapore, prices are falling fast and the model-selection window just reopened.
Five things this week
Enough to retellUS vs China
The same week, both sides| Dimension | United States | China | What it means for ASEAN |
|---|---|---|---|
| New models | Google opened Gemini 4 Carbon; Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 | Alibaba opened Qwen4-Max preview; Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.5 | Flagships arrived together; worth waiting a round for reviews |
| Prices | Fable 5.2 API cut to US$8/40 per million tokens; Gemini 4 Hydrogen about 30% of Sonnet 5.5's cost | Meituan LongCat-2.5 open-sourced under MIT licence, no commercial authorisation needed | US cuts API prices; Chinese open weights allow self-hosting |
| Benchmarks | Fable 5.2 tops Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 65 | GLM-5.3 scores 28.3 on Terminal-Bench 3.0, highest among open weights | Both sides pushing open-weight records on coding benchmarks |
| Policy | — | Former OpenAI researcher claims evidence of Blackwell-trained Chinese models | Export-control dispute may affect regional cloud procurement |