Anthropic, Google, and a Chinese open-weight lab all made frontier-grade AI cheaper in the same seven days — while the money behind it got a lot bigger. If you blinked this week, you probably missed a model launch. The back half of July has become the most crowded stretch the AI industry has ever seen, with new systems arriving every few days. But this week had a theme worth pausing on, and it wasn't raw capability. It was price. Three of the most powerful models on the plane