Claude Gets Up To 3x Faster As Opus 5.5 Fast Mode Opens To Everyone And Space Bunny Is Unmasked!

Today's AI news: Anthropic took Opus 5.5 fast mode out of research preview with no waitlist, up to 2.5x faster at $8/$40 per million tokens, and Claude Code now responds up to 3x sooner. MiniMax revealed the Space Bunny stealth model was M3.1 Flash, at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens with open weights due October 23. Viggle released JST-2, a physics-native world model built in 3D. Grok Bot now works from the iPhone Action Button. And Figure's F.03 humanoid passed nine straight days on a treadmill. Chapters: 0:00 Today's AI News 0:30 Claude Gets Faster 1:19 MiniMax M3.1 Flash 2:01 Viggle JST-2 2:42 Grok Bot Action Button 3:14 Figure F.03 Treadmill Blend Roundup 2026-10-19 https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2111209208012210409 https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2110825294655562048 https://x.com/MiniMax_AI/status/2112150867868541221 https://x.com/ViggleAI/status/2112202242048528540 https://x.com/bot/status/2112252507762368684 https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2112227583643509174 Anthropic has made Claude faster across the board, with Opus 5.5 fast mode now open to everyone and Claude Code responding three times sooner. MiniMax reveals it was behind the mysterious Space Bunny model, Viggle builds a world model entirely in 3D, Grok Bot lands on the iPhone Action Button, and Figure's humanoid has been walking for nine days straight. Here's today's AI news. Anthropic has made Claude noticeably faster this week. Opus 5.5 fast mode is out of research preview and the waitlist is gone. It's the same Opus 5.5, up to two and a half times faster, at 8 dollars per million input tokens and 40 per million output, double the standard price. It's on the Claude Platform and Microsoft Foundry, with Google Cloud coming soon. Claude Code also now compresses the conversation it sends on every turn, and cloud sessions start up as soon as you begin typing. Anthropic's numbers show the wait before the first token is three times shorter in Claude Code, down from about four seconds to 1.3, nearly three times shorter in cloud sessions, and one and a half times shorter in Claude chat, Cowork and the API. MiniMax has unmasked Space Bunny. The anonymous model that climbed the OpenRouter leaderboards, processing more than 200 trillion tokens, was an early version of MiniMax M3.1 Flash. On MiniMax's own numbers it scores 74 percent on DeepSWE, 62 on Automation-Bench and 91 on BabyVision, close to models that cost many times more, at a third of the cost of M3 and three times the speed. API pricing is just 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output. It has a million-token context window, and the open weights arrive on October 23rd. Viggle has released JST-2, which it calls the first full-stack physics-native world foundation model. Most world models learn from pixels and video. Viggle went back to first principles and built the whole stack in 3D, so it generates actual scenes rather than flat frames. It can create a 3D scene in seconds, expand it in real time, and generate characters with their motion built in, all from one architecture, and you can direct what happens in plain language. There's no technical paper or independent benchmark yet, so for now this is Viggle's own claim. xAI's Grok Bot can now live on your iPhone's Action Button. Press it and you're straight into a voice conversation with your Bot, without opening the app. Grok Bot is xAI's always-on agent. Each Bot keeps its own memory and files and works on a persistent cloud computer with a browser and terminal, so tasks carry on when your phone is locked. Friday's update added email support, more connectors and faster voice calls. You'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or later and a paid plan to get it. Figure's F.03 humanoid has now been walking on a treadmill for nine straight days. Brett Adcock says it has covered 348 miles and taken 1.2 million steps, more than 13 marathons. It started as a side project to stress-test the robot and shake out failures, and so far it just keeps going. Long-duration reliability is one of the hardest problems for humanoids heading into factories and homes, where nobody wants a robot that needs fixing every few hours. Adcock says they'll keep it running to see how long it can go.