News Roundup
Anthropic Raises Sonnet Rate Limits for API Tier 3 Users Anthropic quietly doubled the output token rate limits for Claude Sonnet on API Tier 3 (≥$1K/month spend) from 80K to 160K tokens per minute, effective March 10. No announcement accompanied the change — it appeared in the updated rate limits documentation. This follows a pattern of Anthropic making capacity improvements silently rather than as marketing events. source
Google Gemini Advanced Gets Real-Time Web Grounding Google quietly enabled real-time web search grounding for Gemini Advanced subscribers, pulling live results into responses for queries that benefit from current information. The feature works without explicit prompting — Gemini decides when to ground. Early tests show factual accuracy improvements on recent events but inconsistent citation quality. source
Mistral’s Le Chat Hits 1 Million Daily Active Users Mistral reported that Le Chat, its consumer-facing chat product, crossed 1 million daily active users in February, up from 200K in November. The growth followed the launch of Le Chat with Mistral Large 2 and a French government partnership for public sector AI assistance. Mistral remains primarily a B2B API business; Le Chat’s scale is now large enough to influence model training data decisions. source
DeepSeek R2 Training Run Reportedly Underway Three sources with knowledge of DeepSeek’s infrastructure tell The Information that a significant training run consistent with a next-generation model is underway at DeepSeek. No release timeline has been confirmed. DeepSeek R1’s release in January temporarily moved equity markets; a follow-on release would face a different market dynamic given how much the AI sector has since priced in efficient training methods from Chinese labs. source
Scale AI Lands $1.5B DoD Contract for AI Training Data Scale AI announced a five-year, $1.5 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to provide training data, evaluation, and AI readiness services. The contract is the largest publicly disclosed AI services deal in government to date and signals that the DoD has moved from AI experimentation to structured procurement. Scale AI’s government revenue mix will shift significantly — implications for its commercial pricing and priority queue are worth watching. source