New AI tools October 2026: the launches, models, deals, and shutdowns

These are the new AI tools of October 2026, the month the agents from September's announcements started reaching people, and the month the bill for the last few years arrived. Google, Anthropic and OpenAI each shipped an agent that works in the background across your apps. In the same weeks, Character.AI filed for bankruptcy and Anthropic filed to go public. Below is our list of new AI tools from October 2026, followed by the month's model releases, deals, and shutdowns. This is edition five of our monthly AI tools news roundup. We track more than 2,800 AI tools and keep a registry of the ones that die or get bought, so this roundup checks the headlines against that data.

New AI tools that launched in October 2026

The month's most significant launches, in date order:

1. Google Gemini agent (October 8). Announced at Gemini at Work, it is a single agent for work tasks, research, writing and coding that can route requests to Gemini models or to Claude. Businesses get it first, in a private beta, with consumers to follow. One analyst put the price at $30 per user per month; Google has not confirmed it.
2. Meta Muse Wonder (October 12). Meta's first frontier models, built for agent work. Wonder is available through Meta's model API and Muse Code at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. The larger Wonder Full is only for Muse Code subscribers. Unlike Meta's earlier Llama models, neither comes with downloadable weights.
3. Claude Duet (October 21). A standalone background agent from Anthropic that runs on Opus 5.5 and works on its own initiative, connected to Gmail, Slack and other apps. It is a waitlisted research preview for US Pro and Max subscribers on the web and iOS, and its usage counts against the plan's limits. It sits alongside Claude rather than inside the chat window.
4. Kimi K3.1 Pro (October 23). Moonshot's new model is in the Kimi app, Kimi Code and the API at $2 / $10 per million tokens, with open weights promised by November 4.
5. GPT-6.1 Terra in ChatGPT Work and Codex (October 26). OpenAI's model for computer use, available to Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users and through Codex. The API price is $1 / $5 per million tokens, which OpenAI says is half the price of GPT-5.6 Terra.
6. Google DeepMind Genie 4 (October 27). A real-time world model that adds sound, dialogue and steering by text prompt. It is a research preview for trusted testers, with access for AI Ultra subscribers "coming soon".
7. Deepgram Voice Agent Platform (October 29). Deepgram launched it the same day it announced the purchase of Daily, the company behind the open-source Pipecat voice-agent framework.

The pattern from September held, but the agents moved from announcement to availability. Duet, the Gemini agent and Terra are each sold as something that works while you are not looking. All three are limited previews or business-first rollouts, so the consumer version of the background agent is still mostly a waitlist.

Model releases: cheaper, and mostly in the middle

October had no new flagship from OpenAI or Anthropic. Instead, the labs filled in the cheaper tiers below the models they launched in September:

• Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7 at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. It is the first Haiku with effort controls, and it matches OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna on price.
• Google made Gemini 4 Argon generally available on October 13, two weeks after the partner-only preview we covered in September. API pricing starts at $2 / $10 per million tokens and rises to $4 / $20 after November 30. On October 28 Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, but only for vetted cyber defenders, with no public release date.
• OpenAI shipped GPT-6.1 Terra on October 26 (see above).
• Meta released Muse Wonder and Wonder Full on October 12 (see above).
• Open weights: Mistral published the weights of Mistral Large 4, a model of about a trillion parameters, on October 29, three weeks after the preview on October 6. Moonshot promised weights for Kimi K3.1 Pro, and DeepSeek shipped a refresh of V4.1 Flash on October 17 under its MIT license.
• Elsewhere, according to release trackers rather than company announcements: Black Forest Labs' small open-weight FLUX.3 Image Klein, which runs on an 8GB graphics card (October 15), Alibaba's Qwen3.6 27B (October 21), and Mistral's Voxtral 3 speech models (October 20).

The price story continues from the AI model prices report. The cheapest models from Anthropic and OpenAI now both cost $0.10 per million input tokens. Gemini 4 Argon's price is set to double after November 30, so the most capable tier is not getting cheaper the same way.

The big one: Character.AI files for bankruptcy

On October 12, Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Disney is the lead bidder at $20 million plus transition services, for a non-exclusive license to some of Character.AI's intellectual property. The sale is expected to finish in late November or early December. The app is still running.

The numbers show how far the company has fallen. Google reportedly paid about $2.7 billion in 2024 to license Character.AI's models and hire its founders, a deal our registry records as an acquisition. The company that remained kept the consumer app, and two years later its lead bidder is offering less than 1% of that. Character.AI is the clearest case yet of the pattern in our consolidation report: when a big company hires a startup's founders and licenses its technology, the product left behind usually fades. We are watching whether the app survives the sale or becomes a shutdown entry.

Deals and consolidation

October's other deals:

• Miro → Bending Spoons closed on October 26. It is an all-cash deal at a $1.355 billion enterprise value, announced on September 10. Miro is the second large collaboration tool Bending Spoons has closed on in two months, after Airtable.
• Augment Code → Harness, October 8. Harness bought Augment Code's agent products, including Cosmos, the Auggie command-line tool and the Context Engine, not the whole company. Cosmos becomes part of Harness's software-delivery platform.
• Daily → Deepgram, October 29. Terms were not disclosed. Pipecat stays open source under its BSD license and moves to an independent Pipecat Foundation.
• AISLE → Cohere, letter of intent signed October 15. Cohere plans to form a new security unit around AISLE, which finds and fixes software vulnerabilities on its own. The deal has not closed.
• NeoSpace AI → Itaú, October 26. Brazil's largest bank agreed to pay R$2.925 billion, about $585 million. NeoSpace keeps running independently under its CEO, pending regulatory approval.
• Smaller deals reported but not confirmed by the buyers: Supabase bought the database company Turso (October 2), Intuit bought Sequence for about $200 million (October 15), and OpenAI bought Orchestra Bio (October 20).
• Not a deal yet: the Wall Street Journal reported on October 11 that Amazon is in talks to buy Decart for about $7 billion, after earlier talks with Anthropic fell apart.

A follow-up from last month: Reuters reported on October 28 that the Justice Department is examining Nvidia's $12.93 billion agreement to buy Hugging Face. No formal challenge has been filed, and the deal is still expected to close in the first half of 2027. The separate probe into Nvidia's Groq deal had no public developments in October.

The other financial event of the month was not an acquisition. Anthropic filed its S-1 on October 26 to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The filing reports $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026.

Shutdowns and sunsets

October's endings were mostly about models and features rather than whole products:

• OpenAI retired its o1 and o1-pro models from the API on October 23. Third-party reports put several older GPT-4-era models on the same date. On October 14 OpenAI also announced that GPT-4o, 4o mini, 4.1 and 4.1 mini will leave the API on January 14, 2027. That is about three months' notice, half of OpenAI's stated six-month policy. Tools still built on those models now have a deadline.
• Ollie, a privacy-focused AI assistant, announced on October 30 that it will shut down on November 6. Its CEO blamed competition from Meta Muse and other assistants from big platforms, and difficulty raising money. It is the first shutdown we have seen blamed directly on September's agent launches.
• Microsoft is removing Copilot from Samsung and LG smart TVs, effective December 1, announced October 30.

As of October 31, 2026, our graveyard tracks 347 AI tools that shut down or were acquired: 153 gone entirely, 77 acquired and sunset, and 117 acquired but still operating under their own brand. October added two acquisitions where the product keeps shipping, Augment Code (Harness) and Daily (Deepgram), plus a late entry for Reve, the image generator that ended generation on September 27 after an OpenAI investment took part of its research team. Character.AI stays in the registry as an acquisition, from Google's 2024 license-and-hire deal, with its bankruptcy noted; it moves to the shutdown column only if the app closes. Ollie will be added when it closes on November 6. The running registry and methodology live at the AI graveyard, and the statistical analysis is in The AI Tool Shutdown Rate.

Legal and policy

• States and regulators turned to OpenAI. On October 14, eight states (Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia) sued OpenAI over ChatGPT safety, and Texas filed its own suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman on October 23.
• The FTC subpoenaed OpenAI and Anthropic on October 14 over incidents in which their AI agents accessed company and government systems without authorization, and on October 26 it demanded testimony from Anthropic executives. It is the first major US enforcement action aimed at what agents do, not what chatbots say.
• Apple v. OpenAI got a trial date. The judge in Apple's trade-secrets case said on October 14 that he is "highly likely" to grant Apple an injunction, and on October 28 set a tentative trial date of July 19, 2027.
• No federal preemption of state AI laws had been enacted by the end of October, and the EU AI Act had no new milestones. The obligations covered in our EU AI Act explainer are unchanged.

What we're watching in November

• Whether Character.AI's app survives the bankruptcy sale.
• Whether the Kimi K3.1 Pro weights arrive by November 4 as promised, and how developers react when the Gemini 4 Argon price doubles after November 30.
• Anthropic's listing, which could begin trading in mid-November, and what it discloses about how much of its revenue comes from tools built on Claude.
• Whether the FTC's agent inquiry produces rules, and how the tools we list that run agents on customers' accounts respond.

How we source this roundup

Deal and shutdown entries are checked against our own reviewed registry, the same data behind the AI graveyard. We supplement it with company announcements, SEC filings and the business press, and we mark figures as reported when the company has not confirmed them. We check every item's event date separately from the claim itself. Several stories that circulated as October news were actually September events or earlier, including Apple's purchase of Huxe (June), the Third Circuit's fair-use ruling (September 29) and OpenAI's Dots launch (September 29), and we left them out. For how we size the market itself, see how many AI tools there are in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What were the biggest new AI tools of October 2026? Google's Gemini agent for work (October 8), Meta's Muse Wonder models (October 12), Anthropic's Claude Duet background agent (October 21), and OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Terra for computer use in ChatGPT Work and Codex (October 26). Google DeepMind also previewed the Genie 4 world model on October 27.

What AI models were released in October 2026? Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 (October 7). Google made Gemini 4 Argon generally available (October 13) and announced Gemini 4 Carbon for cyber defenders only (October 28). Meta released Muse Wonder (October 12), Moonshot released Kimi K3.1 Pro (October 23), OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra (October 26), and Mistral published the open weights of Mistral Large 4 (October 29).

What was the biggest AI company news in October 2026? Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 12, with Disney as lead bidder at $20 million, and Anthropic filed its S-1 on October 26 to list on Nasdaq. Bending Spoons also completed its $1.355 billion purchase of Miro on October 26.

Which AI companies were acquired in October 2026? Bending Spoons closed its purchase of Miro, Harness bought Augment Code's agent products, Deepgram agreed to buy Daily, Itaú agreed to buy NeoSpace AI, and Cohere signed a letter of intent for AISLE. Supabase–Turso, Intuit–Sequence and OpenAI–Orchestra Bio were reported but not confirmed. Amazon's talks to buy Decart had not produced a deal by the end of the month.

Which AI tools shut down in October 2026? OpenAI retired the o1 and o1-pro models from its API on October 23 and announced that GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 will follow on January 14, 2027. The AI assistant Ollie announced it will close on November 6, and Microsoft is removing Copilot from Samsung and LG TVs on December 1.

How many AI tools have shut down or been acquired in 2026? As of October 31, 2026, our graveyard registry tracks 347 AI tools that shut down or were acquired in total, and 124 of those entries are dated 2026. Two entries carry an October 2026 event date, both acquisitions where the product is still operating.

— The ToolDirectory.AI editorial team