Anthropic launched the Claude Marketplace on September 23 — a unified storefront for 2,000+ MCP connectors and plugins, Claude-powered agent products, and consulting partners, purchasable against committed Anthropic spend. The most telling detail: Cursor itself is listed as a partner product.
Twelve days after Anthropic named Xiaomi in a threat report accusing it of routing requests through Claude to harvest its output, Xiaomi shipped MiMo-V2.6 — an MIT-licensed, trillion-parameter model that’s now #1 on Artificial Analysis’ open-weight Intelligence Index at roughly a tenth of Opus 5.5’s price. Xiaomi still hasn’t responded to the allegation, and its own benchmark table shows a real gap behind frontier models on the hardest current agentic tests.
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, cutting API pricing to $4/$20 per million tokens (down 40% from Opus 5) while claiming a jump to 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 — a benchmark whose independent public leaderboard still shows zero populated rows. It’s already the default model in Claude Code v2.1.280.
Grok 4.7 shipped September 21, nine days late, and landed simultaneously in GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Devin. Cognition’s own benchmark disclosure says it scores below Grok 4.6 on aggregate because it keeps editing code nobody asked it to touch.
Foremerge, launched on Show HN September 21, has AI coding agents declare intent before touching code so it can catch semantic conflicts — one agent replacing a service while another extends it — that Git’s line-based diffing misses entirely. Apache 2.0, pre-1.0, single maintainer, no independent benchmarks yet.
Codex CLI 0.155.0 (Sept 17) added Touch ID verification for MCP tool-call requests in local TUI sessions on supported Macs, using the Secure Enclave. It’s a genuinely nice UX touch, and it only covers the one deployment mode — a human sitting at a keyboard — where MCP’s real exposure is already smallest.
Claude Code v2.1.277 (September 18) added AGENTS.md as a fallback instructions file when no CLAUDE.md is present — a small changelog line that closes an interoperability gap Anthropic has had the standing to close since co-founding the Agentic AI Foundation last December. It also quietly doubles the blast radius of a supply-chain problem this blog has been tracking since April.
Air Security disclosed Plugin4Shell on September 17-18: a Git checkout flaw that lets a malicious plugin repository silently defeat SHA-pin verification across four major AI coding agents. Anthropic shipped a fix for Claude Code in June and OpenAI patched Codex in August — GitHub has no fix planned for Copilot, and Google is deprecating Gemini CLI instead of patching it.
Anthropic redesigned Claude Code Projects on September 17 from a folder of chats into one persistent conversation that scopes work, delegates it across parallel cloud threads, and assembles the result — with shared memory across every thread. It’s a real upgrade, but it’s cloud-only for now and Anthropic is upfront that concurrent threads mean concurrent full sessions burning through your usage limits faster.
Anthropic collapsed Claude Chat, Cowork, and Design into a single interface on September 16 and added Claude Docs and Claude Slides in beta, calling the whole thing ‘One Claude.’ Claude Code was not touched — a deliberate line between a consumer/knowledge-worker product and a developer-native one.