🧠 The Biggest AI Week Yet — GPT-5.5, ChatGPT Images 2.0, and More

Miss one week in AI, and you might miss everything.

Simon Willison just dropped his weekly newsletter calling it "a big one" — and he wasn't kidding. Here's what happened:

**GPT-5.5 is here** — but only for ChatGPT subscribers, no API yet. Willison found a backdoor through the open-source Codex CLI. At maximum reasoning effort, it takes 4 minutes per response but delivers significantly better results. Pricing will be double the previous generation.

**ChatGPT Images 2.0 dethroned Gemini.** Tested with a "find the raccoon with a ham radio" challenge at 4K resolution, the new model produced the most detailed and accurate result. Willison declared it "takes the crown from Gemini."

**Claude Code's quiet price hike backfired.** Anthropic silently changed pricing from $20 to $100-200/month. The internet noticed. It turned out to be a 2% A/B test, but the trust damage was done. Willison said he may shift to OpenAI's Codex instead.

**Qwen3.6-27B punches way above its weight.** Alibaba's 27B model claims coding performance matching their 397B flagship. It runs on consumer hardware, generating quality output at 24-25 tokens/second.

**The Headless API revolution is coming.** As personal AIs prefer programmatic interfaces over GUIs, Salesforce launched Headless 360 — exposing their entire platform as APIs. This signals a fundamental shift in how software will be built and consumed.

One week. Five game-changers. The pace isn't slowing down.