A weekly summary of what actually shipped across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot — features, deprecations, pricing changes, and retirement dates. Written for operators who need to know what changed, not what was announced.
11 – 18 September 2026
Two dated deprecations and one genuinely new capability. OpenAI put a calendar on the end of custom GPTs: new ones can no longer be created after September 25, and the ones you have stop running on December 11 — plugins are the replacement. Google's Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking reached general availability for real-time audio-to-audio work, and Gemini Code Assist quietly stopped being included in new or renewed Gemini Enterprise Standard and Plus subscriptions. Anthropic added on-demand conversation compaction to the Messages API, so you decide when a conversation gets summarised rather than waiting for a context limit, and a Salesforce plugin with 37 pre-built skills. GitHub Copilot's auto model selection gained three cost-and-quality tiers, and budget increase requests went GA so a developer who exhausts their credits can ask for more instead of being locked out.
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