#product-launch

ByteDance released Doubao 2.0 ahead of Lunar New Year, claiming GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro parity with 98.3 on AIME 2025, a 3020 Codeforces rating, and pricing 10x cheaper than Western rivals.

xAI released Grok 4.20 as a public beta on February 17, introducing a continuous post-deployment learning architecture that updates the model weekly from user feedback. The release also adds a four-agent collaboration system and medical document analysis via photo upload.

ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 accepts text, images, video clips, and audio simultaneously to generate up to 20-second 1080p video, drawing immediate copyright cease-and-desist letters from Disney and Paramount within days of launch.

Anthropic released Claude Code Security on February 20, a research preview that uses Claude Opus 4.6 to reason about codebases like a human security researcher, finding over 500 previously undetected vulnerabilities in production open-source projects. The launch sent cybersecurity stocks tumbling up to 9%.

Unitree, MagicLab, Noetix, and Galbot showcased humanoid robots performing martial arts, flips, and parkour at China's 2026 Spring Festival Gala on February 17, marking dramatic progress from 2025.

Alibaba launched Qwen 3.5 on February 16 under Apache 2.0, featuring 397B parameters with a sparse MoE architecture (17B active), 256K context, and native multimodal capabilities matching leading US proprietary models on key benchmarks.

Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 4.6 on February 17, offering major upgrades in coding, computer use, and agent planning—now the default model for Free and Pro users at the same $3/$15 per million tokens pricing.