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AI's Impact? CEOs Say "No" as Costs Plummet

Anthropic's release of Claude Sonnet 4.6, a new AI model, and SurrealDB's launch of version 3.0 of its namesake database, alongside a $23 million Series A extension, marked significant developments in the tech world on Tuesday, February 17, 2026. Simultaneously, concerns about the impact of AI on productivity and employment were raised, echoing a decades-old economic paradox.

Claude Sonnet 4.6, according to VentureBeat, delivers near-flagship intelligence at a mid-tier cost, representing a "seismic repricing event" for the AI industry. The model offers a full upgrade across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design, featuring a 1M token context window in beta. The pricing remains steady at $315 per million tokens, the same as its predecessor, Sonnet 4.5. This pricing is particularly noteworthy, as Anthropic's flagship Opus models cost $1,575 per million tokens. The model is now the default in claude.ai and Claude Cowork.

In a separate development, SurrealDB launched version 3.0 of its namesake database, alongside a $23 million Series A extension, bringing total funding to $44 million, as reported by VentureBeat. The database aims to simplify the complex process of building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems for AI agents. These systems often involve multiple layers and technologies for structured data, vectors, and graph information. The complexity and synchronization of different data layers can lead to performance and accuracy issues, a challenge SurrealDB is attempting to solve.

Meanwhile, the impact of AI on employment and productivity continues to be debated. According to Hacker News, thousands of CEOs admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity. This observation has led economists to revisit the "Solow's productivity paradox," which emerged in the 1980s. Nobel laureate Robert Solow noted that despite the advent of transformative technologies like microprocessors, productivity growth slowed. Newfangled computers were at times producing too much information, generating agonizingly detailed reports and printing them on reams of paper, according to the source.

In other news, MIT Technology Review reported on two separate stories. One detailed the rise of luxury car theft, where criminals use email phishing and fraudulent paperwork to steal vehicles. The other focused on a cybersecurity researcher, Allison Nixon, who received death threats from anonymous hackers.

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Synthesized from multiple sources. Reviewed for accuracy.

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