FrontierThe story, in brief
Xiaomi's affordable flagship AI leads the open models, and Anthropic says Claude helped get it there
Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6-Pro tops open models at $2.62M training cost. Anthropic says Claude's training data got siphoned in the process.
The KeyNews take
Why it matters
A new open-weight model has broken into the frontier-capability tier at a fraction of expected cost, but the achievement rests on contested training practices — raising questions about data sourcing and whether open models can compete on performance without relying on proprietary model distillation.
The key facts
5 to knowMiMo-V2.6-Pro ranks first among openly available AI models
Training cost: $2.62 million via reinforcement learning
Significant price undercut vs. competitors
Anthropic alleges Claude training data was used without permission
Lab-race drama: capability claims shadowed by training-data accusations
Go to the source
The Decoderthe-decoder.com
Publisher excerpt: With MiMo-V2.6-Pro, Xiaomi moves to the top of the openly available AI models and drastically undercuts the competition on price. What makes that possible is massive reinforcement learning that cost $2.62 million. But the success comes with a catch: Anthropic accuses the company of siphoning off…