This is the first of what I plan to make a monthly note on AI for people who would rather use it than follow it. Each one has something I wrote and a few things from my reading that are worth your time. I read a lot of AI newsletters so you can read one short one.
This month’s piece
Which AI should you use? What I’d tell a small business in 2026. The short version: pay $20 a month for Claude or ChatGPT and hand its agent mode one real task you do every week. The piece covers how to choose between the two, what prices did in September, and three cautions before you connect your email to anything.
Worth your time
Put a hard cap on AI spending. Simon Willison argues that any pay-as-you-go service should shut off at a limit you set, not just send a warning email. Agents can spin up paid services while you sleep, and most of us would rather see an error than a surprise $10,000 bill. AWS and Google Cloud have both started offering hard limits. Read his post.
The free tiers are not equal. Also from Willison: Claude’s free tier now runs Sonnet 5.5, a recent mid-size model, while ChatGPT’s free tier uses a smaller one. If your only experience is free ChatGPT, try free Claude before you decide AI isn’t worth paying for.
The price war, in one page. On September 22, Anthropic and OpenAI released new models within an hour of each other, and both led with lower prices. Latent Space’s AINews recap is long, but the first few sections explain what actually got cheaper and what didn’t.
A two-minute daily scan. If you want one AI newsletter and not five, TLDR AI is the quickest way to see what launched each day.
In Springfield
The Springfield Tech Council’s October Learning Over Lunch is “The Future is Headless: A Practical Guide to AI-Powered Work with Claude.” It covers what tools like Claude Cowork do across writing, research, documents and automation, and how to connect them securely. Thursday, October 15, 11:30am to 1pm, at the efactory, 405 N. Jefferson. Free for members, $25 for non-members.
That’s it for this month. If there’s an AI question you’d like me to take on next, reply to this email and tell me.
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