I don't believe anything out of these startups anymore unless its backed by evidence.

Too expensive? Why would anthropic train a model too expensive to run? I doubt they would. Let's look at the evidence: Opus 4.5 came in at double the speed and half the price of old opus. Its speed matched older sonnet models. Higher Speed + Lower price = smaller model. So they rebranded sonnet sized models to opus. Where is the og opus sized model?