Writer Slashes AI Agent Costs by 52% with Palmyra X6 Model and Upgraded Harness

Writer introduces new AI model and upgraded harness to contain token costs

Across the AI industry, users are becoming more conscious of just how expensive their deployments can be -- and feeling a new urgency to cut costs. But while open-source models offer significantly lower per-token costs, it can be difficult to find the right model for a given job. On Thursday, Writer, which offers AI tools and agents for marketers, launched a new flagship model called Palmyra X6, aimed at solving that problem for its users. Built as a post-training variation on Z.ai's open source model GLM-5.2, Writer says the new system should provide deployment-ready capabilities at a much lower price. The company estimates the new model, combined with changes to the companies harness infrastructure, will cut costs for its customers by as much as 50 percent for basic tasks. Together with the new model, the company also released significant upgrades to its standard agentic harness. Both features will be available to Writer clients starting Thursday. "I think the enterprise is absolutely sick of chasing the next benchmark," CEO May Habib told TechCrunch. "They want flattening cost, and it seems like nobody can deliver that." The new approach puts particular emphasis on complex, multi-step tasks, executed faster and with fewer tokens. And Writer sees harness optimization as a crucial lever towards making that happen. A recent paper from Writer researchers lends credence to this approach, testing small changes in harness efficiency across multiple different models. The research found that, in many cases, changes in the harness were a more reliable way to reduce costs than model choice, with costs falling an average of 40% across their testing. "The harness is the one component whose efficiency multiplies across every model an organization runs -- present and future," the researchers wrote. For Writer's clients, the experience is still model-agnostic: Palmyra X6 will sit alongside other Writer models or outside models imported through Azure or Amazon Bedrock. But Habib also sees the push to cut costs as driving a broader distrust towards major AI labs, who have a financial incentive to drive up token use. "The cost explosion here is just unprecedented for customers, and so is the degree to which CIOs are giving up on the labs," Habib told TechCrunch, adding that the AI labs "don't deeply understand right how to help an enterprise get benefit from AI."

Writer bets on cheaper AI agents with Palmyra X6 and a leaner harness

The enterprise AI firm says its new flagship model and a smarter orchestration layer can cut token costs by up to half, and it is not shy about blaming the big labs for the bills. Writer, the enterprise AI company, has launched Palmyra X6, its new flagship model, alongside an upgraded "harness" built to do something the industry has been curiously reluctant to promise: spend fewer tokens. The model is a post-training variation on Z.ai's open-source GLM-5.2, and it is available to Writer's clients from today. The pitch arrives at a nervy moment. As agentic AI quietly multiplies the steps, and therefore the tokens, behind every task, enterprise bills have started to sting. Writer is wagering that a cost backlash has arrived, and it is far from alone in scenting the opportunity, with Baseten raising $1.5bn on the theory that AI's profits lie in cheap inference. A harness, in Writer's telling, is the orchestration layer wrapped around a model, the machinery that decides how a multi-step agent actually executes each request. Optimise that layer, trimming the redundant calls and bloated context that agents tend to accumulate, and you cut token consumption without ever touching the model itself. The savings, Writer says, are substantial. The company estimates that the new model and harness together cut costs by as much as 50% for basic tasks, while a Writer research paper found that harness-efficiency changes alone trimmed costs by roughly 40% on average across testing. What makes the harness interesting is that it is model-agnostic. It works with Writer's own models, but also with external ones served through Microsoft Azure and Amazon Bedrock, so the efficiency gains are not locked to a single vendor's roadmap. "The harness is the one component whose efficiency multiplies across every model an organization runs, present and future," Writer's researchers write, framing orchestration rather than raw model quality as the lever enterprises have been ignoring. It is also a pointed one. Writer's underlying claim is that the big labs have little incentive to help you spend less, because their revenue rises with every token you burn. Distrust of that arrangement is doing a lot of work in the company's messaging. CEO May Habib put it bluntly. "The enterprise is absolutely sick of chasing the next benchmark," she said. "They want flattening cost." It is a neat inversion of the usual sales script, in which each new model is faster, cleverer and, invariably, hungrier. A wider thrift-maxxing trend, in which buyers reach for cheaper Chinese models, has already started to unsettle the valuations underpinning eventual OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, a sign that price sensitivity is no longer a fringe concern. Building the flagship on GLM-5.2 is telling in its own right. Rather than train a frontier model from scratch, Writer took a capable open-source base and specialised it through post-training, a route that keeps costs down and neatly matches the frugal story it is selling. For European buyers, the framing should feel familiar. Scepticism about American hyperscalers' incentives, and a preference for architectures that are not hostage to one provider, has been a running theme on this side of the Atlantic, and Writer is pitching straight into it. There are caveats worth keeping in mind. Efficiency figures produced by a vendor about its own product deserve the usual pinch of salt, and "up to" 50% is not the same as a guaranteed 50%, but the direction of travel is hard to dispute. The deeper shift is what Writer calls harness engineering: the discipline of spending fewer tokens per task rather than chasing another point on a leaderboard. If it takes hold, and the incentives increasingly suggest it will, the era of the ever-hungrier model may finally be meeting its budget.

Writer says its new Palmyra X6 model cuts AI agent costs by 52% as token spending surges

Writer, the enterprise AI agent platform used by Fortune 500 companies including Accenture, Uber, and Vanguard, released its new flagship model Palmyra X6 today, alongside a rebuilt agent orchestration "harness" and new governance tools designed to give IT leaders control over runaway token spending. The headline numbers are striking: Writer says its agent product now operates at an average 52% lower cost, with a 48% improvement in speed and a 10% improvement in quality when paired with Palmyra X6. But the more consequential story may be how the company got there -- and what its choices reveal about where the enterprise AI market is heading. Palmyra X6 is not trained from scratch. It is a post-trained version of GLM-5.2, the open-weight mixture-of-experts model from Beijing-based Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI -- a fact Writer discloses openly in its technical report, and one that places the San Francisco company at the center of one of the industry's most charged debates: whether American enterprises should build on Chinese open-source foundations. "This model is in no way, shape, or form connected to any of its original developers. It is fully run on our U.S. infrastructure," Matan-Paul Shetrit, Writer's director of product management, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the announcement. Dan Bikel, who leads Writer's AI research, put it more bluntly: "It's very much a Palmyra model, and we just happen to grab the floating point numbers as the starting point, and train from there." Why AI agents are blowing up enterprise budgets in ways chatbots never did Writer's announcement lands at a moment when the economics of agentic AI have moved to the center of enterprise buying decisions. Unlike a chatbot, which typically generates one answer per user request, an AI agent turns a single request into repeated rounds of planning, retrieval, tool calls, validation, and retries -- with every loop consuming metered tokens. The user sees one answer; the invoice reflects the entire loop. The scale of the problem is becoming clear. Goldman Sachs forecasts that token consumption will multiply 24 times between 2026 and 2030, reaching 120 quadrillion tokens per month, driven not by more people asking questions but by always-on enterprise agents. The same analysis warned that falling per-token prices do not guarantee falling bills: if an agentic task draws 20 times more tokens while unit prices fall 75%, total charges still rise fivefold. "The enterprise wants token consumption to explode -- it means adoption is happening -- but they need costs to flatten," said Waseem AlShikh, Writer's CTO and co-founder, in a statement. Shetrit framed the cost problem as the primary obstacle to enterprise AI adoption -- more so than model capability itself. "The biggest barrier today to enterprise expansion using AI is actually not model capabilities in most cases; it's actually the cost around them," he said. "The reality today is, in most cases, the alternative for AI is not another AI, it is human labor." Asked whether cutting customers' token consumption would cannibalize Writer's own per-token revenue, Shetrit rejected the premise. "Reducing the cost is not hurting my bottom line. It's actually expanding it, because it's expanding the TAM of opportunity within an organization," he said, arguing that lower per-task costs unlock workflows enterprises would otherwise never automate. That argument echoes a pattern familiar from the cloud era, where unit prices fell for a decade while total bills rose as consumption expanded -- a dynamic Writer is explicitly betting will repeat with agents, and betting it can profit from. Inside Palmyra X6: how 626 training examples fine-tuned a 744-billion-parameter model Palmyra X6 is a 744-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with roughly 40 billion active parameters per token, inheriting GLM-5.2's architecture unchanged, according to Writer's technical report. The company's contribution is a deliberately conservative post-training recipe: a technique called anchored supervised fine-tuning (ASFT), applied to a remarkably small corpus of just 626 curated synthetic agentic trajectories, trained for a single epoch at a low learning rate. The tiny dataset is the point, not a limitation. ASFT pairs a token-weighting scheme with a KL-divergence "anchor" that penalizes the fine-tuned model for drifting too far from a frozen copy of the base model -- teaching new tool-use behaviors without eroding the general capabilities the base already has. Writer also swapped the standard Adam optimizer for Muon, a newer method that treats weight matrices as geometric objects, on the model's core weight matrices. "There's a whole string of papers following a quote-unquote 'less is more'" philosophy, Bikel said, referencing research showing that "small, extremely high quality data sets go a really long way." He added: "That's the philosophy -- one of the philosophies -- that we followed when building this model, and it showed. It allowed us to optimize for our customers at lower cost to do the work of optimization, and that ultimately yielded a lower cost model for us and for them." The training data itself is fully synthetic -- every plan, tool call, and final answer machine-generated by teacher models, then filtered through structural quality gates, a model-based verifier, and a two-model LLM judging panel before entering training. That continues a long-standing Writer practice: the company's Palmyra X 004 was trained almost entirely on synthetic data for roughly $700,000 back in 2024, as TechCrunch reporte at the time, and Palmyra X5 required about $1 million in GPU hours, according to SiliconANGLE. On Writer's internal evaluations -- nine capabilities spanning grounding and retrieval, tool use, content generation, sub-agent delegation, and brand voice -- X6 scored an average of 0.87 out of 1.00, edging out Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 (0.86), Claude Sonnet 4.6 (0.85), OpenAI's GPT-5.5 (0.80), and Google's Gemini 3.1 (0.77). The price gap is the real differentiator: Writer prices X6 at $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens, versus 15/75 for Opus 4.8. The company says X6 completes tasks in 26 seconds on average and can work unattended toward a single goal for up to eight hours. Writer is candid that internal benchmarks invite skepticism. Asked directly whether the company would publish its methodology after grading its own homework, Bikel said the technical report covers "both the protocol we used to do our public benchmarking as well as our internal evaluations." He described public benchmarks as sanity checks rather than targets: "We do things like public benchmarks to let us know that we're climbing the right hill and that we don't have any sort of huge gaps, but we don't slavishly follow them either, because that's not really serving our customers." The China question: what building on GLM-5.2 means for enterprise security and trust Writer's choice of base model would have been unthinkable for an American enterprise vendor two years ago. Today it reflects a market reality: GLM-5.2, released in June under the permissive MIT license, is arguably the most capable openly available model in the world. Independent analysis house Artificial Analysis scored it at 51 on its Intelligence Index -- ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K2.6, and even some of Google's Gemini models on agentic tasks -- while undercutting U.S. flagship API pricing many times over, as European tech outlet Trending Topics reported. Writer's press release calls it "the strongest available open-weight model." The open-weight surge carries genuine baggage. An August report from AI safety nonprofit SaferAI found that GLM-5.2 refused none of the offensive cyber or biology tasks it was given via Z.ai's public API, and that Z.ai published no safety framework or pre-deployment risk assessment -- a gap that widens once anyone can download and modify the weights. Writer's answer is that provenance and post-training matter more than origin. Bikel emphasized that the company "grabbed the weights off of the U.S. Hugging Face" and trained entirely on American infrastructure; the technical report states all datasets were synthesized and stored in the U.S., and all training hardware was located in the U.S. The company also ran what it describes as an unusually rigorous, pre-registered model-risk evaluation covering political bias, censorship, factuality, and refusal behavior -- 19,674 evaluated responses scored by blinded judges -- comparing X6 against its GLM-5.2 base and four frontier control models. On the Washington Post's ModelSlant political-bias evaluation, Writer says X6 presented both sides of hot-button questions 80% of the time, the highest rate of any model tested, and answered politically sensitive prompts that DeepSeek V4 refused outright. On the FORTRESS adversarial safety benchmark, X6 with its deployment system message scored 8.6 points higher on adversarial safety than the raw GLM-5.2 base, at negligible cost to benign helpfulness. "We've run extensive benchmarking around bias, around censorship," Shetrit said, "and the work Dan and the team has done has actually proven that this model is actually significantly better than not just open source alternatives, but any closed source alternative in the market at the time of the benchmarking." The report does hedge in one notable place: while English-language behavior showed no statistically robust political asymmetry, "the behavior was shown to vary by language" -- a candid admission that 626 fine-tuning trajectories do not scrub every trace of a base model's training. The harness effect: why orchestration may matter more than the model itself Perhaps the most strategically interesting claim in Writer's announcement has nothing to do with Palmyra X6 at all. The company says its rebuilt Writer Agent harness -- the orchestration layer that plans tasks, batches work, delegates to sub-agents, and manages context -- cuts costs by 41% and completes tasks 44% faster across every model it tested, including third-party models from Anthropic and OpenAI, while maintaining quality. Writer published the finding in an accompanying research paper on what it calls "The Harness Effect." That raises an obvious question, which VentureBeat put to the company: if the harness alone delivers most of the savings on any model, why build a model at all? Shetrit's answer was about control. "I cannot control if a lab deprecates their model. I cannot control what data they use in their model," he said. "Where when I build the model, I have significant moral control, and I can answer the tough questions that enterprise customers ask me." Bikel added that the model and harness were developed together: "This model was built and essentially co-evolved with the harness... We know that we have a flagship product, Writer Agent. We want that to work really, really well with this model, and sure enough, it does. And we take that into account during model development, and that's something that is not possible if you don't build your own model." Notably, Writer is simultaneously hedging. With this release, the company extends multi-model support to Writer Agent, letting admins enable models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and cloud providers including Microsoft Azure, AWS Bedrock, and Nvidia NIM -- even image-generation models, a category Writer does not build. The message to CIOs is disarmingly simple: use our model because it is cheapest and best for your workflows, but the platform saves you money either way. New governance tools aim to end surprise AI bills before they start The third leg of the release targets a quieter enterprise pain point: nobody in the C-suite knows what the agents are spending. New governance tools give administrators a centralized view of agent usage across the business, per-workflow analytics for the company's shareable "Playbooks" and "Skills" automations, and consumption controls with alerts and spending limits. Asked whether the introduction of spending controls implied that customers had been receiving surprise bills, Shetrit reframed it as an adoption enabler rather than damage control. "How do we build the tools to allow you as the CIO, CISO in a company, to feel comfortable both on the security and spend, so you can expand AI usage in your organization," he said. In his telling, visibility is what lets leaders say yes: businesses with clear cost data "are actually looking to expand AI adoption to use cases that they would never have touched before." The feature set tracks a broader shift in how enterprises budget for AI. As Forbes analysis of the token price wars argued, sophisticated buyers are learning to model cost per successful task -- counting retries, tool calls, and escalations -- rather than multiplying expected calls by the advertised rate card. Writer is effectively productizing that discipline, turning what has been a finance-team spreadsheet exercise into a native platform capability. It also completes a governance arc the company has been building for over a year. Writer shipped its unified agent experience with admin controls last November, then added agent Skills and workflow analytics in March, according to earlier company announcements. Thursday's release closes the loop by attaching a price tag -- and a spending limit -- to every workflow. Writer, founded in 2020 by May Habib and Waseem AlShikh, raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation in late 2024, and has built its business on regulated, high-stakes deployments rather than consumer scale. Shetrit made no apology for the narrowness of that focus. "The privilege of working and focusing on enterprise use cases is that I don't need my model to be able to write a French sonnet," he said. "When you don't try to do everything, you can focus on your customer problem and needs." He was equally direct about identity: "We are not a research lab converted to a consumer product now dabbling in enterprise. We are first and foremost an enterprise company that serves enterprise customers, and we evaluate our decisions within that lens. Which means, if we think building things from scratch is the right decision, that's what we will do. But if we think there are other alternatives out there in the market that serve our customers better, that's what we will do." That pragmatism may be the release's most important signal. A well-capitalized American AI company with five years of model-building experience has concluded that the frontier of value no longer lies in pretraining, but in the last mile: post-training open weights, engineering the harness around them, and handing the CFO a dashboard. If Writer is right, the frontier labs' moat narrows to the workloads where quality genuinely justifies a sevenfold price premium -- and for everything else, the winning model is the one somebody else paid to pretrain. In an industry that has spent three years arguing about whose model is smartest, Writer is making a different wager: the enterprise AI race won't be won by the company with the best floating point numbers, but by the one that knows what to do with them.

Writer launches major agentic AI improvements with Palmyra X6 flagship model

Generative artificial intelligence startup Writer Inc. today announced the release of its next-generation flagship model, Palmyra X6, designed to deliver frontier-level performance for marketing and revenue teams while keeping costs in check. The company said it also brought major upgrades to its AI agent platform that enable complex, multistep workflows for cost efficiency and long-task capabilities for customers at large scale. Together, these upgrades allow users to scale agents and worry less about the economics at play. To cite some statistics provided by Writer, the company said its Agent platform now operates at an average of 52% lower cost, with a 48% improvement in speed and a 10% improvement in quality when paired with Palmyra X6. "The enterprise wants token consumption to explode -- it means adoption is happening -- but they need costs to flatten," said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Waseem AlShikh. X6 is an upgrade over Writer's previous flagship model X5, released in April 2025. The company said it developed the new model to address the specific demands of enterprise work by curating capabilities that work with content generation, sub-agent delegation and brand voice. The model was post-trained on top of GLM 5.2, a leading open-source flagship mixture-of-experts large language model developed by Z.ai Co. Ltd. On evaluation, X6 scored an average of 0.87 across nine evaluations at $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens, ahead of Claude Opus 4.8 (0.86 at $3/$15), GPT-5.5 (0.80 at $5/$15) and Gemini 3.1 (0.77 at $2.50/$10). The company added that the model is the least politically biased model Writer evaluated, which is important for marketing and revenue teams to reach audiences and produce neutral content that can be customized easily to brand guidelines. The model completes tasks in 26 seconds on average, produces 82 tokens per second and can work unattended toward a long-term goal for up to eight hours. This means it can sustain coherent reasoning across long, multistage objectives without drifting off task for long periods without human intervention. The company said it launched a major upgrade to reporting and governance on the backend of its agentic controls, providing administrators a clear view of activity across teams. Employees can now build and share Playbooks and Skills. These are repeatable agent workflows and instructions that allow a dashboard to surface the most common use cases. This provides a centralized view in Writer Agent of how it's being used across the business, easily filtering and comparing over periods so admins can understand adoption, performance and spend. A dedicated analytics and governance section exists for Playbooks and Skills, allowing admins to see usage data, manage status and ownership. They can also monitor performance and costs for individual tasks or skill levels. Consumption levels and alert limits can also be set to specific thresholds to help leadership control and manage spend across teams.

Writer Unveils Palmyra X6 with Faster AI Agents and Lower Token Costs

The model and platform updates became available to Writer customers on Thursday. Writer says the combined system lowers average costs while improving speed and task quality. developed Palmyra X6 through post-training work on Z.ai's open-source GLM-5.2 model. GLM-5.2 uses a mixture-of-experts structure that activates selected parts of the model for each request. The company designed X6 for content creation, brand voice controls, sub-agent delegation and long workflows. Writer charges $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens. It says basic enterprise tasks could cost up to 50% less under the new setup. Chief Executive May Habib said companies now care more about practical costs than benchmark results. "I think the enterprise is absolutely sick of chasing the next benchmark," she said. "They want flattening cost, and it seems like nobody can deliver that." Meanwhile, Writer reports that X6 scored an average of 0.87 across nine internal evaluations. The company compared this result with Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1. Those models scored 0.86, 0.80 and 0.77, respectively.