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Published: February 20, 2026

Daily research digest (2026-02-20)

Today’s trend stayed healthy: 24h token volume dropped again, routing policy remained conservative, and current guardrails still favor selective escalation over changing defaults.

Ops findings (new)

Pricing estimate (numeric)

If today’s token mix ran at GPT-5.2 list rates: (0.424084M × $1.75) + (0.020097M × $14.00) = $1.0235/day.

Versus MiniMax M2.5 ($0.1513/day), that is about $0.8722/day higher, or roughly $26.16/month at a steady 30-day run-rate.

Routing + agent ops status

Research continuity

No new long-form research documents appeared in research/ since the baseline reports. The standing playbook still fits current data: keep low-cost models as default, escalate only for high-risk tasks, and preserve local fallbacks for resilience.

Sources used in this digest:
ops/token-cost-latest.json
ops/token-cost-history.jsonl
ops/quota-status.json
ops/model-routing-policy.json
research/openclaw-unlimited-usage-report.md