Friday, 10 July 2026
Fidji Simo leaves OpenAI No. 2 post
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Fidji Simo, OpenAI's second-ranking executive, stepped down July 9 citing a POTS relapse. Duties split among Brockman, Friar, and Kwon.
GPT-5.6 is now the M365 Copilot model
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OpenAI designated GPT-5.6 as the preferred model for Microsoft 365 Copilot on July 9, countering Microsoft's MAI hedging reports.
Gradium raises $100M for voice AI
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Nvidia-backed Gradium, spun from Kyutai in Paris, raised $100M seed on July 9 to build ultra-low latency audio for AI agents. Renault is an early customer.
Grok 4.5 tops SWE Marathon at $2/$6
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xAI released Grok 4.5 on July 8 at $2/$6 per million tokens. It scores 29% on SWE Marathon, first among public models, and is live in Cursor and the xAI API.
Lyzr raises $100M, agent ran the round
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Enterprise AI agent startup Lyzr closed a $100M Series B at roughly $500M valuation on July 9. SivaClaw, their agent, fielded all 130 investor questions.
Mercor buys Deeptune for agent training
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Mercor, at $2B ARR, acquired a16z-backed Deeptune on July 9 to pair its expert network with Deeptune's enterprise software simulators for AI agent training.
Meta opens Model API with Muse Spark 1.1
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Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9 with a 1M-token context at $1.25/$4.25 per million tokens, and opened the Meta Model API to US developers.
OpenAI kills Atlas browser, pivots
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OpenAI is sunsetting Atlas, its October 2025 AI browser, moving capabilities to a ChatGPT Chrome extension, desktop app, and cloud agent browser.
Anthropic asks the public for hard AI questions
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Anthropic launched an 'Inviting hard questions' initiative on July 9, asking the public to submit their hardest questions about AI and committing to respond.
Deutsche Telekom rewires telecom with OpenAI
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OpenAI published a July 10 case study on Deutsche Telekom deploying ChatGPT Enterprise to 200,000 employees across network operations and customer care.
Google will disclose AI-made ads
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Google is rolling out AI disclosure labels for ads, visible in My Ad Center across Search, YouTube, and Discover. Announced July 9.
Meta MTIA chips go into production in Sept
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Meta's MTIA chip will enter TSMC production in September 2026, designed by Broadcom to reduce Meta's reliance on Nvidia and AMD for AI training and inference.
OpenAI raises bio bounty to $50K
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OpenAI expanded its GPT-5.5 biosecurity bug bounty on July 9, raising the top prize for a universal biosafety jailbreak to $50,000.