The 252nd episode of Last Week in AI, recorded on July 11, 2026, summarizes major developments in the artificial intelligence industry from the previous week.
- OpenAI publicly released GPT-5.6 (including Sol and Luna) and rebranded its desktop coding product as ChatGPT Work, amid concerns about jailbreakability and disputed claims regarding US government oversight.
- SpaceX AI launched Grok 4.5 as a low-cost, Opus-class coding model with minimal safety documentation, intensifying pricing competition.
- Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 with aggressive pricing and benchmark gains, while previewing Muse Video and Image before backtracking on the latter due to backlash over generating images of public Instagram accounts.
- Chinese open-source models captured over 30% of weekly OpenRouter tokens as cost pressures increased, alongside discussions of insider threat risks.
- Infrastructure and policy updates included Meta exploring selling AI compute as a cloud business, US energy regulators pressuring grid operators on data-center connections, and Anthropic publishing a "global workspace" interpretability method.
- The episode also discussed potential Chinese restrictions on overseas access to top models and the AI 2040 proposal for US-China coordination to slow progress until alignment improves.