#deployment

OpenAI launched GPT-Live, a full-duplex voice model backed by GPT-5.5 reasoning, while xAI's Grok 4.5 topped SaaS automation benchmarks at one-quarter the cost of rivals. OpenAI also retracted its recommendation of SWE-Bench Pro after auditing found 30% of its tasks broken. Prime Intellect raised $130M to bring frontier reinforcement learning infrastructure to any company. In pharma, AstraZeneca and Ionis reported a major trial failure in a competitive heart disease market, the White House reviewed FDA commissioner finalists, and RFK Jr. moved to create a formal list of Covid vaccine injuries. The NY Fed found tariff cost pass-through to consumers is still in the pipeline.

Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 shipped on June 30 and Fable 5 returned globally on July 1 after the Department of Commerce lifted export controls that had restricted access for 19 days. Cloudflare declared a second Content Independence Day, launching a Monetization Gateway that lets site owners charge AI agents for any resource via stablecoin settlement over the x402 protocol, and released new granular controls to distinguish search bots from training bots. The FDA granted a historic clearance to an LLM-based diabetes management app, prompting debate about whether the model is an interface or a clinical decision-maker. Biotech stocks have now rallied for 15 consecutive months. The U.S. Department of Transportation proposed the first update to supersonic flight rules since the 1970s, opening the door to civilian supersonic travel.

OpenAI quietly launched GPT-5.6 in three tiers (Sol, Terra, Luna) restricted to trusted partners, while Semgrep reported that GLM 5.2 outperforms Claude on its internal cybersecurity benchmarks. Portugal's National Health Service contracted Sword Health to deliver AI-assisted physical therapy nationwide, the first country-scale deployment of its kind. Edison Scientific and Population Health Partners announced a deal to use AI agents for end-to-end drug discovery. Patrick Boyle assessed Brexit's 10-year economic toll, and Noah Smith examined whether AI will push companies toward more or less outsourcing.

AbbVie agreed to acquire Apogee Therapeutics for nearly $11 billion, the latest in a pharma M&A wave that has totaled $123 billion in 2026 deals so far. Definium's LSD therapy met its primary endpoint in a Phase 3 trial for major depression, and the FDA reversed a four-month-old rejection of Regenxbio's gene therapy for Hunter syndrome. In AI, Samsung deployed ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to employees worldwide in one of OpenAI's largest enterprise rollouts, while Nathan Lambert and Kevin Xu argued that banning open-source AI would damage US interests. Patrick Boyle examined how SpaceX humiliated Wall Street and Cuba announced its most sweeping economic reforms in decades, including private banking and the end of fuel subsidies.

An OpenAI reasoning model disproved an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture in discrete geometry for under $1,000 in compute, a result mathematicians are calling one of the most significant AI contributions to pure math to date. Eli Lilly's retatrutide, a triple-receptor obesity drug, produced bariatric-surgery-level weight loss in a Phase 3 trial, though dropout rates from side effects were notable. Google shipped Gemini 3.5 Flash to general availability at Google I/O and announced a $100 AI Ultra subscription tier. The acting head of NIH's infectious disease institute stepped down as senators pressed NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya on leadership gaps and a proposed 2027 budget cut. Kevin Warsh was confirmed and sworn in as the new Federal Reserve chair this week.