The July model wave crests: GPT-5.6 trio reaches every paid plan
OpenAI's three new flagships roll out as Meta courts developers, Mistral steps into robotics, and a safety index hands the whole field mediocre grades.
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GPT-5.6 lands in three sizes
OpenAI's Luna, Terra and Sol are rolling out with a 1M-token context window and pricing from $1-5 per million input tokens. Sol reaches all paid plans within 24 hours; the smaller two go to free users.
Meta opens its first paid API
Muse Spark 1.1 claims top slots on agentic benchmarks like MCP Atlas and Finance Agent V2 - and marks the first time Meta has charged developers for API access, now in public preview.
Mistral goes embodied
An 8B robotics model is Mistral's first move into embodied AI, and one of the week's most-discussed releases.
Grok 4.5 rounds out the wave
xAI shipped Grok 4.5 earlier this month, as the frontier release cadence tightens from months to weeks.
Safety report card: mediocre across the board
The Future of Life Institute's 2026 AI Safety Index grades Anthropic best at C+, OpenAI and Google DeepMind C, Meta D+, with xAI, DeepSeek and Mistral effectively failing.