July 25, 2026 · Friday

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5

A thoughtful and proactive model approaching Fable 5-level intelligence at half the price, with immediate availability across the developer ecosystem.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, its most advanced model to date. Described as thoughtful and proactive, the model approaches Fable 5-level intelligence at half the cost. Within hours of launch, Opus 5 was live on the Claude Platform, Claude Code, Cursor, Perplexity, and v0, each platform publishing independent evaluations. The benchmark results are striking: a record-breaking 30% on the ARC-AGI-3 abstract reasoning test, CursorBench parity with Fable 5 at half the price with zero data retention compatibility, and WANDR evaluations ranking it second only to Fable 5 while being 57% cheaper. Elon Musk posted a cost-performance chart showing Grok 4.5 and Opus 5 standing alone on the Pareto frontier of intelligence versus efficiency. François Chollet described the ARC-AGI-3 result as an impressive jump in a domain where scaling has historically bought the least. Developers report that Opus 5 excels at complex coding tasks, long-form reasoning, and multi-step agentic workflows. The model also supports images as input and output, with Claude Code benefiting from an 80% reduction in system prompt length thanks to improved instruction following. Anthropic released detailed feature notes alongside the launch, emphasizing improved steerability and refusal handling.


"Grok 4.5 and Opus 5 are alone on the Pareto frontier."

— Elon Musk, sharing a cost-performance benchmark chart

Jensen Huang's first post champions open models

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made his debut post on X, sharing an open letter co-signed by dozens of industry leaders arguing that open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem. The letter drew broad support from Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, Michael Dell, and executives across the industry. Huang's post quickly became one of the most-reshared AI policy statements of the day, signaling growing industry alignment around open-source AI as both a competitive and safety imperative.

AMD unveils MI455X GPU with 432GB HBM4 memory

AMD introduced the MI455X, packing 432GB of HBM4 on a single card — more memory than five H100 GPUs combined. A four-card server configuration can assemble a massive unified VRAM pool suited for training and serving the largest frontier models. The announcement intensifies competition in the AI hardware supply chain, where memory capacity has become the binding constraint for models with trillion-parameter scale and long-context inference workloads.

Ant Group launches Ling-3.0-flash: 124B MoE model

Ling-3.0-flash is a 124B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model that activates only 5.1B parameters per token, using hybrid linear attention to natively support 256K context windows. The model is optimized specifically for production-scale agent systems, offering frontier-level reasoning at dramatically lower inference cost. The vLLM project congratulated the Ling team on the release, noting that hybrid-attention MoE architectures are becoming a key direction for serving large models at scale.


● PRODUCT & INTEGRATION07.25 · FEATURE
INTEGRATION

Grok integrates with Google Workspace

Grok is now available as a plugin embedded directly into Google Sheets, Slides, and Docs, providing AI-assisted writing, analysis, and presentation support.

PRODUCT

ChatGPT Work agents can now log into websites

ChatGPT Work agents can now access sites requiring authentication. Users take over a cloud browser to complete login once, with session persistence across conversations.

INTEGRATION

Cursor integrates Opus 5, matching Fable 5 at half cost

Cursor now supports Opus 5. On CursorBench it scores 66.7 versus Fable 5's 66.5 at default effort, at half the price, with zero data retention.

INTEGRATION

Perplexity adds Opus 5 — only Fable 5 ranks higher

Opus 5 is now on Perplexity. WANDR evaluations show it outperforms all but Fable 5 while being 57% cheaper.

PRODUCT

v0 converts entire Figma files into working apps

v0 Agent takes a single Figma link, explores all pages and frames, and builds the screens as one working application.

PRODUCT

Replit ships mobile app, deployment price cuts, MCP beta

Four major updates: a new mobile app, deployment costs cut 50 to 80 percent, a unified tools pane, and Replit MCP in beta.

ACQUISITION

Midjourney acquires astrology app Co-Star

Co-Star CEO Banu Guler joins Midjourney as Chief Design Officer, overseeing design, product, and front-end teams. The Co-Star app continues independently.

EVALUATION

GPT-5.6 Pro rated smartest model on hard tasks

User evaluations found GPT-5.6 Pro outperforms other models including its own Ultra variant on challenging reasoning tasks.

INTERVIEW

Kaifu Lee on China's AI: Kimi K3, TrueNorth, and Boss AI

In a Bloomberg interview, Kaifu Lee discussed AI technologies emerging from China, including Kimi K3 and 01.AI's TrueNorth enterprise platform with Boss AI and Investor AI products.


Samples from Midjourney V8.2, now the default model, showing the bolder and more creative style.

Midjourney V8.2 released and set as default model

Midjourney released V8.2, making it the default model for all users. The update focuses on improved aesthetics, personalization, and image quality, with a new style described as more creative, bold, and fresh. The personalization system now adapts more accurately to individual user preferences, producing consistently more satisfying results across varied use cases from concept art to product visualization.

Runway Agent's new Workflows feature enables building complex node-based pipelines with natural language.

Runway Agent introduces natural language workflow building

Runway Agent now supports building, running, and editing node-based workflows through natural language. The feature unlocks high-quality outputs at scale by replacing manual pipeline construction with a conversational interface. Users invoke the Workflow skill to describe their desired pipeline, and the agent assembles and executes the corresponding node graph.

Google's ATLAS report provides the first public usage data on Gemini and other AI tools across domains.

Google publishes first Gemini usage report: ATLAS

Google released the inaugural ATLAS report — Activities, Tasks, Applications, Scenarios, and Adoption — sharing real-world usage data for Gemini and other AI tools. A key finding: multimodal AI's utility in manual labor and physical task domains may substantially exceed prior estimates, suggesting adoption patterns are broader than the knowledge-worker focus of early AI products.

Perplexity CLI lets coding agents search the web

The Perplexity CLI is now available, equipping coding agents with direct command-line web search capabilities. Developers can copy a single configuration snippet to enable their agents to retrieve real-time information from the internet during code generation and debugging sessions. The tool is designed to integrate cleanly with existing AI coding workflows, including those powered by Claude Code, Cursor, and other agent platforms.

Ollama pauses new subscriptions amid surging demand for open models

Ollama temporarily paused new Max-tier subscriptions due to surging demand for frontier-level open models like GLM-5.2. The company is adding infrastructure capacity in anticipation of upcoming large model releases and aims to resume sign-ups once the expanded capacity is operational.

Vidu rebuilt its one-click music video feature with four specialized AI pipelines for different styles.

Vidu's one-click MV feature gets full pipeline rebuild

Vidu completely rebuilt its one-click music video feature, introducing four specialized pipelines that replace generic AI video models. The new architecture uses separate stacks for lip-sync vocals, hybrid visual effects, choreographed sequences, and stylistic rendering, aiming to produce consistently higher-quality music videos with genre-specific aesthetics.


● BRIEFS & RESEARCH07.25 · ROUNDUP
INDUSTRY

Sam Altman wants US to lead in both open and closed AI

The OpenAI CEO expressed strong support for the industry-wide open models letter, saying he wants the US to win in both proprietary and open-source AI.

ENGINEERING

Anthropic trims Claude Code system prompt by 80%

The team shared new findings about writing effective system prompts after removing roughly 80% of the Claude Code system prompt for the newest models.

MODELS

Elon Musk: Grok 4.5 excels at real-world work

Musk praised Grok 4.5's practical performance, reinforcing the cost-efficiency claims made in his Pareto frontier chart.

RESEARCH

ChatGPT shows no detectable effect on college grades

A large-scale study found that after controlling for pandemic disruptions, ChatGPT had no detectable impact on grades or course evaluations.

ANALYSIS

Geopolitical landscape of frontier closed and open models

Commentary notes that frontier closed models mostly come from the US while frontier open models mostly come from China, making the open debate inevitably geopolitical.

POLICY

Replit CEO writes to Congress supporting open AI ecosystem

Amjad Masad argued that LLMs benefit from open ecosystems and that openness is the best path for maintaining American competitiveness.

INDUSTRY

Perplexity and NVIDIA co-sign open weights letter

Aravind Srinivas, on behalf of Perplexity, joined NVIDIA and other companies in emphasizing the importance of open weights for competition and innovation.

INFRASTRUCTURE

vLLM releases Attention-FFN disaggregation plugin

The AFD plugin separates Attention and FFN in MoE inference, optimizing compute efficiency for two very different workload types.

RESEARCH

Google releases differentiable 3D head model running on CPU

Google open-sourced gmn, a parametric model that drives real-time facial animation entirely on CPU, with every movement encoded as parameters.

TOOLS

LiteParse image-to-PDF conversion speeds up by 7.2x

LiteParse v2.8.0 switched from ImageMagick to native Rust for image-to-PDF conversion, achieving speedups of 1.2 to 7.2 times depending on image format.

EVENTS

MiniMax launches Intelligence in the Open research series

The first event will be held in San Francisco on July 28, bringing together researchers and builders to discuss groundbreaking work across AI.

PRODUCT

Synthesia launches real-time interactive AI avatars

Users can now roleplay in real time with interactive avatars, useful for practicing presentations and sales pitches.


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