Apple filed suit against OpenAI in Northern California federal court, alleging systematic theft of trade secrets to build OpenAI's own consumer hardware. The complaint centers on OpenAI hardware chief Tang Tan, a former Apple VP, and engineer Chang Liu, who allegedly kept an Apple laptop with confidential technical documents after joining OpenAI.
Why it matters
It marks a sharp break between two companies that struck a high-profile AI partnership in 2024, and raises the stakes of OpenAI's hardware push following its $6.4 billion acquisition of Jony Ive's IO Products.
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RELEASE
OpenAI takes GPT-5.6 family to general availability
OpenAI opened GPT-5.6 — sold as three tiers, Sol, Terra and Luna — to the public on July 9 after the Trump administration lifted access limits from its late-June preview. Sol is OpenAI's strongest model yet, while Terra and Luna target cheaper everyday use.
Meta ships its first paid AI model, Muse Spark 1.1
Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9, a multimodal reasoning model with a self-managed 1-million-token context window and native agent orchestration support. It's priced at $1.25/$4.25 per million tokens, Meta's first model sold commercially rather than given away.
xAI made Grok 4.5 public on July 8, positioning it as a cheap, Cursor-trained coding model priced at $2/$6 per million tokens. The release pushes xAI further into the crowded developer-tooling market.
Federal Reserve taps Marc Andreessen to co-lead AI jobs task force
The Fed appointed a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen to co-lead a new task force studying AI's impact on jobs, productivity and monetary policy. It's a notable step by a central bank to formally track AI's macroeconomic effects.
Together AI closes $800 million round at $8.3 billion valuation
Together AI raised an $800 million Series C for its platform that lets enterprises train and run AI on open-source models. The round lands as global startup funding hit a record $510 billion in H1 2026, with AI infrastructure a major driver.
