What shipped, when, and why it mattered.

Claude Enterprise gains automatic security scanning of third-party skills and plugins: when someone uploads or edits one, it is checked for malicious content before it can run. Skills and plugins are packaged instructions and tools that extend what Claude can do, and until now nothing inspected them on the way in. In beta on Enterprise plans.

Claude Enterprise organizations can route every governed prompt through a security server they run, which returns an allow or deny verdict before inference begins. A denied request never reaches the model. The hook runs on Anthropic's servers and covers claude.ai, Cowork, and Claude Code, with shadow mode, a rollout percentage, and role exclusions for staged deployment. In beta; not available on Bedrock or Google Cloud.

Anthropic retires Claude Opus 4.1 (`claude-opus-4-1-20250805`). Requests to the model now return an error rather than falling back. Anthropic recommends Claude Opus 5, which sits at the same $5/$25 per million tokens as Opus 4.8. Researchers can request continued access through the External Researcher Access Program.

OpenAI publishes "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science," reporting that an internal version of Astra — its next major model — produced new constructions, counterexamples, and bounds for ten problems that had seen no progress for at least a decade. Each argument is formalized as a machine-checkable Lean proof, published in the openai/ten-proofs repository, so verification does not depend on trusting the model. OpenAI put the token cost of finding all ten at roughly $2,000 at Sol API rates.

Anthropic ships support for the 2026-07-28 revision of the Model Context Protocol across Claude. MCP is the open standard — now governed by the Agentic AI Foundation — that lets Claude connect to external tools and data sources through a common interface rather than a bespoke integration per system. Spec revisions matter to anyone maintaining an MCP server: each one sets the contract that servers and clients agree on, and lagging behind a revision is how connectors quietly stop working.

Anthropic and Cognizant expand their partnership to bring Claude to Cognizant's enterprise client base. It follows the same pattern as the KPMG alliance (May 19) and the Blackstone/Goldman Sachs deployment joint venture (May 4): Anthropic reaching enterprises through systems integrators rather than direct sales alone. For IT leaders evaluating Claude, it increases the odds your existing consulting partner already has a Claude practice.

Claude Opus 5 (`claude-opus-5`) launches as a step-change over Opus 4.8 at unchanged pricing of $5/$25 per million tokens — half the cost of Fable 5, with Anthropic positioning it as close to Fable 5's frontier intelligence. It ships with a 1M token context window as both default and maximum, 128k max output, thinking on by default, and the full effort ladder (`low` through `max`), with effort as the primary control for reasoning depth. The prompt cache minimum drops to 512 tokens. One breaking change: `thinking: {"type": "disabled"}` at `xhigh` or `max` effort now returns a 400. Two behaviours to watch when migrating — `max_tokens` now has to cover thinking tokens, and the model self-verifies unprompted, so verification instructions carried over from older models cause over-verification. Fast mode for Opus 4.7 was removed the same day and now errors rather than falling back.

Claude voice mode moves onto the Opus and Sonnet model families, adds tool actions against connected Gmail and Slack accounts, supports eleven languages, and lets you switch models mid-conversation. Voice moves from a transcription front-end to something that can act on connected systems while you talk.

Anthropic launches four role-based certifications for people who deploy Claude for customers, alongside a voice mode update that lets users think through hard problems by talking rather than typing. The certifications are the first formal credential Anthropic has offered around Claude deployment — relevant to the forward deployed engineer and agent manager roles that consultancies and enterprises are now hiring for, where 'how do I prove I can do this' has had no standard answer.

The legacy Workbench at platform.claude.com/workbench is being sunset, with access ending August 17, 2026. Saved prompts, variables, and evals are not carried over to the replacement Workbench at /playground — you have to export anything you want to keep from the banner or Organizational Settings. The experimental prompt tools APIs retire on the same date: `/v1/experimental/generate_prompt`, `/improve_prompt`, and `/templatize_prompt` will return errors. Anything in your tooling that calls those endpoints needs replacing before mid-August.

Claude Enterprise organisations can now manage people programmatically through the Admin API, in beta: list members, look them up by email, change roles, remove members, send and withdraw invites, manage groups and membership, and read custom roles. Group and custom-role calls need the `ce-user-management-2026-07-13` beta header; member and invite calls need none. This is the piece that lets identity automation — joiner/mover/leaver flows, offboarding scripts — cover Claude the same way it covers other SaaS. Anthropic also launched Claude for Teachers the same day.

OpenAI opens GPT-5.6 to the public two weeks after its government-gated preview, releasing all three tiers — Sol (flagship), Terra (mid-range), and Luna (fast and cheap). Alongside it comes ChatGPT Work, an agent built to carry out whole jobs rather than answer questions, and a small-business programme bundling ChatGPT Work and GPT-5.6 with training and in-person AI academies. OpenAI also shipped GPT-Live, a full-duplex voice generation that listens and speaks simultaneously. The public release lands two weeks before Claude Opus 5.

Meta ships Muse Image inside Meta AI, its first image generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. It uses reasoning to interpret complex prompts and blends multiple source photos into a single output. Rolling out to Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It follows Muse Spark (April) as the second proprietary model from the lab, continuing Meta's move to run closed models alongside the open Llama line.

Claude Enterprise admins get usage and cost broken down by group and by individual user, an Analytics API that feeds tools like Datadog Cloud Cost Management and CloudZero, model defaults and entitlements that set which model conversations start on across chat, Cowork, and Claude Code, and spend threshold alerts firing at 75% and 90% of an org limit. Users get their own warnings at 75% and 95% plus an in-app way to request an increase before they hit the cap.

Meta is building Meta Compute, a cloud infrastructure unit that will sell spare AI computing capacity to outside customers, putting it in direct competition with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. It is the clearest sign yet that the AI buildout has produced more capacity than any single company's own products consume, and that compute itself is becoming the product. For enterprises, another potential venue for running models — and another vendor in an already crowded procurement conversation.

The US Commerce Department lifted the export controls on June 30, and Anthropic put Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 back online worldwide on July 1 — across Claude.ai, the Claude Platform, Claude Code, and Cowork. To get there Anthropic shipped a new safety classifier that blocks the underlying jailbreak at a 99%+ rate, agreed to four government-collaboration terms, and — with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other Project Glasswing partners — proposed a shared jailbreak severity framework that scores each jailbreak on factors like capability gain (how far it takes a user beyond tools they already have). The three-week round trip is the case study for model-continuity planning: a frontier model can vanish and return on government action, so production systems need a wired-in fallback model and refusal handling regardless of which lab they build on.

Claude Sonnet 5 (`claude-sonnet-5`) launches as a drop-in upgrade to Sonnet 4.6 and the new default on Free and Pro, with its biggest gains in coding and agentic work — on Terminal-Bench 2.1 it even edges the Opus 4.8 flagship (80.4% vs 74.6%). It ships with a 1M token context by default, 128k max output, and adaptive thinking on by default, and is the first Sonnet-tier model with real-time cybersecurity safeguards (refused requests return a 200 with `stop_reason: 'refusal'`). Introductory pricing is $2/$10 per million tokens through Aug 31, 2026 (standard $3/$15). Three migration gotchas beyond the model-ID swap: manual extended thinking (`budget_tokens`) now returns 400, non-default sampling params (`temperature`/`top_p`/`top_k`) now return 400, and a new tokenizer produces ~30% more tokens for the same text — so recount prompts and revisit `max_tokens` and cost budgets before switching.

Anthropic launches Claude Science, a beta workbench (macOS and Linux; Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise) that pulls a researcher's scattered tools into one place — 60+ scientific databases and toolkits spanning genomics, single-cell work, proteomics, structural biology, and cheminformatics. Ask a question in plain language and a coordinating agent hands work to specialist sub-agents while a separate reviewer agent checks every citation and calculation as it goes. The bet is on workflow, not a new model: it runs on existing Claude models but packages the multi-agent orchestration and auditable outputs that regulated research demands. Anthropic is funding up to 50 'AI for Science' projects with up to $30k in credits, with applications open through July 15.

Google opens its Gemini 3.5 family with Gemini 3.5 Flash — a faster, lower-cost model for coding, agents, multimodal tasks, and long-document work — now with built-in Computer Use that lets agents see, reason, and act across desktop, mobile, and browser environments. Alongside it, Gemini Omni Flash (a natively multimodal model for building custom video workflows) reaches public preview and Nano Banana 2 Lite ships as Google's fastest, most cost-efficient image model. Google signaled Gemini 3.5 Pro is still on the way. The Computer Use integration puts Google head-to-head with Anthropic's and OpenAI's agentic desktop-control offerings.

OpenAI previews the GPT-5.6 family — Sol (flagship), Terra (balanced, ~2x cheaper than GPT-5.5), and Luna (fast, lowest-cost) — priced at $5/$30, $2.50/$15, and $1/$6 per million tokens. At the US government's request, access starts as a limited preview for roughly 20 trusted partners (whose participation was shared with the Administration) through the API and Codex, not ChatGPT, with broader release planned 'in the coming weeks.' It closely mirrors Anthropic's Fable 5 episode: frontier releases are now routed through government pre-release review. OpenAI also plans to run Sol on Cerebras hardware at up to 750 tokens/sec, and retired GPT-4.5 from ChatGPT the same day.

Anthropic launches Claude Tag (beta, Team and Enterprise), moving the unit of AI collaboration from the private conversation to the shared Slack channel. One Claude joins the workspace as a persistent teammate with its own identity, its own memory, and admin-scoped access to tools and data. Tag it on a task and it breaks the work into stages and executes in the background, posting results back to the channel; with 'ambient' mode enabled it proactively flags relevant information and follows up on threads that have gone quiet. It replaces the old Claude-in-Slack integration (retiring Aug 3), with a 30-day window to migrate. A concrete template for the 'agent as coworker' pattern — Anthropic says its internal version now writes about 65% of its product team's code.

Claude Code gains artifact support, letting a session publish a rendered page — a report, a dashboard, a diagram — rather than leaving output as terminal text or a file on disk. It closes a gap between Claude Code and the web app for work whose deliverable is something a person needs to look at and share rather than run.

The original Claude 4 models — `claude-sonnet-4-20250514` and `claude-opus-4-20250514` — are retired, and all requests to them now return an error. Anthropic recommends Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.8 as replacements. Researchers can request continued access through the External Researcher Access Program. The retirement was announced with the Opus 4.7 launch in April, giving roughly two months of notice — a useful data point for how much runway to expect on future deprecations.

Three days after launch, Anthropic receives a US government export-control directive (June 12, 5:21pm ET) barring access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national — inside or outside the US, including foreign-national Anthropic employees. To comply, Anthropic abruptly disables both models for all customers worldwide. The stated concern is national security tied to a method of bypassing Fable's safeguards; the directive gives no specifics, and Anthropic — which reviewed a demo tied to a few previously known minor vulnerabilities — calls it a misunderstanding and says it is working to restore access. All other Claude models (Opus 4.8, Sonnet, Haiku) are unaffected. A live lesson in cloud-AI continuity: a hosted model can vanish overnight, so production systems need a fallback model wired in.

Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5 (`claude-fable-5`), its most capable widely released model, built for demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work. It ships with a 1M token context window by default, up to 128k output tokens, and always-on adaptive thinking (the older on/off thinking toggle is gone). Pricing is $10/$50 per million tokens — double Opus 4.8. It posts 95.0% on SWE-bench Verified and 80.3% on SWE-bench Pro (an 11-point jump over Opus 4.8). The integration-breaking change: built-in safety classifiers can decline a request, returning `stop_reason: "refusal"` as a successful 200, so apps need refusal handling and a fallback path to another model. Claude Mythos 5 (`claude-mythos-5`) shares the same capabilities without the classifiers and is limited to Project Glasswing partners. Free on Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise through June 22, then metered against credits.

Anthropic expands Claude Managed Agents along three lines. Self-hosted sandboxes reach general availability on the Claude API and Claude Platform on AWS: tool execution runs on infrastructure you control and can reach your private MCP servers, while Claude keeps running on Anthropic's side. Agents can now run on a schedule without an external trigger, and environment variables (API keys, credentials) can be stored in encrypted vaults instead of being passed in per request. Together these move Managed Agents closer to production use inside enterprise security boundaries.

OpenAI confidentially submits a draft S-1 registration to the SEC — the legal step that precedes an initial public offering. Reported valuations run $730B–$852B against annualized revenue above $25B. The company says it has not set a timeline and that some plans are easier to pursue while still private. It follows Anthropic's own confidential IPO filing in late May, signaling that the two largest frontier labs are both moving toward public-market scale and scrutiny.

Anthropic notifies developers that Claude Opus 4.1 will be retired on the Claude API. With Opus 4.8 and now Fable 5 available, teams still calling `claude-opus-4-1` need to migrate to a current model. A reminder that pinning a specific model ID carries an end-of-life clock — production code should plan for model migration as routine maintenance.

OpenAI ships a new ChatGPT memory system it calls Dreaming, which reviews past conversations to keep preferences and context fresh across sessions. The same week it expands Codex with role-specific updates aimed at non-developers — analysts, marketers, operators, and designers — who now make up a fast-growing share of Codex's 5M+ weekly users. Both moves push ChatGPT further from a chat box toward a persistent, cross-role work assistant.

Mark Zuckerberg unveils Meta Business Agent, an AI agent businesses can deploy across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram to answer customer inquiries, recommend products, and book appointments. It ships inside a business tier of Meta One and is billed on a consumption basis for large WhatsApp Business Platform users. Meta's clearest move yet to monetize AI beyond advertising. Separately, Meta's Muse Spark model API for developers slipped again with no firm launch date.

At Build 2026, Microsoft introduces Autopilots — a new category of always-on, autonomous agents — starting with Scout, which works in the background across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, browsers, and local files and acts without being prompted each time. Microsoft also ships seven new in-house MAI models (headlined by MAI-Thinking-1, a 35B reasoning model with a 256K context built without distillation) and Copilot Platform, a set of APIs and a runtime for embedding Copilot agents in any app. The framing shift: from AI-as-assistant to AI-as-operator.

OpenAI makes its frontier models and Codex generally available on AWS through Amazon Bedrock, and expands Codex with role-specific plugins, Sites (sharing interactive workspace apps and websites), and annotations for refining documents, spreadsheets, and slides. Codex now has more than 5 million weekly users, and non-developers — analysts, marketers, operators, designers, bankers — make up about 20% of them, growing more than 3x faster than developers.

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.8 (claude-opus-4-8), its most capable generally available model. Pricing is unchanged at $5/$25 per million tokens. The effort parameter now defaults to high across all surfaces, a 1M token context window ships by default, and max output rises to 128k tokens. Fast mode runs ~2.5x faster at $10/$50 — three times cheaper than prior Opus fast mode. New mid-conversation system messages let instructions change without breaking the prompt cache. Anthropic reports it beats GPT-5.5 on 12+ benchmarks (SWE-Bench Pro 69.2% vs 58.6%) and is ~4x less likely than 4.7 to let a code flaw pass in review. Migration from Opus 4.7 is a model-name swap — no new breaking changes.

Shipping alongside Opus 4.8 as a research preview, Dynamic Workflows let Claude author a multi-step plan and orchestrate work across tens to hundreds — up to roughly a thousand — subagents running in the background. Built for jobs a single context window can't hold: codebase-scale migrations across hundreds of thousands of lines, sweeping audits, large repetitive transforms. Distinct from sub-agents, Agent Teams, and the `claude agents` terminal mode — here Claude decides the structure and you approve the plan rather than each step.

Anthropic closes a $65B Series H round at a $965B post-money valuation, with run-rate revenue reported to have crossed $47B earlier in May. The same day, it confidentially files for an initial public offering — setting up a public-market test of the AI boom. Together they mark Anthropic's transition toward public-company scale and scrutiny.

Claude Code v2.1.149 ships two practitioner-relevant features: /usage, a new command that shows per-category token cost breakdowns mid-session (context vs. tools vs. output vs. cache); and allowAllClaudeAiMcps, an enterprise setting that blanket-approves all Claude.ai cloud MCP connectors without per-server admin review. Also in the v2.1.147-v2.1.152 range: /simplify renamed to /code-review, /code-review --fix auto-applies findings, Auto mode runs without a per-session consent prompt, and VS Code 1.121 adds remote agent sessions that survive laptop disconnect.

Anthropic publishes the first update on Project Glasswing — its controlled-access cybersecurity initiative using the unreleased Claude Mythos Preview model. In the first month, Glasswing partners discovered 10,000+ software vulnerabilities. The open-source scan alone (1,000+ widely used projects) flagged 6,202 high/critical vulnerabilities with a 90.6% confirmed true-positive rate. Partners include AWS, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Palo Alto Networks, and now Verizon.

Anthropic ships the Claude Compliance API and 28 launch-partner integrations across DLP (Microsoft Purview, Nightfall, Forcepoint), SIEM (Splunk, Securonix, Sumo Logic), CASB (Netskope, Zscaler), identity (Okta, CrowdStrike Falcon), eDiscovery (Relativity, Logikcull), and AI security posture (Wiz, Orca, Lacework). Enterprise admins get programmatic access to all Claude usage data — request-level prompts and responses — for compliance, eDiscovery, and security monitoring. The Compliance API and Security Ingestion API are distinct: compliance routes data to legal/HR, security routes alerts to SOC tooling.

Elon Musk's XAI (backed by SpaceX compute infrastructure) acquires Cursor at roughly $60 billion with a $10 billion opt-out clause. The compute access enables Composer 2.5, a new coding model that is significantly faster and cheaper than equivalents on Claude or Codex — early reports put it at near-frontier quality for front-end work at a fraction of the token cost. Cursor announces intent to become a full 'coding and knowledge work' platform, adding automations and a marketplace alongside its existing in-app browser.

Google I/O 2026's AI announcements: Gemini Spark (leaked/previewed) — a new agentic surface inside the Gemini app with virtual computers, long agent trajectories, canvas, deep research, and connections across Google Workspace. Gemini 3.5 Flash releases but falls short of frontier expectations — widely noted as faster but not competitive with GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus 4.7 on complex reasoning. Gemini Omni video model also announced but trails Sora and Kling. Google's main challenge: no clear unified super-app strategy (Gemini vs. AI Studio vs. Project IDX).

OpenAI ships two meaningful Codex updates: /goal mode, which lets agents run autonomously for hours (or more than a day) toward a stated high-level objective rather than stopping after each command; and plugin sharing, which lets team members publish workflow plugins to the entire workspace. Design mode (screenshot + annotation for UI iteration) also ships. Together these move Codex significantly closer to a unified super-app that handles both coding and long-horizon knowledge work.

Karpathy — founding OpenAI member, former Tesla Autopilot lead, and the foremost AI educator on the internet — announces he has joined Anthropic to get back to R&D. The hire is widely read as a significant talent signal: CTOs of publicly traded companies and top researchers across the industry have been choosing individual contributor roles at Anthropic over running organizations. Karpathy's publicly stated focus: the next few years of LLM development will be "especially formative."

Anthropic ships `claude agents`, a new terminal mode that lets users run multiple independent agent tasks simultaneously. Each task runs as its own agent; keyboard navigation moves between them. Distinct from the desktop parallel sessions sidebar — this is the headless/terminal-native equivalent. Enables parallel research, builds, and pipelines without GUI.

KPMG signs a global alliance with Anthropic to deploy Claude across its 276,000-person workforce and embed Claude Cowork and Managed Agents into KPMG's Digital Gateway platform. Launch use cases: tax, legal, private equity. KPMG also announces KPMG Blaze — a product built on Claude Code for modernizing legacy IT systems inside private equity portfolio companies. Second Big Four firm to go all-in on Claude in one month, following PwC's announcement on May 14.

Anthropic acquires Stainless for $300M+. Stainless automates generation of SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers from API specs, and previously generated all official Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cloudflare, and Meta SDKs. Bringing Stainless in-house means Anthropic now controls the SDK pipeline and MCP server generation toolchain. All hosted Stainless products are being wound down; existing customers keep their generated SDKs.

Anthropic announces that from June 15, 2026, programmatic Claude usage (the Agent SDK, `claude -p` headless mode, Claude Code GitHub Actions, and third-party apps using Agent SDK credentials) stops drawing from a subscription's rate limits and instead draws from a separate monthly dollar credit metered at API list prices — $20 for Pro, $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x, per user, no rollover. Interactive Claude Code and web chat are unchanged. The change ends uncapped subsidized automated usage and is effectively a large price increase for heavy programmatic workloads.

Anthropic launches Claude for Small Business: a bundle of pre-built connectors and ready-to-run workflows targeting companies without a dedicated IT or AI team. Seven integrations at launch: QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365. Claude can read live data from connected tools and perform tasks without manual copy-paste. Available on Claude Pro and higher.

OpenAI launches a majority-owned deployment company with McKinsey, Bain, and Capgemini, funded at $10B+. Simultaneously acquires Tomoro, a 150-person forward deployed engineering firm, to staff it immediately. The Deployment Company puts OpenAI engineers inside enterprise clients to build production AI systems against their actual infrastructure — a direct copy of Palantir's FDE model. Launched within days of Anthropic's $1.5B JV with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs.

Google's Android Show 2026 centers on Gemini Intelligence: on-device AI that automates complex tasks, summarizes web content, fills forms, and includes Rambler (polishes voice messages or builds custom widgets from natural language). New Googlebooks AI-first laptops announced. Gemini comes to Chrome. Rolling out to Samsung and Pixel phones first, then broader Android. Signals the shift from Gemini-as-chatbot to Gemini-as-OS-layer.

Anthropic's native Claude Platform experience arrives on AWS as a GA service — the first cloud provider to offer it. AWS customers get the full Claude API (Messages, Files, Batches, Managed Agents, Agent Skills, code execution, web tools) through native AWS endpoints, unified with existing AWS billing, authentication, and security controls. No separate Anthropic contract needed. Anthropic simultaneously commits $100B+ to AWS over ten years.

Anthropic ships three new capabilities for Managed Agents. Dreaming: agents review their own past sessions, extract patterns, and self-improve over time. Outcomes: a separate grading agent scores completed tasks and re-runs them until they hit quality thresholds — lifted document generation quality 10.1% on benchmarks. Multi-agent orchestration: a lead agent breaks jobs into pieces and delegates each to a specialist with its own model, prompt, and tools running in parallel on a shared filesystem.

Anthropic ships 10 ready-made agent templates aimed at financial services workflows: Pitch builder, Meeting preparer, Earnings reviewer, Model builder, Market researcher, Valuation reviewer, General ledger reconciler, Month-end closer, Statement auditor, and KYC screener. Each is a reference architecture bundling skills (task instructions + domain knowledge), connectors (governed access to data), and subagents. Available as plugins for Claude Cowork and Claude Code, and as cookbook snippets for Claude Managed Agents.

OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 Instant as the default model for all ChatGPT users, replacing GPT-5.3 Instant. Produces 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims on high-stakes prompts (medicine, law, finance). Can search past conversations, files, and Gmail for personalized answers. GPT-5.3 Instant remains available to paid users for three months before retirement.

Anthropic announces a new joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman to build an enterprise AI services company. The venture will help large companies integrate Claude into core business operations — sales, finance, ops, customer support — with funded engagement teams and prebuilt playbooks. Signals Anthropic going further down the services + integration path, not just the model + API path.

Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs announce a new AI services company targeting mid-sized businesses. The joint venture deploys Claude into core operations across sectors — the first major move by Anthropic to own the services layer, not just the model.

Microsoft ships Agent 365 ($15/user/mo) and the Microsoft 365 E7 "Frontier Suite" ($99/user/mo, bundling M365 E5 + Copilot + Agent 365). Agent 365 is a control plane that discovers, governs, and secures AI agents across an enterprise — Microsoft's own Copilot agents, third-party SaaS agents, AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud agents, plus local agents on Windows endpoints including Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and OpenClaw. Aimed at IT/security teams managing "agent sprawl."

Anthropic moves Claude Security from research preview into public beta for Claude Enterprise. Built on Opus 4.7. Scans repositories, traces data flows across files and modules, and produces vulnerability findings with proposed patches you review and apply. Three scan modes (scheduled, targeted, ad-hoc); findings export to Slack, Jira, CSV, or Markdown. Started life as Claude Code Security in February. Team and Max access on the roadmap.

OpenAI rolls out Advanced Account Security for ChatGPT: phishing-resistant sign-in, tighter recovery controls, shorter sessions, login alerts, and automatic exclusion from training. Required by June 1, 2026 for individuals using OpenAI's most cyber-capable models under its Trusted Access for Cyber program. Tightens the consumer surface that has lagged enterprise IDP integrations on most LLM products.

Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and others are on track to collectively spend ~$700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, nearly double 2025 levels. Meta alone guided $115–135B in capex. No clear ceiling: every major hyperscaler is accelerating, treating AI compute as the defining infrastructure race of the decade.

The claude-api skill — an open-source bundle of current API patterns, model parameters, prompt caching strategies, and SDK updates — now ships inside JetBrains IDEs (with Junie), Warp terminal, CodeRabbit PR review, and Resolve AI. Originally released in Claude Code in March, the skill keeps developer tools current with new model launches like Opus 4.7 without manual doc lookups. Reduces stale-API errors in production code and surfaces guided migrations inline.

Anthropic launches nine connectors for professional creative software: Adobe Creative Cloud, Blender, Ableton, Autodesk Fusion, Affinity by Canva, SketchUp, Resolume, and Splice. Claude can now tutor, extend via scripting, and bridge across creative pipelines. Three university partnerships (RISD, Ringling, Goldsmiths) anchor an education push. Distinct from Claude Design (April 17), which generates visuals on its own.

Microsoft and OpenAI renegotiate their partnership: OpenAI can now license its models across multiple clouds including Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. Microsoft loses exclusive IP access in exchange for a capped revenue share through 2030 and a nonexclusive license to OpenAI IP through 2032. Removes a structural barrier that had kept GPT models off competing cloud platforms. Amazon confirms it will make OpenAI models available on Bedrock shortly.

OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro: a single unified architecture handling text, images, audio, and video end-to-end. Co-designed with NVIDIA GB200/GB300 rack systems to match GPT-5.4 latency despite significant capability gains. Scores 84.9% on GDPval (44-occupation knowledge work benchmark), 78.7% on OSWorld-Verified (real computer operation), and 90.1% on BrowseComp. API access followed on April 24. Supports 1M token context in the API.

Anthropic ships agent memory in public beta under the Managed Agents API. Agents can now store and retrieve facts, context, and past decisions across sessions — without the developer managing a custom memory layer. Completes the foundational stack for stateful production agents.

OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro, framing it as a step toward a unified AI 'super-app.' Available via API (as chat-latest) from April 24. Positions ChatGPT closer to a full-featured work assistant rather than a pure chat interface.

Microsoft, Google, and Shopify co-publish an open standard for AI agents to discover products and transact on users' behalf, backed by Visa, Mastercard, and 20+ others. First shared infrastructure spec for agentic commerce — defining how agents connect to merchants, authenticate, and complete purchases. Sets the ground rules for a future where AI assistants shop independently.

Google ships the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform at Google Cloud Next '26: a unified product to build, deploy, govern, and monitor AI agents at scale. Includes an Agent Designer UI, activity inbox, and pre-built agents from Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe, and Atlassian. Paired with a $750M partner fund to accelerate enterprise adoption.

Google confirmed it is Apple's preferred cloud AI partner: Gemini will power the context-aware capabilities in the next major Siri upgrade. Gives Google model reach into every iPhone without a consumer product of its own — and signals that Apple Intelligence's real bet is on partnered foundation models, not Apple-built ones.

Microsoft ships agentic Copilot across all three core Office apps at GA. Multi-step, in-app actions now work natively: Word drafts and restructures documents in one flow; Excel builds analysis, formulas, and charts; PowerPoint updates existing decks with new data while respecting company templates. Takes Copilot from text suggestion to document-level action for all M365 enterprise customers.

OpenAI ships gpt-image-2 with two modes: Instant (fast generation) and Thinking (browses for references, reasons through the prompt, self-verifies before rendering). Significantly better at dense text, precise object placement, and multi-language images. Available in ChatGPT and via API. Thinking mode closes a longstanding gap in instruction-following quality for complex visual tasks.

OpenAI expands Codex from code tool to full agentic workspace: computer use, in-app browsing, image generation via gpt-image-2, memory, and plugins ship in the desktop app. Also launches Codex Labs — a developer training and certification program with GSI partnerships. Signals Codex repositioning as a general agentic surface, not just a coding assistant. Over 4 million weekly developer users.

Anthropic launches Claude Design, an experimental product for creating visual work: prototypes, presentation decks, one-pagers, and UI mockups. Built on Opus 4.7. Users describe what they need, Claude builds a first version, then they refine through conversation or inline edits. Reads a team's design system and codebase for brand consistency. Exports to PDF, URL, PPTX, or Canva. Available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

Opus 4.7 upgrades the flagship model with improved agentic coding, multidisciplinary reasoning, scaled tool use, and computer use. New xhigh effort level gives finer latency vs. reasoning control. Maximum image resolution jumps from 1.15MP to 3.75MP (3.3× increase). Pricing unchanged at $5/$25 per million tokens. Available across Claude products, API, Bedrock, Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry.

OpenAI launches GPT-Rosalind, a frontier reasoning model fine-tuned for life sciences: genomics, protein engineering, chemistry, and drug discovery. Named after Rosalind Franklin, the model outperforms GPT-5.4 on six of eleven LABBench2 tasks and leads on BixBench bioinformatics benchmarks. Supports evidence synthesis, hypothesis generation, and experimental planning. Available as a restricted research preview to qualified Enterprise customers; launching with Amgen, Moderna, the Allen Institute, and Thermo Fisher Scientific.

OpenAI ships a major Agents SDK update: native sandbox execution isolates agents in scoped environments (only the files, tools, and code each task needs), and a model-native harness optimized for how GPT-5.4 performs on long-horizon, multi-tool work. A Manifest abstraction standardizes workspace description from local prototype to production, with support for S3, GCS, Azure Blob, and Cloudflare R2. Python first; TypeScript planned.

Meta embeds a shopping experience directly into Muse Spark, rolling out across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Users get outfit suggestions, room styling help, and gift recommendations in-conversation. First major commerce integration built on a foundation model rather than a separate product layer — a template for how AI interfaces could replace traditional e-commerce flows.

OpenAI releases GPT-5.4-Cyber to vetted researchers and security teams, with access tiers that loosen restrictions for verified practitioners doing defensive research. Designed for threat modeling, vulnerability analysis, and exploit documentation — with guardrails calibrated by verification level rather than a single policy. Released in direct response to Anthropic's Mythos Preview from Project Glasswing.

Claude Code's desktop app ships a major redesign: a sessions sidebar for running multiple tasks in parallel, an integrated terminal and file editor with faster diffs, expanded preview pane, side chat (⌘+;) for asking questions without interrupting the main session, drag-and-drop workspace, and SSH support on Mac. The shift from a single-task CLI to a multi-session coding environment.

Claude launches as a native sidebar add-in for Microsoft Word on Mac and Windows. Highlights passages, rewrites sections, and inserts edits as tracked changes using Word's existing review workflow. Completes Claude's integration across the full Office suite (Excel, PowerPoint, Word). Available to Team and Enterprise plans.

Claude Code gains Ultraplan: a cloud-powered planning mode that uses Claude on the web to generate comprehensive implementation plans before coding begins. Designed for complex, multi-file tasks where getting the architecture right up front saves hours of rework.

Anthropic introduces the advisor tool: pair a fast executor model (Sonnet or Haiku) with Opus as a strategic advisor that only gets called on hard decisions. Sonnet + Opus advisor improved SWE-bench Multilingual by 2.7 percentage points while cutting per-task cost by 11.9%. A new paradigm for cost-effective agent intelligence.

Anthropic launches Ask Your Org: a pre-configured Project that searches across connected company tools (Slack, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, custom MCP connectors) and returns a single synthesized answer with citations. Permission-aware — users only see data they can already access. Available to Team and Enterprise plans after owner setup.

Anthropic ships a batch of admin controls for Team and Enterprise: user groups with SCIM sync, role-based access defining which Claude features each group can use, per-user spend caps, managed Claude Code policies (tool/file/MCP permissions), and a new Compliance API for Enterprise giving programmatic access to usage data and selective deletion.

Cowork goes GA on macOS and Windows with Analytics API access, OpenTelemetry monitoring, and role-based access controls for enterprise departments. The shift from collaborative experiment to production-grade team workspace.

Claude Code gains the Monitor tool: spawn a background process and stream its stdout into the conversation without blocking the thread. Enables patterns like "watch kubectl logs for errors and fix any crashes" — a step toward always-on agent awareness.

Meta launches Muse Spark, its first proprietary (non-open-source) model, developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs. Small and fast, competitive on reasoning and agentic tasks. Signals a strategic shift: Meta now has both open (Llama) and closed model lines.

Anthropic launches Managed Agents in public beta: a fully managed harness for running Claude as an autonomous agent with secure sandboxing, built-in tools, and streaming. Create agents, configure containers, and run sessions entirely through the API. The biggest shift from Claude-as-assistant to Claude-as-worker.

Anthropic announces Project Glasswing alongside AWS, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others to secure critical software infrastructure. Claude Mythos Preview — a specialized cybersecurity model — available as a gated research preview for defensive work.

Google quietly ships AI Edge Eloquent, an on-device dictation app for iOS using Gemma-based speech recognition models. Works fully offline; optional Gemini cloud integration for post-processing. Signals Google's push into private, on-device AI — where inference stays on the hardware rather than hitting a remote API.

Google releases Gemma 4, an open model family from 2.3B to 31B parameters that is natively multimodal (text, image, video). The 31B Dense variant ranks #3 globally among open models. A major leap in what open-weights models can do.

Microsoft announces three new proprietary MAI foundation models available in Azure AI Foundry: MAI-Transcribe-1 (state-of-the-art multilingual speech recognition), MAI-Voice-1 (custom voice synthesis), and MAI-Image-2 (top Arena.ai leaderboard scores, 2× faster generation). First clear signal that Microsoft is building its own model stack alongside its OpenAI and Anthropic partnerships.

The 1M token context window is now GA for Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 at standard pricing — no beta header required. Requests over 200k tokens work automatically. Also raised the media limit from 100 to 600 images or PDF pages per request.

Anthropic launches the Claude Partner Network with $100M invested to accelerate enterprise adoption. Targets system integrators, consultants, and implementation partners helping organizations deploy Claude at scale.

Sonnet 4.6 launches as the balanced model for professional work at scale — improved agentic search, fewer tokens consumed, extended thinking support, and 1M token context window. Web search and code execution tools hit general availability on the same day.

Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at a $380B post-money valuation, with $14B annual run-rate revenue. One of the most valuable private companies in history. Signals market conviction that frontier AI will be defining infrastructure.

Opus 4.6 launches for complex, long-horizon agentic tasks. Introduces adaptive thinking (replacing manual budget_tokens), the compaction API for effectively infinite conversations, and data residency controls. Fast mode — up to 2.5x faster — available in preview.

Anthropic launches Labs, a platform for experimental Claude features before they reach the main product. First move toward a formal beta program for early access to capabilities in development.

Anthropic launches HIPAA-ready infrastructure with clinical trial connectors for healthcare and life sciences. Opens Claude to regulated industries that previously had compliance blockers.

Microsoft Copilot reaches general availability across M365 enterprise. AI embedded in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Forces the question: if Copilot is good enough for document work, what does Claude add?

Anthropic donates the Model Context Protocol to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation, cementing MCP as an open industry standard. Adopted by dozens of companies since its release, MCP becomes a neutral, community-governed protocol.

Real-time collaborative sessions in Claude — multiple users working in the same conversation. Foundation for team-based AI workflows.

Opus 4.5 launches as the most capable Claude model yet — step-change improvements in vision, coding, and computer use at a more accessible price than previous Opus models. Best model for complex specialized tasks and professional software engineering.

Claude models come to Azure customers through Microsoft Foundry with Azure billing and OAuth authentication. Full Messages API access including extended thinking, prompt caching, PDF support, and Agent Skills.

OpenAI ships long-term memory as a default ChatGPT feature, and launches canvas — a structured writing and code workspace. Accelerates the shift from chatbot to persistent AI workspace.

Agent Skills launch in beta: pre-built Skills for PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and PDF files. Also supports custom Skills where you package your own domain expertise. Claude can now read and write Office documents without manual parsing — a major unlock for enterprise workflows.

Haiku 4.5 launches as the fastest and most capable Haiku yet — near-frontier performance for real-time applications, high-volume processing, and cost-sensitive deployments where speed matters more than maximum intelligence.

Sonnet 4.5 launches with the highest intelligence of any Sonnet, built for complex agent workflows and coding tasks. Also ships: the memory tool (persistent context across conversations) and context editing for automatic conversation management.

Web fetch tool launches in beta, letting Claude retrieve full content from any web page or PDF by URL. Pairs with web search for end-to-end research tasks.

Claude Code launches as a terminal-native development experience: reads codebases, runs commands, writes and edits files, and navigates full projects. Goes further than autocomplete into agentic development.

Anthropic ships the first Claude 4 models: Opus 4 for frontier tasks and Sonnet 4 for everyday use, both with extended thinking. Also ships: Files API, Code Execution tool, and MCP connector in the API. A step-change in what Claude can do in production.

Web search launches in the API, giving Claude access to up-to-date information. Closes the biggest gap between Claude and web-native AI products.

GPT-4o ships as a single model handling voice, image, and text without switching modes. Real-time voice with sub-second latency. Brings the conversational AI interaction model much closer to reality.

Meta releases LLaMA 4 with performance competitive with GPT-4-class models. Largest open-weights release to date. Reinforces that the gap between open-source and proprietary is closing faster than expected.

Claude Sonnet 3.7 ships as the first Claude model with extended thinking built in — a mode where Claude reasons step-by-step before answering. Near-instant responses or visible thinking, one model. Anthropic's first mainstream reasoning model.

The term "AI agents" crosses from research into mainstream product discussion. Every major AI lab ships or announces agentic products. The question shifts from "can AI do this?" to "how do you orchestrate AI to do this reliably?"

Claude gains the ability to cite its sources when answering from documents — pointing to the exact passage it drew from. Major unlock for trust in enterprise document workflows and RAG applications.

Google ships Deep Research in Gemini Advanced — a mode that autonomously researches a topic across the web over several minutes and returns a structured report. First mainstream implementation of a multi-step research agent.

Anthropic moves several API features to general availability: Message Batches API (50% cost reduction on batch jobs), Token Counting API, Prompt Caching (90% cost reduction), and PDF support. Also ships Go and Java SDKs.

Anthropic releases MCP as an open protocol for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources. Other companies adopt it quickly, making MCP a de-facto standard. The shift from proprietary to standardized AI integrations.

Claude Haiku 3.5 launches as a fast, cost-efficient model for real-time applications and high-volume tasks. Better than Haiku 3 at a similar price point.

Anthropic ships Computer Use in public beta: Claude can move a mouse, click, type, and navigate GUI applications. First mainstream API for AI-controlled computer interaction. Sets the foundation for desktop-level automation.

OpenAI releases o1, a model that reasons explicitly before answering. Significantly outperforms GPT-4 on math and science benchmarks. Introduces "reasoning model" as a distinct category from "chat model."

Workspaces launch in the Developer Console: custom spend limits, grouped API keys, usage tracking by project, and user roles. First real admin layer for teams using the Claude API.

Prompt caching launches in beta: cache and reuse prompt content to reduce costs by up to 90% and latency by up to 80%. Major cost unlock for applications using the same system prompt or documents repeatedly.

Claude Sonnet 3.5 launches with benchmark-leading coding performance. Artifacts ship alongside: a side-panel for code, documents, and interactive outputs. The shift from text responses to living, editable artifacts.

Anthropic ships the Claude 3 model family: three tiers for speed vs. capability tradeoffs. Opus leads on benchmarks. Haiku enables real-time, cost-efficient use cases. Establishes the tiered naming convention still in use today.

Google rebrands Bard to Gemini and ships the Ultra tier. Natively multimodal from architecture rather than retrofit. Signals Google's intent to compete directly with GPT-4 and Claude at the frontier.

Anthropic ships the first public Claude, trained using Constitutional AI — aligning model behavior using a set of principles rather than purely human feedback. First major alternative to GPT at capability scale.

GPT-4 launches with vision capabilities and measurably better reasoning than GPT-3.5. Triggers the "AI moment" for enterprise adoption.

ChatGPT launches and reaches 100 million users in two months — the fastest consumer product adoption in history. Not the most capable model at the time, but the one that made AI accessible to everyone. Everything since has been a response to this moment.