• OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser, in favor of the new ChatGPT desktop app (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
• Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is discussing raising new funds at a roughly $20B valuation, less than a year after raising money at a $10B valuation (Bloomberg)
• OpenAI merges Codex and ChatGPT desktop apps for Mac and Windows under a new ChatGPT desktop app, allowing users to switch between Codex, Chat, and Work (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
• GPT-5.6 Sol costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, GPT-5.6 Terra costs $2.50 and $15, and GPT-5.6 Luna costs $1 and $6 (OpenAI)
• OpenAI broadly releases GPT-5.6, and launches ChatGPT Work, an AI agent that can gather context across apps and files to create documents, on Mac and Windows (Axios)
• Microsoft President Brad Smith says the US now has AI "regulation without transparent or complete rules", and adds that "without rules, businesses can't plan" (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)
• Kraken Technology, which designs and builds autonomous maritime platforms, such as uncrewed subsurface vessels, raised a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)
• Bun's creator says he rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust using a Claude Fable 5 prerelease version in 11 days, noting it would've taken three engineers "about a year" (Jarred Sumner/bun.com)
• Character.AI launches three human-written, AI-generated microdramas, whose characters users can chat with, and aims to eventually let users make their own shows (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
• Meta prices Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25/1M input tokens and $4.25/1M output tokens; Alexandr Wang says improving coding and agentic performance was a key focus (Ina Fried/Axios)
• Meta launches a Meta Model API, which Mark Zuckerberg says will have "aggressive and attractive" pricing at ~25% of the cost of OpenAI's and Anthropic's models (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)
• Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1, capable of more advanced coding and a "step-change" from the first generation, available to US developers via a public API preview (Dominic Preston/The Verge)
• European startups raised $24B in Q2, up 66% YoY and the strongest quarter in four years; UK startups raised $10.4B, above Germany's $3.2B, and France's $2.4B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)
• Anthropic debuts a "reflection" dashboard in beta for Free, Pro, and Max users with memory turned on, to track their Claude activity over 1, 3, 6, or 12 months (Anthropic)
• Databento, which sells financial data feeds, raised a $97M Series B led by NEA, taking its total funding to $127M, and says it is "profitable every month" (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
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