GPT-5.6 goes generally available; publishers seek to sanction OpenAI

OpenAI moved GPT-5.6 out of its limited preview and into general availability on July 9, rolling it into ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, Codex, and the API. The family splits into three tiers — Sol (the flagship), Terra (balanced), and Luna (fastest and cheapest) — each with a roughly one-million-token context window. It caps a two-week ramp from the June 26 preview and sets a new default for OpenAI's most capable model.

The New York Times and The New York Daily News asked a federal court to sanction OpenAI, alleging it deleted billions of ChatGPT outputs after the suit was filed and redacted a court-ordered sample of chat logs so heavily as to render it unusable. The publishers also say OpenAI falsely claimed it could not search its own training data. A sanctions ruling could reshape how the two-year-old case — a bellwether for how AI training-data law gets settled — plays out.

Meta released Muse Spark 1.1, a multimodal reasoning model it is positioning as an agentic coding tool that can diagnose and fix complex bugs, ship features in enterprise codebases, and run large code migrations. The model manages a one-million-token context window and can delegate work across parallel subagents. It launched in public preview through Meta's new, OpenAI-compatible Model API, pushing Meta directly into a market already crowded with Cursor, Claude Code, and GPT-5.6.

Ollama, the open-source tool for running open-weight AI models locally, raised a $65 million round led by Theory Ventures, bringing total funding to $88 million. The company says it now reaches nearly 9 million developers a month and sits inside 85% of the Fortune 500. Its growth tracks a broader shift: as teams look for cheaper alternatives to closed frontier models, running open weights on your own hardware keeps getting more viable.

Engineers and surgeons at UC San Diego used teleoperated humanoid robots to complete two minimally invasive gallbladder removals on live pigs — a world first reported in the journal Nature. One operation paired a robot with a human surgeon acting as assistant; the other was run by two robots working side by side, both wielding standard surgical tools rather than custom hardware. If the approach reaches human patients, it could bring robotic surgery to smaller hospitals that cannot afford today's specialized systems.

Google Research introduced SensorFM, a foundation model pre-trained on more than one trillion minutes of sensor data from five million people wearing Fitbit and Pixel Watch devices. It draws on signals like heart rate, blood-oxygen, sleep, motion, and skin temperature, and transfers to 35 health-prediction tasks across cardiovascular, metabolic, sleep, and mental-health domains. When it grounded a personal health agent, its predictions matched the quality of using the real measurements.

Gradium, a Paris-based voice-AI startup spun out of the French lab Kyutai, reopened its seed round and raised $100 million total, adding Nvidia as a new backer alongside Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel. It builds low-latency audio models aimed at removing the awkward pauses in AI voice agents, and counts the automaker Renault among early customers. The round pits it against ElevenLabs, valued at $11 billion, and the voice offerings from Google and OpenAI.