Microsoft reportedly plans to merge its consumer and enterprise Copilot apps into a single app in August. Rarely used features like Copilot Podcasts are getting cut, and new AI agents called "AutoPilot" will handle tasks in the background for an extra fee.

Epoch AI reports a sharp rise in security vulnerability reports. In June 2026, 21 organizations reported about 1,500 high-severity and critical CVEs, more than 3.5 times the previous monthly record. The surge lines up with the launch of AI-powered bug-hunting programs.

In a study covering seven benchmarks, the UK's AI Security Institute shows that standard AI evaluations systematically underestimate agent capabilities by capping the compute budget. On software engineering tasks, success rates jumped about 25 percent when the token budget was increased tenfold. Newer models benefit the most. Depending on the token budget, actual progress at the frontier is about 60 percent steeper than previous measurements suggested, according to AISI.

Anthropic is trying to block Chinese companies like ByteDance and Ant Financial from accessing Claude Code, but they're getting around the restrictions through VPNs and overseas subsidiaries. Alibaba, meanwhile, has banned its own employees from using the tool after hidden code was found that could identify Chinese users.

Bridgewater and Thinking Machines Lab—the startup from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati—have fine-tuned a Qwen3-235B model for financial tasks. According to their own testing, the model hits 84.7 percent accuracy, beating Gemini, Claude, and GPT at roughly one-fourteenth of the cost. The numbers haven't been verified by anyone outside the two companies, though.