The AI race shifted into a higher gear over the past 24 hours, with OpenAI shipping its most capable model to date, fresh multi-billion-dollar capital pouring into video and infrastructure startups, and a blockbuster acquisition reshaping the AI coding landscape.
OpenAI ships GPT-5.6 and launches ChatGPT Work
OpenAI made GPT-5.6 generally available and unveiled ChatGPT Work, an autonomous agent that produces finished documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and web apps. The model arrives in three tiers — Sol, Terra, and Luna — spanning flagship reasoning to fast, low-cost inference, and ships with Codex built in plus a Plan mode that lets users approve steps before work begins. As 9to5Mac reports, the rollout is a direct answer to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork.
SpaceX moves to acquire Cursor maker Anysphere
Days after its record IPO, SpaceX confirmed its intent to acquire Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI coding tool Cursor, in a deal valued at roughly $60 billion. The move signals how aggressively hardware and space firms are now buying their way into frontier software tooling. Details were tracked by Crunchbase.
Kling AI raises $2.8B for generative video
Kuaishou’s generative-video unit Kling AI closed a $2.8 billion round led by Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, lifting its pre-money valuation to $15 billion. The raise underscores how China’s tech giants are consolidating behind homegrown video and multimodal models, per Crescendo AI.
Together AI hits $8.3B valuation
Open-model infrastructure provider Together AI raised $800 million in Series C funding, reaching an $8.3 billion valuation. The platform lets enterprises train and serve open-source models, and the round reflects sustained appetite for alternatives to closed frontier APIs. The deal was among the week’s largest.
Google DeepMind pushes Gemini 3.5 Pro to July 17
Google DeepMind delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro to July 17 for what it describes as an architectural rebuild targeting stronger mathematical reasoning, SVG scene generation, and image quality. The slip keeps GPT-5.6 and Anthropic’s lineup in the spotlight for another week.
What to watch: whether Gemini 3.5 Pro lands on schedule next week, and how ChatGPT Work stacks up against Claude Cowork in real-world agentic tasks.