AI Timeline

Apple filed a trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI in federal court in Northern California on July 11, 2026, citing more than 400 former Apple employees now at OpenAI, particularly from silicon and on-device AI teams. The suit alleges that OpenAI hardware chief Tang Tan, a former Apple VP, directed job candidates to bring confidential materials from Apple and coached employees on evading Apple security processes. The lawsuit marks a dramatic turn for two companies that had a ChatGPT integration partnership beginning in 2024, with relations cooling after OpenAI's $6.4 billion acquisition of Jony Ive's IO Products.

OpenAI brought the GPT-5.6 family to general availability on July 9, 2026, following a two-week limited preview. The three-tier release includes Sol (flagship, $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens), Terra (balanced, $2.50 and $15 per million tokens), and Luna (budget, $1 and $6 per million tokens), all with 1 million token context windows. Terra delivers performance comparable to GPT-5.5 at roughly half the cost. Sol runs at approximately 750 tokens per second on Cerebras hardware. OpenAI also launched ChatGPT Work alongside the models, a general-purpose agentic assistant that can manage long-horizon projects, create documents, and run scheduled tasks.

Meta Superintelligence Labs launched Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9, 2026, alongside the first public preview of the Meta Model API for developers. The model has a 1 million token context window with native computer use, tool orchestration, and multi-agent coordination. API pricing is $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. Muse Spark 1.1 is Meta's first paid proprietary model.

SpaceXAI launched Grok 4.5 to the public on July 8, 2026, after a private beta at SpaceX and Tesla. Built on a 1.5 trillion parameter V9 foundation model trained in part on data from the Cursor coding environment, Grok 4.5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens with a 500,000 token context window. Elon Musk described it as Opus-class in capability but faster and more token-efficient.

Illinois Governor Pritzker signed the AI Safety Measures Act on July 6, 2026, making Illinois the first US state to impose mandatory safety requirements on frontier AI developers. The law applies to AI models generating more than $500 million in annual revenue and requires a published AI safety framework identifying catastrophic risk, 72-hour incident reporting (24-hour for imminent threats), annual independent third-party audits, and whistleblower protections. Civil penalties apply for violations. The law takes effect January 1, 2027.

Anthropic restored global access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on July 1, 2026, following a 19-day suspension under a US Commerce Department export control directive. The models had been pulled June 12 after researchers published a jailbreak method bypassing their safeguards. Anthropic added a new cybersecurity classifier trained with government collaboration that blocks the specific attack vector in more than 99 percent of cases. Access was initially capped at 50 percent of weekly usage limits for paid plan users through July 7 while the rollout stabilized.

Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026 as the most agentic Sonnet-class model yet, positioned to narrow the gap to Opus 4.8 on reasoning, tool use, coding, computer use, and knowledge work while staying priced below the flagship. Introductory API rates are $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, 2026, moving to $3 and $15 from September onward. Sonnet 5 ships a 1 million token context window with context compaction and adaptive thinking with selectable effort levels up to xhigh. Anthropic's own numbers show 85.2 on SWE-bench Verified, 63.2 on SWE-bench Pro, 78.3 on SWE-bench Multilingual, 81.2 on OSWorld-Verified, 84.7 on BrowseComp agentic search, and 80.4 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (which beats Opus 4.8 at 74.6 on that specific benchmark). Available on the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex, and Microsoft Foundry at launch.

Meituan open sourced LongCat-2.0 on June 30, 2026, a 1.6 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts coding model published to GitHub and Hugging Face under an MIT license. Dynamic activation of 33 to 56 billion parameters per token, native 1 million token context, and a 30 trillion token pretraining mix spanning Chinese, English, multilingual, and code data. Meituan reports 59.5 on SWE-Bench Pro (self-reported, ahead of Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5, and Claude Opus 4.6 by their measure). The model is the first trillion-parameter release to complete full training and inference entirely on a 50,000-card domestic Chinese compute cluster, an important signal for China's ability to build frontier AI without leading-edge Western chips. A preview version has been quietly running on OpenRouter and longcat.ai for weeks, ranking among the top three models globally by call volume during that stealth window.

Elon Musk announced on June 28, 2026 that xAI's Grok 4.5 is in private beta at SpaceX and Tesla, its first deployment before any wider release. Grok 4.5 is built on xAI's 1.5 trillion parameter V9 foundation model, which finished training on May 26, 2026 and used data from the Cursor coding environment in supplemental training. Musk claimed early evaluations put performance close to, and potentially above, Claude Opus, but xAI has not published benchmarks or a system card, so capability claims remain unverified. Reinforcement learning is ongoing, and xAI says it plans to release new models trained from scratch through SpaceX every month through the end of 2026. There is no public availability window and no API price for Grok 4.5 as of the announcement.

OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.6 as a three-model family (Sol, Terra, Luna) on June 26, 2026, then immediately gated it. Per a US Government request, GPT-5.6 went live only to roughly 20 pre-approved organizations in a limited preview, with general availability planned in the coming weeks. Pricing per 1M tokens is $5 input / $30 output for Sol (frontier reasoning and agentic work), $2.50 / $15 for Terra (a balanced model OpenAI says delivers GPT-5.5-level performance at roughly half the cost), and $1 / $6 for Luna (the fastest and cheapest variant). OpenAI published partial benchmarks (coding, biology, cybersecurity), with Sol Ultra reaching 91.9% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and base Sol at 88.8%. SWE-bench, MMLU-Pro, GDPval, and FrontierMath numbers were held back until GA. A Cerebras deployment targeting roughly 750 tokens per second on Sol is planned for July.

GPT-4.5 was removed from ChatGPT on June 26, 2026. Existing GPT-4.5 conversations route forward to GPT-5.5, and earlier GPT-5.2 variants (Instant, Thinking, Pro) had already been pulled from ChatGPT on June 12. The API listing for gpt-4.5 remains for now, but the deprecation tightens the active OpenAI lineup to GPT-5.5 (with GPT-5.6 still in limited preview), o1, and o3-mini.

OpenAI and Broadcom announced the Jalapeño inference chip on June 24, 2026. OpenAI's first custom silicon, the chip is a near-reticle-sized ASIC built on TSMC 3nm and optimized for LLM inference. The full design-to-tape-out cycle took nine months, with OpenAI using its own models to accelerate parts of the chip design. Prototype deployments are targeted for late 2026 and mass production for 2027, with full-scale deployment planned for the first half of 2028.

Anthropic ended the introductory window for Claude Fable 5 on June 23, 2026. From June 9 through June 22 the model was included at no extra cost on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Starting June 23 Fable 5 use is billed against usage credits on those plans; API pricing stays at $10 per 1M input and $50 per 1M output, with safety-classifier reroutes to Opus 4.8 billed at Opus rates for the rerouted portion. Opus 4.8 remains the default plan-included model.

SpaceX announced a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, maker of the Cursor AI code editor, on June 16, 2026, four days after SpaceX's Nasdaq IPO. The deal is described as the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup in history. Cursor had been building its Composer agentic coding capabilities using SpaceXAI infrastructure, and SpaceX had held an acquisition option since April 21 with a $10 billion breakup fee. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026.

Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin, the AI-native customer experience platform formerly known as Intercom, for $3.6 billion on June 15, 2026. Fin's proprietary Apex AI model resolves 76 percent of customer support volume without human intervention across chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone, and Slack. The deal brings approximately 30,000 business customers to Salesforce and is expected to close in Salesforce Q4 FY2027.

SpaceX completed the largest technology IPO in history on June 12, 2026, raising $75 billion at $135 per share on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. First-day trading pushed the market capitalization to approximately $2.1 trillion. SpaceX had merged the xAI division into SpaceXAI in May 2026, making the listing also a major AI infrastructure event. The offering made Elon Musk the first person to reach a net worth of one trillion US dollars.

The US Commerce Department applied export control restrictions to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on June 12, 2026, suspending global access to both models. The action followed the publication of a jailbreak method by Amazon researchers that bypassed the models' safety guardrails. Anthropic later added a government-approved cybersecurity classifier and restored global access on July 1, 2026.

Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 (API id claude-fable-5), a new frontier tier positioned above Claude Opus 4.8, which remains the default model. Pricing is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output with no long-context surcharge, on a 1 million token default context window with up to 128K output tokens and text plus vision input. Adaptive thinking is always on and cannot be disabled, with effort levels spanning low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. Anthropic's launch table reports 80.3 on SWE-bench Pro, 29.3 on FrontierCode Diamond, 85.0 on OSWorld-Verified, and a GDPval-AA ELO of 1932, all vendor-reported. Always-on safety classifiers can reroute flagged requests to Opus 4.8, billed at Opus rates for the rerouted portion. The model is available on the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex, and Microsoft Foundry at launch.

Apple unveiled its third-generation Apple Foundation Models (AFM 3) at WWDC 2026 on June 8. The five-model family includes two on-device models (AFM 3 Core at roughly 3B parameters and AFM 3 Core Advanced at roughly 20B parameters) and three server-side models running on Private Cloud Compute (AFM 3 Cloud, AFM 3 Cloud Image, and AFM 3 Cloud Pro). AFM 3 Cloud Pro runs on NVIDIA GPUs hosted on Google Cloud. Apple also announced Xcode 27 at the same event, a redesigned IDE with native support for coding agents from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.

Microsoft announced its first in-house coding and reasoning models at Build 2026 in San Francisco. MAI-Code-1-Flash rolls out across all GitHub Copilot tiers with a 256K context window, priced at $0.75 per million input tokens ($0.075 cached) and $4.50 per million output, with Microsoft claiming better price to performance than Claude Haiku 4.5 and 60% fewer tokens used on hard tasks. MAI-Thinking-1, a 35B active parameter MoE reasoning model with a 256K context window, posted 97% on AIME 25 and 53% on SWE-Bench Pro, which Microsoft says matches Claude Opus 4.6. It enters private preview on Microsoft Foundry with distribution planned through Fireworks AI, Baseten, and OpenRouter. The launches mark a deliberate step away from Microsoft's dependence on OpenAI models inside Copilot.

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC for a proposed initial public offering, less than a week after closing a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation. Annualized revenue run-rate recently crossed $47 billion on enterprise adoption of Claude for coding and agentic workflows. Share count and pricing are not yet determined. The move puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which is reportedly preparing its own confidential filing, in the race to a landmark AI listing.

MiniMax launched M3, an open-weight coding and agentic model built on MiniMax Sparse Attention, which replaces full attention with KV-block selection and cuts per-token compute at 1M context to roughly one twentieth of the previous generation. M3 accepts text, image, and video input across a 1,048,576 token context window with up to 512K output tokens, priced at $0.30 per million input and $1.20 per million output. MiniMax reports 59% on SWE-Bench Pro and 83.5 on BrowseComp, though headline runs used its own infrastructure with agent scaffolding, so independent verification is pending. Weights and a technical report are due on Hugging Face within about ten days.

Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H funding round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, surpassing OpenAI's reported $852 billion to become the most valuable private AI company. The round landed the same day as the Claude Opus 4.8 release and set the stage for the confidential IPO filing that followed on June 1.

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 just six weeks after Opus 4.7, keeping the 1 million token context window. Anthropic's own measures put agentic coding at 69.2% (up from 64.3%) and knowledge work at 1890 (up from 1753), with the model roughly 4x less likely than 4.7 to let flaws in its own code slip through while using about 35% fewer tokens per task. A new fast mode runs roughly 2.5x quicker and about three times cheaper than before, and Dynamic Workflows adds large-scale parallel subagent support.

President Trump pulled a landmark AI executive order from the schedule hours before its planned signing ceremony on May 21. The order would have established a voluntary 90-day pre-launch review framework for frontier AI models with NSA involvement and tasked federal agencies with using AI models to harden government network defenses. Trump cited concerns the framework could slow US competitiveness against China. Former AI czar David Sacks, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are reported to have lobbied against it directly. No new signing date announced.

Coupa acquired Tonkean, a Palo Alto-based no-code workflow orchestration platform with 250+ native connectors and multi-agent coordination. Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal is Coupa's second AI-focused acquisition in two weeks, following the May 12 Rossum (intelligent document processing) deal, and feeds Coupa's emerging agentic trade network across procurement, invoicing, and supplier transactions.

Cohere released Command A+, a 218B-total / 25B-active mixture-of-experts model with a 128K input context and 64K max generation, under an Apache 2.0 license. Multimodal text and image input, tool use, 48-language coverage, available on Hugging Face in BF16, FP8, and W4A4 quantizations. Runs on a single NVIDIA Blackwell B200 or two H100s at W4A4. Scores 37 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 75.1% on MMMU, and 80.6% on MathVista. Cohere's first fully Apache 2.0 enterprise model and first multimodal reasoning model.

Google ships Gemini 3.5 Flash to general availability at I/O 2026. Priced at $1.50 per million input and $9.00 per million output tokens, with a 1,048,576 token context window. The first Flash-tier release that outscores the previous Pro flagship (Gemini 3.1 Pro) on agentic coding suites including Terminal-Bench 2.1 (76.2%) and MCP Atlas (83.6%), at roughly 4x the throughput.

Google introduces Gemini Spark, a general-purpose AI agent inside the Gemini app that can reason across connected apps and take actions on the user's behalf. Available first to trusted testers and Google AI Ultra subscribers in the week following the keynote.

Alibaba unveils Qwen3.7-Max at the 2026 Alibaba Cloud Summit, the flagship proprietary model in the Qwen3.7 family. 1 million token context window, extended thinking mode, claims of autonomous operation up to 35 hours on long-horizon agentic tasks. Scored 57 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (first place on the public leaderboard) and roughly 1,475 Elo on the LM Arena text leaderboard. Landed on the Alibaba API platform on May 19, formally announced May 20. Priced at $2.50 per million input and $7.50 per million output tokens via OpenRouter.

NVIDIA ships Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B-A3B-Reasoning, an open-weight multimodal model that processes text, image, video, and audio in a unified sequence. Hybrid Mamba-Transformer-MoE backbone (30B total, 3B active per token), 256K context window, native audio handling up to 20 minutes per clip. Tops six leaderboards for document intelligence and video/audio understanding including OCRBenchV2-En (65.8), MMLongBench-Doc (57.5), OSWorld (47.4), Video-MME (72.2), and VoiceBench (89.4). Available on Hugging Face in BF16, FP8, and NVFP4 quantizations.

OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.5-Cyber, a variant of GPT-5.5 tuned for cybersecurity workflows, in limited preview to vetted defenders. Launch partners include Cisco, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Intel, Snyk, and SentinelOne. The model offers reduced classifier-based refusals for authorized red team and vulnerability research.

OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 Instant as the new default ChatGPT model, replacing GPT-5.4 Instant. The update tightens accuracy, cuts gratuitous emoji output, and rolls out to free, Plus, Pro, Business, and Edu tiers.

Google releases Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite in preview through the Gemini API and Vertex AI. Priced at $0.25 per million input and $1.50 per million output, with a 1M context window, the model targets high-volume workloads at half the cost of Gemini 3 Flash.

Amazon invests up to $25 billion in additional funding to Anthropic, bringing its total commitment to $33 billion. The deal includes over $100 billion in AWS infrastructure spending over the next decade.

DeepSeek releases V4 Pro (1.6T parameters, 49B active) and V4 Flash (284B total, 13B active) under the MIT license with native 1M context windows. V4 Pro scores 80.6% on SWE-bench Verified.

OpenAI launches GPT-5.5, its first fully retrained base model since GPT-4.5. Features 1M context, native omnimodal capabilities, and benchmark leadership at $5/$30 per million tokens.

Anthropic launches Claude Design as an Anthropic Labs research preview. It reads codebases, generates design systems, and hands off finished prototypes to Claude Code.

SpaceX acquires Elon Musk's xAI in a $250 billion deal, the largest acquisition in AI history. The merger brings Grok and the Colossus GPU cluster under SpaceX.

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7 with a 1 million token context window at flagship pricing and incremental gains across reasoning, code, and SWE-bench.

Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6, a faster and more affordable model in the 4.6 family with strong coding and reasoning performance.

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.6 with extended thinking and a 1M context window option, setting new benchmarks across reasoning tasks.

Google launches Gemini 2.5 Pro with a native 1M token context window and improved multimodal reasoning capabilities.

Meta releases Llama 4 with Scout (10M context) and Maverick (1M context) variants, pushing open-source model capabilities forward.

OpenAI launches GPT-4.5 with a 256K context window and significantly improved creative writing and emotional intelligence.

xAI releases Grok 3 with strong reasoning performance, trained on the Colossus 200K GPU cluster.

DeepSeek releases V3, a powerful open-source model trained with a fraction of the compute used by competitors, sparking industry debate about efficiency.

Anthropic releases Claude 3.5 Haiku, a fast and affordable model that outperforms the original Claude 3 Opus on many benchmarks.

Anthropic ships an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet with computer use capabilities and significant improvements in coding and tool use.

The European Union begins enforcing the AI Act, requiring risk assessments and transparency for high-risk AI systems deployed in EU markets.

OpenAI launches o1, a reasoning-focused model that uses chain-of-thought at inference time to solve complex math and coding problems.

Meta releases Llama 3.1 with a 405B parameter variant, the largest open-source model at the time, matching frontier closed models.

OpenAI launches GPT-4o Mini at $0.15 per million input tokens, dramatically undercutting existing pricing and pressuring the entire market.

Anthropic releases Claude 3.5 Sonnet, surpassing GPT-4o on most benchmarks while maintaining fast response times and lower costs.

OpenAI releases GPT-4o with native multimodal capabilities including real-time voice and vision, available free to all ChatGPT users.

Meta releases Llama 3 in 8B and 70B variants, establishing a new bar for open-source language model performance.

Anthropic launches the Claude 3 model family (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus) with vision capabilities and a 200K context window.

Google launches Gemini 1.5 Pro with a 1M token context window, a major leap in long-context processing for production use.

Google releases Gemini 2.0 Flash with native tool use and multimodal output, optimized for agentic workflows.

Mistral releases Large 2 with a 256K context window, strong multilingual support, and competitive pricing for enterprise use.

OpenAI closes a $6.6B funding round at a $157B valuation, making it the most valuable private AI company in the world.

The EU AI Act officially enters into force, establishing the world's first comprehensive legal framework for artificial intelligence regulation.

Amazon completes its $2.75B additional investment in Anthropic, bringing its total commitment to $4B and deepening the AWS partnership.