Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1 as Apple files suit against OpenAI

The clearest new turn since the last update came from Meta: on July 9, it publicly released Muse Spark 1.1, a multimodal agentic coding model. That adds another direct entrant to the coding-model race around OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft-backed tools.

Microsoft’s main move this week remains inside its own products. On July 9, Microsoft said OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 model family is now available across Microsoft 365 Copilot apps and is the preferred model for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Chat and Cowork. Microsoft also said on July 9 that OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna models are generally available in Microsoft Foundry, alongside a new Asia-Pacific Data Zone and hosted production agents.

Around that, the other concrete shifts were legal and commercial. Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on July 10 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing OpenAI of trade secret theft and breach of contract. OpenAI announced the general availability of the GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna family on July 9, and Anthropic announced on July 9 a partnership with UST under which UST will deploy Claude into engineering environments and train 20,000 engineers, architects and consultants globally.