The Model Context Protocol's biggest revision yet makes it stateless at the protocol layer — a release candidate is out now, the final spec is set for July 28, and SDK maintainers have a validation window to test against real workloads before the standard underneath every agent stack shifts.
A July 9 pricing audit finds Cursor separating first-party and third-party model usage into distinct Teams pools, adding a $120/mo Premium seat — as Copilot's share slides to 51% and Cursor hits $2B ARR.
OpenAI's latest Codex updates ship broader plugin and MCP support with remote plugins on by default, proxy-aware auth on macOS and Windows, new Bedrock models, and tool search as the MCP default.
Windsurf's July updates bring auto-reconnect, reviewable diffs, a /mcp slash command with live server status, and ACU usage visibility across Devin Desktop and Devin Local.
Lionsgate took an equity interest in Runway and set a joint development program to create new IP — starting with a short-form episodic series drawn from the studio's existing franchises.
ByteDance launched Seedream 5.0 Pro on July 9 — editable layer output, multilingual text rendering and native 2K images tuned as keyframes for video pipelines like Seedance.
nmatic.ai and VFX collective Alibi Studios launched The Next Valley, one of the first studios built to combine AI tools with traditional VFX production for film, advertising and broadcast.
Cutback launched Selects on June 30 — AI that syncs multicam, transcribes, organizes and assembles rough cuts, reporting up to 60% less prep time on productions including Beast Games.
RedShark breaks down how Eddie AI assembles first-pass rough cuts and integrates directly with Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro to speed post-production.
Banijay and All3Media closed their merger on July 9, forming a London-based $8 billion colossus of nearly 200 labels behind The Traitors, Big Brother, MasterChef and Peaky Blinders — Bassetti as CEO, Turton as deputy, and Jeff Zucker in the chairman's seat.
Saban Films extended its $60 million senior credit facility with East West Bank through 2030, prolonging a financing relationship that has run for a decade.
Range Media Partners named Jake Carter and Billy Offer co-heads of Range Select, its film finance and sales division, after the pair financed and sold titles like The History of Sound and May December.
Virtual production outfit Orbital Studios is relocating its LED walls to Television City in L.A., adding volume stagecraft and an R&D lab to the historic broadcast lot.
The Lionsgate-backed live-action Naruto movie opened a worldwide casting search on July 9 to find the actors who will play Team 7: Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura.
John Goodman joined Brie Larson in Sony's Skeletons, a modern creature-horror thriller told through a young boy who discovers his parents are hiding a secret about his mother's true nature.
The Daniels' untitled Universal event film added Silvia Dionicio, Jackson Kelly, Kerrice Brooks and Thalia Dudek to a cast led by Matt Damon, Sandra Oh and Charles Melton.
Ai Weiwei's Button Up! opened July 2 at Factory International in Manchester — 30 tons of buttons rescued from a shuttered Croydon factory, sewn into eight flags of 9,000 buttons each recalling the Eight-Nation Alliance, beside an 80-foot Lego History of Bombs, in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
At the Petersen Automotive Museum, Joshua Vides spent nine days hand-painting five vehicles and a full garage into Flat Out — a monochrome room that reads as one continuous drawing.
Dezeen reveals the tunnelled interior of JR's La Caverne du Pont Neuf — a 2,400 sq m inflatable cave over Paris's oldest bridge, honoring Christo and Jeanne-Claude 41 years on.
DroneArt Show: Harry Potter sends 1,200 illuminated drones reimagining the films across night skies worldwide, with audiences wearing LED wristbands synced to the show.
A 1,000-drone performance over Taipei's Xinyi District, framed against TAIPEI 101, staged Digital Fireworks — a reusable, zero-emission replacement for pyrotechnics at civic scale.
ExplorersWeb tracks the climbers challenging Broad Peak, K2 and the Gasherbrums without bottled oxygen or Sherpa support, as rope fixing advances toward the first summit windows.
Canadian-Belarusian climber Liliya Ianovskaia summited Nanga Parbat via the Kinshofer Route — the oldest woman ever on the Killer Mountain, and her fifth oldest-woman record on an 8,000er.
NOAA Ocean Exploration's 2026 field season charts this year's expeditions to unexplored seafloor, deep-sea habitats and maritime heritage sites — much of it streamed live from the ship.