xAI launched Grok 4.5 on July 8 — its strongest model, trained alongside Cursor and pitched by Musk as comparable to Opus 4.7 but faster and cheaper — shipping in Grok Build, in Cursor on all plans, and via the console at $2/$6 per million tokens.
Meta Superintelligence Labs announced Muse Spark 1.1, a multimodal agentic model with a 1M-token context window and big gains in coding and tool use — early testers cite its parallel tool-calling.
Microsoft's Foundry Agent Service reached general availability in early July — sandboxed hosted agents with filesystem state, managed Toolboxes, memory and multi-agent orchestration.
Runway added Gemini Omni Flash for paid video generation and editing from prompts, images or video — a rival model inside Runway's own pipeline, after June's Seed Audio and Seedance API additions.
A July 14 roundup argues creative AI is the one domain where Chinese models — Seedream, Alibaba, open-weight tools — now compete at the frontier, the week Goldman Sachs began recommending them to clients.
Blackmagic's July 14 Resolve update ships AI Cinematic Haze — depth-map-driven atmospheric fog with slider controls — plus Ursa Cine Immersive support, ProRes RAW decode and ripple-editing improvements.
Adobe's Firefly AI Assistant entered public beta across Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io — in Premiere it sorts bins, batch-renames clips, finds interview questions and adds markers.