Today’s AI News · 2026-07-08 · 22 min
Today we’re covering the biggest AI stories of July 8th, 2026. Meta’s Superintelligence Labs released Muse Image, its first in-house image model, opening at No. 2 on Arena’s leaderboards behind only OpenAI’s GPT Image 2 and rolling out free across Meta AI, Instagram, and WhatsApp, with a Muse Video model teased right behind it - proof that Alexandr Wang’s earlier claims about catching up to the frontier weren’t just talk. China is reportedly considering its own restrictions on letting top domestic models like Qwen, Doubao, and GLM-5.2 be used outside the country, discussing the idea with ByteDance, Alibaba, and Z AI just weeks after Washington’s Fable and Mythos export controls set the precedent - meaning the world’s cheapest, most popular open models could suddenly become harder for Western users to access too.
GPT-5.6 Sol Launches, ChatGPT Work Takes On Cowork, Meta’s Muse Spark Undercuts the Frontier77 / 100GPT-5.6 Restricted Like Fable, China Stole 28M Claude Exchanges, AI Avatar Built 200K Followers45 / 100OpenAI Built Its Own Chip in 9 Months, Fable 5 Is Coming Back, AI Is Trying to Kill the Common Cold55 / 100Claude Joins Your Slack as a Coworker, Meta’s $299 AI Glasses Launch, AI Gets a Biology Language40 / 100Grok 4.5 Rivals Opus at a Fraction of the Cost, ChatGPT’s Voice Gets GPT-Live, Seedream 5.0