The July update to VS Code brings a small but practical change for Claude users: multiple parallel chats within a single agent-host session. Sounds unremarkable — but it changes how you work with the agent.
The new Claude Code version closes a tricky gap: in auto mode, tampering with session transcripts is now blocked. Plus fixes for Windows worktrees and background agents.
Anthropic brings Claude Code and Claude Cowork to the public beta of Claude for Government Desktop — in a FedRAMP High environment, with local history storage and hard spending caps.
GPT-5.6 is now public — weeks after the Trump administration asked OpenAI to limit the launch to a few vetted partners. And the timing lines up exactly with Fable 5 leaving Anthropic's subscription plans.
IT services company UST enters a strategic alliance with Anthropic: Claude moves into the platforms and workflows UST builds for Global 1000 clients — and 20,000 employees worldwide get trained on it.
Two fresh case studies put Claude Cowork to work in the real world: Anthropic's own marketing team automates weekly reporting, and Thomson Reuters builds 'fiduciary-grade AI' for lawyers. Both rely on a checker agent that verifies every number.
SpaceXAI unveiled Grok 4.5, its first coding model co-trained with Cursor. Musk calls it 'roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster' — at half the price. That puts real pressure on Anthropic and OpenAI.
OpenAI replaces Advanced Voice Mode with GPT-Live — a full-duplex architecture that listens and speaks while you're still talking. For heavy tasks, the model hands off to a frontier model in the background.