Welcome back! OpenAI has taken the model frontier back from Anthropic nine days after Opus 4.7 arrived. An AI agent has signed a three-year lease on a San Francisco retail store and hired two humans. Microsoft has turned Copilot into an agent by default across Office. And the White House has accused Chinese labs of stealing frontier capabilities at industrial scale.
In today’s Generative AI Newsletter:
OpenAI: retakes the model frontier with GPT-5.5, codenamed Spud.
Claude: is now running a retail store in San Francisco.
Microsoft: makes Copilot agentic by default across Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
The White House: accuses Chinese AI labs of industrial-scale model theft.
