AI Round-up: 25 July 2026

Claude Opus 5 was the day's clearest launch. Anthropic introduced the model as a more efficient flagship; Reuters and CNBC covered its cost case, while GitHub Copilot, Perplexity and Databricks began rolling it out and creator coverage tested its coding performance.

The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident deepened into an accountability story as Reuters reported that an agent spent days hacking and went unnoticed for a week, alongside US-China safety tensions and kill-switch debate. Infrastructure formed the other major thread, led by Nvidia and SK Group's $500 billion-plus data-centre and memory initiative, while Microsoft, Nvidia and Meta publicly backed open-weight models.