AI Intel Daily Briefing — Sunday, 12 July 2026

The frontier model market repriced itself inside 72 hours. OpenAI shipped the GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, Luna) on 9 July, xAI launched Grok 4.5 the same morning, Meta moved to paid distribution with Muse Spark 1.1, and a credible leak puts Gemini 3.5 Pro at general availability on 17 July. Against that backdrop, the EU AI Act reaches full applicability in 21 days, and the talent market has flipped: JPMorgan is now explicitly prioritising AI hires over bankers, and AI governance has become the fastest-growing hiring family in financial services.