10 – 16 August 2026

OpenAI has started pulling companies off the waitlist for Premium seats in ChatGPT Business, priced at $100 per month. OpenAI describes the seat as 5x the usage of a Standard seat, with the five-hour limit removed and the quota resetting weekly on a predictable schedule.

Workspaces can mix Standard and Premium seats. Early participants can pick up as much as $500 in extra credits, calculated at $100 per Premium seat added. That five-hour window Premium drops is the same one OpenAI brought back to Codex in late July after temporarily scrapping it.

Waitlist applications tied to the promo credits are open through August 20.

OpenAI says projects, chats, skills, and plugins are kept in a single synced state across Codex, ChatGPT Work, and other AI agents. Start a project in one, and it's the same project in the other.

The project and chat sync between Codex and ChatGPT Work is described in OpenAI's own post and in a Crypto Briefing writeup dated August 11.

Codex usage limits were zeroed out on August 13, according to services that track resets. The post announcing it credited a 15 million user milestone and separately called out Codex Realtime as a big opportunity. Neither the number nor the status of Codex Realtime is backed by any other source.

The publicly confirmed baseline is smaller. OpenAI said more than 5 million people were using Codex weekly as of June 2. Testing Catalog later put the combined weekly audience for ChatGPT Work and Codex at 10 million.

The previous limit reset landed on July 29, when an OpenAI employee flagged the return of the five-hour cap in Codex.

Codex's app-server now has an experimental thread/revert request for rolling a thread back. The commit touched 24 files: 939 lines added, 21 removed.

• The loaded thread's long-term paginated history is replaced with the slice preceding the beforeTurnId turn, and the thread ID stays the same. • The active turn is interrupted, history reloads without unloading the thread, mutable thread settings are preserved, and a thread/reverted event fires. • Backward pagination cursors are returned for the remaining turns and items. • Stale rollout paths are rejected after the revert, and local file changes are untouched.

The work landed in pull request #38440.

Ultrafast, a new service tier in the OpenAI API, pushes GPT-5.6 Sol to up to 750 output tokens per second. OpenAI says that's up to 14x the model's normal speed.

The tier is in preview and starts with a limited group of API customers. OpenAI plans to widen access as capacity grows.

Google has introduced Gemini 3.7 Flash, according to posts from Testing Catalog on Threads. The claims:

• 50% cheaper than Gemini 3.6 Flash • 65% on the DeepSWE V1.1 benchmark, close to GPT-5.6 Terra • better tool use when driving Google Workspace apps • rolling out in Gemini Spark, which the same post says is available to Pro and Ultra subscribers in 160 countries

The model is already live in the API, AI Studio and Antigravity. Other products get it as the rollout continues.

Zhipu AI announced GLM-5.3 in ZCode on August 14. The model is built for cyberdefense and coding work, and the company says API access and open weights will both be released in stages, after strict safety checks.

A post on Threads claims GLM-5.3 scored 84.5 on CyberGym, beating Mythos 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and that it was trained on top of a 743B-parameter base model. Zhipu's official materials don't confirm any of those numbers.

For reference on the same benchmark: Microsoft's MDASH multi-agent scaffold scored 88.45%, according to the company's own materials.

Per a post on Threads, xAI's voice agent builder picked up post-conversation actions: outbound SMS, email, and API calls.

• Outbound SMS through Twilio numbers: the agent texts the person it's currently talking to, from an imported number, in the middle of the call. Meant for confirmations, links, and anything easier to read than to hear. • System variables in API tools: the caller's number gets passed into the request so the agent can pull up their account and hand back personalized data. • Post-call email notifications: the message goes to up to three recipients and includes call duration, the channel, and a link to the recording.

The announcement says emails have a minimum call length setting so short calls don't trigger notifications. We couldn't find independent confirmation of the update in press coverage or in xAI's own materials.

Microsoft says MAI-Image-2.6 debuted on Arena and landed second in the text-to-image ranking, with access in MAI Playground and through the API promised for next week.

Public data doesn't back that up. As of August 10, 2026, second place on the Arena board belongs to grok-imagine-image-2.0, and mai-image-2.5 sits ninth. There's no separate 2.6 announcement in Microsoft's public materials either; the second-place finish the company has documented was for MAI-Image-2.5 in the image editing category.

Microsoft did previously open a public preview of MAI-Image-2.5-Pro in Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground, priced at $106 per 1M output tokens.

OpenAI is now on an annualized revenue pace of more than $40 billion, roughly double its level at the end of 2025, Bloomberg reports. The outlet's sources spoke anonymously because the figures aren't public.

Growth picked up over the past few months on the back of AI coding tools, subscription sales, and an advertising business still in its early stages. The consumer side is growing too.

The numbers land as OpenAI preps for a public listing. Ahead of it, the company bought back roughly $7 billion in employee shares at an $852 billion valuation.

>bAnthropic in talks to buy Decart AI for about $6 billion, per Bloomberg

Bloomberg reports that Anthropic is negotiating an acquisition of AI startup Decart AI for roughly $6 billion. The outlet's sources, who asked not to be named because the talks are private, say the deal isn't final and could still fall apart.

If it closes, it would be the largest known acquisition Anthropic has made ahead of its expected IPO.

Reuters reports that Apple Intelligence in China will run on a large language model Apple trained itself, in partnership with Alibaba. Qwen features in the Chinese version too, with the Apple-trained model doing the primary work.

In the US and most other territories, Apple Intelligence uses Google Gemini technology, while its Foundation Models are entirely Apple's. Apple has also shipped ChatGPT extensions for Siri, and none of those options, Gemini, ChatGPT, or Anthropic's Claude, are available in China.

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