OpenAI's first device is set to be a smart speaker that lets you talk with ChatGPT, according to a report from Bloomberg. The device apparently won't have a screen, but will use a camera and additional sensors to "understand" your environment.
The report comes just days after Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI that accused the AI company of stealing hardware secrets. OpenAI, in a new statement on Tuesday, said that it is "not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit."
Sources tell Bloomberg that OpenAI's device will also feature a rechargeable battery that will allow users to carry it with them. It will offer smart home contro …
OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 last week and folded Codex into a unified ChatGPT desktop app. Since then, the company has been running flat out.
Early Tuesday, Tibo Sottiaux, engineering lead for Codex at OpenAI, mused on X that combined active users of Codex and ChatGPT Work might hit 8 million. The trajectory has been impressive, especially as the use of Anthropic Claude has grown so much in 2026. Codex had fewer than 1 million weekly active users in February but hit 5 million by early June. Then GPT-5.6 launched on July 9, and the numbers accelerated sharply — 6 million by July 12, 7 million roughly 24 hours later, and 8 million by Sunday.
That’s a growth curve most enterprise SaaS products never see in a lifetime, let alone in five months.
Tomorrow might be 8M active user celebration day. Just saying
According to the company, demand surged almost immediately, with traffic roughly doubling OpenAI’s previous peak within 48 hours. The sudden influx exposed several scaling issues. In a detailed thread published on July 12, Sottiaux outlined the team’s response, which included optimizing inference to increase capacity by about 10% per subscriber, reducing the context window from 372,000 to 272,000 tokens after the larger limit created unintended billing issues, rolling back experimental reasoning-effort settings (internally known as “juice” values), and patching overly aggressive multi-agent behavior at the highest reasoning levels.
OpenAI also temporarily removed the five-hour usage cap for Plus, Business, and Pro subscribers — a move that amounts to the most generous access the product has offered since launch.
Community reactions were split between those who read the context window rollback as a stealth downgrade and those who credited Sottiaux for explaining the operational trade-offs publicly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman weighed in with what amounted to a positioning statement against competitors who, in his framing, treat users with contempt.
Competitors respond to the surge
Within hours of OpenAI announcing its 7 million user milestone, Anthropic extended its Claude Fable 5 promotional pricing through July 19 and bumped Claude Code’s weekly usage limits by 50%. Whether one caused the other is unknowable, but the overlap gives us plenty to speculate about.
Since Thursday, GPT-5.6 Sol has risen to second on Arena’s agent leaderboard after 7,800 real-world agentic sessions, and many developers now see OpenAI as the leader in AI coding again.
Cost per task matters
Developers judge systems by the cost of completing a task. Cognition, for example, reported that its Devin Fusion product, powered by Fable 5, can be cheaper per completed task than Anthropic’s pricier Opus 4.8 because better delegation reduces unnecessary work. In 81% of Fable-led runs, the lead model never edits code. The takeaway is that a more expensive model can still lower overall costs if it avoids wasted work.
In 81% of Fable-led runs, the lead model never edits code.
The harness is becoming the product
OpenAI’s decision to merge Codex, ChatGPT Work, and its built-in browser into a single desktop app reflects that shift. The same is true of its plugin architecture, which connects the app to Slack, Google Drive, SharePoint, CRMs, and calendars. OpenAI is turning it into a workspace that sits atop the tools people already use.
Anthropic has moved in a similar direction with Claude Cowork, which developed after the company saw users already using Claude Code for far more than software development.
Usage caps remain the bottleneck
Right now, the problem remains the usage cap. Even with the five-hour limit lifted, Codex and ChatGPT Work are forced to share a single weekly pool. If you run a heavy Sol Ultra session with multi-agent orchestration, you’ll burn through that allowance incredibly fast. (Sottiaux is aware of the headache and says a fix is in the works).
In the broader race, OpenAI has the sheer gravity of 900 million weekly users and killer benchmark scores. Anthropic still holds a massive amount of developer goodwill thanks to premium code quality and enterprise-friendly pricing. And for the DIY crowd, open-source stacks running GLM 5.2 or Kimi K2.7 look better than ever if you want to trade a little speed for data control. Coding agents and knowledge work are multiplying fast, and we haven’t even hit the weekend yet.
Coding agents for coding and knowledge work are multiplying fast, and we haven’t even hit the weekend yet.
Every package has a set of status flags describing its current health and availability. These can be queried via the Package.Status property.
A package may report more than one status value at a time if multiple conditions apply.
Package Status Groups
The various states fall into three groups:
NeedsRemediation
DependencyIssue
LicenseIssue
Modified
Tampered
NotAvailable
DataOffline
Disabled
PackageOffline
Servicing
DeploymentInProgress
NeedsRemediation
Status values in the NeedsRemediation group indicate that the package is in a bad or broken state and must be repaired before it can be used.
Tampered indicates that the package contents have been modified in a manner consistent with malware. Anti-malware products typically set this status.
Modified indicates that the package contents have changed for reasons other than malware (for example disk corruption or unintended administrative modification).
DependencyIssue indicates that the package itself is intact, but one or more of its dependencies are unavailable or in a broken state. For example, if a Framework package is marked Tampered, any Main packages depending upon that Framework will report DependencyIssue.
NotAvailable
Status values in the NotAvailable group indicate that Windows has the package installed, but it cannot be used at this time.
DataOffline indicates that the user’s ApplicationData for the package resides on removable media that is no longer present.
Disabled indicates that the package has been explicitly disabled and should not be used. Administrators may use this to block access to a package, and complex installers may set this to temporarily disable a package during servicing operations.
Servicing
Status values in the Servicing group indicate that the package is currently undergoing a deployment operation, such as servicing, repair, or update.
Windows checks a package’s status before using it. For example, when activating an application, Windows verifies the package’s status before activation and blocks activation if the package is not usable.
The PackageStatus.VerifyIsOK() method returns false if one or more status flags are preventing usage. Individual properties can be queried to determine the specific reason(s) why the package cannot be used at this time.
Get-AppxPackage surfaces this information via its Status output property, for example:
PowerShellPS C:\> Get-AppxPackage *calc*
Name : Microsoft.WindowsCalculator
...
Status : Ok
If the status is not Ok, PowerShell repors one or more blocking conditions instead.
A group of 26 former Meta employees is suing the company over claims that it used AI tools to unfairly target workers on leave with layoffs, as reported earlier by Reuters. In the lawsuit, the employees allege Meta determined which workers to dismiss based on performance data collected by a "constellation" of internal AI tools, but failed to exclude those on parental or medical leave from its ranking system:
The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising thei …
Instagram head Adam Mosseri believes companies will eventually need to manage AI token spending the same way they manage payroll or other operating expenses, predicting that engineers could soon face limits on how much they spend using AI tools.
The Ally X20 (front) and Lenovo Legion Go 2 (behind).
When I first told you about the "OLED Xbox Ally X of my dreams," I had to curb my enthusiasm a bit. That's partly because I hadn't yet tried the handheld myself, and partly because Asus was only planning to sell itbundled with a pair of expensive AR glasses! I'm happy to say both things are no longer true.
Asus will sell a standalone version of the OLED Ally as well, spokesperson Anthony Spence confirms to The Verge. "We are actively discussing the release schedule for a standalone version of the new Ally. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements."
And after spending two hours with the OLED Ally at the company's California offices, I …
Log in
