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A letter circulating among House members urges Speaker Mike Johnson to cancel recess and keep Congress in session until AI safeguards pass. Drafted by Rep. Sam Liccardo and co-signed by Reps. George Whitesides, Lori Trahan, and Ted Lieu, the letter cites existential warnings from current and former Anthropic researchers. It highlights bills like the AI Kill Switch Act and the FRONTIER Act. Johnson has offered no indication the House will vote on AI regulations before Election Day.

Sakana AI has released Fugu Max and Fugu Ultra v2, two orchestration systems that route tasks across pools of open and specialized models to optimize cost and capability simultaneously. Fugu Max, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, delivers 40-60% lower output costs than Sonnet 5, GPT 5.6 Terra, and Kimi K3, while topping six benchmarks. Fugu Ultra v2 achieves top scores on five of eight benchmarks, including a 74.3 on DeepSWE, without relying on GPT-Astra or Fable 5.

Anthropic has launched the Anthropic Economic Index, an initiative tracking AI's real-world effects on labor markets using anonymized data from millions of Claude.ai conversations. Key findings show software development and technical writing dominate usage, with 36% of occupations using AI for at least a quarter of their tasks. AI leans toward augmentation over automation, 57% to 43%. Mid-to-high wage roles like computer programmers see the heaviest use. Anthropic is open-sourcing the dataset and inviting economists and policy experts to contribute.

ElevenLabs has released Music v2.5, now the default model in ElevenMusic for prompted and reference generation. The update delivers more layered, complex songs with more natural-sounding instruments, and was preferred in a blind test across 47,885 prompt pairs. Lossless downloads are available on every plan, including Free, which gets five per day; Pro users receive 400 per month. Downloads are blocked on tracks referencing other artists' songs. Music v2.5 is also available in ElevenCreative and the ElevenLabs API.

Meta's new agentic AI app Muse reached No. 2 on the U.S. App Store after accumulating over 83,000 iOS downloads since its Tuesday launch, according to Sensor Tower data. However, the debut trails Meta's own Threads app, which saw 4.3 million U.S. downloads on launch day, and ChatGPT, which averaged roughly 83,300 daily downloads in its first week. Muse's main competitor is Instinct, a text-based AI agent valued at $2.5 billion, which has been rapidly shipping new features.

Tavus has released Phoenix-4.5, a real-time human rendering model achieving 134ms audio-to-video latency, 25% faster than competing models. Unlike Phoenix-4, which composited a 512×512 face region onto static footage, Phoenix-4.5 uses a GAN-based generative renderer to generate the full frame — face, head, neck, shoulders, and torso — in a single pass. Lip sync improves 16%, motion vividness increases 1.3×, and the model supports zero-shot rendering from a single image in about one minute, with full fine-tuning completing in two hours instead of four.

OpenAI has launched the Agents API in public beta, giving developers access to the same Codex harness and infrastructure that powers Codex and ChatGPT for Work. Available to all developers at no additional fees beyond token and tool costs, the API enables cloud agents via a single API call, with features including automatic context compaction for long sessions, parallel subagent support, and tool search. Sandbox options include OpenAI-hosted environments and partners like Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, and Vercel.

Google Labs has expanded Dreambeans, its personalized daily story app first introduced in June 2026, to all U.S. users aged 18 and older on Android and iOS. The app generates daily story collections by combining personalized topics like places, shows, and upcoming events with data pulled from connected Google apps including Calendar, Gmail, Photos, Search, YouTube, and Gemini. Users who connect Google Photos can see visuals of themselves and loved ones woven into stories, and can bookmark, share, or dive deeper into any story.

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a tailored product combining GPT-6 Astra's reasoning with built-in premium financial data from Daloopa, PitchBook, LSEG News, and Crunchbase. Developed with design partners Morgan Stanley and Evercore, it targets investment banking and equity research teams. The product supports LBO modeling, earnings analysis, and pitchbook preparation, and integrates existing subscriptions from S&P Capital IQ, MSCI, and Moody's. Enterprise security controls, granular citations, and firm-specific Excel, Word, and PowerPoint templates are included.