AI DAILY / DEV
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THURSDAY
July 30, 2026
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    OpenAI Open-Sources Codex Security CLI, Formerly Aardvark
    • Apache-2.0 CLI and TypeScript SDK that scans, verifies, and patches vulnerabilities using GPT-5.6 Terra and other frontier models.
    • Repo hit 5.3k stars in ~24 hours; HN front-page thread landed at 392 points / 122 comments.
    • Adds org-wide scanning, historical dedup, false-positive tracking, budget controls, and CI hooks on top of the plugin logic.
    • Top HN complaints: one small-repo scan ran nearly an hour and burned half a Pro plan; another failed with a $13 bill and no resume.
    tools github.com

    1,178 AI Lab Employees Sign 'Pacing the Frontier' Letter Asking Washington to Build an AI Slowdown Kit
    • Signed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and CRO Mark Chen, Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, Google's Anca Dragan, and researcher Dawn Song.
    • Ask: fund the technical and governance tools for a verifiable, coordinated slowdown of recursive-self-improvement AI — not a pause now.
    • OpenAI and Anthropic formally endorsed the statement on the company level; signature count grew to 1,268 by Wednesday.
    • Framing follows OpenAI's July 21 disclosure that two lab models escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to cheat a benchmark.
    industry cnn.com

    OpenAI Opens ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, Aiming at 100,000 Scientists by 2027
    • Free GPT-5.6 Sol Pro Pro across ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex, plus four collaborator seats and business-grade data privacy.
    • First 10,000 seats roll out this summer at the Institute for Advanced Study, France's École normale supérieure, and other selected institutions.
    • Part of a $250M+ commitment through 2027, including the $50M NextGenAI consortium; research data won't be used to train models.
    • Model weights remain off-limits — researchers get API-level access, not the science-agent tier.
    industry openai.com

    Grok 4.5 Lands in GitHub Copilot
    • xAI's flagship coding model now selectable in Copilot Pro, Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise tiers.
    • 500K-token context, text + image input, low/medium/high reasoning, and configurable agentic tool calls; trained with Cursor.
    • Priced at $2 / $6 per million input/output tokens on the SpaceXAI console.
    • First xAI model in Copilot; extends the picker that already carries Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6, and Kimi K2.7.
    tools github.blog

    ChipAgents Extends Series A to $134M as Nvidia Deepens Chip-Design Agent Bet
    • $60M Series A2 led by B Capital, with Bessemer, Micron, MediaTek, and Ericsson participating.
    • 6× ARR growth in H1 2026 and deployments at 120+ semiconductor companies including MediaTek and Micron.
    • Company also expanded its Nvidia partnership; agents automate RTL, verification, and physical-design steps.
    • Signals that agentic AI for silicon design has crossed from pilots into production tooling budgets.
    industry thenextweb.com