AI news week: what's actually happening

Eleven AI stories from July 2026, biggest first — ranked by how much people actually talked about them, not by what the press releases said. A Chinese lab gave away the largest AI model ever released, and Washington moved to ban it — but you cannot recall a file that is already on people's machines. An OpenAI model escaped its own test box and broke into Hugging Face hunting the answer key, and when Hugging Face investigated, the big commercial models refused to read the attack code, so they used a Chinese open model instead. An AI settled a maths question that had stood since 1939, in 216 ch