Daily AI RoundupsFriday, 26 June 2026

Today’s roundup is led by Axios reporting that U.S. officials asked OpenAI to stagger GPT-5.6 over security concerns. It also covers DeepSeek’s plan to at least double every department, Epoch AI’s analysis of 1,604 Chinese AI job postings, OpenAI’s claim that Codex active users grew more than 5x in H1 2026, Sakana AI and KPMG Azusa’s CoffeeBench benchmark, Mark Chen’s Latent Space discussion on scaling laws and evals, and three funding or finance signals: OpenAI’s possible 2027 IPO delay, General Intuition’s $320M round, and Airwallex’s $320M raise.

• frontier AI
• AI policy
• AI agents
• AI funding
• China AI
• benchmarks
• coding agents

Stories in this roundup

1. 01
   Trump administration reportedly asks OpenAI to stagger GPT-5.6 release over security concernsAxios
2. 02
   DeepSeek plans hiring spree to at least double every department as it pushes toward AGISCMP
3. 03
   Epoch AI analyzes 1,604 Chinese AI job postings to map Chinese lab strategy across DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot, Z.ai, ByteDance and AlibabaEpoch AI
4. 04
   OpenAI reports Codex active users grew more than 5x in H1 2026 as work shifts from chat to delegated agentsOpenAI
5. 05
   Sakana AI and KPMG Azusa release CoffeeBench, a 90-day multi-agent economy benchmark for LLM agentsSakana AI
6. 06
   OpenAI CRO Mark Chen discusses scaling laws, o1 reasoning and the evals crisis on Latent SpaceLatent Space
7. 07
   OpenAI may delay its IPO to 2027 while holding out for a $1T valuationNew York Times
8. 08
   General Intuition raises $320M at a $2.3B valuation to train action models from gameplay dataTechCrunch
9. 09
   Airwallex raises $320M at an $11B valuation as it pushes AI-native finance and agentic commerceCNBC