Four Frontier AI Models Land in a Single Week as Meta, xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic Battle on Price and Agentic Skill

Within a span of two days in early July, the industry's four leading AI labs shipped new frontier models, setting up a direct contest between Meta's Muse Spark 1.1, xAI's Grok 4.5, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. The clustered releases have turned attention to a familiar but sharpening tension: raw intelligence versus cost versus the ability to act autonomously.