Busy nine days on the frontier, so here's a consolidated summary with sources. Model launches: OpenAI released GPT-5.6 broadly on July 9 — three variants (Sol $5/$30, Terra $2.50/$15, Luna $1/$6 per 1M tokens), 1.05M context (Axios, OpenAI). xAI shipped Grok 4.5 on July 8 at $2/$6, positioned as a workhorse for routine knowledge work (TechCrunch, Axios). Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro reached GA today, July 17, after a full architectural rebuild — 2M token context, Deep Think reasoning layer, ~$1.2...