An essential briefing on the AI upheaval: OpenAI’s post–GPT‑5 blitz—record traffic, a cheaper plan, and trillion‑dollar data‑center ambitions—meets Microsoft’s Copilot rollout at global scale. Meta reshuffles amid safety scrutiny, while Walmart deploys end‑to‑end agentic AI. We unpack the US–China chip fight, cloud and security updates, and a torrent of startup launches and soaring valuations. Research highlights span GPT‑5’s medical gains, label‑free vision, brain‑computer speech, and AI‑designed antibiotics. Plus: best‑practice agent patterns, platform risk lessons, and China’s driverless and hyper‑speed transit bets.