Meta’s Watermelon Model Rivals GPT-5.5, Alibaba Bans Claude, a $44 AI Phone for Students

Today we’re covering the biggest AI stories of July 6th, 2026. Meta superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang told employees that Watermelon — the model currently training at roughly 10x the compute of April’s Muse Spark — has matched GPT-5.5, with an Opus-level coding model teased as coming soon, even as Mark Zuckerberg admitted at the same town hall that industry-wide agent progress “hasn’t really accelerated” the way expected. Alibaba reportedly ordered staff to wipe Claude from work computers, citing the same China-user checks found in Claude Code that sparked controversy last month. Plus, Lenovo launched a $44 AI Student Phone in China stripped down to calling, homework help, and parental tracking with no browser or social media — and today’s community workflow comes from Leah in McMinnville, Oregon, a swim parent who built a “Road to Championships” dashboard with ChatGPT that tracks her daughter’s progress toward different competition qualifying standards.