You open a Power BI report and ask Copilot to summarise it. It gives you a tidy overview. What it does not tell you is that half the visuals are hidden behind bookmarks, and Copilot never read them. That changes this month. So do eleven other updates worth knowing about.
Most people learned to prompt AI from a LinkedIn post written in 2023. The techniques in that post were based on research from even earlier, when models were a fraction of what they are today. Science has since run hundreds of thousands of evaluations on modern models and found that most of what people still do is wrong.
Scientists used AI to design viruses that have never existed in nature, watched them come to life in a lab, and confirmed they could wipe out bacteria that had grown resistant to existing treatments. Tesla and SpaceX announced a $16.8 billion chip factory. OpenAI put its most powerful model on hold because it was too dangerous to release. And Anthropic announced it will watermark every piece of text its AI generates.
Mark Zuckerberg recently told Meta staff that AI agents have not progressed as quickly as he had hoped. Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI, is now quietly switching to its own in-house models to cut costs. And the US Treasury has a completed internal report comparing the AI market to the dotcom bubble sitting in a drawer, while the Treasury Secretary publicly praises $750 billion in AI investment as the foundation of America’s golden age.
None of this made the front page. But taken together, these three things tell you more about the state of AI in 2026 than any product launch announcement.
Governments are now deciding who gets access to the most powerful AI. One model was forced offline for three weeks, then brought back. A new OpenAI model launched gated behind a government review process. A study revealed most AI chatbots lean politically in one direction. And a developer built a PlayStation 1 game engine using Claude as his co-engineer. This was not a quiet week in AI.
June 2026 is one of the busiest months in AI since ChatGPT launched. A new chip. A new way to work with AI in Slack. A government ban that 100 security experts are fighting back against. And a Harvard study that changes how you should be using AI every day. Here is what happened and why it matters for your work.
You publish a report with a date slicer set to last month. A week later a colleague opens it and updates it manually. Then someone else does the same. Every month, the same report gets manually updated by multiple people who assume someone else already did it.
That problem has a fix in this month’s update. So does a long list of other genuinely useful things.
In January 2024, OpenAI was generating $2 billion in annual revenue. Anthropic was a rounding error at a reported $87 million. ChatGPT had hundreds of millions of users. Claude had almost none. By April 2026, the lines crossed. Anthropic hit a reported $47 billion run rate while OpenAI sat at a reported $25 billion, with 30 times fewer users.
This is the story of how that happened.
Everyone is telling Excel users to stop learning formulas and let AI write them instead. That advice works until the AI generates a VLOOKUP when you needed an INDEX MATCH, uses an absolute reference where you needed a relative one, or builds a formula that technically works but breaks the moment someone adds a row. The people who catch those errors are the ones who know Excel. The ones who do not are the ones who stopped learning it.
You are reviewing a shared Excel workbook. A colleague made a dozen changes overnight. Some were manual edits. Some were generated by Copilot on their behalf. Scrolling through the file, there is no way to tell which is which.
That changes with one of the three Copilot updates Microsoft released for Excel this month. Here is what each update does.
