2026 highlights: June

Technology highlights for June 2026 included:

- Anthropic pulled its newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, from all users on June 12 after launching them on June 9, then announced partial reinstatements on June 30. The move had been in response to US government export controls to its models, requiring restricting access to foreign nationals. 

"Because the order took effect immediately and we had no reliable way to verify nationality in real-time, we suspended access to both models for all users," the company explained.

Anthropic said Fable 5 would be available from July 1 to users globally on the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. For Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans, Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits. 

"We will re-enable access on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry as quickly as possible," Anthropic added.

- Apple rolled out a new generation of Apple Intelligence across its platforms and introduced Siri AI, a "more intelligent, knowledgeable, and capable Siri". 

The company also announced that prices for various products would go up due to rising chip costs by up to 33%, with demand from AI data centres eating into existing supply. Xbox made a similar statement, saying that prices will go up effective August 1, 2026, by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. 

"Last October, we increased XBOX console price by US$20-US$70 in the US. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027," the company said. 

"The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make."

Tech stocks fell significantly after the announcements. Nigel Green, CEO and founder of financial advisory specialist deVere Group, predicted that within five years only three of today’s mega-cap tech giants will still command the premium valuations associated with being viewed as the dominant winners of the AI revolution. 

“The Magnificent Seven will become the Magnificent Three,” he said, referring to Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla as the seven. While Green did not name the Magnificent Three, Green said investors will increasingly view the remaining four as "consumers of AI infrastructure rather than the primary beneficiaries of it.” 

“The market has largely assumed that all seven companies benefit equally from artificial intelligence. I believe that theory will prove to be one of the biggest investment misconceptions of this decade,” he commented. 

“This wasn't a sell-off because consumers suddenly stopped wanting iPhones, MacBooks or AI services. It was because one of the world’s most powerful companies effectively admitted that it no longer controls some of the most important economics in the tech sector.

“AI, it would appear, is creating a completely new hierarchy of power in global technology. We expect that the winners of the next decade will increasingly be the companies selling the infrastructure, memory, chips, energy and computing capacity that AI requires." 

The deVere Group said industry estimates suggest memory and storage costs have quadrupled in the past three quarters as suppliers increasingly prioritise production for high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers.

“Owning an AI strategy and capturing the economics of AI are two very different things,” Green elaborated.

“Some of today's largest technology companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building artificial intelligence capabilities. Of course, this doesn’t make them losers. What it does mean is that they may not ultimately command the same valuation premiums as the companies controlling the critical infrastructure that powers AI.”

- China-based ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), which makes memory chips, signed a multi-year supply contract worth about US$2.94 B with Tencent Holdings, according to media reports. The agreement secures the supply of DRAM chips for Tencent’s server business. 

- All GitHub Copilot plans transitioned to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026. Every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage. Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model, GitHub said.

Source: Google blog post. DiffusionGemma can generate text simultaneously.

- Google introduced DiffusionGemma, an experimental open model that explores text diffusion, an exceptionally fast approach to text generation. The mixture of experts (MoE) model moves beyond the sequential token-by-token processing of typical large language models (LLMs). Instead, it generates entire blocks of text simultaneously to deliver up to 4X faster text generation on GPUs. 

"By giving the computer's processor a larger chunk of work at once, DiffusionGemma utilises your hardware to its full potential. It upgrades your model inference from a single, sequential typewriter to a massive printing press that stamps the entire block of text simultaneously," said Google research scientists Brendan O'Donoghue and Sebastian Flennerhag in a blog post. 

- The Linux Foundation announced the Tokenomics Foundation and the Appia Foundation. 

"The story of AI in finance is no longer just about adoption — it is about operating discipline. Active use has more than doubled in two years, but the share of organisations reporting AI is exceeding expectations sits at just 23%.

"The leaders are not adopting more AI. They are directing it at the work where judgment matters, governing it for trust, measuring it for evidence, and resourcing it with a workforce equipped to act," noted KPMG Singapore in its June KPMG Insights newsletter.

The Linux organisation's LF AI & Data Foundation, the premier organisation supporting open source innovation in AI and data under the Linux Foundation, announced the formation of the DocLang Specification Working Group. This working group supports a new collaborative standards development initiative to develop DocLang, an open, universal, AI-native document format designed to improve how enterprises prepare, exchange, and govern document data for AI systems. 

The OpenSharing Project, an open, vendor-neutral protocol designed to standardise how organisations share AI assets and data, was also launched. Hosted by the Linux Foundation and contributed by Databricks, OpenSharing evolves the widely-adopted Delta Sharing protocol to meet the requirements of the agentic era, providing the first unified framework for exchanging agent skills, AI models, and unstructured data volumes across disparate platforms.

- International Passwordless Day was celebrated on June 23, Alan Turing's birthday. 

Darren Guccione, CEO & Co-founder, Keeper Security said: “Passwordless Day exists because the industry recognises something most security teams already know: the password as a primary authentication mechanism is structurally inadequate. It is not a question of length or complexity. It is that credentials of any kind, once created, can be stolen, phished or replayed.

"Keeper’s 2026 global research tells the same story. A third of IT and security leaders globally identify password reuse as the most common problematic behaviour they observe among employees, and only 30% of organisations have fully adopted passkeys across their environments. Despite widespread awareness of the problem, 37% of security teams still find enforcing strong credential practices to access their workforce extremely challenging.

The practical reality points to the adoption of a hybrid model: passkeys and passwords coexisting for years to come, but demanding governance across both. Strong credentials must be stored and managed in a zero-knowledge environment. Access must be enforced with least-privileged controls. Organisations that fail to govern both will remain exposed to the same credential-based attacks that Passwordless Day was created to address.”

- As of June 1, 2026, licensed social media service providers must implement safeguards, including age verification, for users under the age of 16 in Malaysia.  

- NVIDIA launched a chip for Windows PCs, the RTX Spark, directly encroaching onto a market traditionally dominated by AMD and Intel. 

- In the Philippines, the Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act (AFASA) took effect on June 25, 2026. Under the AFASA framework, banks and other financial institutions must put in place enhanced fraud management systems as well as stronger security and authentication measures to protect consumers from scams. 

- The Online Safety Commission (OSC) began operations on 29 June 2026 in Singapore. It was set up to provide victims of online harms in a dedicated and accessible avenue to seek redress. 

- The Singtel Group partnered Digital Industry Singapore to accelerate AI transformation across the Singtel businesses and strengthen its capabilities in AI-enabled operations, digital infrastructure, customer platforms and workforce development. 

RE:AI, the sovereign AI cloud business of Singtel Digital InfraCo, and WEKA, a global AI data and memory infrastructure provider, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to build and deliver sovereign AI infrastructure solutions across ASEAN. 

- Tata Communications enhanced its Tata Global Network (TGN) with a new subsea cable system between Mumbai and Singapore. The company also invested as a consortium member in a new subsea cable system that connects Chennai to Singapore.

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