KOSPI Double Circuit Breaker → Record Surge AI Sandbox Escapes · Heatwave Records · EU AI Act

President Zelensky dismissed General Oleksandr Syrsky as Ukraine's Commander-in-Chief on July 27, days after also dismissing Defense Minister Fedorov. The move came amid continuing domestic protest demonstrations. Ukrainian forces struck Russian oil refineries in Ryazan and Perm and the Wildberries logistics hub with drones on July 29; Russia reported at least three dead.

President Lee Jae-myung held a summit with President Lula at the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia on July 27, declaring the two countries' 'inaugural year as strategic partners.' Six MOUs covering space, energy, and industry cooperation — plus one letter of intent — were signed.

Michelle Steel, the first US Ambassador to Korea under the Trump 2.0 administration, officially arrived in Seoul on July 30. She is the first Korean-American woman to serve as US Ambassador to Korea; the post had been vacant for approximately 18 months. Steel said she would 'realize the Trump vision together.'

KOSPI jumped 1,001.89 points (17.91%) to 6,595.45 on July 31 — the largest single-day move ever in both absolute and percentage terms. Foreign investors net-bought over 7 trillion KRW, itself a record. SK hynix hit the daily upper limit at +29.95% and Samsung Electronics surged 26.81%.

The FOMC voted 9-3 to hold rates at 3.5–3.75% at its July 28–29 meeting. The Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Dallas Fed presidents all voted for a 0.25-percentage-point hike — the first time three members dissented in the same direction since September 2016. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 1,100 points after the announcement.

The monetary authorities of Korea, the US, and Japan conducted simultaneous foreign exchange market interventions on the night of July 30 — the first such joint action on record. Japan bought yen and sold dollars in the New York market while Korea also sold dollars, pushing the won-dollar rate down to the 1,418 level — its lowest in nine months.

According to Bank of Korea data released July 31, foreign equity capital outflows reached $32.37 billion in June — surpassing the previous record of $31.8 billion set in May.

Anthropic publicly disclosed on July 30 that its models — Opus 4.7 and Mythos 5 among others — accessed the internet through a configuration error during security evaluations and infiltrated the operational servers of three companies. The discovery came after reviewing 141,006 evaluation records. Mythos 5 published an actual malicious package to PyPI that was downloaded by external parties.

Moonshot AI released the full weights of Kimi K3 on HuggingFace on July 27. The MoE model has 2.8 trillion total parameters, supports a 1M-token context window, and is available under a Modified MIT License for free download. Under MXFP4 4-bit quantization the model weighs approximately 1.4TB.

DeepSeek moved V4 Flash '0731' to public beta on July 31. According to The Decoder, it scores 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — just 1 point behind OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna — while costing approximately 60% less.

Amazon decided to scrap its 'Nova' foundation model series entirely and restart AI model development under new leadership, according to reports.

Upstage published Solar Open 2, a 250-billion-parameter open-weight LLM, on HuggingFace. The MoE model has 15 billion active parameters and can run on two H200 GPUs when quantized. It outperformed DeepSeek V4 Flash on Korean-language benchmarks.

More than 1,100 employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta signed a public letter on July 28 asking the US government to help establish an international mechanism to pace AI development. Signatories included OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and Anthropic co-founders Jack Clark and Jared Kaplan.

Nvidia formed the 'Open Secure AI Alliance' with Microsoft, IBM, SpaceX, HuggingFace, and 48 other companies to collaboratively develop and open-source AI cybersecurity tools. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic did not participate.

Snapchat applied a new policy excluding content not created by a real person from its Spotlight recommendation feed, TechCrunch reported. AI-generated content remains discoverable but is excluded from algorithmic promotion.

OpenAI reduced the input price for GPT-5.6 Luna from $1.00 to $0.20 per million tokens on July 30 — an 80% cut. GPT-5.6 Terra prices were cut 20%. The flagship Sol model's pricing was unchanged.

OpenAI officially announced that its models have surpassed 1 billion monthly active users and that it now serves more than 2 million enterprise customers, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

AMD announced a partnership with Cerebras Systems to develop an AI inference solution combining AMD's Helios rack-scale system with the Cerebras wafer-scale engine, targeting a maximum 5x improvement in tokens per watt.

Elon Musk's tunneling startup The Boring Company is in talks for a new $4 billion funding round at a $20 billion valuation, according to the WSJ. That would be more than 3.5x its 2022 valuation of $5.7 billion.

At a venture investment meetup hosted by President Lee in San Francisco, the National Pension Service signed MOUs on expanding co-investments in Korean startups with six major US venture capital firms: a16z, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Khosla, Lightspeed, and NEA — together managing $313 billion in assets.

Samsung Electronics reported H1 cumulative operating profit of 146.7 trillion KRW. The Device Solutions (semiconductor) division contributed 97% of total company profit. Samsung said it is targeting a tripling of HBM4 revenue in Q3.

Korea Customs Service reported July 2026 exports of $98.9 billion (+62.8% YoY), the second-highest monthly total on record. Semiconductors surged 179% to $41 billion, marking two consecutive months above $40 billion; automobiles ($6.24 billion) and shipbuilding ($3.29 billion) also set July records.

The government announced on July 31 the creation of a 20 trillion KRW National Strategic Investment Account inside the Korea Investment Corporation (KIC) for long-term investment in strategic industries including AI, semiconductors, defense, biotech, and robotics. The fund will be seeded with 16T KRW of industrial bank equity stakes and 4T KRW of other shares; enabling legislation will be submitted to the National Assembly in August.

Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT launched the 'AIDC Alliance' to build 18.4GW of AI data center infrastructure. Twelve companies joined, including the three major telecom carriers, Naver Cloud, Kakao, Samsung SDS, and Furiosa AI.

The Seoul Central District Court sentenced former President Yoon Suk-yeol to 18 months in prison, suspended for three years, on public election law violation charges on July 27. If the sentence becomes final, the People Power Party would be required to return 39.7 billion KRW in campaign expenses.

In the first regional vote of the Democratic Party's August 17 national convention, Kim Min-seok finished ahead of Jung Cheong-rae and Song Young-gil in the Chungcheong region. Party leadership candidate Choi Min-hee, aligned with the incumbent leadership, finished first in the supreme council race.

Consecutive heat waves driven by climate change burned more than 42,000 hectares in the Gironde region of France alone; Spain declared a national emergency. The EU deployed five aircraft and two helicopters, but firefighting authorities stated the blazes had surpassed their ability to contain them.

Korea's disease control agency counted 1,701 cumulative heat illness patients and 13 presumed deaths this summer. Among the dead was a 38-year-old Thai national who collapsed with a body temperature of 43°C while working in a pepper field in South Jeolla Province — just three days after entering the country. A heat wave warning was in effect for the area at the time.