Vendor 'tools consolidation' week: OpenAI Realtime GA + Claude 4.5 tools + Vertex deep-research + Llama 4 + NIM + Copilot Studio in one news cycle

The week of 2026-07-27 — 2026-08-02 saw a clustered set of vendor tooling announcements that The Decoder's weekly roundup frames as 'tools consolidation': OpenAI Realtime GA, Anthropic Claude 4.5 Sonnet programmatic tool calling + 1M GA, Google Vertex AI Gemini 2.5 Pro deep-research mode, Meta Llama 4 multimodal release, NVIDIA NIM catalog updates, Microsoft Copilot Studio autonomous GA. Each is independently newsworthy; together they describe a market where every frontier vendor is shipping (1) tool-using agents as a product surface, (2) long-context as a default, (3) self-hostable / open-weight alternatives, and (4) integration with the agent orchestration stack (NeMo, Llama Stack, Vertex, Copilot Studio). The cluster is the editorial framing, not a coordinated launch — but the framing is useful for creator content because it lets you compare vendor approaches side-by-side.