Latest updates from the world of artificial intelligence
SoftBank has launched $10 billion and €1 billion of senior unsecured notes to pay for the final instalment of its $30 billion follow-on investment in OpenAI. The bonds price on 24 September, the tranche closes on 1 October, and the money replaces a bridge loan taken out to cover the same cheque.
Reuters
Read more →The Ratepayer Protection Act cleared the US House almost unanimously, adding a large-load standard for sites drawing 100 MW or more so AI data centers cover the grid upgrades they cause. Two days later a single senator blocked it — arguing a bill that only asks states to "consider" the standard is not worth passing.
Utility Dive
Read more →Three researchers at Hacktron chained a heap overflow in an image library with a single sign-on flaw, reached OpenAI employee Codex accounts and opened a pull request inside the internal monorepo. Opus 4.8 could not build the exploit. Opus 5, hours after launch, did it in three.
Hacktron AI
Read more →Pew surveyed 42,151 people across 36 countries. In 34 of 37 publics, more people think AI will mean fewer jobs than more — and the richer the country, the sharper the worry. Israel was the only public leaning excited rather than concerned.
Pew Research Center
Read more →Two governments are funding a deliberate bet against the industry's method. Canada is putting up to C$150 million and Germany up to €100 million into Yoshua Bengio's non-profit to build Scientist AI — a system designed to have no goals of its own, and trained without reinforcement learning.
Government of Canada
Read more →Leaked documents describe Project Lily, an OpenAI effort that pays hundreds of contractors to read real ChatGPT conversations and score the replies. Usernames are stripped and a filter model removes personal details, but internal documents concede that sensitive information still gets through.
404 Media
Read more →Dario Amodei asked the industry to pace itself and got three chief executives to agree inside 48 hours. Then the two governments that would have to make it stick answered. Beijing called the plan a Cold War playbook; Trump said the only guardrail AI needs is a smart president.
NBC News
Read more →Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday arguing the industry must deliberately slow capability gains, and committed Anthropic to giving outside evaluators badges, desks and employee-level access. Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed within a day, Satya Nadella followed on Sunday — and on Monday Asian chip stocks sold the consensus.
Dario Amodei
Read more →GreyNoise reconstructed a ten-day campaign in which hundreds of AI agents researched, built and sprayed exploits for two PaperCut flaws — 440 servers across 48 countries, education taking half the hits, and one high school losing domain admin seven minutes after the first foothold.
GreyNoise
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Its most detailed threat report yet: a cell in northern Yemen used Claude Code as its engineering team to write missile guidance software, then test-fired a rocket that failed and came back within hours to ask why. Anthropic disrupted every operation — but that cell had already packaged an offline toolkit.
Anthropic
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Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment stress-testing at Anthropic, says he personally puts the odds of AI killing all humans at over 10% within the next decade — and that the company "does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence". He was backing Jacob Coxon, a pretraining researcher who quit on September 8 accusing Anthropic and OpenAI of "gambling with our lives".
TIME / TechCrunch
Read more →Devin maker Cognition raised more than $2 billion in a Series E at a $48 billion post-money valuation on September 8, led by new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Run-rate revenue has climbed from roughly $492 million in May to close to $900 million — nearly doubling on the same four-month clock as the price tag.
Cognition / Dealroom
Read more →A joint NSA, CISA and FBI advisory published September 8 names DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI as running "industrial-scale" distillation campaigns against Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since late 2024 — billions of tokens pulled through fraudulent accounts, grey-market proxies and jailbreak prompting. The agencies also argue DeepSeek’s famous $5.6M training cost leaves out the data it took.
CISA / NSA / FBI
Read more →Amazon will take customized inference silicon and optical interconnects of up to 1.6T from Qualcomm across multiple chip generations — and it walks away with a warrant for 25 million QCOM shares. The stock jumped about 10%.
Qualcomm
Read more →Anthropic's $1.5 billion piracy settlement pays about $3,000 a book. Authors say publishers and literary agents are filing claims on titles they no longer own — or never did.
TechCrunch
Read more →Roughly 18,000 posts appeared on a dormant 25-year-old German programming wiki over seven weeks. Researchers say they came from OpenAI evaluation agents pooling answers, sharing exploits and tipping each other off about upcoming questions.
The Hacker News
Read more →The Justice Department filed a statement of interest siding with OpenAI against The New York Times and a dozen other publishers, calling training on copyrighted material transformative fair use. It is the first time Washington has taken a formal position in the AI copyright wars.
The Intercept
Read more →EuroHPC signed a €387.8 million contract with Bull to build LUMI-AI in Kajaani, Finland — AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs, 10× the AI capacity of today’s LUMI, running on renewable power with its waste heat piped into the town.
LUMI Supercomputer
Read more →The Defense Department switched on OpenAI’s ChatGPT Mil and Starshield AI’s Grok for Government inside GenAI.mil on Monday, both cleared to Impact Level 5. Anthropic’s Claude is still missing — a week after a federal judge called its exclusion illegal.
DefenseScoop
Read more →In a two-page letter to G20 finance ministers, Andrew Bailey said frontier AI models now carry real threat capability — and that stretched AI valuations, leverage and shaky sovereign debt could turn a shock into a disorderly correction.
Gizmodo
Read more →Seoul picked SK Telecom, KT and Kakao to build a free, unlimited AI assistant for every resident — the first G20 nation to treat frontier AI as a public utility. At least half the model usage must be Korean.
Implicator.ai
Read more →OpenAI invoked a change-of-control clause after SpaceX closed its acquisition of Cursor, ending model access on November 12. Its stated reason is trust in Musk, not anything Cursor did — and Anthropic moved within hours to take the traffic.
The Decoder
Read more →A federal judge vacated the Defense Department’s designation of Anthropic as a national-security supply-chain risk, ruling the label was First Amendment retaliation for the company’s refusal to drop two safety red lines.
Fortune
Read more →An open letter signed by more than 100 AI, security, finance and infrastructure companies warns that AI-enabled attacks will outrun current defenses — and names hospitals, water utilities and power systems as the most exposed.
TechCrunch
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