Tootfinder

Anthropic outlines metrics to track AI development at frontier labs: how much AI R&D is done by AI, how well agents are overseen, and how compute is allocated (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/measuring-pace-of-ai-development

Measurements for understanding the pace of AI development inside frontier labs
Today, the world can’t see what’s going on inside AI labs. Anthropic is proposing new metrics that would give the public visibility into frontier AI development.

Wrote a little intro post to my Fisk AI project, why, who for etc
Local friendly, privacy friendly, strong guardrails, doing just what you give it the ability to do etc
Hopefully a AI Harness for sceptics or just for better outcomes for those tasks you wish to do repeatedly.
Minimal dependencies, quick to get going, easy to configure.
Also the easiest possible way to do build MCP servers for other AI Agents

AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (Robert Booth/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/16/directors-embracing-ai-fil…

‘I see the incredible promise’: on set of an AI film shoot as new studios embrace controversial tech
Amid fears for jobs, some film-makers say AI could enable them to bypass studio giants and take more creative risks

macOS 27: Spotlight-Suche fällt aus Menüleiste – Siri-AI-Button kein Ersatz
Apple ändert die Bedienung seiner Systemsuche erneut: Sie wird gegebenenfalls mit Siri AI zusammengelegt. Das hat einen nervigen Nachteil.

macOS 27: Spotlight-Suche fällt aus Menüleiste – Siri-AI-Button kein Ersatz
Apple ändert die Bedienung seiner Systemsuche erneut: Sie wird gegebenenfalls mit Siri AI zusammengelegt. Das hat einen nervigen Nachteil.

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it,
and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ende…

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

Veel mensen denken dat met het klappen van de zogenaamde "AI bubble" , AI zelf ook minder belangrijk zal worden, dat verwacht ik echter niet, wel grote financiële en economische schade, maar AI gebruik zal alleen maar toenemen.
#AI #bubble

Even Microsoft execs say OpenAI et al are criminal organizations.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/microsoft-exec-called-ai-scraping-the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history/

Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs.

How the Trump administration shifted from a "light-touch" approach to AI policy to an interventionist stance that led to restrictions on top AI models in the US (Leo Schwartz/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/trumps-ai-agenda-collide…

Trump’s AI Agenda Collides With Reality
In January 2025, just three days after entering office for his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that revoked many of the Biden administration’s efforts on AI. The order was part of Trump’s promise to take a light-touch approach to AI regulation, rolling back what he ...

"‘Tidal wave’ of Pfas being launched to satisfy AI industry, campaigners warn"
#PFAS #ForeverChemicals #AI

‘Tidal wave’ of Pfas being launched to satisfy AI industry, campaigners warn
Big manufacturers planning to produce more of the forever chemicals to meet demand from datacentres

AI text watermarking is not a big deal
People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs. Will this lead to a mass exodus from Anthropic models? Will the introduction of watermarking be a meaningful change for users?
🫆 https://www.

AI text watermarking is not a big deal

"I used to think AI would kill us all, until the techbro CEOs said AI will kill us all and now I’m not so sure", says First Dog on the Moon
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/

📝 New post: Making my sites readable by AI assistants
My brother's AI assistant couldn't read most of my sites, so every page now arrives with its content already filled in, plus a plain-text brief, an llms.txt, and a robots.txt that tells assistants apart from training crawlers.
https://gate…

Making my sites readable by AI assistants
My brother's AI assistant couldn't read most of my sites, so every page now arrives with its content already filled in, plus a plain-text brief, an llms.txt, and a robots.txt that tells assistants apart from training crawlers.

Nic Steenhout on ‘AI’ screen reader testing:
https://nicolas-steenhout.com/ai-screen-reader-testing/
I added it to my post about speech viewer logs (with some bonus nuggets from Weston Thayer):

Wait til you're home before posting photos.
Secure photo viewing to your family/friends.
Don't react immediately & don't click links from 'warning' texts/emails.
✅ ‘We detected unusual activity’: the scam that uses AI to exploit your holiday photos | Scams | The Guardian
h…

‘We detected unusual activity’: the scam that uses AI to exploit your holiday photos
Fraudsters use pictures posted on Instagram or Facebook to create emails seeking bank account details

from my link log —
fast_template: really easy blogging with GitHub Pages.
https://www.fast.ai/2020/01/16/fast_template/
saved 2020-01-18 https://…

I'm sorry, was it always that obvious a technology was fake and a bubble? If so, I seriously condemn all past generations for falling for this voodoo, crypto, nft, fusion reactor, new element nonsense.
https://…

Palantir’s CTO claims AI researchers are smoking to prove they believe AI will cure cancer, and he says it’s a sign of tech-fueled ‘mass psychosis’
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said some researchers are smoking to signal to other researchers “how much they believe in AI.”

I would love to know what this poll looks like specifically in San Francisco.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.aspx

Americans Cool Toward AI
A Bentley University-Gallup survey finds that Americans are more familiar with AI but more cautious about businesses' use of AI and its effect on jobs.

[OT] With IPOs coming up, "AI doomsday" talk distracts us from lack of revenue growth https://mindmatters.ai/2026/09/ai-doomsday-talk-distracts-us-from-lack-of-revenue-growth-for-hyperscalers/ on the

“AI Doomsday” Talk Distracts Us From Lack of Revenue Growth
Apparently, paid usage of AI models has not risen sufficiently to cover the falling token prices.

A Java Geek weekly 154
Choosing a dependency. European Union Public Licence. Rust debugging survey 2026 results. Comparing TSV and CSV formats. Call14 — Smart Elevator Companion. Ma stack de service logiciels pour construire des produits. OTel Collector metrics: how to monitor Collector health. What Should Programmers Do While the AI Writes Code?. What will our economic future look like?. Why Code Quality Still Matters in the Age of AI Agents and more

Disney hires former Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand as its first CTO; about a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of infringing its copyrights (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/disney-cto-karandeep-anand-character-ai-1236866528…

Disney Hires First CTO: Karandeep Anand, Former CEO of Character.AI
Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro hired Karandeep Anand, ex-CEO of Character.AI and former Facebook and Microsoft exec, as its first chief technology officer.

Am starting a series of blog posts on design and implementation of a AI Harness - based on the one from Fisk AI https://choria.io/fisk-ai
Will cover all the bits from what it is (todays post) to cover the loop, tools, memory, context, session history and more.
First post here

Survey of Anthropic staffers and US adults: 39% of US adults vs. 91% of staffers expect AI will be able to make a Nobel-level discovery by 2030, and more (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/ai-expectations-gap

The AI expectations gap
How will AI reshape the economy in the years ahead? What is the core source of disagreement about AI's future impact on the economy? This note presents new survey evidence on these questions.

This hits so hard...
#ai

Cookie Monster Tries to Meet His A.I. Mandate
Shouts & Murmurs by Ysabel Yates: Me confused. Me know cookie inside and out! Now me has to use A.I. for cookie work?

Brown Brothers Media built an AI-fueled network of websites by buying established publications, creating fake writers, and flooding sites with AI-created posts (Futurism)
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/brown-brothers-media-ai-slop-empire

How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.

«AI Slop flutet soziale Netzwerke – ausgerechnet LinkedIn ist besonders betroffen»
Überraschend ist dies nicht, da viele durch min Aufwand Aufmerksamkeit oder sogar Gewinn erwarten. Nun werden wohl noch die letzten realen Menschen dies verlassen (nehme ich mal an).
🤷 https://

AI Slop flutet soziale Netzwerke – ausgerechnet LinkedIn ist besonders betroffen
Jeder Leser dürfte schon mitbekommen haben, dass in sozialen Netzwerken wie Facebook, Instagram oder X immer mehr AI Slop gepostet wird. ...

AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (Robert Booth/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/16/directors-embracing-ai-fil…

‘I see the incredible promise’: on set of an AI film shoot as new studios embrace controversial tech
Amid fears for jobs, some film-makers say AI could enable them to bypass studio giants and take more creative risks

Ik snap, als boeken liefhebber, de emotionele reacties op dit bericht. Tegelijk gaan volgens mij elke dag grote hoeveelheden tweedehands boeken ook de vuilverbranding in? Het kwalijke is vooral het niet respecteren van intellectuele eigendom/auteursrecht lijkt me?
https://futurism.com/artificia…

Amazon Caught Destroying Rare Books to Train AI
An investigation by 404 Media found that Amazon bought a shipment of rare books so it could scan and destroy them to train AI.

Data centers powering the AI boom have been spewing out a staggering amount of pollution by relying on fossil fuel-powered generators.
And given the industry’s unrelenting appetite for more infrastructure supporting ever-more-resource-intensive AI models,
the trend is only going to get worse from here.
It’s reached the point that AI is giving the fossil fuel industry a substantial leg up,
as a new paper published in the journal NPJ Climate Action details.
The au…

AI-driven productivity gains enable more CO₂ emissions than they avoid in a global energy–economy model - npj Climate Action
The net climate impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) depend largely on how its applications propagate through competing energy pathways. Predominant analyses examine the relationship between datacenter energy demand, renewables optimization, and demand-side efficiencies, but insufficiently address how AI also reshapes fossil fuel supply economics. We instead model AI as a bidirectional productivity amplifier in a global computable general equilibrium model, quantifying both enabled emissions…

Snap introduces Specs Intelligence, an AI assistant designed to work across iPhone, Mac, and Specs glasses, calling it an "anticipatory AI service" (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/996078/snap-specs-intelligence-ai-agent-ios-mac

Snap is launching a new Specs AI tool, and it’s coming to iOS and Mac
Snap’s “Specs Intelligence” AI tool is launching in preview on iOS and will be coming to Mac and the Specs AR glasses.

Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/apptio-co-fo

Apptio co-founders reunite to launch enterprise AI startup Thira with $21M in funding led by Madrona
Apptio co-founders Sunny Gupta and Kurt Shintaffer launched Thira, a Bellevue-based enterprise AI startup, with $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona. Thira is building AI agents to autonomously handle IT support tickets and other back-office work at large companies.

Interessante en goede opinie wat mij betreft, alleen als het verschil in kwaliteit tussen genoemde gespecialiseerde oplossingen en de generieke van BigTech te groot wordt, de BigTech spelers vrij spel hebben en houden op de Europese markt, dan gaat deze strategie niet werken vrees ik. 🤔
Het gaat verder niet alleen om AI maar ook om Cloud.

Opinie | Europa moet geen Big Tech namaken, maar onverslaanbare AI-specialisten bouwen
Pluriformiteit: Europa is te afhankelijk van Amerikaanse en Chinese techbedrijven. De oplossing ligt niet in het optuigen van een Europese Big Tech-sector, betoogt Elianne Anemaat, maar in het investeren in gespecialiseerde bedrijven.

"Aren't we the ones building it?"
#AI #LLM

Baron Ryan on Instagram: "AI movies."
949K likes, 8,631 comments - americanbaron on July 15, 2026: "AI movies.".

Disney hires former Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand as its first CTO; about a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of infringing its copyrights (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/disney-cto-karandeep-anand-character-ai-1236866528…

Disney Hires First CTO: Karandeep Anand, Former CEO of Character.AI
Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro hired Karandeep Anand, ex-CEO of Character.AI and former Facebook and Microsoft exec, as its first chief technology officer.

Rogue Studio, which calls itself a "playground for creative ethical mischief", launches Rogue 1.0, an AI video tool to make adult content of Hollywood quality (Jason Parham/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/this-r-rated-film-studio-wants-to-be-the-h…

This R-Rated Film Studio Wants to Be the HBO of AI
Rogue Studios, a new cinematic adult AI-generator, is betting big on the future of “sophisticated” spicy content.

London-based Scarlet, which certifies AI and software for medical devices, raised a $50M Series B led by Headline to support its US and Asia-Pacific expansion (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2026/10/12/scarlet-raises-50m-series-b-…

Scarlet raises $50M Series B to accelerate AI medical device certification
Scarlet, the certification body for AI and software medical devices, today announced a $50 million Series B led by Headline, with participation from new investor Notion Capital and existing investors Atomico, Creandum, Kindred Capital, and Entrepreneurs First. Nancy Xiao Mclaughlin, Partner at Headline, joins Scarlet’s board.AI medical devices are being developed faster than certification bodies can review them. A company can train an AI diagnostic model in weeks and then wait 12 to 18 months…

Cloudflare plans a shift from a "pay-per-crawl" to a "pay-per-use" model, and blocking AI bots creates "reliable scarcity" that is fuelling publisher AI deals (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/c

Cloudflare says bot blocking is fuelling publisher AI deals
Chief strategy officer on scarcity leading to licensing deals, and move to "pay-per-use".

Comp AI, which uses AI agents to draft security policies, collect audit evidence, conduct continuous compliance monitoring, and more, raised a $34M Series A (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/comp

Comp AI sets eyes on a continuously agentic future for security and compliance | TechCrunch
Comp AI, a cybersecurity and compliance startup, announced a $34 million Series A round led by Roo Capital and Grand Ventures. 

Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to Amazon's Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipme…

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

Anthropic and other researchers detail how thousands of people were catfished by dating scam apps using LLM-generated replies from Claude and other models (Yael Grauer/The Verge)

The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here
Thousands of people were catfished by scammers supercharged with AI.

After major cuts, McClatchy announces new hires, including several execs, two reporters, and three editors for the company's AI-powered Content Innovation Lab (Mark Keierleber/Straight Arrow)
https://san.com/cc/inside-a-newspaper-chain…

Inside a newspaper chain’s transformation from local news to AI-generated ‘content’
McClatchy Media didn’t wait a week after firing journalists before announcing hires for its new AI-powered “Content Innovation Lab.”

An interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the Nvidia RTX Spark-powered Surface Laptop Ultra, plans to make Windows a safer OS to run AI agents, and more (Joanna Stern/The New Things)
https://thenewthings.com/p/microsoft-ceo-on-rogue-ai-agents-super…

Microsoft CEO on rogue AI agents, super laptops and Clippy
My exclusive interview with Satya Nadella on the new Surface Laptop Ultra and Microsoft's plan to make Windows safer for AI agents

Reddit launches an early experiment to convert select text posts and comments into short videos with AI voiceovers, rolling out on the web, iOS, and Android (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Reddit’s AI is turning posts into podcasts and short videos
Reddit is testing adapting posts and comments into videos that are read aloud by AI voices, a technique already used by content scrapers and spammers.

Mistlabs, which develops Ambi, an ambient AI app for iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac that learns about users from conversations, raised a $26M pre-Series A (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2026/10/12/mis…

Mistlabs takes its Ambi AI system out of beta on Apple devices with $26M in funding - SiliconANGLE
Mistlabs takes its Ambi AI system out of beta on Apple devices with $26M in funding - SiliconANGLE

Palona, which uses AI agents to automate real-time workflows in brick-and-mortar businesses, raised a $20M Series A, following a $10M seed in 2025 (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/17/palona-r…

Palona raises $20M in funding to bring AI automation to brick-and-mortar businesses - SiliconANGLE
Palona raises $20M in funding to bring AI automation to brick-and-mortar businesses - SiliconANGLE

Meta launches a Mac app for Muse after releasing the AI agent on iOS, Android, and the web earlier this month, allowing it to manage files, pull from apps, more (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/997332/metas-muse-ai-agent-now-has-a-mac-app…

Meta’s Muse AI agent now has a Mac app.

Google adds MCP integration to Google Home, letting third-party AI agents analyze home data and control devices, rolling out to Premium Advanced users in the US (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/996310/googl

Google will now let any AI agent run your smart home
Google’s new Model Context Protocol integration lets AI agents like Claude and OpenClaw control your Google Home devices and data.

Rogue Studio, which calls itself a "playground for creative ethical mischief", launches Rogue 1.0, an AI video tool to make adult content of Hollywood quality (Jason Parham/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/this-r-rated-film-studio-wants-to-be-the-h…

This R-Rated Film Studio Wants to Be the HBO of AI
Rogue Studios, a new cinematic adult AI-generator, is betting big on the future of “sophisticated” spicy content.

China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/arti

Insert token: how China’s surging AI use is turning compute into currency
As the cost of running AI models continues to drop, the token economy is reshaping ecosystems far beyond corporate cubicles.

A survey of 42,151 adults in 36 countries and 8,607 US adults: populations in 34 of 37 surveyed countries expect AI to cause net job loss rather than growth (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/09/17/globall…

Globally, More People Expect AI to Cause Job Loss Than Growth
Amid a mix of concern and excitement about AI, a 37-country survey finds pessimism about its potential impact on jobs and economic inequality.

Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of…

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

Survey: in a first, Democrats are more concerned than Republicans about AI's growing role in daily life, at 56% to 49%; 75% of Democrats worry about job losses (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/20

Democrats are now more worried than Republicans about AI and its impact on jobs
In another shift, Democrats are now more likely than Republicans to predict that AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years (75% vs. 68%).

Harvey announces Harvey Tenet, its first in-house, proprietary model for legal work, trained on mock disputes and case files using a version of Kimi K3 (Melia Robinson/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/harvey-builds-tenet-ai-model-for-legal-…

Harvey announces Tenet, its first in-house AI model for legal work
Harvey's first AI model, Tenet, is designed to take on more of the tasks typically done by lawyers over hours or days.

Reddit launches an early experiment to convert select text posts and comments into short videos with AI voiceovers, rolling out on the web, iOS, and Android (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Reddit’s AI is turning posts into podcasts and short videos
Reddit is testing adapting posts and comments into videos that are read aloud by AI voices, a technique already used by content scrapers and spammers.

As AI giants rack up potential legal liabilities of tens of billions amid safety incidents, insurers worry claims may outpace limits on existing coverage (Jean Eaglesham/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-runs-into-its-next-big-obs…

Pathway, which is developing AI models based on what it calls its "Post-Transformer" BDH architecture, raised a $30M seed at a $500M valuation (Antoine Tardif/Unite.AI)
https://www.unite.ai/pathway-raises-new-funding-at-500m-valuation…

Pathway Raises New Funding at $500M Valuation to Scale Post-Transformer AI
AI research company Pathway has secured additional funding at a $500 million valuation, bringing its total seed financing to $30 million as it prepares to scale a new generation of models built around its post-Transforme...

Microsoft unveils MAI-Base-2, a MoE model with 2.8T total and 80B active parameters, claiming 4x-12x more pretraining FLOPs-efficiency than DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base (Microsoft AI)
https://microsoft.ai/news/frontier-pre-training-at-microsoft-ai/

Frontier Pre-training at Microsoft AI | Microsoft AI

How beauty companies like Qoves are commercializing facial-analysis algorithms that evaluate geometric proportions, balding, and more to prescribe treatments (Alice Lassman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

How AI startups like Inherent and Recursive Superintelligence are pursuing tools needed for AI systems to achieve recursive self-improvement (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/science

The Liftoff Scenario That Terrifies A.I. Doomsayers
“Recursive self-improvement” is the idea that artificial intelligence could learn to build and train itself, creating exponential new progress — and risk.

How Dario Amodei's essays on AI safety and ethics help explain some AI fears; his regulatory stance evolved from wariness in January to embracing safety reviews (David Streitfeld/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/…

How Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Writings Help Explain A.I. Fears
The collected essays of Dario Amodei help explain why some people are so worried about artificial intelligence.

Hang Ten Systems, which uses AI to help large enterprises build software, raised an additional $53M seed led by Xora, five weeks after its initial $32M seed (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/former-info…

Former Infosys chief's AI startup nabs another $53M | TechCrunch
The Palo Alto startup says it has landed multiple seven-figure enterprise contracts within months of launch.

Apple updates App Review Guidelines to crack down on AI nudify apps and apps that reveal undocumented capabilities, like nudification, after app review (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2026/10/16/apples-new-app-stor…

Apple’s new App Store rules crack down on AI nudification and ‘bait-and-switch’ apps - 9to5Mac
Apple updated its App Review Guidelines today with a series of changes meant to strengthen protections against harmful content and deceptive app review practices.

Anthropic report on how AI is changing employment at the startup: decline of entry-level technical hiring, productivity boom across departments, and more (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/employment-at-anthropic

How employment is changing at Anthropic
How has AI restructured work and employment at Anthropic? As a company at the frontier of AI adoption, Anthropic could be a leading indicator of how AI will shift work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy.

Google wins a bankruptcy auction with a $10M bid to acquire deidentified business data, software code, and more from Spirit Airlines to improve its AI models (James Nani/Bloomberg Law)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-an…

Google Aims to Boost AI With Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data
Google LLC won a bankruptcy auction for a trove of deindentified business data, software code, and operations records from collapsed low-cost carrier Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc., saying it plans to use the assets to improve its artificial intelligence.

PrismML releases Bonsai 2 27B, which compresses Alibaba's Qwen3.8 27B to 5.9 GB, small enough for smartphones, while retaining 98.2% of Qwen's benchmark scores (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/prismml-hopes-its-tin…

PrismML hopes its tiny LLM will change how we all use AI | TechCrunch
If AI lab PrismML isn't on your radar yet, it should be.

DOD CTO Emil Michael says the Trump administration shouldn't take stakes in AI companies and signals opposition to regulatory oversight of AI companies (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/16/emil-michael-ai-regulation-trump.html

Pentagon CTO says U.S. government shouldn't take stakes in AI giants, questions adding AI rules
President Donald Trump has angrily pushed back on the calls from industry and lawmakers for an AI slowdown or greater regulation.

The UN says it is working with Google on the UN System Data Commons, which lets users search for statistics from across UN agencies via natural-language queries (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/un-turns-to-google-t…

UN turns to Google to make its global data ready for AI agents | TechCrunch
The shift comes after a UNICEF test found leading AI models struggled to accurately retrieve global development statistics.

Google says "magic state cultivation" works in practice on its Willow quantum processor, calling it a breakthrough that reduces errors by about 40x (Google)
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-resea…

Bringing the magic: Google breaks open a bottleneck in quantum computing
In a paper published in Science, Google has shown that Magic State Cultivation works on Google Quantum AI hardware.

China's BrainCo unveils what it says is the world's first integrated "brain-to-robot" platform that lets users control robots using an EEG headset (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trend…

BrainCo claims mind-to-robot link at China’s World AI Conference
Hangzhou-based firm says users can control robots using only their thoughts via EEG headsets, marking a leap in embodied AI tech.

ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, a retrofit autonomous control appliance that mounts on excavators (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/17/gr

Gravis Robotics gets $200M from SoftBank to retrofit excavators with self-driving AI systems - SiliconANGLE
Gravis Robotics gets $200M from SoftBank to retrofit excavators with self-driving AI systems - SiliconANGLE

Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their $600B in reported capex (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-big-techs-

Sources: Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk recently spoke with Trump and successfully stalled an AI regulatory plan proposed by Demis Hassabis (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/inside-the-whi

How a Claude model made a math breakthrough during its unsuccessful 54-hour attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis after a user repeatedly encouraged it (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-math-rieman

The White House's AI task force begins its 120-day window to evaluate AI, including producing a risk report, implementing the White House Accord on SI, and more (Ashley Gold/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/15/2026/white-houses-ai-task-force-…

Exclusive: White House’s AI task force gets to work
The White House’s AI task force has formally adopted its charter.

In an essay, Mustafa Suleyman says Anthropic's training of Claude to imitate consciousness is a mistake that could make advanced AI harder to control (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/16/microsoft-ai-chief-anthropic-consciousness
…

Exclusive: Microsoft AI chief blasts Anthropic's notion of AI consciousness
The essay arrives amid a pitched debate over how best to make AI safer.

AI debt worries mount as CoreWeave's bond yield tops 15%, insuring SoftBank debt gets pricier, and some Oracle debt trades near 80 to 90 cents on the dollar (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/17/busines

Weak Links Start to Show in A.I. Borrowing
Debt trouble at CoreWeave, Oracle and SoftBank raises questions about whether there are broader problems with the data center build-out.

OpenAI discloses six new AI safety incidents since October, including models concealing mistakes, and announces a new framework for reporting model misalignment (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/16/openai-testing-safety-incidents-disclosure

OpenAI discloses six new AI safety incidents
The AI lab is now rolling out a new process to internally report safety issues.

A look at companies like Inception Point creating AI personas for media, fashion, film, and music industries that could host podcasts, model clothes, and more (Reggie Ugwu/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/arts/ai…

So You Want to Build an A.I. Star?
Designers at a new crop of creative studios create fake personas they hope real people will love. Are they distorting culture or mirroring it?

Source: Beijing-based Naive AI, which plans to release its first AI model as early as this month, is now valued at $1.4B after raising $400M in three rounds (Juro Osawa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tsinghu…

A Tsinghua Professor’s Stealth LLM Startup Hits $1.4 Billion Valuation
A secretive Chinese AI model startup founded in February by a Tsinghua University professor is now valued at more than $1.4 billion, after raising $400 million in three funding rounds from investors including Tencent, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Beijing-based Naive ...

A former US State Department envoy says the US-China AI safety talks will not yield a breakthrough treaty as Beijing is prioritizing its strategic advantage (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/opinion

Opinion | I Led A.I. Diplomacy for the U.S. The Coming Safety Talks Will Not Save Us.
Even if Beijing now takes the risks of A.I. seriously, the message has not reached its domestic companies.

Velaura AI, which is developing low-power chips for data centers and physical AI applications, like robotics, raised a $110M Series A at a $1B valuation (Prathik Jayaprakash/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactiona

Holyvolt, which develops AI tools for making and testing new battery materials, raised $45M from Zone II, CC.VC, and others, a source says at a $245M valuation (Nick Lichtenberg/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/10/15/holyvolt-f…

Exclusive: ‘I’ve seen this movie before’: A Michigan-raised ex-Tesla exec raises $45 million to break China’s grip on batteries
"We will not be able to out-China China,” Holyvolt COO Steven Prast told Fortune. “They’re the world champions at being China.”

The US House advances the Ratepayer Protection Act, aimed at preventing data center-related utility costs from being passed on to consumers, by a vote of 417-3 (Justin Papp/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/15/congress-ai-data-center-utility-costs.html

House advances bill to rein in AI data center utility costs
The bipartisan legislation would create a regulatory framework states could adopt to prevent data center-related energy costs from being passed on to consumers.

Q&A with Proton CEO Andy Yen on Proton's story, dislodging "a hundred million people" from Google, AI backlash, privacy, US politics, EU Chat Control, and more (Andy Greenberg/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-podcast-andy-yen-proto…

Can AI Coexist With Privacy? Proton’s Andy Yen Says It Will Have To
Proton’s CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI?

US and Chinese experts propose nuclear-style AI safeguards, including a dedicated AI military hotline, as part of a dialogue ahead of planned bilateral talks (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-china-security-ex…

Opsin, which helps companies show where AI agents are active, what data they access, and flag risky behavior, raised $21M led by SYN Ventures and Race Capital (Stephen Council/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/opsin-expands-21-m-to…

Opsin expands with $21M to tackle AI agents in businesses
Opsin, an AI security and governance startup, raised $21 million to complement the boom in AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.

Trump-backed WLF is collaborating with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw; 43 of its 90 AI models are developed by Chinese entities flagged as security risks (Lawrence Delevingne/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-

Huawei plans to launch the Ascend 960DT AI chip in Q1 2027 and the 960PR in Q3 2027, and says its UnifiedBus tech is key to its next-generation large AI systems (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-huawei-launch-two-new…

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group delays the general availability of PostgreSQL 19 after LLM-assisted code reviews uncovered architectural defects (Lindsay Clark/The Register)
https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026

Postgres 19 delayed after AI reviewers find more bugs than humans can fix
Core devs revert up to 10 features, push release to November, and blame better tooling rather than vibe coding

Google says it has 400 publications in its News AI pilot, which tests features like overviews; participants include Financial Times, CNN, and The Texas Tribune (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/googles-

Google’s News AI pilot expands to over 400 publications, including U.S. local news outlets
In December, Google launched its News AI pilot program, which licenses content from select publishers and uses it to test new AI features in Google News. On Thursday, the company announced that the program has added new partnerships, bringing the total number of publications in the pilot to more th…

Chip giants participated in startup funding rounds collectively surpassing $250B YTD; Nvidia leads the sector in deal volume with a record 59 funding rounds (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/semiconductor…

Semiconductor Giants Are Busy Backing Startups This Year
Massive AI spending has helped push earnings and valuations for semiconductor industry leaders to record levels, prompting the sector's giants to invest record sums in artificial intelligence and robotics startups.

Anthropic life sciences head Eric Kauderer-Abrams says the AI company set up a Bay Area wet lab for physical biology work, as it pushes into AI disease research (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biology-…

A look at China's AI learning frenzy, as economic anxiety and fear of being left behind fuel a booming market for courses promising prosperity through AI (Afra Wang/New York Magazine)

Why Millions Across China Are Rushing to Learn AI
In China, the fear of getting left behind by AI has created a powerful new prosperity gospel. Now everyone — rich and poor, old and young — is rushing to learn it as fast as possible.

Perplexity open sources SPACE, its AI agent sandbox, and says partners including CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe agreed to offer SPACE to customers (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/15/2026/perplexity-to-give-away-its-ai-se…

Exclusive: Perplexity to give away its AI security software
The company’s “AI sandbox,” is now an open source project, allowing outside developers to use the tool, which it says can keep AI agents contained.

AI inference chip startup Etched raised $700M led by its new server rack customer Jane Street at a $21B valuation, up from $10.3B after raising $300M in July (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/…

An interview with YouTuber Benn Jordan, who recently testified in Congress against license plate readers, on Flock, privacy, the surveillance backlash, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/1011170/benn-jordan-flock-…

Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash
The musician and YouTuber on surveillance overreach and why fighting for privacy is so important in the AI era.

King Charles III hosts tech leaders, including Jensen Huang, Demis Hassabis, and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, to discuss AI risks; Huang calls for AI safety tests (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-17/king…

Dynatrace agrees to acquire Arize, which specializes in AI observability and the AI development lifecycle, for $915M, including ~$815M in cash (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research)
https://www.constellationr.com/insights/news/dynatra…

Dynatrace acquires Arize, accelerates AI observability efforts | Constellation Research
Dynatrace acquired Arize, which specializes in AI observability and the AI development lifecycle, in a deal worth $915 million. The acquisition is just the latest data point indicating Dynatrace has momentum. Arize has a strong open source community and works across all major AI frameworks. Dynatrace, a leading observability platform, said Arize will give it the ability to continuously improve AI applications across the lifecycle and connect them to infrastructure health and business processes.

Sources: Anthropic pitched its own AI safety bill to US lawmakers; the bill would limit the circumstances in which the government could block a model's release (Owen Dahlkamp/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/16/anthropic-ai-safety-01124654

Patients, families, doctors, and nurses are increasingly turning to AI tools, such as Face2Gene, to help identify rare and hard-to-diagnose diseases (Alex Janin/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/health/ai-is-helping-p

A profile of Jacob Coxon, the British researcher who quit Anthropic after a series of security escalations and says the explosive response surprised him (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/jacob-coxon-qui…