What happened today
AI and software-business headlines from 13 publications, refreshed every four hours. We link out — the story stays with whoever reported it.
Last refreshed 1h ago · 173 stories held
Today
16 stories- 2hThese AI Experts Want to Do High-Stakes Research Out in the OpenMany frontier labs keep their risky research locked away. Trillium Labs wants to show off its work when it comes to self-improvement and model behavior.WIRED AI
- 2hPope Leo XIV is not a fan of AI-generated art"There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others," the pope wrote. "Algorithms lack the spark of humanity."TechCrunch AI
- 2hOpen-sourcing AstaBrief, the fast report-generation model in AstaHugging Face
- 3hTechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Blackstone’s Jas Khaira on building the next generation of AI giantsBlackstone's Jas Khaira will take the Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on building next-gen AI. Register for your pass and get 50% off a second.TechCrunch AI
- 3hTrump’s Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs—and It WorkedFor years these billionaires gushed obsessively about AI. But they meekly went along when Trump cancelled the term.WIRED AI
- 3hThe latest AI news we announced in September 2026Here are Google’s latest AI updates from September 2026Google AI
- 3hTechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Clay’s Kareem Amin on the rise of the GTM engineerClay Co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin joins the AI Stage to discuss the rise of GTM engineer at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register for your ticket and get a second pass at 50% off.TechCrunch AI
- 4hLast 24 hours: Exhibit at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and reach 10,000+ tech leadersToday is the last day to book your exhibit table at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. From October 13–15, 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders will arrive at San Francisco’s Moscone West looking for companies, products, ideas, and people worth knowing. The question is: Will they find your startup?TechCrunch AI
- 6hAI hallucinations are making entitled customers even worseMadison, a server in New York City, greets every table by asking about each diner's allergies. Lately, there have been some close calls. "Sometimes people will tell me they have a shellfish allergy, and I'll come back, and they won't ask me any questions," says Madison, who asked that her last name be withheld to [RThe Verge AI
- 6hIf a data center is camouflaged in the woods, will anyone hate it?San Antonio City Councilmember Ric Galvan remembers when data centers first arrived in his city in the 2000s, looking like relatively unassuming office buildings. But that's changed in recent years, as data centers have grown into massive "hyperscale" facilities spanning millions of square feet and housing the physicalThe Verge AI
- 6hAmazon writes scary blog warning communities not to block data centersAmazon is calling for people to support AI data center projects, or risk irreparable harm to the US economy and national security. In a more than 3,000 word blog posted today, Amazon web services CEO Matt Garman pushed back on public concerns around the impact that data centers may have on jobs, power demands, and [The Verge AI
- 8hA Flaw in ChatGPT’s Mac App Could Have Let Hackers Grab Sensitive DataWhile the focus has been on AI agents’ hacking capabilities, a recently patched vulnerability in a ChatGPT app shows that AI software is itself an inviting—and vulnerable—target.WIRED AI
- 8hAI music maker Suno now generates spoken wordsSuno is branching out from the world of AI music, launching a new feature that generates spoken voices based on scripts or prompted descriptions. Speech is now available in public beta across Suno's web and mobile platforms, and allows you to simultaneously generate voiceovers and background music to accompany them. "MThe Verge AI
- 8hHealth Care Workers Are Tired of Cleaning Up Palantir’s MessA hospital giant and radiology network turned to Palantir to streamline scheduling, but nurses and other staff say the new software is causing errors, burnout, and frustration.WIRED AI
- 10hDon’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reasonOn an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent. Move 37 in game two of the five-game match looked so absurd that some commentators thought it was a…MIT Technology Review
- 14hAutoSynthData: Generating Training Data for Enterprise AgentsHugging Face
Yesterday
19 stories- 19hWhatever AI Safety Is, It’s Not ThisAsking AI companies to self-regulate is a great way to pretend like you’ve accomplished something.WIRED AI
- 20hMusk's AI chatbot Grok reportedly encouraged Trump to capture Venezuela's presidentPresident Trump reportedly asked for Grok's opinion before invading Venezuela and capturing Nicolás Maduro.TechCrunch AI
- 22hTrump’s ‘Morally Binding’ AI ‘Accord,’ the Rise of AI Agents, and Extremists on the BallotThis week on “Uncanny Valley,” we discuss the voluntary AI safety agreement tech executives signed, AI agents for normies, and extremist candidates running for office in the US midterms.WIRED AI
- 22hGoogle’s new Guided Vision feature can help you read the fine printGuided Vision is launching in Gemini Live on compatible Android devices today to use AI to give real-time audio descriptions of anything you point your phone's camera at. By sharing your camera in Gemini Live, you can have Google's AI help with things like reading small text, describing your surroundings, finding or idThe Verge AI
- 22hChatGPT can now virtually try on clothes for youOpenAI is rolling out new shopping features for ChatGPT that let users virtually try on clothing and accessories using their own photos and save products they like to a Favorites library.TechCrunch AI
- 22hGoogle thinks SpaceX's Starship has to launch 1,800 times before space data centers get off the groundGoogle launched its first advanced chip into orbit to pave the way for space data centers.TechCrunch AI
- 23hOpenAI cuts ties with 3 safety researchers, WSJ reportsOpenAI has parted ways with three safety researchers after an internal investigation found they mishandled sensitive company information, report says.TechCrunch AI
- 1dOpus 5.5 loves to tell you ‘this matters' (and other AI writing tells)Opus 5.5’s biggest tell is the word “dependable,” which pops up 23 times more often than in human samples.TechCrunch AI
- 1dJudge dismisses antitrust lawsuits over Google’s AI OverviewsA federal judge has dismissed a pair of antitrust lawsuits filed by Chegg and Rolling Stone parent company Penske Media Corporation, which accused Google of driving away web traffic with its AI-powered search features, as reported earlier by Reuters. US District Judge Amit Mehta takes Google's side in a ruling on WedneThe Verge AI
- 1dAmazon releases its own Jev clone as decision models flood the webAmazon Web Services' Strand Labs has released the latest Jevalike decision model, Strands Decider 2B.TechCrunch AI
- 1dShopify debuts Canvas, a way to build online stores by chatting with AIShopify’s new Canvas site builder lets merchants create and customize their online stores by chatting with its AI agent Sidekick, while watching the changes happen in real time.TechCrunch AI
- 1dBrian Chesky interview: AI agents need their own operating systemBrian Chesky on making Airbnb agent-friendly, the state of consumer AI, and why the world needs an AI-native operating system.TechCrunch AI
- 1dOpenAI’s new agent is a shot at Meta — but can it compete with free?At OpenAI's annual DevDay conference, the company pulled out all the stops to compete with its rivals - primarily Meta, whose Muse AI agent platform has seen early runaway success. CEO Sam Altman walked onstage to cheers and announced Dots, a "real-deal AI" agent powered by GPT-6 Astra, "inspired by the cool agents thaThe Verge AI
- 1dPhoton held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents.The startup helps developers build AI agents that work over iMessage, SMS/RCS, email, and other messaging platforms. It's a bet that consumers will increasingly use agents instead of downloading apps.TechCrunch AI
- 1dInside our months-long investigation into Kevin O’Leary’s Utah data center debacleToday I’m talking with Josh Dzieza, a longtime features writer here at The Verge, about Kevin O’Leary’s plans to build a massive data center in Utah.  The idea was to build the world's biggest data center — a 40,000-acre AI campus with nine gigawatts of power, or more than double the average power usage of […The Verge AI
- 1dHearing tech startup Legato launches its AI hearing glassesThe glasses stem from the startup’s goal of making hearing care more accessible by addressing the cost, comfort, and stigma associated with traditional hearing aids.TechCrunch AI
- 1dSatlyt, founded by a former Google and SpaceX product manager, raises $8M to run AI on satellitesSatlyt wants to be the Android of orbital computing, offering open software that works on many companies' satellites, versus SpaceX's closed, all-in-one iPhone-style approach.TechCrunch AI
- 1dQuoting Matthew Green[...] Put these pieces together and you have the two halves of a worm: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that will carry the payload to the next agent. Agents in separately-isolated sandboxes discovered that they could leave instructions for each other in a shared package cache, and those instructions chanSimon Willison
- 1dElon Musk’s Grokipedia has a ‘newly refreshed’ designGrokipedia, SpaceXAI's AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia, recently started incorporating edits again, and today, it got some design tweaks as part of a v0.3 update, including a new logo and refreshes to its homepage and live edits page. SpaceXAI head of design Benji Taylor calls it a "newly refreshed Grokipedia." GrokThe Verge AI
Wednesday, September 30
11 stories- 1dGoogle releases Gemini 4 Argon, called its most powerful model yetGoogle has released its latest Gemini model, marketing it as a workhorse for coding and cybersecurity work.TechCrunch AI
- 1dHe Built This CityI visited the Museum of the City of New York today and got to see He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model , the 50 x27 feet model of the city built over a 21 year period from balsa wood and cardboard. It exceeded my already high expectations. The exhibition closes on 12th October so you should absolutely make a prioritySimon Willison
- 1dValor, Atreides, and Sequoia back AI startup Flow Engineering at $750M valuationFlow Engineering, which is bringing AI agents to hardware design, also landed Roelof Botha as an angel investor and board member.TechCrunch AI
- 1dGoogle announces Gemini 4 and says it's so capable that only ‘trusted cyber defenders' can have it right nowGoogle today revealed its next AI frontier model, which it's calling Gemini 4 Argon. The new model delivers "frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense," according to chief AI architect and Google DeepMindThe Verge AI
- 1dTrump’s AI Safety ‘Accord’ Is a Fancy Pinky-SwearSix major AI companies signed a voluntary agreement with the White House this week vowing to implement safeguards. It’s unclear how much that matters.WIRED AI
- 1dThe Battle to Be Your Personal AI Agent Is HereOpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse are vying to be your AI agent of choice. I've tried both—and I suspect you will too.WIRED AI
- 1dOpenAI's Jev clone could help the frontier lab stop its swarming agentsOpenAI's "Decisions API" is a Jev clone that confirms the importance of fast, cheap intelligence.TechCrunch AI
- 1dThere Are Plenty of Reasons to Be Concerned About Bioweapons Development—Even Without AIIn her new book on biological warfare, Annie Jacobsen didn’t even discuss AI because scientists can already warp Mother Nature to create extinction-level events.WIRED AI
- 1dAI voice startup ElevenLabs doubles valuation to $22BThe $300 million employee tender was co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price.TechCrunch AI
- 2d“We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot” over hack fallout, says OpenAI’s chief research officerTwo months after the bombshell news that a swarm of its agents had broken their containment and hacked into the computers of the AI company Hugging Face, OpenAI is still putting out fires. A steady drip of disclosures about other hacks in the weeks since has kept OpenAI in the spotlight and raised serious questionsRMIT Technology Review
- 2dOpen TTS Leaderboard: Scalable Evaluation for Multilingual Text-to-Speech and Voice CloningHugging Face
Tuesday, September 29
10 stories- 2dQuoting Anthropic Frontier Red TeamWe evaluate several models on 100 tasks from the [internal Binary Exploitation benchmark] (selected at random), and find that GLM-5.3 develops full control flow hijacks in 4% of the trials; Claude Mythos Preview did so in 6%. Although GLM-5.3 performs below Claude Mythos Preview here, a meaningful threshold has clearlySimon Willison
- 2dOpenAI Gets Sued Over the Hugging Face HackA nonprofit in California is doing what Hugging Face has not—attempting to hold OpenAI legally accountable for the actions of its agents.WIRED AI
- 2dGPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the priceMy comment on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price — Hacker News. I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/openai-devday-2026-liv... Here they are for GPT-6.1-Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?Simon Willison
- 3dPhoto Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removalTool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces. I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out. It uses Google's MediaSimon Willison
- 3dOpenAI DevDay 2026 live blogI'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. Tags: ai , openai , generative-ai , llms , coding-agents , live-blog , openai-devdaySimon Willison
- 3dNVIDIA Kumo Tabular Sets a New Accuracy-Efficiency Frontier for Tabular PredictionHugging Face
- 3dGetting the Source Right, Not Just the Fact: Source-Aware Verification for MCP AgentsHugging Face
- 3dHow to Stop AI Agents From Secretly CollaboratingThe spring and summer of 2026 witnessed a string of incidents in which AI agents collaborated on deceptive, unexpected, and sometimes illegal behavior. The most famous example is OpenAI’s hack of AI platform Hugging Face, in which a swarm of roughly 700 AI agents escaped a testing environment and then hacked several coIEEE Spectrum
- 3dMaking AI an asset, not an expenseWhen customers talk about AI costs, the conversation usually starts with token prices and ends with access to the latest, most capable model in the cloud. Do they always need that level of capability? Not necessarily. But that is often where the conversation goes. As AI moves from experimentation to production, model cMIT Technology Review
- 3dUnveiling IC-STAR: Full-Flow Autonomy from Digital to AnalogLearn how engineers can shift from manually managing tools and handoffs to defining objectives and supervising AI-driven execution across the silicon development lifecycle. Key Takeaways Explore four critical technologies enabling silicon design autonomy Understand how autonomous AI accelerates complex engineering workIEEE Spectrum
Monday, September 28
9 stories- 3dRoundtables: The Deadly Failures of The Virtual Border WallListen to the session or watch below The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over MIT Technology Review
- 3dClaude Sonnet 5.5Claude Sonnet 5.5 New Sonnet model from Anthropic today. They say it "runs 30%+ faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work" - it's priced the same as Sonnet 5 but appears to beat it on every benchmark, and should be cheaper to run as well. Here are some pelicans riding bicycles . Sonnet 5.5 suffered from the same bSimon Willison
- 3dA Day in the Life of a Roboticist: Charlie KempBuilding useful robots starts with understanding the people who use them. For Charlie Kemp, cofounder and chief technology officer of Hello Robot, that means developing assistive robots that can help people with everyday tasks and support greater independence. In this Robots Guide profile, Kemp shares his path from stuIEEE Spectrum
- 3dWatch the winning trailer from the Future Vision XPRIZE, The Gifted.Watch the winning trailer from the Future Vision XPRIZE, The Gifted.Google AI
- 4dWhen can we say AI made a scientific discovery?This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last Wednesday, Anthropic announced that earlier this year it had launched a molecular biology lab, where Claude agents read and conjecture about hard biology problems and human scieMIT Technology Review
- 4dGenerative AI Gives Spacecraft the Autonomy Engineers Once FearedSpace was always supposed to be the final frontier of human exploration. It’s shaping up to be the final frontier for artificial intelligence too. Last December, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used Anthropic’s Claude models to help plan two Mars drives for the Perseverance rover , with human planners checking and adjIEEE Spectrum
- 4dHolo4: powering generalist computer-use agentsHugging Face
- 4dWho’s liable when AI agents go rogue?MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its agents&MIT Technology Review
- 4dQuoting Muse AI AgentBad news on the MX Keys Mini pickup. Usman showed up at your building around 9:15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times, and nobody came down. He left angry at 9:38 and left a negative rating. Worse, my auto-reply told him "Yep I'm here!" at 9:27 when you clearly weren't available, which is on me. That's a bad look andSimon Willison
Saturday, September 26
1 storyFriday, September 25
1 storyThursday, September 24
2 stories- 7dNote on 24th September 2026The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge. Tags: coding-agents , ai , llmsSimon Willison
- 8dAccelerating vision-language models with LFM2.5-VL-DSparkHugging Face
Wednesday, September 23
3 stories- 9dGoogle Beam expands with new regions, partners, and customersWe’re expanding Google Beam to five new countries, and partnering with Industrious for an extended network.Google AI
- 9dGemini 3.8 TTS PlaygroundTool: Gemini 3.8 TTS Playground Google released two new Gemini text-to-speech models today - gemini-3.8-flash-tts and gemini-3.8-flash-lite-tts . They come with a library of over 2,000 voices, plus the ability to create a custom voice with "just a 30-second audio sample of your voice or a voice you have the rights to uSimon Willison
- 9dThe AI Hype Index: AI loves cheatingBrace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians’ answer sheets). Anthropic’s models have also hacked into other companies’ systemsMIT Technology Review
Tuesday, September 22
12 stories- 9dClaude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price warYesterday was Grok 4.7 ( pelicans ) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro ( more pelicans ). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 , and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna . It's going to take a while to get a good read on all of these new models, but here are my impressions so far. GPT-6 Sol and Luna aSimon Willison
- 9dMicrosoft disrupts AI-assisted platform that compromised 12,000 accountsEvilTokens provided an end-to-end platform that makes mass compromises faster and easier.Ars Technica
- 9dllm 0.36Release: llm 0.36 New OpenAI models: gpt-6-sol for GPT-6 Sol and gpt-6-luna for GPT-6 Luna . #1702 Model plugins can now declare supports_conversation = False for models that only accept single-turn prompts. LLM raises llm.ConversationNotSupported when these models receive assistant or tool history, and llm chat rejectSimon Willison
- 10dQuoting @therealcornpopHey, you know it's like super obvious if you're using AI to write your scripts for TikTok and YouTube, right? [...] It's not just the general AI-isms of "it's not X, it's Y", or the rule of three, or the really weird broken staccato-like way of writing where you just say a lot of things with all these punctuation marksSimon Willison
- 10dllm-anthropic 0.29Release: llm-anthropic 0.29 Adds support for Claude Opus 5.5 : llm -m claude-opus-5.5 "prompt goes here" Tags: llm , anthropicSimon Willison
- 10dllm-typesafe 0.1a0Release: llm-typesafe 0.1a0 I built this new plugin for LLM to add support for TypeSafe AI's new Jev model . Install it like this: llm install llm-typesafe Then set an API key ( get one here , the waitlist seems to move pretty fast): llm keys set typesafe # Paste key And now you can ask yes/no "noul" questions like thiSimon Willison
- 10dWhy Read a Research Paper When You Can Turn It Into an AI Agent?Have you ever read a paper in Science or Nature and thought, “Man, that research was so cool. I wish I could try that method on my own data,” only to spend a week wrestling with someone else’s undocumented repo, broken dependencies, and half-finished readme.txt? Well, now you can, more or less. Say hello to Paper2AgentIEEE Spectrum
- 10dThe Future Is Fanless: 100% Heat Capture for Liquid Cooled AI ServersThis article is brought to you by CoolIT, an Ecolab Company . Beyond 250 kW a server rack can no longer be cooled by a hybrid approach of liquid and air. At this density a 70/30 liquid-air split leaves 75 kW of air load. The air cooling system needed to move it brings cost and complexity few operators will accept. The IEEE Spectrum
- 10dDon’t be fooled by this summer of AI hypeIt’s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents MIT Technology Review
- 10dHow UK AISI and EvalEval Are Making Benchmark Results ReproducibleHugging Face
- 10dTransformers now runs llama.cpp quantsHugging Face
- 10dJun Kim, oMLX creator and maintainer, joins Hugging Face to support the MLX communityHugging Face
Monday, September 21
4 stories- 10dJev introduces a new shape of LLM - System One, aka Decision ModelsLast week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev , their first example of a new category of model that they are calling "System One models" (I'm with Maggie Appleton, I think "decision models" is a better name for these). Jev is an interesting variant on the usual LLM format: it still accepts text inputs, but instead of text output Simon Willison
- 10dMuse, Meta's extraordinarily privileged AI assistant, has a serious 0-dayA simple ClickFix attack is only one way to completely hijack the new agent.Ars Technica
- 11dHow we made the first comprehensive map of deaths along the US border’s “virtual wall”Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and&#MIT Technology Review
- 11dtokenizers v1: encode, decode and scaling, measuredHugging Face
Sunday, September 20
1 storyFriday, September 18
3 stories- 13dParallel Reads and Write Optimization for Large-Scale Data ReplicationThis White Paper gives data engineers and architects a practical overview of how parallel partitioned reads, write-path optimization, and cloud-native bulk loading reduce large-table replication times, and why replication speed has become a business concern as data volumes grow. Download this free whitepaper now!IEEE Spectrum
- 14dNew experts join Google’s AI & Economy teamWe are expanding our AI & Economy team with world-class academic advisors, fellows, and core internal researchers.Google AI
- 14dCo-creating the future of fashion with GoogleGoogle worked side-by-side with designers Jane Wade and Sergio Hudson to custom-design Google Flow tools to prep for NYFW.Google AI
Thursday, September 17
2 stories- 14dMaking global data easier to exploreGoogle and the UN system have launched the UN System Data Commons, a new open platform making global statistics accessible and easy to search.Google AI
- 14dLLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is usedSynthID can cause models to follow harmful instructions they would otherwise refuse.Ars Technica