September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Nadella puts Microsoft's MAI code of conduct up for public consultation and backs 'deliberate pacing'
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella wrote on X on Sunday that any pursuit of superintelligence must rest on AI that helps humanity and stays under human control, that the company welcomes the 'deliberate pacing' needed to make alignment the design goal, and that the code of conduct behind its own MAI models would be published the next day for public consultation. The post is Microsoft's answer to Dario Amodei's call to pace the frontier; the text of the code had not appeared when the reports were written.
Nasdaq 100 drops as much as 1.8 percent after AI chiefs urge a slower build
NBC News says the Nasdaq 100 fell as much as 1.8 percent on Monday morning; Business Insider puts the same index's drop as much as 1.6 percent. Both tie the selling to weekend calls by Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk to slow AI model development. NBC adds Nvidia, Arm and SK Hynix losses and a later bounce in CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.
New York seized 12 celebrity deepfake sites that targeted about 1,200 people
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said his office seized 12 websites hosting AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery and counted likenesses of about 1,200 people. WIRED independently reported the same 12-site, 1,200-victim tally and tied the takedown to the US Take It Down Act. Bragg called it the largest seizure of its kind and declined to say whether images of minors were on the sites.
Obama wants AI at the centre of the Democrats' agenda, with a 'very clear plan' for safety and jobs
Former US president Barack Obama told a fundraiser at which House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries interviewed him that Democrats need a 'very clear plan' for AI safety, its effect on children and job displacement, adding that the technology is moving fast in private hands and could be dangerous if left unattended. His office released a partial transcript of the 10 September remarks to the press on 13 September. Jeffries responded that the former president is right and that decisive action is needed.
One billion tons of lunar ice would keep a city of a million alive for only about a century
Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell calculate in Frontiers in Space Technologies that the water in the Moon's permanently shadowed polar craters, generously taken as one billion tons, would support a city of one million for only about 100 years even at the 98 percent recycling achieved on the International Space Station. Power is no obstacle: kilometre-tall solar towers on sunlit crater rims could deliver three gigawatts. Without tenfold better recycling or a far larger water supply, the authors conclude, large-scale long-term settlement is ruled out.
One ECoG implant decoded speech and gesture; the papers disagree on how many people
Nature Neuroscience reports a single high-density electrocorticography implant decoded speech and gestures at once in three people with paralysis. New Scientist's same-day story names two, Bravo-1r and Bravo-6, on a simultaneous avatar task. Isolated-movement decoding in three participants and the two-person avatar numbers are not the same claim.
OpenAI bought Glass Imaging for more than 300 million dollars
TechCrunch, citing the Wall Street Journal, says OpenAI quietly bought Glass Imaging, a Los Altos camera startup valued at more than 300 million dollars. Ctech names founders Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop as former Apple engineers behind Portrait Mode. OpenAI did not comment. Neither report says which product the cameras would join.
OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors to read live ChatGPT chats
404 Media reports OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors under Project Lily who read real ChatGPT prompts and score replies. Usernames are stripped; OpenAI said sensitive details can still get through. The Next Web adds that the company would not say where it tells users humans may read chats, and that Europe's highest court last September put the duty to inform on the collector.
Pakistan offers 100 rupees a litre off petrol for motorcycles, rickshaws and small cars
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced a relief scheme that cuts petrol by 100 rupees a litre for motorcycles, rickshaws and cars up to 800 cc, days after the government raised petrol by 3.05 rupees and diesel by 5.37 rupees a litre. Two- and three-wheelers get it on up to 20 litres a month, small cars on up to 30 litres. Registration opened on Sunday; the scheme starts in Islamabad on Monday night and nationwide on Wednesday night, with a 75 billion rupee budget for three months.
PAPILLON's 34.3-month survival missed the unadjusted test; 76 percent later switched
IASLC's final PAPILLON overall-survival analysis reports 34.3 months with first-line amivantamab plus chemotherapy versus 27.9 months with chemotherapy alone; HR 0.87 and P 0.307 missed the statistical threshold. Clinical Trial Vanguard repeats that unadjusted miss and the 76 percent later switch, plus a prespecified adjusted HR 0.57 that is nominal.