September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
OpenAI opens Codex's long-running harness to developers through the Agents API
OpenAI has put the Agents API into public beta, giving developers access to the managed harness behind Codex and ChatGPT. The service keeps long-running sessions alive, compacts context, recovers interrupted work and can let an agent execute code, read files, call tools or divide a job among other agents. Workloads may run in OpenAI-hosted sandboxes or customer infrastructure, although the beta currently limits data residency to the United States.
OpenAI packages ChatGPT for finance with licensed data and firm-controlled templates
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services for investment banking and equity research. Reuters and VentureBeat report that it combines GPT-6 Astra with built-in licensed data, granular citations, firm-controlled templates and governance tools. Morgan Stanley and Evercore served as design partners; access is limited to eligible financial institutions, and the announcement provides no public price.
Oracle's cloud infrastructure revenue rose 121% as free cash flow turned negative
Oracle's fiscal first-quarter revenue rose 30 per cent to 19.3 billion dollars, while cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 121 per cent to 7.4 billion dollars. The company spent 28.5 billion dollars on capital investment against roughly 23 billion dollars of operating cash flow, pushing free cash flow about 5 billion dollars negative. Contracted work not yet recognized as revenue reached 664 billion dollars.
Oxford team uses a water-wave processor to steer a robot car
University of Oxford researchers built a physical network that uses interacting waves in a water tank as its computing layer. With only its output connections trained, the apparatus distinguished obstacles with near-perfect accuracy and guided an Arduino robot car in real time. The team also tested a transfer of the principle to gigahertz spin waves in simulation; the solid-state version remains a numerical design rather than fabricated hardware.
Russian drones strike two Ukrnafta stations in Kyiv at the morning rush hour, killing two
Russia struck two Ukrnafta petrol stations in Kyiv during the morning rush hour in the war in Ukraine. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said two people wounded at the state-owned stations in the Dniprovskyi and Obolonskyi districts later died in hospital, and eight more were injured, among them a 12-year-old child and an emergency responder. Russia launched 161 attack drones overnight. The strikes hit civilian fuel distribution and security in the capital; The Guardian reported that Russia targeted Kyiv petrol stations with jet-powered drones for the first time.
Security Council keeps the Iran sanctions item by an 11-to-2 vote
After Russia demanded a procedural vote, the Security Council kept the briefing on its Iran sanctions committee on the agenda by 11 votes to 2, with 2 abstentions. The vote came one day after the IAEA referred Iran's file to the Council. Yet the 1737 committee still has no chair, and no panel of experts has been appointed to monitor implementation.
Slack Surfaces turns channel conversations into interactive workspaces
Slackforce Surfaces turns a user's prompt to Slackbot into interactive reports, polls, dashboards, presentations and microsites. It gathers material from relevant channel conversations and permitted connected applications such as Google Drive and Salesforce. A completed Surface can be pinned to a channel for colleagues to use and comment on. Slack says support for live data begins in October.
Superconducting sensors cut X-ray uncertainty for three actinides by factors of three to eight
Transition-edge sensors operating just above absolute zero measured the fundamental radiation linewidths of uranium, neptunium and plutonium with relative uncertainties of 0.5% to 1.5%. Results three to eight times more precise than earlier values reduce systematic error from overlapping radiation in gamma-ray assays of plutonium-bearing materials and provide a tighter test for theoretical atomic calculations.
Taiwan Vice-President Hsiao Bi-khim makes a rare Italy visit for a democracy forum
Taiwan Vice-President Hsiao Bi-khim and Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung travelled to Italy's Ventotene island for a three-day conference on freedom and democracy. The trip was kept unannounced until their arrival because Taiwan and Italy have no formal diplomatic relations. The rare European engagement gave senior Taiwanese officials a political platform despite Beijing's diplomatic pressure on host countries.
The Hammerschmiede clay pit yielded a short-beaked cormorant and a new Miocene raptor
Early late Miocene beds at the Hammerschmiede clay pit in southern Germany yielded the stem-group cormorant Bavaricarbo brevirostris and the raptor Mioaetus pforzenensis. The University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg institute in Frankfurt described six bird species more than 11 million years old from the pit near Pforzen, two of them new genera and species. The site has now returned 161 species and 50,000 fossils.