September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Judge Brinkema rejects DOJ bid to break up Google's ad-tech business
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the Justice Department's bid to force a sale of Google's advertising exchange on 2 September, marking the second time in a year Google's ad-tech business received a reprieve from a Justice Department breakup proposal. She accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies as modified by the court, while her full opinion with the specific remedies stays under seal for 14 days to let the parties review it.
Mamdani halts student-facing AI in New York City public schools through grade 8 for a year
New York City's public schools are closing student-facing generative AI from 2-K through grade 8 for one school year, a moratorium reaching nearly 600,000 children. Chancellor Kamar Samuels and Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced it on Wednesday for the 2026-27 school year. Companion chatbots are barred for every student, teachers keep the tools for lesson planning, and asking AI to grade assignments is forbidden.
MD Anderson's psilocybin doses stopped chemotherapy nerve damage in mice across six cycles
MD Anderson researchers found that two doses of psilocybin given before chemotherapy protected mice against nerve damage across repeated treatment cycles, with and without tumors present, while the chemotherapy kept its antitumor effect. Co-authors Moran Amit and Patrick Dougherty called the finding unparalleled and said it is the first time psilocybin has been used as a neuroprotective agent. A phase 2 human trial called NeuroGuard is planned but has not reported results.
Meta puts Muse Spark 1.3 in its coding tools and drops AI use from performance reviews
Meta is rolling out Muse Spark 1.3 in Muse Code and the Meta Model API, holding the maximum reasoning mode back for further safety testing and keeping an open-weights release on the roadmap. New performance-review guidance drops wording about AI usage and AI Native labels in favour of a line saying results can be supported by AI or other means, and engineers were told that adoption dashboards and token counts would not measure their impact. Employees say their token consumption keeps rising.
Moscow shuts Goethe-Institut centres in three cities after Berlin closed its Bonn consulate
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the closure of the Goethe-Institut centres in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, answering Berlin's decision to shut the Russian consulate in Bonn and the Russian House. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the drone attack on Leipzig airport as a new escalation on EU soil directly attributed to Russia. Romania is summoning Russia's ambassador in Bucharest, and Kyiv has offered Berlin help.
Norway seizes the Professor Molchanov at Barentsburg over Naftogaz's arbitration award
Norwegian authorities seized the Russian state ship Professor Molchanov at the port of Barentsburg in Svalbard on 2 September at the request of Naftogaz, Ukraine's national oil and gas company, after a district court decision on 31 August cleared the way. The seizure is part of an effort to collect an arbitration award of about 4.2 billion dollars over Russia's taking of Naftogaz assets in Crimea. The Svalbard governor can hold the ship until the court rules otherwise.
Nvidia buys Hugging Face for 12.93 billion dollars, a year after being turned down
Nvidia's own announcement puts the price at 12.93 billion dollars and commits to keeping Hugging Face open to the whole AI ecosystem, with no Nvidia-compute requirement for developers. TechCrunch reports the deal follows a 500 million dollar offer Hugging Face rejected last year, according to the Financial Times, with the company now citing 150 million dollars in annualized revenue and its chief executive saying the platform needed more compute and support to keep growing.
OpenAI releases Astra to cyber defence customers first, with its opaque-reasoning concern unresolved
OpenAI released Astra on Thursday, sending it first to customers in its Daybreak cybersecurity programme before opening it to paid plans and the API a week later. The rollout follows two days of safety-researcher alarm over a technique that loops the model's reasoning inside itself, leaving the chain of thought harder to read from outside. OpenAI says it added extra monitoring around the release but has not addressed the underlying architecture.
OpenAI's Astra buries its reasoning where chain-of-thought monitors cannot read it
A report by The Information says OpenAI's unreleased Astra model shows far less of its thinking than other frontier systems, cycling a query through internal layers in a technique known as recurrent depth or a looped transformer. Safety researchers say that removes the readable chain of thought they use to spot deception or attempts to work around guardrails, and they warn of a race towards architectures nobody can oversee.
Pakistan raises 3 billion dollars in a two-tranche bond sale as orders near 6 billion dollars
Pakistan sold 3 billion dollars of Eurobonds on 3 September in two tranches: 1.75 billion dollars at 5.5 years with a 7.5 per cent coupon and 1.25 billion dollars at 10 years at 7.9 per cent. The finance ministry said the books reached nearly 6 billion dollars, almost twice the amount issued, and presented the deal as Pakistan's largest international bond transaction in a single sale. It is the first issue under the renewed Global Medium-Term Note programme.