September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Who staffs a kill switch that is still only a memo?
California's order wants on-site auditors and a frontier kill switch; the two-month guide has not yet assigned who would actually hold that work.
A changelog closed ZCode wiki uploads after a .git dump showed up
Zhipu's 19 September ZCode 3.14.0 notes say the desktop app fixed abnormal repository-wiki uploads without listing which files left the machine. An independent 18 September write-up on ferstar's blog measured most of a captured ZCode snapshot as .git contents, which is the copy the changelog does not name.
A Greenland security pact is set for next week’s UN
BBC and Al Jazeera both reported on 18 September 2026 that Denmark, Greenland and the United States described a security pact to be signed at the United Nations General Assembly the following week, still needing votes in Nuuk and Copenhagen. Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social of lasting US control and a bar on adversary bases without written US approval. Mette Frederiksen said the text recognises the Kingdom’s sovereignty and Greenlandic self-determination.
A US kill-switch bill sits between hurry and caution
A Nobel laureate in computing left a closed AI-safety meeting this week, USA TODAY writes, warning members may have a year to act; the kill-switch bills are not yet enacted law. Texas Republican Rep. Nathaniel Moran, co-author of a bipartisan bill to shut down rogue models, said haste is unnecessary and the choice should stay measured. Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy tried this week to pass a looser version by unanimous consent. The House calendar loses September floor days; members are due out in October.
A White House post bars three newsrooms from the grounds
On 18 September 2026 the BBC and Al Jazeera both reported that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social an immediate White House ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, calling their work fiction or fake news. CNN called the move an illegal assault on press freedom. The BBC noted reporters from CNN and Politico were still on the grounds shortly afterward; Al Jazeera added that he later named the New York Times and the Washington Post as next.
Accenture Faculty sits inside the lab
Anthropic on 18 September 2026 said Accenture Faculty will sit inside as an embedded evaluator with staff-like access, looking at how models are trained and shipped. Anthropic says the rules for access and who pays are unwritten, so it will cover Faculty’s invoices while speaking with METR and other nonprofits about pilots with money from somewhere else. The partnership is not exclusive.
AIPerf rebuilds inference load tests
NVIDIA on 18 September 2026 said AIPerf is not a reskin of Perf Analyzer; the client was rebuilt so Python’s lock does not cap concurrency. It lists more than 15 endpoint types, ShareGPT-style public datasets, and replay traces from Mooncake, Baseten and WEKA AgentX. Core metrics include first-token wait and tokens out per second. The post cites no outside lab bake-off.
An 8.8 million-year capybara tooth points to a wetter Atacama coast
Gizmodo writes that University of Arizona researchers reported an 8.8 million year Cardiatherium tooth from Chile's Bahía Inglesa beds, a find that implies wetter late Miocene conditions on a coast now treated as hyper-arid for tens of millions of years. University of Arizona News, covering the same paper, says the tooth is Chile's first and oldest coastal capybara find and that no capybaras live in the country today.
Anthropic confirmed a Bay Area lab for physical biology experiments
TechCrunch reports that Anthropic's head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, told Reuters the company is already doing real lab work in a San Francisco Bay Area wet lab, while still using outside partners. Engadget, also following that Reuters interview, says Anthropic has not disclosed the site's size, staffing or biosafety level and has not run a clinical trial.
Bolivia ends the diesel subsidy and ties the pump to import cost
Reuters said President Rodrigo Paz announced on Friday an end to state diesel subsidies, after Bolivia imported about 90 per cent of its diesel and spent about 55 million dollars a week on the support. Euronews said lawmakers had hours earlier approved a 1.9 billion dollar IMF loan and that Paz then cut diesel support while leaving gasoline subsidised for now.