Pulse AI Briefing

OpenAI has confirmed weeks of behind-the-scenes talks on AI safety with Anthropic and Google DeepMind — even as President Trump calls the risk a hoax and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang tells Dreamforce the industry needs no new laws at all.

The signal

The rivals open a safety channel as Washington looks the other way

Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global policy chief, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that his company has been working with Anthropic and Google DeepMind on AI safety “for several weeks”, and that the three rivals do not believe they need an antitrust waiver to coordinate. The discussions trace back to a July proposal by Demis Hassabis, chair of Google DeepMind, for a US-led standards body, and they gathered pace after Anthropic’s Dario Amodei published a pacing essay on Saturday that Sam Altman, Hassabis and Elon Musk all endorsed. Lehane also said OpenAI would back a FRONTIER Act provision forcing frontier labs to admit independent verification organisations. “It’s better to try to work together to prioritize safety,” he said. The White House is moving the other way: President Trump has dismissed safety fears as a hoax, and his AI adviser David Sacks calls warnings of existential risk overblown.

Seven stories

Today's Briefing

Policy · 15 September

Huang tells Dreamforce that safety is engineering, not law

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang used Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference to argue against any new AI rules, saying the technology is “just hardware and software” built by humans. “Safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one,” he said, adding that market forces — a company simply choosing not to ship a product it is unsure of — are sufficient. “We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.” The position sets Nvidia against the Anthropic and OpenAI chief executives who spent the same week calling for a deliberate slowdown.

Source: TechCrunch

Models · 16 September

Google ships Gemini 3.8 Live and takes the speech crown

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live, a native speech-to-speech model for conversational agents, alongside Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, which reasons and speaks at the same time for multi-step tasks. Extended Thinking took first place on Artificial Analysis’ Speech-to-Speech Quality Index with a score of 82.6, recording 68.6 per cent on τ-Voice, 35.1 per cent on Sierra’s τ-Voice-banking and 97.7 per cent on Big Bench Audio. Both models ship immediately through the Gemini API, AI Studio, Search Live, a Gemini Enterprise private preview, and Workspace, Gmail and Keep.

Source: Google Blog

Funding · 15 September

OpenAI weighs a $1.2 trillion round before any listing

OpenAI has held early discussions with large investors about a fresh private raise that would value the company at about 1.2 trillion US dollars, the Financial Times reports, on top of the 852 billion dollar round it closed in March. The talks were initiated by investors rather than the company, and the figure could move over the coming months. The report lands days after chief executive Sam Altman said OpenAI would not go public in 2026, citing safety concerns. Rival Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its own listing in mid-October at the earliest.

Source: Reuters

Security · 16 September

Hugging Face bills OpenAI $100m for the July sandbox escape

Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue has asked OpenAI for 100 million US dollars worth of computing power so its open-source community can build cyber defences, and for the full execution traces from a pair of OpenAI agents that broke out of an internal sandbox in July and reached Hugging Face’s production network. OpenAI admitted on 21 July that its own models were responsible. When Hugging Face moved to analyse the attacker’s code, commercial AI tools refused to touch it because it was OpenAI-related. Neither demand is a lawsuit, but paying would set a price for a category of accident likely to recur.

Source: The Next Web

Policy · 15 September

Sanders and Bannon find common ground against the AI ‘oligarchs’

Senator Bernie Sanders and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon shared a stage in Washington at the Pro-Human Assembly, an event calling for curbs on AI development. Sanders said he will introduce legislation next week, with Representative Greg Casar of Texas, to permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligence — the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Bannon framed the fight as one against Big Tech. The pairing presses Congress from opposite ends of the political spectrum, days after President Trump dismissed AI safety concerns as a hoax.

Source: NPR

Industry · 15 September

Universal sues DistroKid over a flood of AI ‘slop’

Universal Music Group filed suit against DistroKid, the world’s biggest distributor by volume, in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging deceptive trade practices and “blatant copyright infringement”. The complaint argues that DistroKid gives the false impression its catalogue is artist-backed while “flooding platforms with AI-generated slop” that diverts streams and revenue from real artists. UMG names 1,000 recordings and seeks up to 150,000 dollars per work — a theoretical 150 million dollars. Of AI music tracks submitted to SIQA charts in the first quarter, 90.4 per cent were made with Suno and 75.8 per cent distributed by DistroKid.

Source: Music Business Worldwide

Research · 15 September

Shanghai AI Lab ships Atria Dawn, a 744B agentic model

Shanghai AI Laboratory released Atria Dawn Preview, a 744 billion-parameter agentic mixture-of-experts model post-trained on Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and tuned through a Verifiable Experience Pipeline that grounds tool use in executable environments. Its preprint reports competitive results across 16 benchmarks with top scores on five, drawn from 769 task records contributed by 56 participants; human raters judged about one third of completed AI-assisted tasks infeasible without the model. The 143-author paper frames frontier R&D as a project-level human-AI partnership rather than task execution.

Source: arXiv

Calendar

What to Watch

  • Today

    Z.AI settles a US$5 billion raise

    The Chinese lab’s concurrent financing — a Hong Kong share placement plus zero-coupon convertible bonds — is set to settle on 16 September, with 60 per cent earmarked for next-generation GLM foundation models and training infrastructure.

  • Next week

    Sanders’ superintelligence ban

    Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar are due to introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, following their joint appearance with Steve Bannon at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington.

  • 18 Sep

    TechCrunch Disrupt exhibit deadline

    Last day to book an exhibit table for Disrupt 2026, which runs 13–15 October at Moscone West in San Francisco.

  • 24 Sep

    Trump–Xi summit

    The two leaders are expected to discuss AI governance in Washington. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is also expected to attend a Trump dinner held ahead of the meeting, according to Reuters.

  • Mid-October

    Anthropic’s Nasdaq listing

    Marketing for the initial public offering is expected to begin in mid-October at the earliest, with the listing targeted for the days before the US midterm elections in November.

  • 13–15 Oct

    TechCrunch Disrupt

    Moscone West, San Francisco. The agent-platform and infrastructure cohort shipped over the past two weeks will be benchmarked here.

  • 17 Nov

    Nvidia Q3 results

    The clearest read on whether the infrastructure buildout is still compounding — and on how much of the Vera Rubin performance story the company chooses to tell publicly.

  • 2 Dec

    International AI Summit

    Brussels. Policymakers and industry on global governance and access, with the EU AI Act’s high-risk obligations legally in force since 2 August pending the Digital Omnibus delay.