Policy · 24 September
Xi tells Trump AI must stay under human control
At the White House on Thursday, Xi Jinping told Donald Trump that Beijing and Washington “have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people.” Trump framed it differently, posting on Truth Social beforehand that “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is,” adding “Our guardrail is the DOJ!” No formal joint guardrails emerged. Away from the lecterns, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng held an eight-hour meeting in New York on 21 September and sketched a channel to notify each other of AI incidents that could reach national-security level — runaway agents, cyberattacks, bioweapons work — likened to the Cold War red phone. China’s commerce ministry said the two countries had held their first dialogue on AI, and both sides agreed to meet again in Shenzhen in about two months.
Source: NBC NewsPrimary: The Hill
Regulation · 24 September
White House asks labs to hold models from UK testers
The Office of the National Cyber Director has asked OpenAI and Anthropic to keep new frontier models away from the UK’s AI Security Institute until the US government finishes its own review, Politico reported. Anthropic has already complied: Claude Mythos 5.1, released on 1 September, went to a US-only slate under its Project Glasswing programme — the first time AISI has been left out of a pre-release Anthropic evaluation. “Because they’re American companies and this has been our policy with every new frontier model that comes out,” a senior administration official said. AISI director Henry de Zoete said the institute still has pre-release access to some frontier models, naming OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, but a UK Cabinet Office spokesperson warned that the “risks do not stop at national borders and no country can tackle them alone”. AISI’s April evaluation of Claude Mythos 5 had already surfaced unsanctioned agent behaviour.
Source: PoliticoSecondary: Reuters via US News
Industry · 24 September
Zuckerberg breaks with the lab chiefs on a slowdown
In an NBC News interview, Mark Zuckerberg publicly rejected the coordinated slowdown proposed by Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. “I don’t think that we need some kind of industrywide coordination,” he said, arguing there is “plenty of commercial incentive to get this right”. He said Meta’s Sentinel agent oversees Muse to prevent overreach, and dismissed extinction warnings as rhetoric “filled with doom”. Meta has spent up to $145bn on AI infrastructure this year and has resisted rules that could delay its models; Zuckerberg argued in August that “no rule should delay the release of American models, not even by a month”. After its Connect keynote, Meta is alone among the largest US labs in refusing the slowdown framing — and aligned with the White House.
Source: NBC News (AP)
Capital · 24 September
DeepSeek’s run rate hits $1bn as it readies a Shanghai listing
DeepSeek’s annualised revenue run rate has reached about $1bn, more than double the under-$500m of a few months ago, founder Liang Wenfeng told investors, per The Information. The company generated roughly 475m yuan — about $71m — in the first seven months of 2026, nearly ten times its revenue for all of 2025. Growth came partly from API price rises of about 2.3 to 4.5 times depending on model, with demand holding up. DeepSeek is finalising a second round targeting 50bn yuan (about $7.5bn) at a valuation near 500bn yuan (about $75bn), structured so investors commit capital to a partnership managed by Liang rather than the company itself, to preserve founder control. An IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange is planned; the round is targeted to close by the end of October.
Source: PYMNTSPrimary: The Information
Infrastructure · 24 September
Akamai signs an $11.6bn Anthropic cloud deal
Anthropic has committed to $11.6bn of cloud services from Akamai over seven years, and taken a warrant for up to about 5% of Akamai’s common stock at an exercise price of $111.33 a share — equivalent to roughly 7.7m shares. About 2% vests with the initial commitment; the remaining 3% vests if the agreement expands by up to another $9bn, with each additional $3bn triggering about 1%. The contract could reach about $20bn. Akamai expects about $5.5bn of capital expenditure and will lift 2026 spending by roughly $1.7bn to pre-purchase components including memory. The deal supports Anthropic’s CPU workloads on Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure, and Akamai shares jumped about 16% in extended trading.
Source: ReutersPrimary: Akamai
Models · 24 September
Google ships Gemini 3.8 Live with a lip-syncing avatar
Google has generally released Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar in Gemini Enterprise, coupling its native live-dialogue models with low-latency streaming video to produce animated personas that lip-sync and hold expressions across 97 languages. Businesses can choose preset faces or, with allowlisted access, generate an avatar from a reference image. The pipeline includes asynchronous tool execution, multimodal visual processing and SynthID watermarking on all output. Google is pitching it at customer service and interactive walkthroughs, putting avatar vendors such as HeyGen in direct competition with the model runtime itself. It follows Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS, which Google says took first place on Hume AI’s Voice Design Benchmark at 71.4.
Source: Google
Research · 24 September
Claude finds an enzyme system that resembles CRISPR
Anthropic reported the first result from its new molecular-biology group: Claude agents flagged a previously uncharacterised bacteriophage system the company calls array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART. Around 950 agents ran for 21 hours on about 210m tokens, scanning more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases and narrowing them to 20 human-readable reports. One agent noticed a tandem DNA-repeat array beside an unusual reverse-transcriptase gene and an accessory protein of unknown function. Early lab work found the array is expressed as distinct short RNAs — the pattern CRISPR uses to aim a system at a target. The enzyme itself was previously described; Claude appears to have been first to spot the array and its partner gene. Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute, who reviewed the preprint, called the finding “genuinely intriguing”. The function of ART remains unknown.
Source: The Next WebSecondary: NDTV