Editorial - SiliconNoon (Page 40)

The Guardrails

OpenAI and Anthropic put their copyright asks to Australia in writing

Australia's copyright fight stopped being a rumour this morning: the two labs asking Canberra to rewrite its law have now filed their arguments where anyone can read them. OpenAI and Anthropic have filed submissions to parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence setting out what they want Australia's copyright regime to be — and both tie it to whether they train and build in the country. OpenAI asked for a "balanced copyright framework" that lets models learn from publicly av

The Stack

Fastcrawl wants to be the web layer for AI agents — and it is priced like a utility

Every AI agent that needs to read the web runs into the same wall, and it is not the model. It is the page. A modern news homepage arrives as 400 to 900 kilobytes of markup wrapped around a few thousand words of actual text — navigation, adverts and script tags around the part worth reading. Handing that to a model wastes tokens and produces worse answers than the same text would have. So the operator either builds a scraping stack — headless browsers, session handling, retries, anti-bot evasion

The Frontier

Tencent ships Hy Image3.5 at $0.024 an image — parity claim untested

Tencent's image line has been on a two-month clock since it rebuilt the stack in February. The latest tick is a preview model whose rate card does more work than its benchmark does. Tencent released Hy Image3.5 preview on Tuesday, pricing a 2K image at 0.15 yuan on its domestic cloud API and $0.024 on the international endpoint — about a quarter of what the model it claims to match charges. The model does text-to-image and image-to-image, takes up to five reference images per call for identity

The Arena

Alibaba plans a 10T-parameter model and a 500,000-chip cluster

Alibaba's cloud conference in Hangzhou opened this morning with a three-part commitment that is harder to wave off than the usual keynote arithmetic: a model bigger than anything trained so far, the chip to run it, and the power to feed both. Huawei spent the same week putting a coding model inside its own operating system, and a small project on the local-AI forums quietly showed that a model's refusals can be switched off without touching a single weight. Alibaba says its next Qwen models wil

The Everyday

Zelda Williams to AI video makers: 'have some shame'

The family of Robin Williams has spent three years asking people to stop making synthetic versions of him. This time the ask came with a description of the business model behind it. Zelda Williams went public on X on Monday night, after an AI-generated video presenting her father discussing conspiracy theories circulated widely enough that fans sent it to her. "That supposedly 'private video' of dad that I've been shown talking about conspiracies is clearly AI, and not even particularly convinc

The Arena

LG signs a pact to cool and power Microsoft's next 26 GW

A group-level supply pact signed in Redmond and a pair of hardware qualifications handed down by Nvidia landed on the same day — and both point at the same bottleneck: the parts of an AI data center that are not chips. LG Group will supply the cooling, power and IT infrastructure for Microsoft's global AI data centers under a group-wide strategic partnership the two companies signed at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters on September 21. LG chairman Koo Kwang-mo and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met

The Guardrails

The Bank of England is testing a kill switch it can't describe yet

Two stories about control today: the Bank of England admits it is running out of time to get ahead of AI agents that trade on their own, and a new paper finds that the hand-written playbook you give an agent can actively make it worse. Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden said Monday that financial regulators are running out of time to tackle the risk of autonomous AI agents causing a market meltdown — and that the central bank is exploring kill switch tests it does not yet know how to

The Guardrails

22 leaders signed a frontier-AI control pact. The US, China and UK didn't.

Two things landed on the same Monday: a coalition of middle powers published the sharpest international statement yet on frontier AI control, and a Lean-verified number-theory proof appeared with one anonymous account standing behind it. Finland's president, Alexander Stubb, published a joint statement on Monday — a day before the UN General Assembly's high-level debate opened in New York — demanding that frontier AI stay under human control, and it comes with three concrete asks. Companies sho

The Everyday

Amazon pledges $20M to the Colorado River without its own water data

Amazon put $20 million into the Colorado River this week — and still won't say how much water its data centers take out of it. Amazon announced Monday that it will spend $20 million on water conservation across the Colorado River basin, as part of a new corporate coalition targeting $100 million over the next two years. The basin supplies 40 million people across the western United States and is in what federal forecasters call an unprecedented drought, with Lake Mead still declining. The money

The Stack

Cloudflare ships Python Workers GA with native AI bindings

Cloudflare has spent about two years getting Python onto its edge network. As of Monday it is telling developers to build on it for real. Cloudflare has moved Python Workers to general availability, making Python a first-class language on its developer platform — and, for anyone building AI, giving Python code native bindings to Workers AI, R2, D1, Hyperdrive, Durable Objects, Queues and Workflows instead of forcing conversions into TypeScript at the RPC boundary. That last detail is the one th

The Guardrails

Meta's Muse assistant shipped with a local zero-day

Meta spent the Muse launch arguing that a personal agent can be convenient and safe at the same time. A macOS security researcher has now shown how much of that promise rested on the word "can." A local zero-day in Meta's Muse macOS app lets an unprivileged process hijack the assistant's dictation traffic — and everything Muse is allowed to touch. Patrick Wardle, founder of the macOS security nonprofit Objective-See, published a proof-of-concept he calls not-a-mused, showing that Muse ships wit

The Guardrails

Today in AI — September 21, 2026

Monday's through-line was accountability: who answers when a model misbehaves, and who pays when it works. Washington drew that line at management, two labs reportedly negotiated to attack each other's models, China's flagships kept winning the volume race while one of them took a shelf at Amazon, and two compression papers argued that smaller can now mean better rather than merely cheaper. Models & Research * ByteDance Seed and Tsinghua AIR open-sourced DAPO, a reinforcement-learning system

See all