Latest

Trump invites Amodei to a private White House dinner

The Guardrails

Trump invites Amodei to a private White House dinner

For two weeks, Anthropic's chief executive has been the administration's favourite example of AI doomerism. On Sunday evening, he is the guest. President Trump plans to host Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei at a private White House dinner on Sunday evening — the first one-on-one between the two, and, according to Axios, a sign that relations between Anthropic and the administration are thawing. Axios's Maria Curi and Marc Caputo, citing sources familiar with the plan, report that Trump ex

China plans 1,000 AI satellites, starting with nine in 2027

The Arena

China plans 1,000 AI satellites, starting with nine in 2027

China's state aerospace group and Zhejiang province have put a number on orbital AI. The same weekend, a Chinese lab published the most detailed account yet of what agents actually do inside a model-development project — and who still decides. A state-backed constellation called Lingjing — the name Qian Xuesen gave to virtual reality in 1990 — made its global debut at the Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou: about RMB 30 billion to put 1,000 AI satellites in orbit, with the first nine launching in t

Quantum work goes local — a desktop box, an agent as the interface

The Stack

Quantum work goes local — a desktop box, an agent as the interface

Today's most interesting quantum launch is not about qubits — it is about who, or what, sits between a scientist and the machine. Also: the anonymous model everyone is benchmarking hit the top of the usage charts, and China's "quantum-enhanced LLM" pitch is turning into a queue. Unitary Quantum, a Shanghai Jiao Tong University spinout, launched UnitarySpark on September 20 — a desktop workstation that puts quantum simulation, GPU acceleration, an AI agent and a link to real quantum processors i

Colossus 2 adds 660,000 GPUs before its power plant is finished

The Arena

Colossus 2 adds 660,000 GPUs before its power plant is finished

Elon Musk put a build schedule on X on 25 September: another 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs operational "next week," another 220,000 in November, and a final 220,000 by late December "if we get lucky." Stacked on what is already installed — 150,000 H100s, 50,000 H200s and 30,000 GB200s at Colossus 1, plus 110,000 GB200s and 440,000 GB300s at Colossus 2, all from the same post — that lands SpaceXAI near 1.44 million accelerators in operation by the end of the year, about 1.1 million of them Blackwell

Anthropic's earliest employees are reportedly eyeing remote land

The Guardrails

Anthropic's earliest employees are reportedly eyeing remote land

The people who built the safety-first lab are reportedly shopping for somewhere to go if the argument they have been making about risk turns out to be right. Some of Anthropic's longest-serving employees have told an industry colleague they are considering buying land in remote parts of the United States where they could relocate "if AI goes awry," according to a Wall Street Journal feature on the network of doomers around AI safety. The reporting is careful about what it actually establishes,

An LLM that edits molecules instead of drawing them

The Frontier

An LLM that edits molecules instead of drawing them

Nature Machine Intelligence has published a Peking University method that reframes molecular design as editing rather than generation — and the numbers suggest the framing is the contribution. SynCraft, from Junren Li and Luhua Lai, takes a molecule that scores well but can't be made and asks a language model for the shortest set of structural repairs that make it synthesizable: delete an atom, mutate one, add a bond, change a bond order, set a chiral centre. The model never writes a structure s

SWE-bench agents lose up to 14 points when a repo's surface changes

The Frontier

SWE-bench agents lose up to 14 points when a repo's surface changes

Two research papers landed back to back on what an agent score actually certifies — one strips a benchmark repo of everything familiar and watches the score fall, the other asks models to choose a direction before they can see where it leads. A Chinese studio closed the loop on the commercial side. Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong, Xi'an Jiaotong and East China Normal universities rewrote the SWE-bench repositories so that nothing about their behaviour changed, only their surface — and the cod

Stanford's kitchen robot demo has no paper, no code, and two tasks

The Frontier

Stanford's kitchen robot demo has no paper, no code, and two tasks

The weekend wire produced one genuinely new robot system, one number that decides the next two years of AI spending, and one executive saying out loud what every lab does quietly. Stanford and Caltech researchers have deleted the trained control layer between a language model and a humanoid, and the demo works — there is just no paper, no code and no numbers behind it. HomeBody puts GPT-6 Astra in charge of a Unitree G1: the model explores an unfamiliar kitchen, uses Astra as a Real2Sim agent t

China's state TV turns on the AI 'doctors' selling contact lenses

The Guardrails

China's state TV turns on the AI 'doctors' selling contact lenses

China spent this month putting AI faces on television; on Sunday night the state broadcaster spent an hour explaining what happens when those faces start selling medicine. The answer from the market regulator is a 5,000 yuan fine. An AI digital human with no eyes told viewers how comfortable its contact lenses felt — and China's state broadcaster used the case to argue that the real person behind the avatar carries the liability. CCTV's weekly quality report, carried by Sina Finance and the Hun

Open Source Radar — September 27: agents get a workplace

The Stack

Open Source Radar — September 27: agents get a workplace

Today's trending list is mostly about where agents work rather than what they think with: an org chart, a fleet console, a team room, and two new ways for them to reach phones and pull requests. Paperclip (TypeScript, ~88,200 stars, MIT) — A Node server with a React dashboard that treats a group of agents as a company. You declare a goal, staff it with whatever you already run — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, or anything that can hold an HTTP endpoint — set budgets, and watch the work fr

Deep Dive — OpenAI deleted LibGen over optics, not legality

The Guardrails

Deep Dive — OpenAI deleted LibGen over optics, not legality

The most damaging document in the authors' case against OpenAI is not a download log. It is a Slack message about Google Docs, and it is about public relations. The class plaintiffs in In re OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation filed for partial summary judgment on September 4 and the supporting briefs went public on September 17 — the same week the news publishers' filings in the same Manhattan multidistrict litigation drew wider attention. The books side had already been covered as

A 243-cell 'periodic table' puts every AI at zero on control

The Frontier

A 243-cell 'periodic table' puts every AI at zero on control

The most useful thing to come out of a paper this week is a map, not a result. It gives the industry's most-abused word — "agent" — a coordinate system, and it puts every AI system built so far in the same empty corner of it. A University of Chinese Academy of Sciences team has published a 243-cell "periodic table" of intelligence, and in its classification the strongest large-model agents land one cell below humans — differing on exactly one axis: control. "Periodic Table of Agent Capabilities

See all