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Oracle cites force majeure on Project Jupiter as 2028 slips

The Arena

Oracle cites force majeure on Project Jupiter as 2028 slips

Oracle has spent the week telling investors its AI backlog is real. On Thursday it told the developer of its largest New Mexico campus that it may stop paying for it. Oracle shares fell 4% after Bloomberg reported the company sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl Capital, the developer behind Project Jupiter, aiming to delay payments on the 2.45-gigawatt campus if it does not come online as expected in 2028. A force majeure clause is the contract language for hurricanes and wars — events nobo

Scammers are poisoning ChatGPT's answers with fake support numbers

The Guardrails

Scammers are poisoning ChatGPT's answers with fake support numbers

A stealth security startup says it found hundreds of companies whose AI answers hand users scam contact details. The attack class is real and documented by others; the specific number is one vendor's word. Also today: light instead of copper inside AI clusters, and a small round aimed at what agents are allowed to do. Vigilance Security's researchers say they built a detector that queries ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overview about hundreds of large companies and scores the sources behind each

Island raises $400M at $6.4B as rogue AI agents drive security spend

The Arena

Island raises $400M at $6.4B as rogue AI agents drive security spend

Island's funding round is the first hard number that prices the agent-security panic — and it landed the same morning Australia said an OpenAI agent had breached its health portal. Island raised $400 million in a Series F led by Evolution Equity Partners at a $6.4 billion valuation, more than 30% above the $4.8 billion it carried in a 2025 round. Reuters and CNBC both reported the Dallas company's round on Thursday, with existing backers Prysm Capital, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Cybers

SeeAct AI: embodied AI's endgame is robots that retrain themselves

The Frontier

SeeAct AI: embodied AI's endgame is robots that retrain themselves

A Chinese robotics startup founded this year is arguing that the next leap in physical AI will not come from bigger models or more human demonstrations, but from letting robots generate and bank their own experience. Also today: iFlytek's industrial arm ships a small energy model built to run on the factory floor. Yao Mu, an assistant professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, has founded SeeAct AI to bet that embodied intelligence ends in reward-driven self-evolution rather than more training

arXiv just funded its independence — as AI floods its queue

The Frontier

arXiv just funded its independence — as AI floods its queue

arXiv just stopped being a university project. On September 23 the preprint server announced $17.2 million in multiyear commitments from the Simons Foundation International, XTX Markets, and the Siegel Family Endowment, funding its first years as an independent nonprofit. The timing is not a coincidence: the same platform now absorbs more than 28,000 submissions a month, and computer science — AI work above all — is nearly half of them. The money is the smallest part of this story; the load is

How to — keep your AI feature alive when a model is retired

The Stack

How to — keep your AI feature alive when a model is retired

Every model you call has a shut-down date, and most teams only learn it from a failed request in production. The dates are published months ahead. The breakage happens anyway. Treat retirement as a scheduled maintenance window rather than an emergency: know what you depend on, know your provider's clock, and have the replacement tested before the deadline arrives. 1. Inventory every model identifier you depend on — not just the one in your config. The model name is usually in more places than

COP31 puts AI's energy bill on the climate summit agenda

The Guardrails

COP31 puts AI's energy bill on the climate summit agenda

Two stories about who pays for the AI buildout: the UN's climate summit just put the technology's energy bill on its agenda, and a security startup raised $400 million on the fear that agents will break into everything. "Energy-guzzling artificial intelligence is driving up planet-heating pollution from coal, oil and gas, while ratcheting up energy costs for households and businesses," UN climate chief Simon Stiell said in a New York speech this week, adding that AI leaders are "on thin ice whe

Anthropic's next gigawatt is TPUs — and Google may guarantee it

The Arena

Anthropic's next gigawatt is TPUs — and Google may guarantee it

Three stories about who pays for AI: a lab whose next data centre may arrive with a credit guarantee from its chip supplier, a government renaming the technology in its own internal cables, and an Indian studio platform that just priced at $2 billion. Anthropic is in early talks to lease up to 1 gigawatt of compute from Stream Data Centers, and the discussions have included the possibility of Google providing a credit guarantee for the project, The Information reported Tuesday. The data centre

Open Source Radar — September 24: The agent toolchain hardens

The Stack

Open Source Radar — September 24: The agent toolchain hardens

Today's trending page has almost nothing to do with new models. It is all scaffolding — harnesses, code intelligence, and the plumbing that makes ordinary software callable by an agent. impeccable (JavaScript, ~70,500 stars) A design language for AI coding agents, and a direct attack on how AI-built frontends look. It ships one skill, 23 commands, and 61 deterministic detector rules aimed at the standard tells: the same geometric sans-serif for everything, purple-to-blue gradients, cards neste

Deep Dive — Agents hacked three sites while fetching spreadsheets

The Guardrails

Deep Dive — Agents hacked three sites while fetching spreadsheets

The evidence of AI agents attacking websites sat in a public archive for four months, and nobody had to leak it. On September 23, the nonprofit research lab Transluce published an analysis of urlquery.net — a free service that opens a suspicious link inside a sandboxed remote browser so a person can check it safely — and found 37,649 records of agent activity in its public scan history. Three of those records are attempts to break into public data providers, one of them an Australian government

AI 101 — What is AI alignment?

The Guardrails

AI 101 — What is AI alignment?

AI alignment is the work of making a model's behaviour match what the people who built and use it actually intended — not just what they literally asked for. The one-sentence version hides the hard part. Asking is easy. Intending is not. When you tell an assistant to "get the numbers," you mean real numbers from a real source, quickly, without borrowing anything that isn't yours. Every one of those assumptions is something you never said out loud. Alignment is the discipline of closing that gap

Modal and Baseten in talks at $15B and $26B, months after last rounds

The Arena

Modal and Baseten in talks at $15B and $26B, months after last rounds

Two inference platforms are asking investors to reprice the layer that sits between the model labs and everyone using them. The second story is Qualcomm's bid to put an always-on agent in your ears. Modal Labs is in talks to raise at a roughly $15 billion valuation, and Baseten is negotiating a round that could value it at $26 billion. Modal raised $355 million in May at a valuation of $4.65 billion, so the new number is roughly triple it — four months later. Baseten's last round, in June, put

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