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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloudflare ships Python Workers GA with native AI bindings

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

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

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

Today in AI — September 21, 2026

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

Harvey's gross margin hit minus 50% — so it stopped renting frontier AI

The Arena

Harvey's gross margin hit minus 50% — so it stopped renting frontier AI

Two arguments about frontier AI landed the same afternoon: customers finally showing what the invoices do to a business, and a lab building a panel it says can challenge its research — just not slow it down. Harvey's gross margin fell from about 50% at the start of this year to minus 50% by June, and only turned positive again after it released Tenet, its own model built on Moonshot's Kimi K3, according to a Bloomberg report. The legal AI company's token usage rose twentyfold over the same peri

Xiaomi releases MiMo-V2.6 and open-sources a 1T-class flagship

The Frontier

Xiaomi releases MiMo-V2.6 and open-sources a 1T-class flagship

Xiaomi finished the training run it put on a livestream: MiMo-V2.6 is now three shipped models, and two of them came out with their weights released the same day. Xiaomi officially released the MiMo-V2.6 series on Monday and open-sourced the weights of MiMo-V2.6-Pro and MiMo-V2.6-Flash, alongside the technical report, the RL training environment, the training code, and a 9B distillation built on Qwen. Pro is the flagship — native multimodal, a 1M-token context window, and listed at more than a

SoftBank's SB Energy delays a $50B IPO as investors balk

The Arena

SoftBank's SB Energy delays a $50B IPO as investors balk

The first public price check on the AI data-center build-out came back too high for buyers, and a Russian lab put a from-scratch model on the open market the same day. SoftBank's SB Energy has delayed the data-center IPO it had planned for this month after investors pushed back on a valuation above $50 billion, the New York Times reported Monday. The company filed its S-1 on September 1, targeting a Nasdaq listing and a raise of $5 billion to $7 billion, plus a Japanese retail tranche of up to

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