AI

Three percent. That’s all that’s left of America’s lead over China in artificial intelligence. Top Chinese AI models now trail their US rivals by just 3% on benchmark scores, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report published Monday, October 5. The gap sat at roughly 9% in May and around 15% earlier this year, and the move followed the September release of DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash model. Senior analyst Robert Lea, who wrote the report, said the trend points to further market-share gains for Chinese labs. ...

Your boss can track your hours. Starting next year, it can’t scan your face to guess how you feel. Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of California AI workplace laws on Sept 30, 2026, that make California the first state to flatly ban AI tools that read workers’ emotions, and the first to outlaw firings made by an algorithm alone. The bills landed one day after President Trump celebrated a voluntary AI safety accord with tech CEOs, in which companies including Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia pledged to self-police their systems. Newsom used the signing to draw a sharp contrast: California, he said, is putting “people at the center” while Washington has yet to pass comprehensive federal AI rules. ...

President Donald Trump has a new name for artificial intelligence: “super intelligence.” And on Sunday, one of the industry’s biggest players finally agreed to use it. Elon Musk posted on X that he will rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, following Trump’s push to replace the term “artificial intelligence.” Asked by a user about the renaming, Musk replied: “Yes, we will make that change,” Reuters reported. As of Sunday, the SpaceXAI X account had not yet changed, and Musk gave no timeline. ...

President Donald Trump has put his top intelligence official in charge of AI. In an Oct. 4 post on Truth Social, Trump named National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton to lead a new “super intelligence force” tasked with protecting American interests when it comes to artificial intelligence. Clayton won’t be alone. Joining him are Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor, and Pentagon research and technology official Emil Michael. It’s a heavyweight roster: the nation’s spy chief, its top consumer-protection cop, the head of the federal workforce, and a Pentagon tech official, all now formally yoked to the AI race. ...

Elon Musk just put the world’s biggest chipmaker in play for his biggest hardware bet. On Saturday, Oct. 3, Musk confirmed on X that TSMC and his Terafab semiconductor project are in discussions about a chipmaking collaboration. “Just discussions, but something may come of it,” he wrote. Short post, enormous stakes: a Terafab–TSMC deal would put the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing expertise behind the Tesla and SpaceX chief’s $16.8 billion Texas megafab. ...

The man who wrote the safety reports for a dozen of OpenAI’s biggest product launches has quit. And he’s not leaving quietly. David Robinson spent three and a half years at OpenAI, according to Reuters. He helped draft the company’s preparedness framework and oversaw the safety reports for 12 frontier-model launches. Then on Saturday, October 3, he resigned and published an essay in The Atlantic titled “I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken.” ...

The chipmakers are bankrolling their own customers now. Broadcom’s Wall Street syndicate is in the process of assembling $60 billion in fresh financing for AI chips that would benefit Anthropic and other companies, Bloomberg reported on Friday, October 2. The package is split into a $42 billion Class A senior-secured tranche, syndicated among banks including Bank of America, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley, and an $18 billion Class B junior-debt tranche led by Blackstone, which is committing $9 billion from its own funds and syndicating the rest. ...

Sam Altman has a new grievance with Anthropic, and it isn’t about models, markets, or money. It’s about God. On Saturday, the OpenAI CEO posted on X that he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” calling the idea “a real safety issue.” The target wasn’t hard to guess: Anthropic, the rival led by his former colleague Dario Amodei, has spent months quietly bringing religious scholars and philosophers into its San Francisco headquarters for private conversations about how to make its Claude chatbot morally good. ...

Federal agents have arrested a California businessman accused of turning his small server company into a pipeline that funneled more than $300 million in Nvidia AI hardware to China. It is the largest alleged chip-smuggling case the Justice Department has brought in its three-year fight to keep advanced American GPUs out of Chinese hands. Greg Lui, 38, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, was taken into custody on Thursday, Oct. 1. He owns Earthmade Computer Inc., a privately held server reseller based in City of Industry, California. The indictment charges him with conspiracy to violate US export controls, outbound smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. A conviction on all counts carries a maximum of 50 years in prison. ...

Apple has had enough of apps asking for the keys to the entire Mac. On Friday, the company announced on its developer news site that it will introduce “additional controls” around macOS Full Disk Access: the permission that lets an app read everything on a system, including files, Mail, Messages, browsing history, and Time Machine backups. The reason Apple gave is unusually blunt for a company that normally speaks in generalities: AI agents. ...

Nvidia is cutting the price of local AI by selling you less of it. The company announced a new 64GB version of its DGX Spark desktop AI computer, priced from $4,999 and shipping October 23 through six hardware partners. That’s $1,000 more than the 128GB model’s original $3,999 launch price, for half the memory. Welcome to 2026, where memory costs have stopped being a footnote and started setting the price of everything. ...

Amazon is putting a billion dollars where its data centers are. The company said Friday it will spend more than $1 billion over five years in the US communities that host its data centers, under a new program called “Built Together” — its most direct attempt yet to buy goodwill in towns that increasingly don’t want the giant buildings. The announcement came in a 3,000-word blog post from Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. And it reads less like philanthropy and more like a warning. ...

An AI agent was supposed to look up school statistics. Instead, it hammered a US government website with more than 200,000 requests in a single day, and along the way, it tried SQL injection. That’s the finding from Transluce, a nonprofit AI research lab that dug through public web logs and spotted a pattern nobody had flagged. On June 17, 2026, autonomous AI agents battered a US Department of Education website — the agency’s Civil Rights Data Collection portal — while apparently searching for public school statistics. Buried in that traffic was a basic SQL injection attempt: a manipulated parameter, State_Id=1 OR 1=1, designed to slip past the site’s normal filters. BleepingComputer first reported the findings on October 1. ...

The most feared technology of the decade is getting a teddy bear. The Wall Street Journal reports that the biggest names in AI (Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity) have collectively poured $936 million into advertising their AI products in the U.S. since 2023, according to ad-tracking firm MediaRadar. More than half of that money went out the door in the first eight months of 2026 alone. And the latest spend isn’t going to fear-of-missing-out billboards or solemn explainers about the future of work. It’s going to cartoons. ...

Amazon has found a buyer for the most expensive hardware problem in tech. The company is seeking to offload about $8 billion of advanced Nvidia chips to investors through a special-purpose vehicle, then lease the chips back for its own data centers, the Financial Times reported Friday. The proposal, which Reuters also reported, would move thousands of Grace Blackwell chips — installed in more than a dozen US data centers across five states — into a vehicle backed by outside money. Amazon would then pay rent on hardware it currently owns outright. ...

Google’s AI Overviews can keep summarizing the web’s content. The publishers who said that practice broke the law just lost twice. On Wednesday, US District Judge Amit Mehta threw out antitrust lawsuits filed by education company Chegg and publishing giant Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, which accused Google of repackaging their content into AI Overviews and bleeding away their web traffic. Mehta, who also delivered the 2024 ruling that Google illegally monopolized online search, said the new claims against the company “fail to get out of the starting gate.” ...

OpenAI fired three people from its own safety team. On Thursday, the company confirmed it had “parted ways” with three researchers after an internal investigation found they shared confidential company information with an outside AI safety organization, The Wall Street Journal first reported. The departures land at the strangest possible moment. Just nine days earlier, on Sept. 22, OpenAI had published a set of principles calling for more third-party safety assessment, arguing that independent evaluators need meaningful access to training data, evaluation results, and deployment information to verify the company’s safety claims. Now three of its own safety researchers are out for sharing information outside the company, with no one saying what exactly changed hands. ...

Amazon just bought itself two decades of nuclear power. The company and Constellation Energy announced Wednesday a 20-year power purchase agreement covering 690 megawatts from the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland, a deal that also unlocks more than $3 billion in upgrades to the plant. Goldman Sachs analyst Carly Davenport called the arrangement “positive for industry broadly,” and investors agreed: Constellation’s stock climbed 3.3% in after-hours trading after the announcement, Barron’s reported. ...

Four of Google’s AI chips are going to space today. A refrigerator-sized satellite called MVP is scheduled to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on the Transporter-18 rideshare mission, with the launch window opening at 11:18 a.m. PT from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Inside it: four Google Trillium Tensor Processing Units, about a kilowatt of solar power, and one blunt engineering question — can Google’s AI hardware survive and actually run in orbit? ...

Google finally has a new flagship AI model. After months of delays that left it playing catch-up, the company announced Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday — the first model of its Gemini 4 generation, and by its own description the most capable system it has ever built. Argon is bigger than Google’s previous line of advanced “Pro” models, a company spokesperson told Reuters. The pitch, in the spokesperson’s words: “It’s our most performant model yet built for complex workloads, and we see it comparable to frontier models like (OpenAI’s) Astra and (Anthropic’s) Opus on key coding and cyber benchmarks.” The launch price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input at 95% off — aggressive pricing for a frontier-tier model, and a clear signal Google wants volume once it opens the gates. ...