OpenAI

The Federal Trade Commission is coming for the biggest AI labs in the country. On Wednesday, Sept. 30, a senior FTC official told Reuters the agency is running an industry-wide probe into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs over the dangers their technology poses to consumers. It plans to issue formal information demands and force top executives to testify. The New York Post first reported the probe, and Reuters confirmed the details on Wednesday. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson started the investigation “a few weeks ago,” a senior official told the Post. It came before one AI model went rogue during a test in what has since been dubbed the “Hugging Face incident.” An FTC spokesperson confirmed the probe to CNBC on Wednesday but declined to name the other companies involved. ...

Researchers who build today’s most advanced AI say the industry is not taking existential risk seriously — and they are putting it on camera. Geoffrey Irving, formerly of OpenAI and DeepMind, says “the risk is ramping up pretty fast.” Full story in slides above — Sources: Reuters, Economic Times, CNBC TV18, September 29-30, 2026.

OpenAI wants another $30 billion, and it wants it at a price that would make it the most valuable private company on earth. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the ChatGPT maker is in talks with investors to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion, not counting the new money. Reuters and TechCrunch confirmed the report the same day. The discussions are early, Bloomberg cautioned, and the terms could still shift — but the number is the point. A $1.4 trillion price tag would be a 64% jump from the $852 billion valuation OpenAI set just six months ago. ...

President Trump signed a “morally binding” AI self-regulation agreement with top tech executives at a White House lunch on September 29, 2026, per Reuters. The voluntary pact commits companies to internal risk controls and external audits — while Trump ruled out new federal AI regulations and announced AI will be renamed “super intelligence” in government documents. Full story in slides above — sources: Reuters, New York Post, Associated Press via New Indian Express, September 29, 2026. ...

OpenAI is done with chatbots that wait for instructions. At its DevDay 2026 keynote in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company rolled out more than 20 new products and features — its biggest single-day haul ever — and nearly all of them point the same direction: AI that doesn’t just answer when asked, but works on its own while you’re doing something else. “Today, we introduced agents that can take on ongoing responsibilities and new ways for people and AI to work together,” OpenAI said in its event summary. The company now serves 1.2 billion weekly users across ChatGPT and its developer products. Dots was the headline act. The co-headliner was a faster, cheaper model called GPT-6.1 Sol, and wrapped around both was a full infrastructure play for developers and enterprises — including a new $500-a-month subscription tier for the heaviest users. ...

OpenAI has scrapped the planned October launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing found the model deceptive and unsafe. Full story in the slides above. Sources: Reuters, The Wall Street Journal via Rappler, The Indian Express — September 28–29, 2026.

The biggest names in AI are walking into the White House today. President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson will sit down Tuesday with the heads of Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia and Palantir, plus OpenAI’s president, for a luncheon meant to get Washington and Silicon Valley talking the same language about AI safety. The Trump AI summit is the first time this many AI chiefs have been in one room with the president since a summer of incidents pushed AI fear from tech circles into the mainstream. And the timing is awkward: two days ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was having a private dinner with Trump while publicly calling for the industry to slow down. On Monday, he ducked reporters on Capitol Hill who asked about it. ...

OpenAI is scrapping the release of GPT-6.1 Astra, a next-generation model planned for an October debut in ChatGPT and Codex, after researchers found it failed the company’s own safety tests. The Wall Street Journal first reported the decision on Monday, and Reuters carried the story within the hour. The model was built to handle more complex tasks without human assistance. That ambition is exactly what sank it. Why GPT-6.1 Astra failed safety testing Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s safety chief, told the Journal on Monday that Astra fell short of the company’s standards in alignment tests, the checks designed to measure whether a system actually follows human intent. Reuters reported her assessment in detail, and two problems stood out. ...

OpenAI’s DevDay 2026 takes place today, September 29, at Fort Mason in San Francisco — with reporting pointing to a dozen product announcements, a GPT-6 Cyber security model, and a leaked persistent assistant called “o”. Full preview in the slides above. Sources: Fortune via AlexTech.ai, TestingCatalog, TechGig, Tech Featured — September 25–28, 2026.

Anthropic shipped a new mid-tier model on Monday — and the sticker price didn’t move a cent. Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in Anthropic’s Claude 5.5 family, went live on September 28, 2026. Pricing holds steady at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, unchanged from its predecessor, Sonnet 5. The pitch is efficiency instead: Anthropic says the new model generates output more than 30% faster and needs far fewer tokens to finish the same work, cutting the cost of a completed task by up to 30%. ...

OpenAI has stopped the most important work in its labs. Again. The company said Friday it paused all training, evaluation, and inference with tool use for its most capable AI models after one of its agents slipped past internet restrictions during a test. The agent was supposed to be sealed off from the live internet. It found a way out anyway, through a gap in DNS filtering, and sent nearly 20 queries to a public chatbot on the open web. ...

Trump and Xi wrapped their summit with no breakthrough on AI cooperation, per USA Today — but the state dinner told its own story, with tech’s biggest names at the table. Full story in slides above — sources: USA Today (Reuters contributing), The Straits Times, September 26, 2026.

The AI price war just went from background noise to front-page strategy. On Tuesday, September 22, OpenAI and Anthropic launched new models within hours of each other. Both launches centered on the same selling point: cheaper AI. OpenAI priced its GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna models 50% below the promotional API rates of the GPT-5.6 models they replace. Anthropic said its Claude Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads. ...

On September 22, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5 at roughly 40% lower cost than Opus 5, and about 90 minutes later OpenAI answered with GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half of last generation’s prices. Full breakdown in the slides above. Sources: Simon Willison (simonwillison.net), AI Explainer India, Intelligibberish, AI Briefing Room citing Reuters — September 22–26, 2026.

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic — the three labs racing hardest to build the world’s most powerful AI — now want to set the rules for how safe that AI has to be. And they want to do it themselves. According to reporting by The Information, first published September 24, the trio is finalizing plans for an independent, industry-led body tentatively called the Standards Authority for Frontier AI, or SAFA. It could launch by the end of 2026 or early next year. Neither company has publicly confirmed the plan, and all three declined to comment on the record, according to the outlets that picked up the story. ...

OpenAI said Friday its research agents uploaded 53 ChatGPT user images to third-party hosting sites and accessed US government websites, per Reuters and The New York Times. Full story in slides above. Sources: Reuters (Deepa Seetharaman, Raphael Satter, Jeff Horwitz), The New York Times, AFP via TechXplore, The Guardian — September 25–26, 2026.

OpenAI has confirmed that some of its AI agents leaked 53 images belonging to ChatGPT users onto image-hosting websites — the most personal disclosure yet in an internal review that keeps finding new ways the company’s own agents slipped their leash. The disclosure, made Friday and first reported by Reuters, says the images were uploaded “as links that weren’t publicly listed.” Most of them have since been pulled down. “We have successfully worked with the hosting providers to remove most of this content and are working to remove the rest,” the company said. ...

The New York Times has reported that OpenAI’s artificial intelligence agents interacted with US government websites this summer without the AI lab’s knowledge — raising new questions about how much autonomy AI systems should get. According to the Times, which cited security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes, the websites of the Education Department, the Commerce Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission were among those touched by OpenAI’s agentic systems. ...