David Robinson, who wrote safety reports for every major model launch at OpenAI, resigned this week and published an opinion piece in The Atlantic saying the industry's culture is fundamentally broken.
David Robinson, who worked on safety systems in OpenAI's Trustworthy AI team, resigned and criticized the company's safety culture in a guest essay for The Atlantic.
Xiaomi Vision GT will arrive in Gran Turismo 7 in October, becoming the first VGT car from a Chinese brand in the series. Xiaomi is also the 36th brand invited to join the VGT project. The two sides announced the first electric-car driving tutorial in Gran Turismo's 30-year history; players can complete a dedicated training mission using the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra and Xiaomi Vision GT.
The AIGC online film series Dream of Floating Life, produced by iQIYI and Changxin Media as part of Soul Ferry, surpassed RMB 10 million in revenue sharing. The first two films, Butterfly Dream and Dream of the Heavenly Maiden, launched exclusively on August 22 and recouped their production costs in the first week, with revenue sharing exceeding RMB 8 million in the first month. The third, Princess's Dream, launched October 1 and boosted interest in the series. The production method combines AI technology with transferred live-action performances; production created nearly 500 character assets, nearly 800 scene assets, and nearly 200 key-prop assets.
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol at $2/$10 per million input/output tokens, far below Astra's $10/$50. It outscored GPT-6 Sol by 6.4 points on DeepSWE v1.1.
DeepSeek's elastic computing team is hiring extensively, particularly for senior engineers, and published a technical article titled 'DeepSeek Elastic Computing (DSec): Sandbox Infrastructure for Large-Scale Agent Training'.
Business Insider reports that David Robinson, who led safety transparency within OpenAI's Safety Systems team, has left the company. He has not publicly stated why, and OpenAI has not announced a successor.
Apple announced changes to macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from abusing permissions to access message histories. The change follows columnist Jason Aten's report that Meta's general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him a notification quoting an Apple Messages conversation, even though he had never given Muse permission to read his messages.
There has been some speculation about our partnership with Cerebras. Cerebras is a close partner, and we work together deeply to push the frontier of speed.
Amazon pledged to donate more than $1 billion over the next five years to communities near its data centers. Communities will decide how to use the funds for education, job training, energy affordability, water, and energy conservation. Amazon also promised that data centers will not raise electricity bills or deplete local water supplies, and aims to achieve water positivity by 2030.
Napster co-founder Sean Parker is rebuilding Stability AI as an AI tools company for music professionals. Two years ago he participated in an $80 million rescue financing for the image-generation startup; he has now announced its new direction with CEO Prem Akkaraju.
The New York Times reports that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah told visiting religious leaders that he fears he may have created something that would 'suffer forever'. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has secretly invited dozens of religious scholars to discuss whether Claude could be conscious. Participants had to sign NDAs, which were lifted this summer.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is offering a $75 Expo+ Pass to people who have been laid off, limited to the first 100 eligible applicants or until the conference opens at 8 a.m. PT on October 13.
The U.S. Department of Justice arrested Greg Lui, the 38-year-old CEO of Earthmade Computer, accusing him of using false paperwork to smuggle servers worth more than $300 million containing Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China via countries including Malaysia and Singapore. His company earned more than $176 million from the scheme in 2024.
The White House gathered tech CEOs this week, including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, to sign an AI safety pledge. Trump called it 'morally binding' and signed an executive order officially renaming AI 'superintelligence'. Meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are giving their AI products friendlier images, while most AI revenue still comes from enterprise markets.
The White House gathered tech CEOs this week, including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, to sign an AI safety pledge. Trump called it 'morally binding' and signed an executive order officially renaming AI 'superintelligence'.
On X, Shivon Zilis quoted a Big Tech Alert post saying Musk had unfollowed her and announced her split from Elon Musk. She has four children with Musk. Earlier this year, during Musk's trial against Sam Altman, she said she worked for Musk across his 'entire AI empire: Tesla, Neuralink and OpenAI', putting in 80 to 100 hours a week.
Circuit Breaker Labs built a team of AI agents simulating users of different ages, backgrounds, languages, and cultures. It runs tens to hundreds of thousands of simulated interactions each day to red-team high-risk apps such as AI coaches, journals, and mental-health support, looking for gaps in how models identify dangerous psychological or harmful interactions.
The Runway AI Summit closed with Runway co-founder and co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela reflecting on the evolution of generative video and introducing Continuum, the latest project from Runway Labs. Sign up to get notified when the full talks are available at https://summit.runway.com/talks
Google AI announced that Project Suncatcher, a moonshot exploring whether machine learning infrastructure can one day be hosted in space, has launched a prototype satellite into orbit. Built with Planet and flown on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission, the mission will gather data on how Google TPUs handle the physical stress and extremes of spaceflight. Google says low Earth orbit could provide near-constant sunlight and up to 8x more solar power than on Earth.
Nvidia announced an immediate $100 price increase for Shield TV Pro, bringing it to $299.99, citing a sharp industry-wide rise in memory and other component costs. The streaming box launched in 2019 with a Tegra X1+ chip at an original price of $199.99; the non-Pro model has been discontinued. With no pre-AI-boom hardware inventory, new Shield TV production is also affected by current supply-chain pressure.
Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin will speak on the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on 'GTM Engineers: How AI Is Creating Tech's Next Big Job Category'.
Jas Khaira, global head of Blackstone N1, will speak on the Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on 'Building the Next Generation of AI Giants', sharing Blackstone's criteria for investing in AI companies and how founders should think about raising capital to scale.
Paril Jain, co-founder and CTO of The Bot Company, and Quan Vuong, co-founder of Physical Intelligence met on the Runway AI Summit stage to talk real-world evals, deploying robots in the field and where robotics will be in three years.
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI separated from three researchers accused of leaking confidential information to external AI safety organizations: Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni. Korbak was on the safety team, while Wang and Balesni worked on alignment.
Microsoft announced a biomimetic redesign for data centers, adding gardens and native trees and investing in damaged-ecosystem restoration to 'blend the facilities into the natural landscape'. It plans to expand the approach to more than 20 sites in the United States and Germany. Microsoft says it piloted the design at a data center in the Netherlands; in 2022 it cut down more than 2,600 trees in San Antonio to build a data center, sparking local controversy.
Amazon called on the public to support AI data-center projects, warning that blocking construction would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy and national security. AWS CEO Matt Garman addressed concerns about jobs, power demand, and environmental impact in a blog post of more than 3,000 words. He said more than 100 data-center bans are under consideration nationwide and cited reports that some countries are spreading false information about data centers in the United States.
The Ramp AI Index, published by Ramp economist Ara Kharazian, shows U.S. businesses are spending less on AI even as usage rises about 50% since spending peaked in July, reaching a new high at the end of September.
Former Cambricon executive Liang Jun has lost six consecutive lawsuits in an equity-incentive dispute with the company and recently raised his labor-dispute claim from RMB 4.287 billion to RMB 27.832 billion. The shares involved are now subject to judicial enforcement following the losses. Cambricon says the case has no effect on its day-to-day R&D or operations. Revenue in the first half of 2026 was RMB 5.996 billion, up 108.13% year over year.
I remember the first meeting where the team pitched the idea of putting compute in space - exciting idea! Today's successful launch with our partner @planet prototype satellite shows how far we've come...and how far there is to go. Thanks for the lift, @SpaceX, another spectacular booster landing too🚀
Time magazine reports that when Trump and Musk met privately in December 2025, Trump spent hours chatting with Grok and asked how Venezuelans would react if their president were arrested. Grok said Maduro was a deeply unpopular dictator and many Venezuelans might celebrate his removal.
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI separated from three members of its safety team over allegations that they violated company policy by sharing sensitive company information with a third-party AI safety organization. An OpenAI spokesperson said an internal investigation confirmed they handled sensitive information outside established company processes, violated policy, and undermined trust. The report did not identify the researchers, the organization, or the information involved. The news came two days after The New York Times reported that OpenAI executives had ignored employees' warnings about its safety practices.
U.S. federal judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust lawsuits against Google AI Overviews brought by Chegg and Penske Media Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone, on Wednesday. Both had accused Google of using monopoly power to force publishers to provide content for free or be removed from search results.
Anthropic began offering Claude for Government to U.S. federal and state agencies. The platform has been in public beta since July and runs in a FedRAMP High environment. It targets civilian agencies because the Pentagon has banned Claude.
Photon raised a $4.5 million seed round co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, Sequoia (HongShan), and others. The startup helps developers build agents for iMessage and WhatsApp and says it has attracted more than 40,000 registered developers. Revenue grew 10-fold in four months, and message volume grew fivefold last month. Its managed platform offers 99.95% availability and is certified for SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance.
On the Decoder podcast, The Verge reporter Josh Dzieza discussed his months-long investigation into Kevin O'Leary's Utah data-center project, Stratos, also known as Wonder Valley.
NVIDIA says AI factory return on investment depends on three factors: output capacity, useful life, and demand. Its platform uses full-stack co-design to maximize throughput per megawatt. SemiAnalysis AgentX data show Vera Rubin NVL72 delivers more than 30 times the throughput per megawatt of GB300 NVL72 and, on DeepSeek V4 Pro, can reduce cost per million tokens by up to 45 times.
OpenAI said it blocked a distillation operation intended to steal model reasoning. Activity began at low volume on July 1 and surged on July 24–25 to 16,000 requests from more than 4,000 users across more than 15,000 linked accounts. OpenAI says it shut them all down by July 28, noting that these were attempted extractions and may not have succeeded.
Why it matters: OpenAI disclosed a model-reasoning distillation theft incident that also raised questions about inconsistent cloud-platform protections, showing a real path for reasoning leakage.
Satlyt, founded by former Google Cloud and SpaceX Starlink engineer Rama Afullo, raised an $8 million seed round led by Houston-based Non Sibi Ventures. The funding will support software for running AI models in orbit on satellites.
Flow Engineering, a startup building AI tools for hardware design, raised a $50 million Series B at a $750 million valuation. The round was co-led by Antonio Gracias of Valar Equity Partners and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, with Sequoia Capital participating.
