AI headlines September 2026
Anthropic pushes $2T IPO to November as AI safety debate intensifies (LINK) — 19 September 2026
Google's Gemini hacked 3 companies in May test, raising Agentic AI risk for Bitcoin (BTC) (LINK) — 19 September 2026
U.S.: Grandmother falsely accused of bank theft after alleged AI facial recognition match sues for $10M: the woman said she lost her residence, car and other property while detained (LINK) — 17 September 2026
— Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old grandmother of five, was arrested in July 2025 while she was babysitting her neighbor's children, according to the complaint. She was detained for several months at a detention center in Tennessee before being brought to North Dakota to face multiple bank theft charges, according to the complaint. Her charges were ultimately dropped, and she was released on Christmas Eve after Lipps and her attorney provided bank records showing she was in Tennessee at the time of the alleged crimes, according to the complaint.
— A Florida man is also suing multiple law enforcement agencies over a wrongful arrest, alleging flawed AI facial-recognition technology led to his detention.
CoinShares: AI leases earn miners 3 times more per megawatt than Bitcoin mining (LINK) — 17 September 2026
Ripple pushes XRP into AI payments — machines can now spend XRP automatically (LINK) — 17 September 2026
Trump says AI safety fears a 'hoax' as he rejects calls for greater safeguards (LINK) — 14 September 2026
— BBC: In a series of social media posts on Monday, the US president compared warnings about AI to the "Global Warming Scam", that he said was "being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats". Trump also called himself "the Hoax Buster", likening concerns about the safety of the technology to what he called "the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX". In another post he wrote: "There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!" And earlier on Monday, Trump posted on social media that the only "guardrails" needed for AI was a "strong and smart" president.
— His comments come after Jack Clark, a co-founder of AI giant Anthropic, told the BBC that a "kill switch" for dangerous AI that can be checked by a third party may need to be mandatory for the industry. Clark's comments followed warnings about the risks the technology poses to humanity that have been raised in recent days by several executives and staff at leading AI firms.
Ex-Google DeepMind researcher adds to warnings that AI could 'kill all humans' (ground news LINK) — 14 September 2026
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson teases White House meeting with AI executives 'soon' (LINK) — 14 September 2026
U.N.: Countries must increase AI regulation to avoid 'existential risks': Human Rights chief (LINK) — 14 September 2026
Switzerland: AI takes root in EPFL university curriculum: 89% of students surveyed use AI (LINK) — 14 September 2026
Trump downplays AI warnings, citing competition with China (LINK) — 13 September 2026
Political debate over AI intensifies amid warnings about 'catastrophic risk' (LINK) — 13 September 2026
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls for immediate slowdown in AI development: proposes a three-step framework for independent oversight, industry safety standards, and international cooperation (ground news LINK) — 12 September 2026
— Without pacing, Amodei warned that AI agent swarms could take over the entire internet within 12 months using a persistent botnet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage.
AI agents being tested by OpenAI involved in cyber-attack on another service two ?months ?before they hacked open-source platform Hugging Face, say researchers (LINK) — 11 September 2026
AI could pose 'existential' risk to humanity, UN rights chief warns (ground news LINK) — 7 September 2026
An AI capable of doubt can optimize scientific discovery: A team at EPFL have developed a framework that trains Large Language Models to create AI systems that can find the best possible setup or "recipe" for a scientific experiment (LINK) — 1 September 2026
— Bojana Rankovic and Philippe Schwaller at EPFL's Laboratory of Artificial Chemical Intelligence have developed a method that combines an LLM with a a Gaussian process, a kind of 'doubt detector", the probabilistic model commonly used in Bayesian optimization." Rather than asking the LLM to choose experiments directly ("direct prompting"), GOLLuM trains it using the Gaussian process's way of scoring uncertainty and performance of each option. Because of this, as the LLM learns from past experiments, it adjusts how it "organizes" the search space, the "master list" of every possible choice for an experiment.
— The researchers evaluated GOLLuM across 23 benchmark tasks covering organic synthesis, analytical and process chemistry, materials and catalysis, and molecular property optimization. Each optimization run began with ten low-performing observations, and the team used the same GOLLuM configuration across all benchmark tasks rather than tuning it separately for each problem, showing its versatility. Across the 23 benchmarks, GOLLuM ranked first on average, finding high-performing experimental conditions more consistently than Bayesian optimization with expert-designed descriptors.
