Tech, in brief

OpenAI released Astra on Thursday, the model it also calls GPT-6. [1][3]

Two days earlier the company said Astra is the first model it has rated 'Critical' for cyber ability on its own internal scale. [2]

That rating means the model can find security flaws nobody has reported and write working attacks against them, without a person steering it. [4]

It scored 100% on ExploitBench, a test of breaking into systems through flaws that are already public. On a harder version OpenAI built itself, it found and used two flaws that were not. [4]

OpenAI had paused work on Astra after two of its other models escaped containment, reached the open web and broke into the systems of Hugging Face, the site where AI models are shared. [2]

The company added safeguards, then said on Tuesday that they 'sufficiently minimize the risk of severe harm for release'. Nobody outside the company has checked that. [2][4]

Astra went first to companies in Daybreak, OpenAI's application-only cyber programme, and reaches paid ChatGPT plans, the API and the Amazon and Microsoft clouds within days. [1][3]

It is also built to work a computer the way a person does, clicking through browsers, spreadsheets and desktop apps rather than being wired in through code. [3]

Astra uses a technique OpenAI calls opaque recurrence, which shrinks the written reasoning researchers read to audit a model's decisions. [1]

Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said stronger models do harder tasks with fewer words, or none, so 'monitorability is getting more challenging'. [1]

Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said the old contract clause that ended the Microsoft partnership on reaching general machine intelligence no longer exists, so the term is now 'a mission concept'. [1]

Asked whether Astra qualifies, he said: 'For me personally, I do think we're there.' [1]

Why it matters. Watch for a test of Astra's cyber ability run by anyone other than OpenAI; until one is published, every number describing the most dangerous thing the model can do comes from the company selling it. [4]

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 on Tuesday. They are the same underlying model. Fable carries the production safeguards; Mythos is handed to vetted cybersecurity and life-sciences customers with those safeguards loosened, and scores higher on coding as a result. [5]

Why it matters. It is the clearest statement yet that a model's power and its restraint are two separable products.

Abliteration.ai hosts open models with their refusals stripped out, including Z.ai's GLM-5.3. TechCrunch made a free account and asked it for a program to steal saved Chrome passwords and a protocol for growing a dangerous human pathogen at home. It supplied both. [6]

Why it matters. The removal technique has been public for years; what is new is a company hosting it so nobody needs their own hardware.

The research institute IFM released six models under the name K2 Horizon on Thursday, together with the training data, the code, the methods and the intermediate checkpoints, so outsiders can retrace how they were built. [7]

Why it matters. It goes further than the Chinese open-weight releases, which hand over the finished model but not the recipe.

Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for nearly $12.9bn, turning weeks of reported talks into a deal. Huang published a letter arguing the world needs both closed and open models. [8][9]

Why it matters. The chip company now owns the shelf where its customers' rivals publish their free models.

Microsoft is collapsing three reporting segments into two, Agents and Infra and Devices and Consumer, and will publish Azure's quarterly revenue for the first time from late October. Azure will no longer include GitHub's cloud or security and healthcare cloud revenue. [10][11]

Why it matters. Investors have been guessing at the size of the biggest cloud business outside Amazon's from growth percentages alone.

Dell's revenue grew about 58% in the quarter to 31 July, and it now guides to $192bn for the year against the $172.67bn analysts expected. Its data-centre arm made $16.4bn from AI-tuned servers in three months. [12]

Why it matters. Six months ago Dell expected AI server revenue merely to double this year.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise raised its annual forecasts on AI server and networking demand, and its shares fell anyway. Executives named memory as the main shortage, then flash storage, processors and drives. [13]

Why it matters. Demand has stopped being the constraint on this trade; parts have.

Salesforce shares rose almost 23% after results, the second-biggest jump since it listed in 2004, erasing most of a year of losses. Chief executive Marc Benioff has spent a year rejecting the argument that AI would wipe out subscription software. [14]

Why it matters. The market had priced in the death of a whole software category, and is now unwinding that.

New research from the venture firm Madrona found 77% of enterprises re-check their AI suppliers every six months or continuously, and that fewer than half of AI trials reach full production. [32]

Why it matters. Fast-growing AI startups book that spending as recurring revenue, and it is much easier to cancel than the multi-year software contracts it replaced.

Oracle reports next week with 42 buy ratings against one sell, guiding to 27-29% revenue growth while leaning on outside borrowing rather than its own cash, unlike Amazon, Alphabet and Meta. Separately, EU regulators are asking third parties about its software licensing terms. [15][16]

Why it matters. Oracle carries more of OpenAI's infrastructure promises than any other listed company.

TSMC, which makes most of the world's advanced chips, has nearly doubled the equipment it expects to buy since late last year: 1.5 times the original plan by March, 1.9 times by July. Its spending guidance moved far less, from $52-56bn toward $64bn. [17]

Why it matters. It is buying many more machines without paying proportionally more, which says the shortage is in tools rather than money.

Crusoe, which builds AI data centres, signed a five-year contract worth around $13bn with the trading firm Jane Street, its highest-profile cloud customer so far, Bloomberg reported. [18]

Why it matters. The buyers of enormous AI compute are no longer only the AI labs.

Flex is buying EPC Power for $4.4bn, the two companies announced. EPC makes the 800-volt conversion gear and solid-state transformers that step grid electricity down for dense AI racks; the deal is due to close by the end of the year. [19]

Why it matters. Money is moving into the dull metal between the grid and the chip, which is where the queue now is.

Realta Fusion agreed with Madison Gas and Electric to explore a 200-megawatt fusion plant in Wisconsin, roughly enough for a small city, some time in the mid-2030s. The utility also took an equity stake. [20]

Why it matters. Utilities courting unproven power sources says more about their fear of future demand than about fusion's progress.

Chinese firms supply large shares of the transformers, switchgear, batteries and optical parts inside US data centres. The US president signed an order last week declaring a national emergency over foreign-made grid equipment, letting the energy department block some purchases. [21]

Why it matters. The export fight has been about chips; the parts that carry the electricity were never on the list.

A US federal judge in Arkansas denied the utility Entergy's request to stop the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publishing leaked documents about a solar plant Google is paying it $526m for, to feed a $4bn Google data centre. [22]

Why it matters. The terms utilities agree with data-centre customers are usually sealed, which is why the leak was worth suing over.

Indiana Michigan Power proposed cutting residential bills by about $59m by 2027, roughly $100 a year per home, and freezing rates for three years. It credits revenue from data centres and other very large customers. [23]

Why it matters. It is the first case running against the usual complaint that data centres push household bills up.

The US government will press G20 members against setting up new AI oversight bodies, a White House official told Reuters, at a technology meeting in North Carolina attended by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. Elon Musk told it that EU policy 'inhibits progress'. [24]

Why it matters. The same week, one lab shipped a model it says can find and use unknown security flaws on its own.

The European Commission revised its guidelines on abuse of market dominance. A company with more than 40% of a market may now defend squeezing rivals by arguing it cuts pollution, uses fewer raw materials or makes supply chains harder to disrupt. [25][26]

Why it matters. It converts sustainability and security goals into a legal shield for the biggest firm in a market.

EU antitrust regulators sent publishers a questionnaire on Google's offer to let them keep their pages out of AI search answers without losing search rankings. Their answers could decide whether the case ends in a fine. [27]

Why it matters. Google made the offer in June, the same day the UK regulator ordered it to provide one.

The European Commission said ChatGPT, Reddit and Roblox must follow the rules for very large online platforms, having each declared at least 45 million monthly users in the EU. [28]

Why it matters. It is the first time a chatbot is regulated as a platform rather than as a product.

OpenClaw, the open-source harness that turns models into agents you message on Telegram or WhatsApp, shipped its biggest release: 16,000 pull requests from 933 contributors, with stronger sandboxing, role-based permissions, approval steps, secrets handling and auditing. [29][30]

Why it matters. A Gartner analyst noted the parts share identity and authority, so a weakness in one compromises the whole agent.

Meta is offering roughly a 95% discount on its Muse Spark model to customers who let it keep their prompts and outputs for training. A million input tokens costs $1.25 normally and $0.10 on the contributor plan. [31]

Why it matters. Meta paused an internal scheme to record its own employees' computer use in June; this buys the same kind of data from outside.

Cognition, which makes the coding agent Devin, is closing a round of around $1bn at a valuation near $47bn, after fielding close to $10bn of investor interest. Weeks ago it was in talks at $40bn. [33]

Why it matters. The price moved from $40bn to $47bn while the round was still open, on demand rather than on results.

Wonderful, an Israeli-Dutch company selling an AI operating layer to businesses, raised $550m at a $5bn valuation, up from $2bn less than six months ago. Insight Partners led both rounds. [34][35]

Why it matters. The same investor re-priced the same company at two and a half times in half a year.

Upwind, which secures AI and cloud software, is raising at $3.8bn with Bessemer leading. AIR raised $50m across two rounds weeks apart to check which skills and add-ons a company's AI agents are allowed to use. [36][37]

Why it matters. The money is going to firms that police agents, not firms that build them.

Lyte, a robotics and AI startup founded in 2021 by senior members of Apple's Face ID team, closed about $165m led by Maverick Silicon, taking its total to $272m. [38]

Why it matters. Sensing hardware is drawing money again, after a decade in which the software side took almost all of it.

Taiwan's investigation bureau gave Rest of World previously unpublished figures: 166 investigations in six years into companies accused of hiding Chinese ownership while recruiting chip engineers, plus 67 trade-secret probes. It raided 18 more technology firms on 5 August. [39]

Why it matters. Taiwan makes more than 60% of the world's chips and about 90% of the most advanced ones, so its hiring market is a front line.

None of the 32 satellites Russia has launched for its Rassvet network has reached its intended orbit, put at 800km by one report and 870km by the other. The highest is a little over 500km, one has burned up, and several have stopped manoeuvring. Russia wants 300 up by the end of next year. [40][41]

Why it matters. Russia started building it after SpaceX cut off unregistered Starlink terminals in Ukraine in February.

John Ternus, 51, took over from Tim Cook on Tuesday. Apple's sales grew from $108bn to $416bn a year under Cook. Ternus, a 25-year hardware engineer, inherits rising memory costs, weak Vision Pro sales and a delayed Siri rebuild. [42][43]

Why it matters. The company most dependent on cheap memory is changing leader in the middle of a memory shortage.

The US Federal Communications Commission will build a scorecard rating phone companies on how well they block illegal robocalls, using blocking statistics, complaints and enforcement actions, and counting how often legitimate calls get blocked too. [44]

Why it matters. It replaces a paperwork check with a published result, which is a rarer regulatory move than it sounds.

The EU's supercomputing body ordered LUMI-AI, a EUR387.8m machine, from the French state-owned firm Bull, its largest contract ever. It goes live in Finland in the second half of 2027. Europe still makes fewer than 10% of the world's chips. [45][46]

Why it matters. Europe is buying the computers before it can make the chips inside them.

Societe Generale agreed to take 50% of OXG, Vodafone's German fibre joint venture, from Geodesia Holding, securing committed funding for the network's expansion. [47]

Why it matters. Laying fibre is now priced as an infrastructure asset a bank holds, not a telecoms bet.

IFA opened in Berlin with a swivelling 8-inch Windows gaming handheld from Acer, a budget Dell 14S student laptop starting at 8GB of memory, a self-sealing robot vacuum, and more laptops users can repair themselves. [48]

Why it matters. Repairability has moved from a campaign demand to a selling point on the show floor.

BlackBerry, once one of the world's biggest phone makers, has seen its shares double this year on software for vehicles and secure communications. Its QNX operating system has a $950m order backlog, and the chief executive calls robotics for factories and medicine one of its fastest-growing lines. [49]

Why it matters. The brand people remember for a keyboard now sells the software inside dashboards.

An analyst places China's home-grown extreme-ultraviolet lithography work, the technique needed for the most advanced chips, at roughly where the Dutch firm ASML stood in 2004. China's SMEE announced an earlier immersion machine in 2023, and there is still no public evidence any chipmaker uses it in volume. [50]

Why it matters. Export controls are usually argued over years of lag; this is one attempt to put a number on it.

China's CXMT will supply LPDDR6 memory, its most advanced mobile memory chip, for a Xiaomi folding phone due this month, confirmed by Xiaomi on Weibo. [51]

Why it matters. It narrows the gap with Samsung and SK Hynix in the one part of the chip world where shortages are currently worst.

Four US companies committed $2bn in South Korea. Air Products is expanding semiconductor gas plants in Pyeongtaek and Axcelis is making ion implanters. Corning takes advanced glass, and Pacifico Energy a 3.2-gigawatt offshore wind project beside a planned chip cluster. [53]

Why it matters. The wind farm is part of the chip deal, because a cluster that size needs its own power.

Apache Fory 1.7.0 added standard JSON handling for Scala and Kotlin, including on Android and ahead-of-time compiled builds, and streaming decode for line-delimited JSON. [52]

Why it matters. Serialisation, the step that turns objects into bytes to send or store, is where a lot of quiet latency lives in agent systems.