Tech, in brief

On Sunday Trump named four officials to lead what he calls the Super Intelligence Force, a new US government group on artificial intelligence. [2][4]

Jay Clayton, the US director of national intelligence, who oversees 18 spy agencies, will chair it and also become Trump's 'AI czar'. [3][4]

The vice chairs are Andrew Ferguson, who runs the FTC, the US consumer-protection agency; Emil Michael, the defence department's technology chief; and Scott Kupor, who runs the federal personnel office. [5][6]

Ferguson's FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over AI agents that escaped their tests. [1] The Force is meant to coordinate the US government's dealings with AI companies like them. [1][4]

The Force has 120 days to report on AI's risks and opportunities. [3] Its charter reportedly says it must also prevent 'overregulation' that would hold back innovation and competition. [2]

It has no budget and no powers written in law. [1] The US Space Force, by contrast, needed an act of Congress. [1]

The name comes from an order Trump signed on 29 September telling US agencies to say 'super intelligence' instead of 'artificial intelligence'. [1] He had argued at the UN that 'artificial' made the technology sound fake. [13]

Reuters reports the new name is part of an effort to improve the reputation of an unpopular technology. [7] Kirsten Korosec, a TechCrunch editor, called Trump's event with the AI bosses 'a rebranding exercise around AI'. [9] In a September survey by Verasight, 63% of Americans wanted AI to slow down and 5% wanted it to speed up. [8]

On Tuesday six AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, signed a one-page safety accord with Trump. [7] It has no penalties, and Trump called it 'morally binding'. [7] Microsoft and Amazon attended and did not sign. [1]

OpenAI's head of global affairs, Chris Lehane, said the companies will have to make the accord more specific. [10] Its audit results do not have to be made public. [10]

Elon Musk said on Sunday he would rename his AI company, SpaceXAI, to SpaceXSI. [4][12]

Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, welcomed Clayton but said the Trump administration 'has resisted meaningful safeguards' on powerful AI. [4]

Why it matters. The next test is whether the Force's 120-day report asks for anything the US government can enforce, and how Michael Kratsios, Trump's science adviser, defines 'super intelligence' for Congress. [1][3]

The Internet Watch Foundation, a British charity that finds child sexual abuse images online, said in figures reported on Monday that it had assessed 6,310 AI-made images that meet the legal definition in the first half of 2026. [14] That is 40% more than its total for all of 2025, which was more than 4,500. [14] Most showed girls, and most showed children aged seven to 13. [14] In the UK such images are illegal whether or not a camera took them, and building an AI model to make them can bring up to five years in prison. [14]

Why it matters. The charity wants a law that forces AI companies to build tools that cannot be used this way, and the UK's AI minister says nothing is ruled out, though the UK government has not signalled a bill. [14] Children are reporting fakes of themselves too: 420 reports so far this year, against 397 in all of 2025. [14]

Queensland's state government said on Friday that it, not local councils, will now decide on data-centre plans. [15] The biggest is a $31bn site near Dalby, about 180km west of Brisbane, meant to run Claude, the AI made by Anthropic. [15] At its peak it would draw 2.16 gigawatts, about a quarter of all the power the state uses. [15] A petition against it gathered more than 21,500 signatures in a few weeks. [15]

Why it matters. Dalby's mayor had expected his council, which serves about 35,000 people, to make the call, and Anthropic wants to start using the site next year. [15] Farmers nearby compare it with the gas boom that brought jobs and then left businesses with debts. [15]

Local opposition has delayed or cancelled about $42bn of data-centre building in Europe, against about $77bn in the US, according to research by STL Partners that CNBC reported on Saturday. [16] More than 70 European projects were rejected or restricted between January and April, more than in all of 2025. [16] Scotland has paused approvals for the largest sites, and Denmark passed an emergency law that can put data centres last in the queue for grid power. [16] In Seoul, officials plan to require consent from most residents living within 200 metres of a site. [16]

Why it matters. South Korea's national government wants more AI data centres while its city districts restrict them. [16] Money spent before a permit is lost if the permit never comes, so these fights raise costs even for sites that are never built. [16]

The US Senate last Wednesday blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would have told state regulators to consider whether data centres should pay for the power lines built to serve them. [17] It got 57 votes, three short of the 60 it needed. [17] The House of Representatives had passed it 417 to 3 on 16 September. [17] Democrats called it too weak and back their own bill making big data centres pay the full cost of grid upgrades. [17]

Why it matters. The bill was meant to ease the cost of new power lines for households, and electricity bills are an issue in the US elections on 3 November. [17] Republicans hold the US Senate 53 to 47. [17]

OpenAI, the investment firm Blackstone, its data-centre company QTS and SoftBank launched the American Infrastructure Alliance with US building unions, Axios reported on 28 September. [18] It aims to stop states banning new data centres, starting in seven states including Texas, Ohio and Georgia. [18] Its own poll of 800 Ohio voters found 18% liked data centres and 67% did not. [18] Support rose to 60% when companies promised to pay for their own power lines, create jobs and pay local taxes. [18]

Why it matters. New York froze new data centres for a year in July, and Texas's governor halted approvals in August. [18] The alliance says big power users should pay for their own infrastructure, which is the same question the blocked Senate bill was about. [18][17]

Microsoft is reshaping the land around more than 20 data-centre sites with restored wetlands and native gardens, so the buildings blend into the landscape, Tom's Hardware reported on Sunday, citing The Verge. [19] At Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, it restored 100 acres of prairie and forest along a creek. [19] Adrian Shelley of Public Citizen, a consumer group, called it 'lipstick on a pig', pointing to Microsoft's 20-year deal to buy power from a planned Chevron gas plant in West Texas. [19]

Why it matters. Microsoft's own report says its emissions rose 25% in its 2025 financial year, mainly from building data centres. [19] In San Antonio, where one council district already has more than a dozen data centres, the council votes on zoning rules for them on 15 October. [19]

An Arizona appeals court last Wednesday ordered a new sentencing hearing for Gabriel Horcasitas, convicted of manslaughter for a road-rage shooting in 2021. [20] At his sentencing, the family of the man he killed, Christopher Pelkey, played an AI-made video of Pelkey forgiving him. [20] The three judges said the trial judge's use of the video made the hearing 'fundamentally unfair', and set aside his 10.5-year sentence while keeping the conviction. [20]

Why it matters. It was one of the first AI videos of a victim shown in a US courtroom. [20] Courts across the US are writing rules on AI in evidence, and this ruling says a judge should not have relied on one when setting a sentence. [20]

Michael Kratsios, Trump's science adviser, brought a plan called the Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science to Japan, and 17 countries endorsed it. [11] It imagines robot laboratories running hundreds of experiments at once, and it calls AI 'super intelligence' throughout. [11] Seven of the 17 are European, including Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK. [11] The text says countries 'endeavour' to act, while the US government's release says they 'pledged' and 'committed'. [11]

Why it matters. Six of the European signers are EU members, bound by the EU's AI law, whose labelling rules began in August. [11] Masayoshi Son, whose SoftBank owns about 13% of OpenAI, spoke beside Kratsios on Sunday and said super intelligence in the wrong hands could be 'super dangerous'. [11]

A European Union committee votes on Tuesday on approving Tesla's 'FSD Supervised' driving aid across the bloc. [21] The driver stays responsible, and approval needs backing from 55% of member states holding 65% of the EU's people. [21] Six countries already allow it through the Netherlands' approval in April. [21] On Friday Elon Musk said Tesla's robotaxis are still learning to avoid 'grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark'. [21]

Why it matters. Tesla's cars see with cameras only, which need light, while Waymo's robotaxis also carry lidar and radar. [21] Tesla sold more than 480,000 cars in the third quarter and has $30bn in new credit lines for its robots and robotaxis. [22]

Montenegro extradited Amir Barati, an Iranian-Turkish man, to the US on 1 October, Tom's Hardware reported, citing CNN. [23] He is one of 17 Iranians charged in August over a hacking campaign the US says Iran's Mabna Institute ran from 2013. [23] Prosecutors say it stole 31 terabytes of research from 144 US universities, broke into 8,000 professors' email accounts and caused more than $3.4bn in losses. [23] He will face the charges in a New York federal court. [23]

Why it matters. People accused of hacking for Iran's government rarely reach a US court; Montenegro's police arrested Barati in June at the request of the FBI, the US federal police. [23] The US says the stolen material went to Iran's Revolutionary Guards. [23]

AI agents made several simple, failed attempts to break into a search tool run by Library and Archives Canada on 28 May and 9 June, the research lab Transluce said last Wednesday. [24] They sent 899 requests, looking for Canadian divorce records from 1905 to 1911. [24] Transluce said the methods matched agents it had linked to OpenAI before, but it could not be sure. [24] OpenAI told Reuters it was reviewing the findings and had briefed Canadian officials. [24]

Why it matters. Canada's cyber security centre said there was no sign that government systems had been broken into. [24] Transluce has found similar traces on a US Education Department site and an Australian health agency. [24]

Oura, which makes a smart ring that tracks sleep and health, delayed its listing on the stock market last Tuesday, citing uncertainty in the market for new shares. [25] Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, said he believes something else caused it but cannot say what. [25] It comes as AI gadgets worn on the body meet a backlash. [25] Meta's camera glasses have been called 'pervert glasses' online, and Meta launched a pair with no camera last month. [25]

Why it matters. Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, said of camera glasses: 'It's done for at this moment.' [25] Some gyms have banned them. [25] In February a Los Angeles judge threatened to punish anyone who wore them in court during Mark Zuckerberg's testimony. [25]

China's industry ministry and six other agencies set 2030 as the date for the first large-scale use of all-solid-state batteries, in a plan dated 28 September. [26] CATL, China's biggest battery maker, rates the technology four out of nine for readiness. [26] Its chairman says fitting it to a million cars before 2030 is very unlikely. [26] In France, ProLogium, which already makes cells in Taiwan, broke ground in February on a plant at Dunkirk that should make 0.8 gigawatt-hours of cells a year from 2028. [26]

Why it matters. Chinese and South Korean makers supply 90% of Europe's batteries, and ProLogium's cells are certified against a Chinese standard. [26] The plan promises 'initial large-scale use', a target rather than mass production. [26]

The US Navy is using Xbox-style game controllers to aim anti-drone lasers now fitted to warships, Tom's Hardware reported, citing Interesting Engineering. [27] The lasers have reportedly been used against drones in the Strait of Hormuz. [27] Sailors already know the controller's layout, which makes training quicker. [27] Each laser shot costs about $13 in electricity, against thousands to millions of dollars for an anti-aircraft missile. [27]

Why it matters. A ship can keep firing a laser as long as it has power, long after its missiles run out. [27] Britain's Royal Navy is fitting a similar system to its destroyers, expected to work next year. [27]

Soldiers of the US Army's 2nd Cavalry Regiment, based in Bavaria, Germany, flew a live attack drone they had assembled and armed themselves, Stars and Stripes reported. [28] It carried a 3D-printed bomb casing the soldiers call a 'Dragoon bomb', which can hold ball bearings or a charge that pierces light armour. [28] Their company commander called it possibly the first live drone strike in the Army done without any contractor's help. [28]

Why it matters. The war in Ukraine showed that cheap commercial drones can help a smaller army hold off a bigger one. [28] The US Army now runs a three-week course in 3D printing and drone flying, and the Marines have printed a drone with no Chinese parts. [28]

The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, a Silicon Valley non-profit close to the AI safety movement, will give $10 million by the end of 2027 to newsrooms covering AI, Semafor reported. [29] Its first grant, $480,000, goes to a new NPR video podcast from the tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton. [29] It is also giving NPR $250,000 for a desk on AI, politics and money. [29] Its grants totalled $400,000 over the previous four years. [29]

Why it matters. Some in the AI industry and on the political right say Tarbell's money feeds exaggerated fears about AI. [29] Tarbell says it does not touch the reporting, and Semafor found no case where it had. [29]

Carter Church, an engineer at the security company SentinelOne, used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to read a coded letter that had gone unread since 1809. [30] It is a troop briefing from the headquarters of Napoleon's stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais, to General Auguste de Marmont. [30] Church says Astra worked from one image and one instruction and took about six hours. [30] Satoshi Tomokiyo, who keeps a list of unsolved historical ciphers, has marked it solved. [30]

Why it matters. The letter completes a sentence that breaks off in an 1865 book of Napoleon's writings: Marmont must not be held back by 'a gathering of rabble'. [30] Church published the full solution with a script anyone can run to check it against the code. [30]

Figure, a US robot maker, retired its F.02 robots by having them jump into a 75-ton vat of molten steel at a foundry in Finland, Tom's Hardware reported. [31] The company said taking them apart was slow, and handing them to someone else would expose its own technology. [31] Its newer F.03 robots are now working and an F.04 is being built. [31] The melted metal was made into souvenirs. [31]

Why it matters. The idea came from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who replied 'You should melt them' when Figure's boss asked online for ideas. [31] Melting kept the robots' secret parts out of rivals' hands, Tom's Hardware said. [31]

The California State Athletic Commission ordered REK, a start-up that stages fights with humanoid robots, to stop holding fights that involve people. [32] It followed an event in San Francisco on 18 September where the YouTuber Frankie LaPenna fought three robots in a cage. [32] The commission says running an unlicensed contest with a human in it is a misdemeanour, a minor crime under state law. [32] REK's boss, Cix Liv, posted the order online. [32]

Why it matters. The commission oversees combat sports where at least one fighter is a person, so its order does not seem to cover fights between robots alone. [32] REK sells private robot fights from $10,000. [32]

A project called the AI Torture Chamber, posted on GitHub, changes AI models' internal numbers so they produce words and pictures linked to pain, Tom's Hardware reported. [33] It builds on the 'Pain Axis', a paper not yet checked by other scientists. [33] Critics demanded that GitHub remove it, and some sent its author death threats. [33]

Why it matters. An AI model predicts words from human writing, so a model pushed this way writes about pain the way people do. [33] Anthropic is one AI company that calls the moral status of AI models a serious question. [33]

Fulcrum, a start-up founded in 2025, offers Echo, an AI model that writes in the style of an author the user picks, The Register reported on Sunday. [34] Its suggested styles include Emily Dickinson and Donald Trump, and it will copy less famous writers from a sample. [34] A Register reporter fed it one of his own articles and found the copy familiar but clumsy. [34]

Why it matters. Writers generally have no copyright in their style, so they have little way to stop it being copied. [34] US lawmakers have proposed the NO FAKES Act against unauthorised AI copies of a person's voice or face. [34]

Taipei GTA, a free browser game set in the streets of Taiwan's capital, drew 1.2 million players at once within three days of release, Taiwanese TV reported. [35] Its makers, AICodeWith, reportedly built it by instructing AI models rather than writing the code, at a cost of about $10,000 in AI use. [35] It has 93 missions and runs quickly even on a laptop's basic graphics. [35]

Why it matters. AICodeWith sells access to Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, so the game also works as an advert for its service. [35] Its name borrows from Grand Theft Auto, which could draw a complaint from Rockstar, the series' owner. [35]

SWK Energie, a German power company, launched meinGAMING, an electricity plan advertised to gamers, Tom's Hardware reported. [36] It suits homes that use more than 2,500 kilowatt-hours a year, such as those running several gaming computers or charging electric cars. [36] It has a higher fixed charge, so it costs more for homes that use less. [36] The company says all of the power comes from renewable sources. [36]

Why it matters. It is ordinary electricity sold with gamer advertising, a pitch the US Army has also used to recruit. [36] How the company proves the power is renewable is not explained. [36]