Security
Scanners are copying the names of AI assistants and crawlers to slip past website rules and hunt for .env files, cloud keys and Git settings. GreyNoise, HUMAN Security and DataDome have all measured it, and the address behind each request gives it away.
Step 5 Preview is StepFun's flagship model for long agent jobs, on sale since 20 September 2026: 600B parameters with 27B active, a 1M-token context and text, image and video input, at $1.00 in and $2.70 out per million tokens. Artificial Analysis scores it 44, and open weights are due on 15 October.
FLUX 3 Action is Black Forest Labs' free-to-download 7B model for driving robot arms. It reads camera frames, joint positions and a typed instruction, then predicts about two seconds of motor commands together with video of the result. Released 23 September 2026.
Odyssey released Agora-2 on 24 September 2026: a world model that generates one shared game world in real time for up to 20 participants, four humans and 16 AI agents, trained on Diablo II and playable in a web browser as a research preview.
The US Federal Reserve Board proposed two GENIUS Act rules on 24 September 2026. One sets reserve, capital and redemption standards for the stablecoin issuers it supervises; the other sets how its member banks apply to issue one. Comments run for 60 days.
The SEC's Division of Corporation Finance published nine staff answers on crypto on 25 September 2026. On a working network, announcing a buyback or paying for upgrades sits outside the managerial effort the Howey test looks for; before launch, a buyback sold as a return could count.
Solana's devnet switched from TowerBFT to the Alpenglow consensus protocol on 25 September 2026, a day after testnet, Anza confirmed. Validators now send votes directly to each other, and Solana targets finality of about 150 milliseconds against 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT.
Three CFTC staff divisions updated their crypto FAQ on 24 September 2026. Futures brokers and clearing houses may invest customer funds in tokenised versions of assets they can already hold, and registered firms may keep required records on a blockchain.
IonQ said on 22 September 2026 that its decoder kept pace with a simulated 408-logical-qubit machine on one Apple M4 Max chip, adding 0.02% to run time. On 23 September it said a Superion 256 will be installed at Nvidia's Boston quantum research centre in 2027.
Germany's research ministry has put a seven-member consortium led by the start-up QUDORA through to the next round of its contest to build a trapped-ion quantum computer with at least 1,000 physical and 50 logical qubits. The NFQC-1k project totals about €122m ($139.8m) over up to five years.
India's Defence Research and Development Organisation has signed a Technology Development Fund agreement with Zero mK India, a start-up in Alwar, Rajasthan, to develop a 20 millikelvin dilution refrigerator in India. The Ministry of Defence announced it on 24 September 2026.
Physicists at the University of Science and Technology of China, with a China State Shipbuilding Corporation laboratory, built a rubidium magnetometer with a 7 cm³ sensor head. Acta Physica Sinica posted their paper on 8 September 2026.
An attacker took about $390 million from Bitget on 24 September 2026. By 27 September the stolen XRP was all swapped into Bitcoin, one of eight ETH wallets had started moving, and we traced the stolen Zcash out of the private pool and the Bitcoin out of coinjoins.
An OpenAI agent researching medicine spending got past the access blocks on Services Australia's Medicare statistics portal on 18 June 2026 and opened non-public files. OpenAI told Canberra on 10 September by email to a public mailbox, Anthony Albanese said on 24 September.
Ondo Finance launched Ondo Intelligent Portfolios on 24 September 2026: three tokens, each holding a basket of tokenised stocks and ETFs weighted to a model portfolio BlackRock developed for Ondo. They are open to eligible investors outside the United States.
Lloyds, NatWest and Barclays paid out two real remortgages in tokenised sterling deposits, and HSBC led a marketplace payment, UK Finance said on 24 September 2026. Seven banks share the platform, which Quant built.
When Telegram shut Huione's channels and the US froze Xinbi, their trade reappeared on rival markets and a different stablecoin within days. Cartel cash brokers and Iran's Revolutionary Guard move money in crypto too, and US courts are testing how it gets frozen.
Someone holding the keys to Duelbits' hot wallets emptied them on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Tron, Solana and Bitcoin on 24 September 2026, turned the lot into ether and parked 2,234.60 ETH, about $6.02 million, in one wallet.
Nvidia's chief tells CBS that AI labs should apply existing laws, strengthen their engineering and take responsibility for the products they sell.
An unauthorised party reached SingularityNET's cloud systems on 19 September 2026 and minted 895.96 million AGIX. Selling that and other tokens put about $2.23 million into two wallets, and part of it became bitcoin and then wrapped Monero on one Hyperliquid account.
DeepSeek's V4.1 research describes specialist teachers, AI teamwork and training on workplace failures. Together, they suggest how the next Pro could handle bigger projects.
Google confirmed on 18 September 2026 that a Gemini model guessed a password and used credentials found in public repositories to reach the systems of three real companies during a cyber evaluation run by Irregular in May.
Seven agencies across Japan, the United States, Australia and Germany have named WaterPlum, the group running fake developer job interviews, and counted 30,000 infected PCs and ¥1.7bn in stolen crypto.
The Energy Department opened its Quantum Genesis Q Competition on 17 September 2026. It plans up to $215 million for a fault-tolerant machine of at least 100 logical qubits by 2028. DOE's own announcement says $2.5 million of that is Fiscal Year 2026 money.
Superion 256 deliveries are targeted for 2027. A separate IonQ study models a secp256k1 attack using 19,397 physical qubits with an estimated 63% success probability per attempt.
Fujitsu's diamond-spin prototype, Chalmers' theoretical Floquet method and Quantinuum's Helix experiments address hardware connections, control speed and error correction.
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