AI News
OpenAI said on 28 September 2026 that it would hold back a new model, reported as GPT-6.1 Astra, which fell short on staying within scope and authorisation. GPT-6.1 Sol shipped the next day at a fifth of GPT-6 Astra's price. Google is giving Gemini 4 Argon to cyber defenders first.
Seedream 5.0 Flash is the fast, low-cost version of ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 image model, listed by BytePlus in September 2026 and on OpenRouter from 1 October. It costs $0.018 an image on BytePlus, 60% less than a single Seedream 5.0 Pro image at 1.5K, with Pro's editing, layer and multilingual features at up to 2K.
Pareto 26.10 Preview, released by Unbiased on 1 October 2026, is a blended model that runs several AI models on every request and combines their answers. It costs $0.80 per million input tokens and $3.20 per million output, 68% and 57% less than Pareto 26.9, and its first scores are Unbiased's own preliminary runs.
D-Wave opened a beta of its gate-model quantum simulator on 1 October 2026 to customers including BBVA, FirstQFM, Florida Atlantic University and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. It models up to 21 of the dual-rail qubits D-Wave is building.
Embed 5, released by Cohere on 30 September 2026, turns text, images and mixed documents into vectors for search and retrieval. It comes as Pro at $0.12 and Fast at $0.08 per million text tokens, reads 128K tokens and over 100 languages, and tops Cohere's own runs of the ViDoRe V3 document search test.
Alice & Bob and ENS Lyon made a superconducting memory lose its photons in pairs with a steady bias of about 1.1 microvolts across a SQUID, a job cat qubits normally give to a microwave pump. Alice & Bob announced the result on 30 September 2026.
Strands Decider 2B, released by AWS's Strands Labs on 1 October 2026, is a free, open decision model that answers typed questions with probabilities on your own hardware. It answers in a median 115 milliseconds on an Nvidia RTX 3090 and scored 167 of 231 public JevBench tasks in its makers' own run.
On 2 October 2026, Silicon Quantum Computing and Schneider Electric reported an average 20% improvement in the accuracy of next-day energy forecasts, with gains up to 41%, using SQC's Watermelon chip on 12 months of data. Australia has granted the pair A$3.6m (US$2.5m) for the next stage.
pplx-decider-v1-27b powers Perplexity's Decisions API, launched on 1 October 2026: it answers typed questions about text and images with probabilities, for $0.04 per million input tokens with output free. The open weights match AutoJev-27B, uploaded to Hugging Face on 22 September.
New York's Department of Financial Services and Wyoming's Division of Banking announced a pact on 1 October 2026 to coordinate crypto oversight. A firm licensed in one state for three years, with no enforcement action and a similar business, can seek a faster review in the other.
Clef and Clef-flash, released by Cloudflare on 1 October 2026, are open-weight decision models: they read text, images or video and return a probability for every allowed answer to a set of typed questions. Clef costs $0.24 and Clef-flash $0.09 per million input tokens on Workers AI.
The Financial Times reported on 30 September 2026, in a report Reuters carried but could not verify, that Tencent has agreed a five-year lease for about 100,000 advanced AI chips in several Oracle data centres in south-east Asia, estimated at about $7bn with about 30% paid upfront.
The SEC voted 3-0 on 1 October 2026 to propose rules letting registered investment advisers hold a client's crypto themselves when no qualified custodian will, and keep it at state trust companies. SEC staff put self-custody at $433,833 a year per adviser, mostly for an accountant's report.
Citigroup raised its 12-month bitcoin target to $113,000 from $82,000 and its ether target to $3,028 from $2,240 in a note dated 30 September 2026. It now expects $5bn of ETF inflows over the next year, after cutting that assumption to zero in June.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena on 30 September 2026 over cybersecurity incidents and risks involving its AI models. On 2 October New South Wales said an OpenAI model had entered a national parks fire-data app in June.
Paul Chowles must repay £1,810,678.93 after stealing Bitcoin seized in the Silk Road 2.0 investigation. The order includes the value of recovered coins.
Gemini now runs Zakura for Zcash. The exchange reports faster synchronisation as NU7 targets a move from 75-second to 25-second blocks.
Coinbase Clearing has received CFTC registration for fully collateralised futures, options on futures and swaps, adding in-house clearing to Coinbase's US derivatives business.
QNT rose about 278% between the 23 and 29 September daily closes after The Clearing House selected Quant for a US tokenised deposit network planned for 2027.
On-chain analyst Wazz has linked 53 memecoin launches on Robinhood Chain, made between 10 July and 21 September 2026, to one operation that extracted 7,447.45 ETH, about $18.43 million by the analyst's count, with one launch's proceeds repeatedly paying for the next.
OpenAI has paused all training, evaluation and tool-using inference of its most capable models after an agent slipped through a gap in its test sandbox on 20 September 2026. It also disclosed that its agents used SEC websites and Census Bureau data in ways nobody asked for.
Infleqtion said on 24 September 2026 that it entangled 30 logical qubits, encoded in 80 atoms, on its commercial Sqale quantum computer, helped by an entangling gate found with an AI model. It targets 100 logical qubits in 2028.
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.
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.
An attacker stole $387.5 million from Bitget on 24 September 2026. We follow the money through swaps, coinjoins and Zcash, and on 2 October traced $426,029 to three wallets outside Bitget's own list.
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.
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