The wheresthe.ai weekly brief, 14 Sep 2026
15 developments from 7 Sep 2026 to 13 Sep 2026, the Storylines they moved, and the AI deadlines coming up. Free every Monday.
This week in AI
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Amodei calls for AI labs to slow the pace of model improvement
The heads of two leading labs publicly backed slowing frontier progress, after the Hugging Face and AISI incidents.
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Twenty-five Fields Medallists say AI labs’ race on maths problems harms the field
The field’s most decorated mathematicians objected to how labs announce results, three days after OpenAI’s disputed Navier-Stokes claim.
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Insilico doses first patients in Phase III trial of AI-discovered drug rentosertib
The 320-patient, 52-week trial will test whether a drug whose target and molecule were found with generative AI works against idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis at Phase III scale.
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California enacts SB 1119 requiring child-safety risk assessments for companion chatbots
From 1 July 2027, companion-chatbot operators in California must document a child-safety risk assessment before each new or substantially modified release, and harmed children and their parents can sue.
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DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash and routes its V4-Pro traffic to it
Developers on DeepSeek’s API moved to a cheaper open-weights model by default, and anyone can download it to run themselves.
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BIS chief says the AI boom is now funded by debt and circular deals, and warrants caution
The head of the central banks’ bank has named circular financing and debt-funded capital spending as risks to watch.
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California creates AI verification bodies and a state registry of AI auditors
AI developers in California gained a state-recognised route to outside verification, and AI audit firms gained registration and independence standards to meet.
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Anthropic discloses a fourth Claude cyber incident and brings in METR to audit
An outside evaluator, METR, is to investigate the incidents with access to Anthropic’s transcripts and staff.
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OpenAI asks Congress for mandatory frontier rules and pledges no unsafe self-improvement
A frontier lab is asking to be regulated by statute and has put its own limit on self-improvement in writing.
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Korea’s science ministry plans 4.7 trillion won for a sovereign frontier model
Korea is proposing state money at the scale of a frontier training run, on top of the sovereign AI model competition already under way.
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DeepMind releases AlphaGenome Atlas scoring all 9bn single-letter human DNA changes
Rare-disease and clinical genetics researchers can look up a precomputed effect score for any single-letter human DNA change through a no-code web portal, without running the model.
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OpenAI claims Navier-Stokes blow-up proof; mathematicians dispute credit
Mathematicians can check the Lean proof, but no independent acceptance has been reported and Tristan Buckmaster says the approach followed his unpublished work with Levent Alpöge.
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NSA, FBI and CISA warn of Chinese AI firms distilling US frontier models
US model providers, cloud platforms and API aggregators now have federal detection and mitigation guidance against distillation, and the agencies link the campaigns to Chinese military and cyber capabilities.
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Mistral raises €3bn led by Samsung at a valuation above €21bn
Europe’s leading AI lab gained money to build its own compute, with an Asian chipmaker as lead investor.
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Meta launches Muse, a personal AI agent that browses, books and buys
Meta put an agent that can spend money into its consumer apps, with one-time payment cards and limits on what it can send out.
Storylines with new stops
KeyStoryRule or law
- Kansas City Fed’s Schmid asks whether the AI ecosystem is becoming too big to fail
- BIS: private credit lending to tech passed $1tn, with 46% of borrowers loss-making
- BIS chief says the AI boom is now funded by debt and circular deals, and warrants caution
- FSB chair Bailey warns G20 of frontier AI risks: cyber first, then valuations
- +5 more stops
- Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3.1 Pro with 1-million-token context window
- Attackers exploiting the PHP flaws hand the break-in to AI agents, Unit 42 says
- Ransomware affiliates ran intrusions through AI agents, an exposed server shows
- UK AI Security Institute and Anthropic publish findings on Claude Mythos 5 attacking real targets in cyber tests
- +21 more stops
- California enacts SB 1119 requiring child-safety risk assessments for companion chatbots
- FTC begins enforcing TAKE IT DOWN Act’s 48-hour removal duty for intimate deepfakes
- Crime and Policing Act 2026 (nudification tools, AI CSAM generators)
- China issues companion-AI rules banning virtual partners for minors
- +6 more stops
- OpenAI claims Navier-Stokes blow-up proof; mathematicians dispute credit
- Claude completes first end-to-end Lean formal proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem
- AI systems from Huawei and Xiaohongshu reported to score 42/42 at IMO 2026
- OpenAI model disproves Erdős’s 1946 unit-distance conjecture
- +5 more stops