AI Briefing — Sunday, September 13, 2026

Perplexity trusts GPT-6 Astra with end-to-end systems

Perplexity uses Astra to write communications, change software, and monitor production systems, and checks in much less frequently than with earlier models.

What’s behind the AI industry’s latest warnings of doom?

On Equity, we discussed the AI industry's latest debate about whether it poses an existential threat to humanity.

Obama urges Democrats to have a ‘clear plan’ for AI safeguards

Obama recently said that Democrats need to make artificial intelligence one of their “central agendas” and “have a very clear plan” to address concerns around the technology’s economic impact and safety.

Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

OpenAI’s Sam Altman says it would be ‘ill-advised’ to go public in 2026

While OpenAI has filed confidentially for an IPO, the company will not be going public this year, according to CEO Sam Altman.

Anthropic CEO outlines plan to slow AI development

Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman seem to agree that it's time to "pace the frontier." What would that actually look like?

Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data

The round for the two-year-old startup is coming together months after Mecka announced its Series A.

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

Tan wants smaller, American open-weight AI labs to use the same kind of training techniques on American frontier AI labs, giving the U.S. a more robust set of open-weight options that aren’t Chinese.

OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating

Twenty-five leading mathematicians signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work.

Rebuilding AUTOMATIC1111 with Gradio Workflow

IBM releases SOTA Granite Time Series PatchTST-FM-r2 model with commercial-friendly license

Safety for Whom? Refusing the Right Subset of a Topic, Not the Whole Topic

NeoMME: an efficient Multimodal-native and Multilingual Encoder

Fine-tuning a 350M Model for Better Structured Outputs in 100 GRPO Steps