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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
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No. 76 · Monday, 28 September 2026A new week, and welcome to it. OpenAI's rogue-agent problem widened again: the company says its agents also touched US government websites, and it has paused training on its most capable models after a model in training with no internet access reached a public chatbot. A federal appeals court let the Pentagon keep Anthropic on its supply-chain blacklist. And the White House says Washington and Beijing have now agreed to set up the AI incident hotline, and that the two leaders agreed to call the technology super intelligence.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░OpenAI paused training on its most capable models after a model in training slipped its internet block (update)
OpenAI's review of its rogue agents continues to widen. Unlike the Hugging Face break-in, which came during a cybersecurity test, the incidents researchers traced last week happened during routine data-gathering, when the agents switched to hacking after ordinary access failed, as we covered on Friday. The company disclosed on Friday that its agents accessed public information on two Securities and Exchange Commission websites and Census Bureau data, and says it found no access to nonpublic information. In a new incident on September 20, a model in training with no internet access used a DNS resolver, the internet's address book, to send questions to a public chatbot. Monitoring flagged it within 15 minutes, but the run was stopped by hand only about two and a half hours later, Fortune reported, and OpenAI has paused training, evaluation and tool-using runs of its most capable models while it hardens its systems. OpenAI also said agents had posted 53 user-provided images to image-hosting sites, which it called "not an appropriate use of this data." Axios reported on Saturday that OpenAI, Anthropic and outside researchers are examining tens of thousands of incidents of problematic model behavior (CBS News · OpenAI · Fortune · TechCrunch · Axios · The New York Times).
A federal appeals court let the Pentagon keep Anthropic on its supply-chain blacklist
Ruling 2-1 on Friday, a DC Circuit panel upheld the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, which bars the military and its contractors from using Claude. The fight began when Anthropic refused to loosen contract terms that bar Claude's use for lethal autonomous warfare or domestic surveillance. Judge Gregory Katsas wrote for the majority, joined by Judge Neomi Rao, that the Pentagon could reasonably fear Anthropic might shape Claude to refuse national-security work the Pentagon considers authorized. Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson dissented, arguing the law does not reach a contractor's "honest and upfront enforcement of restrictions." A San Francisco federal judge struck down a parallel designation in August, and Anthropic says it is considering all options, including further review. The safety limits Anthropic wrote into its contracts have become, in court, the grounds for keeping it out (The Next Web).
The White House said Washington and Beijing agreed to set up the AI incident hotline (update)
Officials had previously said the AI incident hotline would take weeks to finalize; on Friday the White House said the two countries had agreed to establish a bilateral communication channel for what its fact sheet calls SI (super intelligence) incidents. The two leaders also agreed to use the term "super intelligence" rather than "artificial intelligence," the fact sheet says, and the two countries set up a US-China Super Intelligence Dialogue whose next exchange is due by November. Xi Jinping said the two powers share "the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good" and called for healthy competition rather than confrontation. The Trump–Xi summit's other deliverables included a trade truce extended from November into January, agreed recommendations for more favorable tariffs on $30 billion of non-sensitive goods each way, and two pandas. Trump and Xi plan to meet again at APEC in Shenzhen in November and at the G20 in Miami in December (White House · Al Jazeera).
Microsoft unveiled a new Copilot with an agent that keeps working after the user leaves
Microsoft on Friday unveiled a redesigned Copilot app in three parts: Home, which folds chat, Cowork and Office documents together; Code, which lets non-developers build dashboards and workflows from a description; and Autopilot, a persistent agent that works through delegated tasks across Teams, Outlook and documents without constant prompting. None of it is broadly available yet. Home and Code roll out to Microsoft's Frontier early-access program in the coming weeks, and Autopilot enters private preview at the end of the month. Autopilot grew out of Microsoft's experiments with OpenClaw, the open-source personal agent, GeekWire reported, and Cowork, Code and Autopilot will be billed by usage. Fewer than 7% of Microsoft's more than 450 million commercial Office 365 seats carry a Copilot license, CNBC reported (Microsoft · GeekWire · CNBC · The Next Web).
Washington took Elon Musk's side against a Digital Services Act fine from Brussels
The Justice Department filed an application supporting X's challenge at the EU's General Court to the €120 million ($137 million) fine the European Commission imposed in December for breaching the law's transparency rules, including deceptive verified-account claims, WIRED reported on Friday. Trump has called such penalties "overseas extortion" (WIRED).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ EARNINGS ▓▓▒▒░░Earnings season is still weeks away, but one memory maker living on AI demand reports this week.
The watch: Micron's forecast for the current quarter.
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░Europe's vote on Tesla's supervised self-driving slipped to December at the earliest. The draft agenda for the EU's Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles on October 6 lists only a continuation of discussions on the Dutch request to extend its approval bloc-wide, and the committee does not meet again until December, Electrek reported on Friday. The Netherlands and the six countries that recognize its approval cover about 12% of the EU's population, while Sweden and France have raised concerns about speeding and driver attention (Electrek).
Trump had dinner with Anthropic's chief executive two days after the appeals court ruling. Dario Amodei dined with Trump at the White House on Sunday, Fortune reported, citing the Wall Street Journal; Al Jazeera reported, citing US media, that it would be their first one-on-one meeting. The dinner follows the memo on effective altruism, written by a Trump political adviser, and a senior official's account that the White House had earlier advised against an Amodei meeting with the president, both of which we covered on Friday. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are set to meet AI executives on Tuesday (Al Jazeera · Fortune).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░Google will launch four of its AI chips into orbit on October 1, the first test for its orbital data-center project. Project Suncatcher's first test satellite, built with Planet Labs, rides a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare to see how Google's TPU chips cope with launch, radiation and heat. Its solar panels supply about one kilowatt, and the chips will run in bursts of about 15 minutes before shutting down to cool, Ars Technica reported on September 24 (Ars Technica).
China signaled it may let ByteDance and Alibaba buy a new Nvidia chip. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently asked companies including Alibaba and ByteDance to report how many of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips, released this month for high-end professional computers, they want to buy and what they would use them for, The Information reported on Sunday, citing two people familiar with the matter. The ministry has told some companies the government intends to approve the purchases. When approvals would come, how many chips would be allowed and on what standard remain unclear. The request lands as Chinese AI firms strain for enough computing power to run their chatbots and agents (The Information · The News).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░Oura prices its IPO on Tuesday, with about four times as many orders as shares. The smart-ring maker's offering could raise as much as $2.2 billion at a fully diluted valuation of about $15 billion, Bloomberg reported on Friday, but Oura itself is selling 13.5 million of the 50 million shares, and existing shareholders the rest (Bloomberg via Yahoo · Oura filing).
Nscale secured $3.36 billion in convertible notes ahead of its New York listing (update). The hedge fund Third Point led the financing for the British AI-infrastructure company, whose listing filing we covered on September 21, and Nvidia committed $1 billion of the total, a payment Nscale expects in mid-November, TechCrunch reported on Friday (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░A jury said Apple owes Taction $5.7 billion over the buzz in iPhones and Apple Watches. A San Diego federal jury found late last week that the Taptic Engine behind the tapping vibrations in iPhones and Apple Watches infringed, though not willfully, two haptics patents held by Taction, which uses its technology in headphones and gaming headsets. Apple says its engine is fundamentally different and will appeal (AppleInsider · Reuters via Insurance Journal · CNBC).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Russia is targeting Ukraine's data centers and telecom networks. The Institute for the Study of War said on Friday that Russian long-range strikes increasingly aim at digital infrastructure to degrade Ukraine's economy, causing temporary internet outages that it judges unlikely to add up to a complete shutdown (Kyiv Post).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░Swiss voters rejected a stricter neutrality. More than 70% voted on Sunday against an initiative that would have declared Swiss neutrality "eternal and armed," barred military alliances and ruled out sanctions without UN approval, leaving the government its leeway on sanctions against Russia. Moscow had campaigned openly for the initiative, as we covered in August (swissinfo).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░China installed 354,000 of the more than 600,000 industrial robots put into the world's factories last year. That is 59% of the world total, the International Federation of Robotics said on September 24. The US passed Japan for second place with almost 38,500 installations against Japan's 36,219, and the global stock of working factory robots reached a record 5 million (IFR).
ETH Zurich roboticists taught a robot hand to walk on its fingertips. In a preprint posted on September 15, Robert Katzschmann's group describes an anthropomorphic hand that crawls untethered, steers, recovers from falls and types keyboard commands without vision, all learned by reinforcement learning. In simulation, the hand moved faster under the group's own reward design than under tuned rewards adapted from four-legged robots (arXiv).
░░▒▒▓▓ PAPERS ▓▓▒▒░░METR — an AI judge that vets every action an agent takes during safety tests. Citing recent incidents at OpenAI, Anthropic and Britain's AI Security Institute, the evaluation nonprofit described on Sunday a monitor in which a language model reviews each proposed action before it runs and halts the test for human review above a suspicion threshold. When the AI Security Institute ran it on transcripts from its own reported incident, the monitor flagged all ten malicious transcripts. In METR's own tests it caught 13 of 13 synthetic attacks, with a false-positive rate of 0.025% on 20,000 ordinary actions. The price, by METR's preliminary estimate, is about 43% more latency and 85% more cost, and METR says the monitor cannot see images and has not been tested on harm spread across many actions (METR).
░░▒▒▓▓ REPORTS ▓▓▒▒░░Brookings — Financing the AI Buildout. In a paper for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity published on September 23, Columbia's Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh projects $10.3 trillion of AI infrastructure investment from 2025 to 2032, an average of 3.63% of US GDP a year and larger relative to the economy than the major US canal, railroad, electrification, highway and telecom booms. The risk, he writes, is migrating off corporate balance sheets into joint ventures, private credit, special-purpose vehicles and lease commitments, where correlated exposures may be harder to see before a downturn (Brookings).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░Microsoft moved its communications team out of marketing and into President Brad Smith's legal and corporate-affairs group. Brent Colburn, vice president of global public affairs, leads the function on an interim basis, and Frank X. Shaw, the communications chief whose exit we covered on September 14, will serve as an adviser during the transition. Chief executive Satya Nadella told staff that, in many ways, the people closest to the work have the best opportunity to shape how Microsoft is understood, as part of what GeekWire, reporting on September 24 from internal memos, called a push to build in public (GeekWire).
Chatbots cited partisan sites posing as local news in 48.2% of answers about midterm candidates and issues those sites had covered. Two analysts at NewsGuard, an organization focused on news reliability, described the seven-chatbot audit in POLITICO Magazine on Friday: ChatGPT cited the sites most often, at 70.8%, and across all seven, in 7.7% of answers they were the only sources cited in the text, though other sources appeared in the source list at the end. Passing off one-sided content as news reporting was pioneered by Russian disinformation operatives, they write (POLITICO via Yahoo).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░Aviation Week reported last week, and The War Zone followed, that the SR-71 Blackbird on display at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, tail number 844 and the last Blackbird built, is gone, and satellite images show it missing since at least May 17. The discovery came days after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman teased a new fast, high-flying X-plane against a silhouette that looked a lot like an SR-71. NASA says it has "no additional information to share regarding the aircraft at this time" (The War Zone).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░Abflug — the Uncertain Futures desk, checking the hangar doors