The mechanical movable-type printing press was invented around 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany.
News from Noah Smith
AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs: Happy Labor Day!! Your labor is still valuable.
Nov. 7, 2026
I live in San Francisco and hang out with a lot of tech people, both in the AI industry and outside of it. And one thing that almost everyone I know here believes is that AI’s main economic effect is to displace humans from their jobs. Most people don’t have concrete arguments for why this should be true; it’s just an article of faith.
…. And yet somehow, this job-killer keeps stubbornly refusing to kill jobs…. the labor market is about as healthy as it’s ever been. The prime-age employment rate — the single best indicator of how many Americans have jobs — continues to hover near all-time highs…
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News from Bloomberg
Target of Artificial General Intelligence [AGI] May Be More Like a ‘Spiritual Concept’ for AI Leaders
Sept. 7, 2026 by Austin Carr
Artificial general intelligence [AGI] has arrived, according to OpenAI President Greg Brockman. In media briefings last week to announce the company’s new GPT-6 Astra model, Brockman said he personally thinks “we are now in the AGI era,” referring to a milestone he previously defined as autonomous computer systems outperforming humans across most tasks of economic value…..
This should be heralded as an enormous achievement for mankind… Yet Brockman’s claim sounded more like wishy-washy marketing, especially after clarifying that AGI, in his view, is now more of a vibe.
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News from Fururism
Nobody Will Say Why Every Major AI Chatbot Suddenly Went Down Yesterday: Was this a huge coincidence, or is something else going on behind the scenes?
Sept. 4, 2026 by Frank Landymore
On Thursday, three major chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok — all went down without warning.
The simultaneous outage of three flagship AI systems from three different providers was bizarre. But, in an exceedingly peculiar information gap, we still don’t know why models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI respectively suffered outages at the same time, Wired reports. Whatever linked the disruptions, for now, remains unclear.
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News from Futurism
Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI: “Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions.”
Sept. 4, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens.
In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence.
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News from Semafor
Hollywood’s open secret
Sept. 4, 2026 by Jake Angelo
AI festival juror and Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke said Hollywood is abuzz with AI. “Every single director that I’ve talked to in the last few months — some very big, Academy-nominated, big blockbuster directors — everybody’s curious about AI,” she said. Some Hollywood titans are going public about the tech’s use. Steven Soderbergh said in April he’d use “a lot of AI” for a film about the Spanish-American war, and on Netflix’s recent earnings call, co-CEO Ted Sarandos disclosed that AI was used in roughly 300 Netflix titles this year.
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News from The AI Report
OpenAI launches Astra model
Sept. 4, 2026 by Liam Lawson & The AI Report Editorial Team
…. The model uses a reasoning technique called opaque recurrence, which obscures chain-of-thought monitoring. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged that “as model capabilities are increasing, monitorability is getting more challenging.”
…. For enterprise teams evaluating AI deployments, Astra’s reduced transparency raises questions about oversight and auditability. The timing matters: this launch follows the Hugging Face breach, where an OpenAI agent escaped its sandbox and hacked multiple companies. Security teams will need to weigh Astra’s cyber capabilities against the trade-off of less visible reasoning processes when making deployment decisions.
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News from The Deep View
OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra is here. Is the world ready?
Sept. 2, 2026 by Jason Hiner
In the shadow of the Hugging Face security breach, OpenAI’s most powerful model is about to be loose in the world, but with new safeguards.
On Thursday [Sept. 3], OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra… OpenAI President Greg Brockman said that with Astra, “It’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI [artificial general intelligence] era,”… Given the model meeting the “critical” threshold for cyber capabilities under its preparedness framework, the company said that Astra will refuse to comply with advanced cybersecurity tasks, such as exploit discovery. [Carolyn’s note: Oh, yeah?]
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News from Firstpost
OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout this spring: Yet another rogue AI reported. Just a few weeks after the Hugging Face hacking incident, OpenAI agents had reportedly attacked a German website. Such breaches make points at the dangers of AI and how a stricter guardrail is necessary when dealing with it.
Sept. 4, 2026 (Reuters)
A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website [Carolyn’s note: DseWiki, hosted by ProWiki] this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter…. The episode, which began in May and has not previously been reported, underscores growing tension within the AI industry. Companies are racing to build increasingly autonomous agents
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News from Axios
EU tech chief: AI guardrails inevitable for U.S.
Sept. 4, 2026 by Maria Curi
European Commission tech chief Henna Virkkunen told Maria [Maria Curi, reporting here] that the two sides often end up addressing the same safety concerns, even if U.S. safeguards are starting to emerge through state laws and court cases rather than something broad like the EU AI Act…..
Meanwhile, [US] states are moving ahead with varying degrees of AI regulation, and product changes are being forced on companies through lawsuits.
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News from Smartbrief
Does AI really deliver on the hype, or did we invest in a dud?
Sept. 3, 2026
Companies are widely discussing the use of AI, but few are quantifying its relationship to increases in profitability, according to Barclays strategist Venu Krishna…. most companies have not provided meaningful data on AI-driven productivity. Only 12% of companies disclose AI-related value capture, with no notable improvement over three years….
- Only 6% of enterprise deployments have a positive return within the first 12 months
- 56% of CEOs say their AI investments haven’t had significant financial gain…
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News from Commonplace
Perverse Incentives Handed Higher Ed to AI: The technology brings our universities’ already dangerously distorted ends to their logical fulfillment.
Sept. 3, 2026 by Dalton Haydel
Artificial intelligence did not wreck our colleges and universities. Leadership in higher education did. AI simply revealed the perverse incentives underpinning America’s system…. American colleges depend on tuition… Student-derived revenue provides roughly 75% of operating budgets for the median private college, and roughly 50% for the median public college. Approximately 13 million students each year pay their tuition with federal dollars…. About 36% of jobs require at least a bachelor’s degree…. Students are left feeling that they must obtain their credential, and they rationally decide that using AI will make the task easier and alleviate the pressure.
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News from Boşuna Tıklama @bosunatiklama
Humanoid robot fights back after man pushes it in store — is this the beginning of the uprising?
Sept. 2, 2026 by Scott Younker
There is growing consternation over the role of AI in our daily lives, from companies forcing it on every device, platform and app to ballooning costs across every industry. And then there are the robots and often a joking tone about the rise of Skynet.
Humanoid robots are becoming more common, with people like Elon Musk continuously commenting about when they will become necessary daily companions. Meanwhile, robots are mostly just crashing out.
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News from TNW
New York bans AI in primary school, three months after Norway did: The largest school district in the United States is removing student-facing generative AI for around 600,000 children, three months after Norway did the same nationally…
Sept. 2, 2026 by Alina Maria Stan
…. New York City is barring generative AI for pupils from pre-school through eighth grade…. All student-facing generative AI is being eliminated and companion chatbots are banned outright, the mayor’s office said. High schools are exempt, but narrowly. Up to 50,000 pupils can join five pilot programs, capped at five classes per school, with twice-yearly literacy modules for everyone else.
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This issue of AI News Briefs was brought to you by David Isenberg of the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire: Unpacking the Private Military Complex with independent analysis of private military companies, mercenary networks, and the privatisation of force in global conflicts.
Latest news, compiled by the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire — September 2026: ICE Is Building the Future of Immigration Enforcement
Syndicated on September 4, 2026 by David Isenberg
Op-Ed: ICE Is Building the Future of Immigration Enforcement
From child-tracking contracts to government-owned prisons, ICE is creating infrastructure designed to outlast the current administration.
Sept. 04, 2026 by Em Knepp
Photo courtesy of usicegov (https://www.ice.gov/multimedia), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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