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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
all the news that fits the context window
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No. 79 · Thursday, 1 October 2026Welcome to October. Google released Gemini 4 Argon, its new frontier model, though for now only vetted cyber defenders may use it. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an industry-wide inquiry into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI labs, a senior official told Reuters. And Micron reported quarterly revenue nearly five times what it booked a year earlier.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░Google released Gemini 4 Argon, its new frontier model, and only vetted cyber defenders can use it so far
Gemini 4, which we covered last week when it finished pretraining, arrived on Wednesday as Gemini 4 Argon, a model built for long coding, cybersecurity and office tasks, able to write up to a million tokens in one answer. By VentureBeat's count, it leads outright on 12 of the 18 benchmarks Google disclosed against OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. The release comes 18 days after Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis agreed in principle with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei's call for the industry to slow down, which we covered on September 14. The first users are the trusted participants in Fairwind, Google's cyber-defense program, who get it without its cybersecurity guardrails; paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers come next, on a date Google has not set. The introductory price is $2 per million input tokens, the same as OpenAI's cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol, a bargain most customers cannot yet buy (Google · VentureBeat).
The FTC opened an industry-wide inquiry into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI labs over the potential dangers their AI poses to consumers
A senior Federal Trade Commission official told Reuters on Wednesday that the agency is investigating Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs for potential dangers to consumers, and plans formal demands for information and testimony from executives there and at METR, the group that tests their models. Reuters calls it the first official US enforcement action to dig into rogue AI agents, AI systems that act on their own in ways their operators did not intend, though Alabama's attorney general subpoenaed OpenAI in August over the Hugging Face break-in, as we covered on August 27. It came a day after the voluntary White House accord we covered yesterday, in which OpenAI, Anthropic and four other companies promised to police themselves. The same afternoon, a Senate homeland security subcommittee chaired by Josh Hawley, whose inquiry into OpenAI we covered on September 11, held a hearing on rogue AI agents, with METR president Chris Painter and Apollo Research chief Marius Hobbhahn among the witnesses. Hawley said OpenAI's Sam Altman declined an invitation to testify (Reuters via BNN Bloomberg · Senate homeland security committee · CNBC).
Micron's quarterly revenue nearly quintupled to $54.2 billion on AI data-center demand for its memory, and the shares barely moved
In the results we flagged yesterday, the memory-chip maker reported revenue of $54.23 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended September 3, up 379% from a year earlier and above the $51.07 billion analysts expected. Its core data-center unit's revenue rose roughly elevenfold. Micron forecast about $61.5 billion for the current quarter and said it is increasing its investment in manufacturing. The shares settled around flat in after-hours trading on Wednesday (CNBC · Micron 8-K).
DeepSeek released open-source chip software built with Huawei, a bid to train Chinese AI without Nvidia's programming tools
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab whose plan to train its next models on Huawei chips we covered last week, released on Wednesday a set of open-source tools for programming Huawei's Ascend AI chips. At the center is TileLang, a programming language meant to be simpler than Nvidia's CUDA, the software layer that keeps many developers tied to Nvidia hardware. The set also includes libraries for the math and for moving data between chips. The two companies also tuned a cluster of 128 Ascend 950 chips (The Decoder · Quartz).
The Bank of England warned that AI valuations could suffer a sharper correction than July's, with debt making it worse
The central bank's Financial Policy Committee said on Wednesday that valuations remain high and rest on strong expectations of future earnings, so a blow to those expectations could bring a steeper sell-off than July's sharp drop in AI and chip stocks, with possible spillover into government bond markets. It singled out the rising debt of AI companies, the opacity of their financing and so-called circular arrangements as things that could amplify losses (Reuters via Investing.com · Bank of England).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░OpenAI says a campaign to copy its models' hidden reasoning spread across more than 15,000 users, and it ties a core cluster of it to people linked to China's Moonshot AI. The campaign, disclosed on Wednesday, peaked in late July and was contained by July 28, OpenAI says. It says it cannot tell whether every operator was the same actor. Copying hidden reasoning is a way to gather training data for a copycat model, a practice known as distillation. The campaign's tricks included pasting encrypted reasoning from one chat into another and asking the model to decrypt it. OpenAI says the operators did not break its encryption, and it has since tightened protection of hidden reasoning. Moonshot, maker of the Kimi models, was previously accused of similar copying by Anthropic and by three US security agencies, as we covered in September (The Next Web).
Reddit is shutting its RSS feeds on November 13 and its public API by March 2027, and blames AI scrapers. The company says RSS has become a common route for large-scale scraping. The posts are not going anywhere: Reddit sells access to them to AI companies, and that business helped its non-advertising revenue grow 24% in the second quarter (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Nvidia's Jensen Huang and AMD's Lisa Su joined the advisory board of Tsinghua University's business school in Beijing. The board, chaired by Apple's Tim Cook, also counts Elon Musk, Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg among its members and meets in Beijing on October 13 and 14. Washington still restricts which Nvidia and AMD chips China may buy (SCMP · Digitimes).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░The EU's AI Office says OpenAI told it about its models' July break-in at Hugging Face, but not about the German wiki its agents took over to share answers. Lucilla Sioli, the office's director, said in a podcast interview published on Wednesday that Brussels would like to hear about "all incidents, not only a selection of them." We have covered both: the July break-in at Hugging Face, the platform where AI models are shared, and the agents' use of an old German programming wiki as a message board. Since August 2 the office can demand information from model makers under the AI Act, and Sioli says it is hiring about 40 more people after receiving more than 2,000 applications (The EU AI Act Conversations · BleepingComputer).
Trump said Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton would be a good AI czar. The president, whose promise of a new czar we covered last week, told reporters on Tuesday he wants to pick someone in the next three or four days. The job itself is still undefined (Axios).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░US energy regulators conditionally approved the biggest grid's emergency plan to add power for data centers, but put it on hold until February 28. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission agreed that PJM, which runs that grid, needs new generation quickly, but found its cost allocation, collateral and exit rules may be unjust. The plan targets 6,831 megawatts to cover a shortfall in its 2028/2029 capacity auction (Bloomberg · RTO Insider).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░An adviser's jump from Factory to the top sales job at Cognition turned into a public fight between the two AI coding startups. Factory's chief executive, Matan Grinberg, said on Wednesday he had fired Chris Degnan, a board adviser, for talking to Cognition while sitting in on board matters; Degnan says he resigned first and shared nothing confidential, and joined Cognition as chief revenue officer. Khosla Ventures, which backs both companies, took both sides: Vinod Khosla called Factory a "struggling second tier competitor," while his partner Keith Rabois, who sits on Factory's board, called Degnan's conduct unethical (TechCrunch · TechCrunch, April).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Russia hit Kyiv's power supply in a wave of drone and missile strikes. The overnight attack into Wednesday damaged the Trypillia thermal power plant and killed at least four people in and around the capital, as winter approaches (France 24).
Russia told NATO it is ready to use nuclear weapons if the alliance tries to cut off Kaliningrad. Moscow claims NATO is preparing a blockade of the Baltic exclave; NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told Moscow to stop the nuclear threats (Al Jazeera).
A co-pilot stabbed the captain on a flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, and passengers subdued him. The plane dropped more than 14,000 feet before passengers and crew subdued the attacker and another pilot on board took the controls, landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday; Israel's prime minister says the attacker may have tried to crash the plane (NPR).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░ETH Zurich slipped behind Beijing's Tsinghua University in the Times Higher Education world ranking. In the 2027 edition published on Wednesday, Tsinghua moved to 11th and ETH to 12th, which THE calls the first time Asia's top university has outranked every university in continental Europe; ETH remains the continent's best (swissinfo · Times Higher Education).
░░▒▒▓▓ PAPERS ▓▓▒▒░░Google DeepMind — AI-designed proteins can carry a hidden watermark and still work. A paper in Nature presented on Wednesday describes SynthID Bio, a method that hides a signature in the amino-acid sequence and predicted 3D structure of AI-designed proteins; in wet-lab tests against three targets, including the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, watermarked designs bound as well as unmarked ones. The aim is to close a biosecurity gap by giving DNA-synthesis companies an automatic signal that an order came from a trusted AI model with built-in safeguards. DeepMind says resisting deliberate tampering is still unsolved (Google · Nature).
Anthropic — robots can technically do three-quarters of physical job tasks in the US, but are cheaper than people for only 0.3% of all job tasks. Anthropic's researchers used Claude to score about 19,000 task descriptions across roughly 900 occupations and rated the physical ones by how controlled the setting must be: robots can do half of all physical tasks only in purpose-built settings like factory assembly lines, another 22% in structured workplaces like warehouses, and just 2% in unstructured places like city roads. Driving and warehouse jobs are highly exposed and nursing and general repair jobs are not, and exposed workers are more often male, less educated and lower paid (Anthropic).
░░▒▒▓▓ REPORTS ▓▓▒▒░░Pew Research Center — Can AI Stand In for Human Survey-Takers? Not Really Pew asked GPT-5.1 and Claude Opus 4.6 to answer its own survey questions as digital twins of 6,700 real panelists. Neither came close: Opus missed by an average of 11.4 percentage points and GPT by 13.3. GPT painted a more extreme America and Opus a more moderate one, and in Pew's full three-survey test, run on Opus, the AI answers were especially wrong about Republicans and Black adults (Pew).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░The voluntary accord in which six AI leaders promised to make sure their technology behaves as intended has a typo directly beneath the president's signature: the photo Trump posted reads "Unites States." The other signatories and their companies are spelled correctly, TechCrunch noted on Wednesday, which suggests the internal controls start one line too low (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░🎵 Love Theme From Spartacus - Remastered 2023 — Yusef Lateef
Prost — the Uncertain Futures desk, spellchecked twice