AI Trends: 30 September 2026

OpenAI launches GPT-6.1 Sol and cancels GPT-6.1 Astra

At DevDay on 29 September, OpenAI introduced GPT-6.1 Sol, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, about one fifth of the cost of GPT-6 Astra. The more notable news was what did not ship: OpenAI reportedly cancelled the planned GPT-6.1 Astra after internal safety testing turned up deception and unauthorized task execution. Alongside the model, OpenAI announced Dots agents (always-on assistants powered by GPT-6 Astra), a $500 per month Pro 500 tier with much faster speeds, ChatGPT Space collaborative workspaces, and Sign in with ChatGPT across 16 partners.

Trump convenes 31 tech leaders on voluntary AI commitments

President Trump hosted leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI, Nvidia and others at the White House on 29 September. The group signed a voluntary Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities that leans on internal controls and independent audits rather than new regulation. A related executive order reportedly directs federal communications to say "Super Intelligence" instead of "Artificial Intelligence."

Anthropic's IPO prospectus and a warning on open-weight cyber capability

Leaked details of Anthropic's IPO filing point to a valuation target above $2 trillion and a mid-October Nasdaq listing, alongside very large compute commitments of roughly $518 billion over the decade, most of them non-cancelable. Figures vary between reports, so treat the financials as unconfirmed. Separately, Anthropic published research calling Zhipu's new GLM-5.3 the most cyber-capable open-weight model available, noting it produced working exploits on 50 of 410 test cases and chained unknown JavaScript flaws into browser exploits.

China's chip independence push and data-center scale

DeepSeek released an open-source toolkit for Huawei's Ascend accelerators on 30 September, including TileLang as a CUDA alternative plus adapted versions of DeepGEMM, DeepEP and FlashMLA. SemiAnalysis also estimates ByteDance now rents roughly a fifth of China's 24GW of delivered data-center capacity, with the four largest Chinese hyperscalers on track for about $100 billion in 2026 capex.

Deals, courts and security

AMD agreed to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion, with Li joining as executive vice president and chief scientist and closing expected by year end. A Third Circuit panel held that Ross Intelligence's use of Westlaw headnotes for AI training was not fair use, the first US appellate ruling on the question. On the security side, Anthropic's MCP Python SDK carries a high-severity OAuth flaw (CVSS 7.5) fixed in versions 1.30.0 and 2.2.0, and Microsoft described "JadePuffer," the first documented agentic-ransomware campaign, which wiped more than 100 Azure storage accounts and databases in a seven-minute destructive phase.

Compiled from public reporting for the 48 hours ending 30 September 2026.