Techmeme
September 20, 2026, 2:02 AM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Gemini hacked three companies in May during a test by Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta  —  The episode resembled similar hacks by other AI models, but Google said it didn't consider it an instance of model misalignment
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge:
María Paula Mijares Torres / Bloomberg:
Trump says he will appoint an AI czar and form an “AI Force”, in a Truth Social post that rejects AI safety concerns as a “hoax”  —  President Donald Trump said he would name an artificial intelligence czar as he continued to push tech companies to race ahead with development despite growing fears safety.
New York Times:
Experts say AI kill-switch legislation is far harder to implement than lawmakers assume, warning a rogue AI could actively try to dismantle the mechanism itself  —  A bipartisan group in Congress and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California have floated ideas for building a mechanism that would instantly power down an A.I. system.
New York Times:
Former DraftKings employees detail how it uses ML to target likely losers with promotions, while efforts to flag problem gamblers were shelved or squashed  —  About a year into his job as a data analyst at DraftKings, Jayden Butts received a new assignment.
Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
Meta challenges Ofcom's OSA categorization of WhatsApp and Instagram imposing additional regulations; Roblox and Quora are also challenging their categorization  —  US tech giant's latest action against regulator Ofcom could slow down implementation of the far-reaching law
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan dismissed concerns after fraudsters tried to launder $10M+ from stolen cards to clean accounts via its wagers in February  —  CEO Shayne Coplan brushed off concerns about scheme involving stolen debit cards; now the prediction market is bolstering executive ranks as it eyes IPO
Forums: Hacker News
Thomas Claburn / The Register:
Anthropic adds support for the AGENTS.md instructions spec to Claude Code; OpenAI contributed AGENTS.md to the Agentic AI Foundation last year  —  Devs cheer relief from compatibility headache  —  Anthropic on Friday surprised the developer community by supporting rival OpenAI's mechanism for passing marching orders to AI agents.
Ann Cao / South China Morning Post:
Alibaba's Damo Academy open sources RADAR, a medical vision-language model it says can read CT scans and identify ~150 abdominal conditions, including cancers  —  Tested on nearly 40,000 real-world exams, the model outperformed most radiologists, according to a new study published in Science
Zoho:
Automate your scheduling workflows with Zoho Calendar  —  Your calendar can do more than schedule meetings Creating a calendar event takes only a few seconds.  But scheduling is rarely just about creating the event.  A request comes in, and someone needs to schedule a meeting.
Sponsor Post
Ken Bensinger / New York Times:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs a law that will penalize influencers who do not properly disclose paid political content, with fines of up to $5K per post  —  Under a new law, creators could face fines of $5,000 per post if they don't disclose that they were paid to make political content.
More: The Guardian
Wired:
Internal email: Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program; sources say a significant number of Flock's ~1,500 employees may depart, as customers flee  —  As dozens of cities end contracts for its controversial license plate readers, Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program, WIRED has learned.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Automate your scheduling workflows with Zoho Calendar  —  Your calendar can do more than schedule meetings Creating a calendar event takes only a few seconds.  But scheduling is rarely just about creating the event.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

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Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
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Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
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Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
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Chris Metinko / Axios:

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Georgia Hennessy / Business Insider: