Techmeme
September 21, 2026, 2:20 AM

Top News

Politico:
A detailed recap of the White House's 19-day standoff with Anthropic, where a jailbreak dispute led officials to bluntly order Dario Amodei to take Fable down  —  On the evening of April 6, an unusual request began making its way from Washington to some of Wall Street's most powerful executives.
Steve LeVine / The Information:
Nine drone startups, including Eric Schmidt-founded Perennial, will split US DoD orders for 60,000 drones in a competition that requires no China-made parts  —  Last month, the Pentagon threw up its arms in frustration (metaphorically speaking) when most of the drone startups in competition …
Josipa Majic Predin / Forbes:
Vercel, Cloudflare, and others quickly add Jev, as it makes AI tool selection much faster and cheaper; TypeSafe: Jev matches GPT-5.6 and Sonnet 5 workflow evals  —  Most of what an AI agent asks a frontier model to do is not writing.  It is choosing.  Which tool to call next, whether to retry, whether a command is safe to run.
prinz:
A researcher used GPT-6 Astra to decipher a WWI German radio transmission from 1918, one of the 50 famous unsolved ciphers listed on a German science blog  —  Scienceblogs.de, a German science blogging portal, includes a relatively famous list of 50 unsolved ciphers, which range …
Zhang Shidong / South China Morning Post:
China collected $32.3B of stamp duty on stock sales between January and August, up 80%+ YoY, as average daily trading value rose 72%, amid an AI trading frenzy  —  China's revenue from stamp duty on stock sales jumped more than 80 per cent in the first eight months this year as improved sentiment bolstered trading activities.
Qwen:
Alibaba releases Qwen-Image-2.1, a 7B open-weight model it says outperforms most closed-source models, with native transparency and up to ten reference images  —  We are excited to open-source Qwen-Image-2.1, an image model in the Qwen family that balances generation quality, inference efficiency, and cost.
Natalie Breymeyer / Axios:
Altis Labs, whose AI model analyzes CT scans taken during oncology trials and produces predictions tied to patient survival, has raised a $25M Series A  —  Altis Labs, an AI software company for drug development, raised a $25 million Series A, CEO Felix Baldauf-Lenschen tells Axios Pro.
Truman Dickerson / Business Insider:
Jensen Huang says AI leaders calling for regulation don't want new legislation, but to be “relieved of the laws we do have” because of “ulterior reasons”  —  Don't let the black leather jacket fool you, Jensen Huang isn't a doomer.  —  Nvidia's CEO said as much in an interview with CBS News aired on Sunday.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
A closer look at the upcoming Siri AI-powered home hub, a key pillar of Apple's strategy for the home; sources: Apple started cutting Fitness+ staff  —  Also: What happened with the iPhone Duo Pencil and layoffs at Fitness+.  —  Apple's new “intelligent personal hub” strategy is about much more than the iPhone.

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Cloudflare:
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María Paula Mijares Torres / Bloomberg: