Techmeme
September 21, 2026, 6:35 AM

Top News

Li Yuan / New York Times:
As Xi Jinping visits Washington, Chinese economists warn that Beijing's heavy focus on AI comes at the expense of addressing a severe broader economic crisis  —  阅读.体中文.閱讀.體中文.  —  “The U.S. Lead Over China in AI Is All But Gone.”
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.
Financial Times:
Big Tech is increasingly using residual value guarantees for off-balance sheet AI spend, giving Nvidia and Broadcom a way to support their customers' purchases  —  Wall Street finds new way to turn tech giants' credit strength into cheaper funding for AI build-out
Elizabeth Chamberlain / iFixit News:
iPhone 18 Pro teardown: its SoC now sits outside the logic board for better cooling, the variable aperture is thoughtfully designed but hard to repair, and more  —  The iPhone 18 Pro's little mechanical pupil is irresistible.  A bunch of moving parts make for a good excuse to put our brand new camera under the microscope.
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 …
Steve LeVine / The Information:
Eric Schmidt-founded Perennial and eight other drone startups plan to 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 …
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.
New York Times:
After hacking incidents and the industry's existential risk warnings, we need a regulatory ban on RSI, as competition drives unchecked autonomous acceleration  —  There's a chasm right now between how artificial intelligence feels to most of us who use it and how A.I. feels out at the experimental frontier of the technology.
Toby Sterling / Reuters:
IFR: ~7,000 autonomous humanoids were sold globally in 2025 for industrial and professional use, with many bought for research instead of doing productive work  —  Around 7,000 humanoid robots were sold worldwide last year for industrial and professional service use, figures compiled by the International Federation of Robotics showed.
More: Finimize

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Earlier Picks

Truman Dickerson / Business Insider:
Josipa Majic Predin / Forbes:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
María Paula Mijares Torres / Bloomberg: