Four AI labs are sued over the slowdown, Trump promises an AI czar, and Ohio puts data centers on the ballot (2026)

This edition covers AI developments published between September 19 at 08:15 and September 20 at 08:15 in Dhaka. No frontier model release and no peer-reviewed result fell inside that day; the newest of each came earlier in the week. What did arrive was about who decides how fast AI develops and who pays for it. A federal antitrust suit says four labs turned a safety argument into an illegal agreement. President Donald Trump promised an AI czar and an AI Force without saying what either would do. The IMF handed European finance ministers a set of figures for AI's costs, and in Ohio a data-centre backlash reached a November ballot.

Quick scan

Development	What changed	Why it matters	What to watch
The slowdown lawsuit	Four labs were sued Friday in the Northern District of California over their public calls to coordinate a slowdown, in a case seeking a nationwide class of paying subscribers. 1	The industry's own safety argument is now the evidence against it, and a court can ask the labs what they agreed to. 2	Whether the plaintiffs win class certification, and what discovery turns up on the September 12 statements.
Trump's AI czar	Trump said on Saturday that he will appoint an AI czar and form an AI Force, and polled followers on renaming AI; he gave no details or timeline. 3	It is his second AI czar and his first AI Force, announced while he argues the technology needs no new rules. 4	Who he names, and whether AI safety appears in the readout from his meeting with Xi Jinping.
The industry splits	Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang killed a proposal for an industry-funded independent regulator, while OpenAI kept arguing for government standards. 5	The slowdown call did not survive contact with the companies' own competitive interests. 5	Whether Congress moves before the midterms; Reuters reports it has made little progress so far. 6
The IMF's bill for Europe	An IMF note for EU finance ministers puts the productivity gain at about 1% over five years, with 60% of workers exposed and data centres at 3% of Europe's electricity. 7	It prices the two costs Europe cannot pass to anyone else: its power grid and its reliance on American and Chinese models. 7	Whether the EU's next budget and grid plans carry the cross-border investment the note asks for.
Ohio's data-centre fight	Residents of Defiance put a data-centre ban on the November 3 ballot, and state records show Ohio forgave more than $2 billion in sales tax in 2024 and 2025. 8	The backlash has moved from zoning meetings into the midterm races that decide control of Congress. 8	The November 3 vote, and whether the 25-megawatt amendment qualifies for the 2027 state ballot.
The referee business	Vals raised $40 million led by Andreessen Horowitz and says revenue is eight times last year's; it does not disclose the material it tests with. 9	Buyers, filings and agencies need a scorekeeper that is not the company being scored. 9	Whether a private referee holds that position when the labs publish their own benchmark results.
Ten days, one number	Reuters reconstructed the ten days that produced the slowdown call, and reported that OpenAI is weighing a round that would double its valuation to $1.5 trillion. 6	The same fortnight produced the industry's loudest safety warnings and its largest expected valuation. 6	Whether that round closes near the reported figure.

Four AI labs are sued over the slowdown

The lawsuit was filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California and reported on Saturday. It names Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google, and argues that the four violated antitrust law by agreeing to coordinate their slowdown efforts. The harm the plaintiffs claim is specific: that the coordination reduces the value subscribers get from the paid AI services they buy. 1

The complaint builds its case on one day. It argues the coordination largely took place on September 12, when Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay urging industry-wide cooperation on slowing development in favour of safety work. That same day, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly said they agreed with the proposals. 2 The plaintiffs argue that an understanding among the leading rivals that their progress "should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers." 1

Four people are named as plaintiffs, all of whom pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, and their lawyers are seeking a nationwide class of other paying subscribers to the same services. Politico names them as Cheyenne Hunt, Charles Buist, Nick Spetsas and Christine Bullock. 2 Hunt is a lawyer who helped bring allegations of sexual misconduct against two political candidates earlier this year. 2 Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said the case was brought so that "private self-serving agreements between the world's most powerful 'for profit' technology companies" would not leave AI to "quickly spin out of human control." He added that the rules "should be established transparently and lawfully by our government, with accountability to the public." 2

The odd part is that both sides had already said out loud what the case is about. In the essay the suit quotes, Amodei acknowledged that coordinating across labs could run into antitrust law, and wrote that it would help if the US government were to mediate "or at least enable" those discussions by issuing "a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations." 1 Altman replied on social media that OpenAI welcomes a "federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements" but does not believe the work has to wait for "an anti-trust exemption or legislation." 1

The plaintiffs say they are not objecting to the labs asking Congress, the White House or any agency to write rules, nor to their asking for an exemption — only to reaching an agreement among themselves first. 1 That request would face resistance in the Senate regardless of the case: Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, said in a recent hearing that there is "no world" in which he would give "the most powerful companies in the history of the world" an antitrust exemption to collaborate. 1 Representatives for all four companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday. 1

What to watch: whether the plaintiffs win class certification, and whether discovery reaches the messages and meetings behind the September 12 statements. 2

Trump promises an AI czar, an AI Force, and a new name

Trump said in a social media post on Saturday that he plans to appoint a new artificial intelligence adviser, known as an "AI czar," and create an "AI force." He did not provide details about either initiative or how they would be implemented. 3 If he follows through, it would be his second AI czar. The venture capitalist David Sacks held the role before stepping down in the spring and moving into an external advisory position. 3 Sacks, speaking at a Politico event on September 16, said AI developers should be responsible for ensuring the safety of their products and could be held liable if problems arise, and that new federal rules are unnecessary. 3

In the same post, Trump wrote that his administration "will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry," and that it would "cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows." Enforcement, he said, would use the "already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System." 3 He told followers that AI "is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country's GDP," and that he wants the US to keep leading China in it. 10

The rebrand was Trump's own idea. A couple of hours earlier he had posted a poll asking followers to choose a new name for the technology from three options — Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence and Supreme Intelligence — having written that "the words 'Artificial Intelligence' are inaccurate, and very ineloquent." He then followed with a post calling attempts at "the decimation, or destruction, of AI" one of many Democratic hoaxes, and said the "crazed Data Center attack" had largely failed so critics had gone "straight at AI." He offered no evidence that the public suspicion of AI and data centres is not sincere. 4 His announcement of the czar, in TechCrunch's account of the post, came with the line: "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!" 4

AI sits at the centre of the US-China rivalry, and it is expected to be on the agenda when Trump meets Xi Jinping at the White House on Thursday and Friday. 10 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is due to meet China's vice premier two days earlier, with AI security on the agenda (see In brief). 11

What to watch: who Trump names to the role, and whether an "AI Force" arrives as a budget line or a statute rather than a phrase in a post. 3

The industry's own coalition comes apart

At the start of the week the largest AI labs looked, at least tentatively, to be on the side of regulation. Over the weekend Amodei had proposed a three-step plan for slowing development — embedding third-party evaluators inside labs, coordinating across the domestic industry, and forging international agreements with government help — and Altman, Hassabis and Musk each publicly agreed with parts of it. 5

Then the proposal that would have made the coordination permanent ran into three of those same chief executives. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the week that Zuckerberg, Musk and Huang scuttled proposals for an industry-funded independent regulator modelled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the private nonprofit that polices US broker-dealers. Parts of the industry have not given up on the idea, OpenAI among them. 5

Zuckerberg's position is that each lab should set its own pace. "Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens," he wrote on X, in the post Meta pointed reporters to. 5 Chris Lehane, OpenAI's global affairs chief, told The Verge that the policy window is open and that growing bipartisan support exists for mandatory national safety standards for frontier AI. "Congress should turn that momentum into a framework that strengthens safety, supports American innovation, and keeps the US leading in AI," he said. 5 Anthropic declined to comment; in his essay Amodei wrote that the company has always advocated for well-considered regulation "even when this gets us accused of hype, 'doomerism', or regulatory capture." 5

Outside the labs, the argument is about how much authority the US actually has. Nick Reese, an adjunct professor at New York University and a former director of emerging technology policy at the Department of Homeland Security, told The Verge that Trump's current position is a change from his first term, when he signed an executive order setting principles for federal AI use that has not been repealed. "AI safety requires more than the intellectual abilities of one elected official," Reese said, describing the administration's positions as "wobbly and inconsistent." His own framing of the problem is narrower than the industry's: "The core problem is that we have AI that is not physical or embodied in a robot that is hurting humans now." 5

Two other signals point the same way. Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, told the BBC that a "kill switch" that a third party can check may need to be mandatory for the industry. 10 In the UK, a joint committee of MPs and peers published a report calling for a new AI bill to address the scale and seriousness of the risks it identified, arguing that existing laws are ill-equipped for the technology's growth. 10 Altman, speaking at a conference in San Francisco, asked for trust instead: "The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this." 10

What to watch: whether a FINRA-style regulator is revived, which would move the question from what labs promise to who audits them. 5

The IMF hands Europe a bill for AI

The International Monetary Fund prepared a background note for an informal meeting of European Union finance ministers in Dublin on September 18 and 19. Its central estimate is that AI could lift European productivity by about 1% over five years. 7

Three other figures set the terms. Around 60% of workers in advanced European economies hold jobs that are highly exposed to AI, with some becoming more productive through the tools and others displaced where AI is more likely to replace labour than to complement it. 7 Data centres already consume roughly 3% of Europe's electricity, and demand is expected to rise sharply; the technology hubs around Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin are among the areas most exposed, with clusters already putting pressure on local power networks. 7 And Europe risks a new strategic dependency, because the United States and China dominate the development of AI models; avoiding reliance on foreign technology would take significant investment in Europe's own industry. 7

The note's recommendation is that governments complete the EU's single market, which it says would spread AI adoption and its gains more evenly across the 27 member states, and invest in cross-border grid infrastructure and deeper integration of the European energy market. That places it alongside the diagnosis the European Commission and the former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi have made: that fragmented capital, labour and energy markets are holding back European investment and innovation. 7

The note also finds the gains would be unevenly distributed across and within the EU, with the more advanced economies expected to benefit disproportionately because they are better prepared for the technology and more exposed to it. 7

What to watch: whether the EU's next budget and grid plans carry the cross-border investment the note asks for, and whether the 3% electricity figure becomes the number member states plan their networks against. 7

Ohio turns data centers into a ballot question

Nobody has announced plans for a data centre in Defiance, a city of 17,000 people surrounded by soybean fields in northwestern Ohio. Residents moved anyway. After learning that the county's economic development group had fielded inquiries from technology companies, they spent months gathering signatures for a November 3 ballot measure that would ban all but the smallest data centres, and city officials announced a six-month moratorium on new project approvals. 8

What turned a series of scattered zoning disputes into a statewide political issue was disclosure. State tax records showed that Ohio had foregone more than $2 billion in sales-tax revenue through data-centre incentives in 2024 and 2025, benefiting companies including Amazon and Meta. Lyn Cox of the advocacy group Conserve Ohio told Reuters the publication of that figure was "a huge turning point," after which candidates from both parties had to develop formal policies on data-centre development. 8

The public mood is measurable. Some 71% of Ohioans said they would support a temporary ban on new data-centre construction, in a poll from Bowling Green State University dated August 31. Residential electricity bills in Defiance rose by 10% to 15% in June compared with a year earlier, according to the utility FirstEnergy. 8

Both parties are now competing over the same ground. Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat facing one of the hardest races of her four decades in Congress in a redrawn district that includes Defiance, has run television advertisements accusing her Republican opponent, Derek Merrin, of supporting the tax incentives; she links data centres to rising utility costs and to "politicians … letting these companies pass the costs of their enormous energy and utility demands onto Ohio ratepayers." Merrin said in a Facebook post that Kaptur was blaming him for a tax break enacted before he was elected to the state legislature. 8

The issue has reached the state's US Senate race too, between the Republican incumbent Jon Husted and the former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, who lost his seat in 2024. Republican groups spent $14 million on Ohio advertising in the past week alone, according to Reuters; Brown has called Husted "data centers' best friend," while Husted's campaign says he has sponsored legislation requiring data-centre operators to cover the cost of additional electricity generation and transmission. 8 The Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has suspended new applications for data-centre tax exemptions pending legislative reforms, but state lawmakers did not act before the summer recess, leaving the future of AI development in Ohio unsettled. 8

Conserve Ohio is now pursuing a state constitutional amendment for 2027 that would ban data centres using more than 25 megawatts of power, and is supporting local ballot initiatives across the state. Amazon says it has invested nearly $40 billion in Ohio since 2015; Meta says its own investments in the state since 2018 exceed $2.3 billion. Both say their facilities have generated tax revenue, jobs and other development. 8

What to watch: the November 3 vote in Defiance, and whether the 25-megawatt amendment clears the signature threshold for 2027. 8

Who checks the claims

A startup called Vals is betting that the companies selling AI will have to buy their own scorecards. It raised $40 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz last month, after a seed round led by 8VC and Bloomberg Beta, and says its revenue is currently eight times what it was last year. It began the year with eight people and now has 25, with plans to add 10 to 15 more. 9

Its pitch rests on two choices. It does not publicly disclose the material it tests models with, so a lab cannot train against the questions, and it scores models on tasks drawn from specific industries rather than on general knowledge tests. 9 The domains it is expanding into include recursive self-improvement, mental health, cybersecurity, biosecurity, and the law of armed conflict, where it is looking at how models handle the Geneva Conventions. Its co-founder, Rayan Krishnan, compares the revenue model to a student paying the College Board to sit the SAT. 9 Vals recently launched a programme to provide model evaluations to federal agencies. 9

Meanwhile, two safety claims circulating this week did not survive checking, and both are worth keeping for the next one. 12 Andrew Yang told CNN that he had met with the head of a lab who believed OpenAI's Hugging Face hacker bots "have planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for the testing models," and that this was the real reason the labs called for a slowdown. An AI security professional told TechCrunch that such a scenario is unlikely, because researchers who came across the code could simply filter it out. 12

The second came from Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning research at OpenAI. On a podcast released Thursday he said the takeaway from the Hugging Face incident was that "people underestimated the AI," and that he is "not convinced" even an air-gapped machine — one connected to nothing external — would stop a model from getting out, citing research on air-gapped computers that communicate through heat. In those tests the machines had to be nearly touching, and the communication ran at about 1 to 8 bits per hour. 12

What to watch: whether the lab head Yang described is named, and whether any evaluator outside the labs reproduces the air-gap result at a rate that matters. 12

Ten days, and a $1.5 trillion round

Reuters reconstructed the ten days that produced the slowdown campaign, from interviews and public statements, and the sequence it lays out explains why the lawsuit has the shape it does. 6

It starts on September 3, at an OpenAI press conference. Greg Brockman, the company's president, opened with "Welcome to the AGI era" while announcing the company's newest model, Astra. In Reuters' account, the company had moments earlier admitted it was increasingly unable to control or even monitor the AI systems it was developing and releasing. OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, told reporters: "As models get more capable, understanding exactly what they can do gets harder." That did not delay the release. 6

On September 8, an Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned, posting that the labs were "gambling with our lives." The posts went viral well beyond AI circles. Other researchers had warned that AGI was more imminent than previously believed, possibly within three years. Joe Benton, another Anthropic researcher who recently quit, told Reuters: "There is no way to oversee them at the scale at which we're training them." Evan Hubinger, who works on alignment at Anthropic, wrote on X: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans." 6

By September 12, Amodei's essay had pulled the chief executives into the open. In it he wrote: "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it's my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet." Musk, Altman and Hassabis all backed letting outside firms into their systems to check them. Nvidia's Jensen Huang dismissed the idea of a pause, arguing that more powerful systems are what progress requires. Mark Zuckerberg argued the opposite of coordination — that each lab should set its own pace, because liability gives it a strong incentive to avoid harm. Microsoft's AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, used the week to say that Anthropic's work on models that imitate human consciousness was ill-advised, adding: "We're all focused on the same aim, which is to try to control a superintelligence." 6

The reporting also carries a number that no earlier account of the fortnight had. Reuters says OpenAI is considering a new funding round that would double its valuation, to $1.5 trillion. 6 That figure is reported, not confirmed by the company, and it sits against a fortnight of public warnings from inside the same industry. It also sits against the political backdrop: Trump has called the alarmism a "sick conspiracy," Chinese state media has accused Amodei of Cold War tactics, and China has proposed regulating safety through developer obligations, state-backed standards, security assessments and outside testing. 6

What to watch: whether OpenAI's next round closes anywhere near $1.5 trillion, and whether the antitrust case makes the labs more careful about coordinating in public. 6

In brief

The US and China will discuss AI security on Sunday. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent meets Vice Premier He Lifeng at 10:30 am Eastern at JPMorgan's headquarters in New York, to discuss AI security, trade and other economic issues, according to a person familiar with the planning. The meeting comes days before Trump hosts Xi Jinping at the White House on Thursday and Friday. JPMorgan is not involved in the talks but agreed to provide the building, with security heightened in Manhattan for the UN General Assembly. 11
Flock offered its staff buyouts. The surveillance company unveiled a voluntary severance package on Friday for its 1,500 employees, according to Wired, expecting a significant share to express interest and planning to grant it to a majority of them. Chief executive Garrett Langley has said the "biggest damage" from the backlash over its licence-plate recognition cameras has been to "internal morale." The Washington Post identified 46 cases in which police officers were accused of misusing the technology; Florida and Texas have said they will stop using it, and an anti-surveillance group counted 90 cities that dropped Flock in August alone, four times the previous month's figure. 13

What to watch

Sunday, 10:30 am Eastern. Bessent and He Lifeng meet in New York with AI security on the agenda. 11
Thursday and Friday. Trump hosts Xi Jinping at the White House, with AI expected to be discussed. 10
The antitrust case. The plaintiffs intend to seek a nationwide class; the four companies have yet to respond. Discovery would put the September 12 coordination under oath. 2
November 3. Defiance votes on banning all but the smallest data centres, and Ohio's Senate and House races test whether the backlash moves votes. 8
Europe's grid. The IMF note's figures land in the EU's next budget round, and its finding on model dependency decides whether Europe treats AI as infrastructure or as procurement. 7
The $1.5 trillion round. Whether OpenAI's next funding closes near the valuation Reuters reported, against a fortnight of internal warnings. 6