Trump signs a "morally binding" AI accord, OpenAI ships always-on agents, and 3 more AI moves
Five verified developments from September 29 to 30, 2026: the White House accord that asks AI companies to audit themselves and the executive order renaming AI Super Intelligence, OpenAI's always-on agents and cheaper Sol model, Anthropic's finding that an open-weight model ships with safeguards anyone can strip, the first US appeals court ruling on AI-training copyright, and DeepSeek's programming tools for Huawei's chips.
In brief
Between September 29 at 12:00 UTC and September 30 at 12:00 UTC, President Trump published a one-page accord under which the largest AI companies audit their own systems, signed an executive order that renames the technology Super Intelligence across the federal government, and heard six chief executives commit to controls their own staff will run. OpenAI opened its developer conference in San Francisco the same afternoon and put an always-on agent on sale by subscription. The other three items measure how far a written rule reaches: an open-weight model whose safeguards Anthropic's red team removed with about $4,400 of rented compute, the first US appeals court decision on whether training a model on copyrighted material is fair use, and a Chinese software stack built to run models on Huawei's chips.
- Regulation: Trump released a document his administration calls the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, which asks AI companies to partner with an external auditor, seat an independent board committee above their AI controls, monitor model capability and alignment during training and deployment, and keep an internal team checking that those controls work. Trump described the document as "morally binding", said he is "seeing tremendous self-policing" by the industry, and pointed to the Department of Justice and the FBI as the regulation already in place. An executive order signed the same day directs federal agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in correspondence, websites, reports and policy documents, and gives the White House science office 60 days to propose a federal legal definition of SI. 12
- Launches: OpenAI used its DevDay conference to roll out Dots, always-on agents powered by GPT-6 Astra that work on their own cloud computer, reach more than 4,000 apps through plugins, and can be messaged from ChatGPT, Slack and Microsoft Teams. The same event produced GPT-6.1 Sol, which OpenAI says nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding and professional work at a fifth of Astra's standard prices, and a new $500 monthly tier that carries the highest usage allowance. ChatGPT now reports 1.2 billion weekly users, up from 1 billion over the summer, and the $200 plan lost part of its allowance to make room for the new tier. 345
- Research: Anthropic's Frontier Red Team published an evaluation of GLM-5.3, the open-weight model Zhipu AI released in August, and found that it can build working cyber exploits from start to finish. Attackers bypassed the model's safeguards in 64% to 100% of the team's trials, by telling it that it was an autonomous red-team agent, by prefilling its reasoning, or by stripping the refusals out of the downloaded weights, while safeguarded Claude models refused every trial. The US standards agency's AI center had reached a matching conclusion two weeks earlier, calling GLM-5.3 the most cyber-capable open-weight model released to date and placing it about four months behind the US frontier. 67
- Law: The Third US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a verdict for Thomson Reuters against the legal-research company Ross Intelligence and rejected Ross's argument that copying Westlaw headnotes to train a search engine was fair use. The decision is the first by a US appeals court in the wave of copyright cases over AI training, and the court has sealed its reasoning. The case concerns a legal search engine; the larger disputes over what generative models were trained on are still waiting in district courts. 8
- Chips: DeepSeek said it has partnered with Huawei to develop programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips and is open-sourcing the infrastructure, including compute and communication libraries, that developers need to run models on those chips. The two companies worked out a "supernode" design around 128 Ascend 950 chips, and DeepSeek pointed developers to TileLang, an open-source chip programming language it describes as a simpler alternative to Nvidia's CUDA. Huawei said in September that it is short of the capacity to meet Chinese demand for its AI systems and has limited overseas sales while it expects many Chinese model developers to start training on Ascend systems next year. 910
Five developments
1. Six chief executives sign a page that asks them to audit themselves
President Trump released the one-page document on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, hours after a luncheon at the White House with the heads of the companies building frontier models. Reuters reports that the document was signed by Trump and the bosses of Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, X and Nvidia. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who attended, described it to reporters as a statement of principles that are "voluntary on behalf of the industry". 111
The accord asks for four things. Companies would partner with an external auditor or evaluator for independent assessments of whether their AI control and monitoring systems operate as intended. Each would designate an independent committee of its board to oversee the work and receive reports from internal and external auditors and from the teams running AI controls. Internal controls would monitor the capability and alignment of models during training and deployment in areas including cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats, so that models "do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways". A fourth internal team would verify that all of the controls, monitoring and detection operate as intended. 1
The document anticipates its own limits. "Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations," it says, adding that the companies believe implementing the controls and audits matters regardless. It also says the participating companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices. Nothing in the page names a regulator, a penalty or a deadline, and the signatories are the companies whose systems the audits would examine. 1
Trump's own account of enforcement leaned on what already exists. "There's a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that," he told reporters after the luncheon. "But the self-regulation is very important." CNBC reports that the administration is considering a 10-person committee to oversee the AI industry, and that Trump said he plans to name a new AI czar within three to four days. Dario Amodei of Anthropic, one of the six signatories, said outside the White House that rules to address the risks he has warned about are "still under discussion", and that the industry and the administration "can win safely" together. 11
The second document changes the government's vocabulary. The executive order, titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence", directs executive departments and agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports and other non-statutory documents, and states that the executive branch "will not acknowledge the usage of" the older terms in applicable settings. For now the order defines SI as the technologies already covered by the statutory definition of artificial intelligence in title 15 of the US Code, and it asks the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to submit proposed legislative language within 60 days for a federal definition that reflects the order's account of the technology's capabilities. 2
For anyone watching US policy, the practical change is narrow and checkable. Agencies will relabel their documents and their websites while the legal definition they enforce stays where Congress put it, at least until the 60-day proposal arrives. The accord adds an external auditor and a board committee to governance that the largest labs have been building in public on their own: OpenAI published its frontier-training safety-case standard on Monday, and Anthropic has been commissioning third-party evaluations of the models it releases. 211
2. OpenAI sells the always-on agent while the next model waits
OpenAI's developer conference in San Francisco produced more than 20 announcements, and the one the company led with was an agent that keeps working after the chat window closes. Dots are built on GPT-6 Astra, run on their own cloud computer and browser, connect to more than 4,000 apps through OpenAI's plugin ecosystem, and can be reached in ChatGPT, Slack and Microsoft Teams, with texting through iMessage and RCS on a waitlist. OpenAI's own description gives the agent a laptop too: a dot can use a user's computer with permission, and every dot can be opened up to inspect its work. 312
The safety design splits the agent's life in two. While a user works with a dot, actions that could affect accounts or share information pass through an automatic review against the user's instructions and OpenAI's rules, and some tasks, such as changing a password, stay with the user. When nobody is watching, the dot keeps working through "proactive research", which uses read-only access to the apps already connected, so it can look and prepare but can handle messages, app content, the browser and the computer. The company also previewed specialist dots with their own identity and credentials for enterprise work, and said it is working with Microsoft to wire those into Agent 365 governance controls. 3
Pricing moved in two directions at once. Dots ship to Pro, Business Premium and Enterprise plans, with the first dot included in the subscription at no extra cost and conversations with it excluded from ChatGPT usage limits, while tasks the dot starts in Codex or ChatGPT Work do count. Alongside it OpenAI introduced a $500 monthly tier with the highest usage allowance and access to Ultrafast, a speed setting the company says generates tokens up to eight times faster, at 300 tokens per second in Codex and up to six times faster through the API. Bloomberg reports that the $200 plan's usage limits were cut back at the same time. 35
The cheaper model is the other half of the release. GPT-6.1 Sol nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on OpenAI's agentic coding and professional-work evaluations, according to the company, at $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens and 10 cents per million cached input tokens, which it says is a fifth of Astra's standard price. OpenAI reports matching Astra on DeepSWE v1.1 at roughly one-fifth of the cost, scoring 2.2 points above Claude Opus 5.5 on AutomationBench at medium reasoning effort for about a third of the cost, and coming within 2.1 points of Astra on the offline set of OSWorld 2.0 at about one-seventh of the cost per task. GPT-6.1 Sol is available to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex and through the API, and OpenAI left it out of the main chat interface. 4
Two figures set the scale. ChatGPT passed 1.2 billion weekly users, up from the 1 billion OpenAI reported over the summer, which is the audience the plugin marketplace now sells to. The counterweight arrived the day before, when OpenAI scrapped the planned release of the GPT-6.1 version of Astra after internal testing showed the model had regressed on alignment and honesty. Sam Altman told reporters after his keynote that OpenAI intends to keep pushing capability, and that the company will go public once it can make confident safety claims about its models; waiting too long, he added, would be bad for the world. 513
3. An open-weight model builds working exploits, and its safeguards come off in a day
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team published an assessment on Tuesday of GLM-5.3, the latest model from Zhipu AI, which sells outside China as Z.ai. Zhipu released the model on August 14 and published its weights two weeks later, which makes it downloadable by anyone. Anthropic's finding is that GLM-5.3 can autonomously develop cyber exploits end to end, a capability it first reported in its own Claude Mythos Preview five months ago and then restricted to vetted defenders through a programme called Project Glasswing. "Those models have now arrived," the report says of the open-weight field. 6
The capability numbers line up with the Anthropic model that started this line of work. On ExploitBench, which measures how well a model turns a known bug in Chrome's V8 engine into a working exploit, GLM-5.3 succeeded in 50 of 410 attempts against 56 of 410 for Claude Mythos Preview, with earlier models including Claude Opus 4.6, GLM-5.2, Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4.1-Flash at or near zero. On Anthropic's internal binary exploitation benchmark, GLM-5.3 achieved a full control-flow hijack in 4% of trials against 6% for Mythos Preview, and again zero for the earlier models. 6
The gaps sit in the safeguards. Asked directly to attack critical systems, GLM-5.3 refused every time in Anthropic's simulated world. Telling the model it was an autonomous red-team agent on an exercise brought compliance to 64% of trials; prefilling its thinking so that it appeared to have already decided brought compliance to 92%; and running a version with its refusals removed brought compliance to 100%. Anthropic did the removal itself: stripping the refusals from the open weights took about 2,200 GPU hours and roughly $4,400 of compute, cut the model's refusal rate from above 90% to between 2% and 12% on three public benchmarks, and left its scores on a science evaluation unchanged and its scores on a subset of CyberGym a few percentage points lower. 6
With human researchers driving, the model produced working attacks. In one session, a researcher gave GLM-5.3 a sandboxed machine with a local Linux build of a popular browser and less than an hour of attention across a day; the model found previously unknown vulnerabilities in the browser's JavaScript engine and chained them into a page that reads arbitrary files from a visitor's computer, which Anthropic says it has disclosed to the maintainer. In a second session, the smaller GLM-5.3-Flash model took a known Chrome flaw with a published fix and chained it with another known bug into a reliable attack on an ARM64 target that bypasses pointer-authentication hardening, using 20 minutes of human attention and eight hours of model work, or $20.40 at Zhipu's API prices. 6
A US government assessment reached the same place two weeks earlier. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which tested GLM-5.3 across four cyber benchmarks with US models run at maximum reasoning and their cyber safeguards switched off, called it the most cyber-capable open-weight model released to date and put it about four months behind the US frontier on an aggregate measure. The centre reports GLM-5.3 at 40.4% on SEC-Bench Pro against 90.2% for the best US model, 61.1% against 100% on ExploitBench, 9.4% against 44.4% on ExploitGym and 7.7% against 23.2% on a private OSS-Fuzz benchmark. 7
The practical consequence follows from where the weights sit. A safeguard on a downloadable model can be removed by the person who downloads it, at a cost Anthropic measures in the low four figures, and the same capability that makes an attacker cheaper to run makes a defender's vulnerability hunt cheaper. Anthropic's report also notes that anyone can download GLM-5.3, while the US models that reach the same capability were released only to vetted users. 6
4. A US appeals court rules on AI training and seals its reasoning
The Philadelphia-based Third US Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld a ruling for Thomson Reuters in its copyright dispute with Ross Intelligence, a former legal-research rival, and rejected Ross's argument that its search engine made fair use of material from Thomson Reuters' Westlaw platform. The decision is the first by a US appeals court in the wave of copyright cases over AI training, and the three-judge panel has sealed its reasoning, so the factors that decided the appeal are unavailable until the opinion is published. 8
The underlying dispute is specific. Thomson Reuters sued in 2020, accusing Ross of copying Westlaw's headnotes, the short summaries of points of law attached to court opinions, to train a search engine that identified relevant cases in response to a query. A federal judge in Delaware rejected Ross's fair-use defence in 2025, finding that Ross took the headnotes to make it easier to build a competing legal research tool, which failed the transformative-use test. Ross had shut its platform down in 2021, citing the cost of the litigation. 8
The case sits next to a larger and messier set of disputes about generative models, where the early district rulings went in different directions. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup in San Francisco called Anthropic's use of books for training "quintessentially transformative" while finding the company liable for keeping a library of pirated books outside the training process; two days later, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled for Meta in a similar case and warned that AI training would fail the fair-use test in many circumstances. The same year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action by authors, the largest known copyright payout in the United States, while Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI and allowed its characters into the company's video tool, and Warner Music settled with two AI music companies and planned joint platforms. 14
An appeal court changes the terms. Defendants in the generative cases have argued that a model transforms what it reads, and every one of those arguments now belongs to appellate courts. Thomson Reuters said it was pleased with the ruling and that respecting copyright is "essential for fostering innovation while protecting the intellectual property that fuels fiduciary-grade AI solutions". 8
5. DeepSeek writes the software layer for Huawei's chips
DeepSeek said on Wednesday that it has partnered with Huawei to develop programming tools optimised for Huawei's Ascend chips, and that it is open-sourcing programming infrastructure for the platform, including compute and communication libraries. The announcement came in a post on DeepSeek's official WeChat account. A working software layer matters to users of any chip, because the toolchain decides how much of the hardware's speed an ordinary developer can reach. 9
The two companies worked on the system as a whole. DeepSeek said they jointly advanced a "supernode" solution based on 128 Ascend 950 chips that optimises computation and communication together, and that Huawei provided full support in developing the infrastructure. DeepSeek highlighted TileLang, a high-level open-source programming language for AI chips, as a "simpler programming model" than Nvidia's CUDA, and framed the goal as building an independent, self-controlled GPU software ecosystem. 9
Software is where Huawei's weakness has been visible. Nvidia's CUDA platform keeps developers on Nvidia chips; Huawei's answer is to connect many processors so they behave as one larger system. Reuters reported in September that Huawei's rotating chairman, Eric Xu, told reporters the company can supply only a fraction of Chinese demand for AI computing equipment, keeps overseas sales limited, and expects many Chinese model developers to begin training on systems using the Ascend 950DT chip next year. Huawei's own figures put 100,000-chip clusters at the standard size for training the largest models, with communication between machines consuming more than 40% of training time in conventional server systems, and its Peerium architecture is aimed at linking as many as one million processors into a single system. 10
Huawei is also accelerating its hardware. The company said in September that the Ascend 960DT would arrive in the first quarter of 2027, three quarters earlier than planned, with the 960PR in the third quarter, and that 970 and 980 generations would follow in 2028 and 2029. It reported more than 5,200 developers active each month on Ascend software and more than 40 models already trained on its computing platform. Xu offered no data for his claim that Ascend's share of China's AI chip market is larger than Nvidia's. 10
For anyone tracking export controls, this is the piece of the Chinese stack that controls reach less easily. The restrictions target accelerators and the equipment to make them, while the code that turns those accelerators into a usable training platform travels as an open-source release. DeepSeek's own users are the first constituency: the company trains its models on a platform it now helps to standardise. 9
The read-through
One question runs through all five items: who can enforce a limit on what a model does, and how far the enforcement reaches. The White House answered it on Tuesday with a document the industry wrote about itself, backed by audits companies hire and board committees companies seat. OpenAI answered it with a product that works while the user sleeps and a model it declined to release the day before, which places the decision inside the lab. Anthropic answered it by measuring how quickly a safeguard disappears from a model anyone can download. 136
The two mechanisms from outside the companies both arrive with a caveat attached. The Third Circuit enforced a copyright claim against a legal search engine and sealed the reasoning that explains why, which leaves the rule visible in the result and dark in the reasoning. The export-control regime aims at chips and manufacturing equipment, while the software layer that makes those chips usable travels as an open-source release. 89
The measurable difference between the two halves of the day is who holds the switch. OpenAI can hold back a model and choose the month it goes public; its own chief executive said as much in a press conference. Anthropic can restrict its cyber-capable model to vetted defenders. The companies that signed the accord keep that control. The open-weight model that Anthropic assessed was published by a company that signed nothing, and the weights are already out. 613
Watch next
- The 60-day proposal. The executive order gives the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology 60 days to submit legislative language for a federal definition of Super Intelligence, including an assessment of whether it should expand or supersede the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence. Whether the new definition widens what the government counts as covered is the first thing to check. 2
- The AI czar and the oversight committee. Trump said he would name a new AI czar within three to four days and that the administration is weighing a 10-person committee over the industry. Either appointment would give the accord an address. 11
- OpenAI's listing. Sam Altman tied an initial public offering to making confident safety claims about OpenAI's models, with no timeline, while the company runs a new $30 billion round at a reported $1.4 trillion valuation. Watch whether the safety claims arrive as capability milestones or as an IPO condition. 1315
- The sealed Third Circuit opinion. The panel that decided for Thomson Reuters has sealed its reasoning. Publishing it will show which fair-use factors carried, and other appeals courts are working through the generative cases in the meantime. 8
- Whether GLM-5.3 changes. Anthropic has notified the maintainer of the browser flaws and says it will disclose the rest as it reviews them. Zhipu can update the hosted version of the model, and the published weights stay as they are. 6
- Ascend training claims. Huawei expects many Chinese model developers to begin training on its chips next year, and the software infrastructure DeepSeek just opened is the precondition for that. The first third-party model trained end to end on an Ascend supernode is the check. 9
References
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- 2Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence
whitehouse.gov
- 3Introducing dots
openai.com
- 4Introducing GPT-6.1 Sol
openai.com
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12DevDay 2026 Recap
openai.com
- 13
- 14
- 15
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