Trump promises an "AI Force" and an AI czar, four labs are sued for agreeing to slow down, and 3 more AI moves
Five verified developments from September 19 to 20, 2026: Trump's promised AI Force and AI czar, a class action accusing four leading labs of agreeing to slow development, US-China talks that put AI guard rails on the table, StepFun's 600-billion-parameter Step 5 Preview, and CXMT's fifth-generation DRAM entering mass production.
In brief
Across the 24 hours from September 19, 2026 at 12:00 UTC through September 20, 2026 at 12:00 UTC, three authorities outside the labs — the White House, a federal court and the US Treasury — moved to set the pace of AI development, while two companies in China shipped the model and the memory that the argument runs on:
- Politics: President Donald Trump said he would stand up an "AI Force" and appoint an AI czar, and left both jobs undefined.
- Antitrust: a class action filed in California accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of agreeing to slow their own development, and says the agreement cost subscribers.
- Trade: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China's vice premier, He Lifeng, opened a day of talks in New York that put AI guard rails on the table ahead of Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping on Thursday.
- Models: StepFun opened API access to Step 5 Preview, a 600-billion-parameter Chinese model priced at $1 per million input tokens, with open weights promised for October 15.
- Chips: CXMT put its fifth-generation DRAM platform into mass production, at a memory-array half-pitch of 11.95 nanometres.
Five developments
1. Trump promises an "AI Force" and an AI czar, and leaves both jobs undefined
- President Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Saturday, September 19 that he plans to appoint a new artificial intelligence adviser, known as an "AI czar," and to create an "AI force." The post gave both jobs a name and left the rest open. "We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry," Trump wrote. "Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!" 1
- The czar would be his second. David Sacks held the role until he stepped down this spring and moved into an external advisory position. Sacks said at a Politico event on September 16 that AI developers should be responsible for the safety of their own products and could be held liable when something goes wrong, and that the industry needs no new federal rules. Trump has argued that additional regulation is unnecessary, and has called attempts to limit the technology a "sick conspiracy" and the risks it poses a "hoax." 12
- The post landed ahead of two gatherings. Trump meets Xi Jinping in Washington on Thursday, with the two governments competing for leadership in AI, and the UN General Assembly opens in New York this week, where Secretary-General António Guterres has said AI will be a major topic. Fears about the technology have been building among lawmakers in Washington: the former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said this month that "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." 12
2. A class action accuses four labs of agreeing to slow down
- A class action filed on Friday, September 18 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California claims that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal agreement to slow the pace of their own AI development. Four people who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini brought the case, and they are asking the court to represent a nationwide class of other paid subscribers. 34
- The complaint dates the coordination to September 12, when Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay urging industry-wide cooperation on decelerating development in favor of safety measures. Sam Altman, SpaceXAI chief executive Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly agreed that day. The complaint also cites a statement from July 2026, signed by senior employees at several leading labs, that acknowledged "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development and asked governments to back a global effort to slow automated AI development. 34
- The plaintiffs argue that an agreement among chief rivals that their progress "should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers," and that antitrust law forbids "substituting collective restraint for individual accountability." Amodei had written that the US government would need to "mediate or at least enable" cross-lab discussions and to "issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations." Altman answered that OpenAI welcomes a federal framework setting consistent safety requirements, and that the company sees no reason to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation before starting on it. 34
3. The Treasury and China open talks that put AI guard rails on the table
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng were set to meet on Sunday, September 20 at JPMorgan Chase's headquarters in Manhattan, with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer joining them. The talks were due to start at about 10:30 a.m. (1430 GMT) and to run all day, with the aim of teeing up agreements on AI, tariffs and critical minerals for the Trump–Xi summit in Washington on Thursday. 5
- AI reached this agenda as a security matter. The talks were to cover "potential guard rails for artificial intelligence after reports of key security breaches involving AI models." Bessent said on Friday that he expects the discussion to cover "both open- and closed-weight models," the distinction between systems whose core components are published for anyone to download and fine-tune and those kept closed, and he has called for the two countries to agree on guard rails aimed at keeping powerful models out of the hands of malign non-state actors. 5
- Two constraints sit under the AI agenda. The trade truce the two sides reached in November 2025 expires on November 10, and a senior US official said on Friday that China's performance on restoring critical-mineral flows "has not been up to par." Chinese open-weight models are meanwhile winning American customers on price, since they can cost less than the closed-weight tools from Anthropic, OpenAI and others. Bessent said in a statement that the United States "remains the leader in AI" and is "open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems." 5
4. StepFun opens Step 5 Preview and promises open weights in October
- StepFun introduced Step 5 Preview, its flagship model for agentic work, and opened API access the same day. The model is a sparse mixture-of-experts system, an architecture that routes each token through a small slice of a much larger network, with 600 billion total parameters and 27 billion active per token, a one-million-token context window, and native text, image and video input. StepFun says the weights will be published openly on October 15. 67
- StepFun lists the API at $1 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens. The model scores 44 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite that ranks models across capability tests, and StepFun says that at comparable intelligence its cost per task comes in below that of similarly capable models. 6
- On StepFun's own published evaluations, Step 5 Preview scored 67.7 on DeepSWE v1.1 against 74.0 for Claude Opus 5 and 74.1 for GPT-6 Astra, and 80.5 on ProgramBench against 82.3 for Opus 5 and 85.4 for Astra, in both cases leading the Chinese rivals GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3. The distance to the two American frontier models widens on the harder agentic sets: 33.3 on Terminal-Bench v4, against 57.9 for Astra. 6
5. CXMT puts its fifth-generation DRAM into mass production
- ChangXin Memory Technologies said on Sunday, September 20 that its fifth-generation DRAM platform, known as G5, has entered mass production, announcing it at the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei, in eastern China's Anhui province. The company showed two LPDDR5X products built on the platform, the low-power memory used in phones and portable devices, each with a capacity of 24 gigabits, 50% higher than comparable products of the previous generation, in 496-ball and 245-ball packaging. 8
- The platform reaches an active-area half-pitch of 11.95 nanometres in the memory array using quadruple patterning, which CXMT says closes the distance to the most advanced memory platforms in volume production. CXMT reports an array capacitor aspect ratio of 45:1 and a DRAM-optimized high-k metal gate process that cuts the core cell array height to 6,762 nanometres, and says the number of dies produced per wafer has risen by at least 50% against its fourth-generation platform. 8
- The market these numbers land in is growing quickly and supplied by few companies. TrendForce counted a 59.5% quarter-on-quarter rise in global DRAM industry revenue in the second quarter of 2026, with supply expansion lagging demand growth, and the telecom analyst Ma Jihua told the Global Times that Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron still dominate the market. Ma said an advance at this node could improve China's supply-chain resilience and give device makers more sources to buy from. 8
The read-through
Three of the five argue the same contest from three seats: who decides how fast AI development goes. The White House answered with a unit, an "AI Force" and a czar, and kept its position that new federal rules are unnecessary 1. A federal court was asked to answer from the opposite direction, in a complaint that says four labs broke antitrust law when their chief executives publicly agreed to slow down 3. The Treasury took a third route, sitting down with Beijing to write guard rails that would apply across two countries rather than inside one 5. Each of the three puts the missing piece in someone else's hands: a government unit, a court, a negotiating partner abroad.
The other two items supply the material all three are arguing about. Step 5 Preview lands within a few points of Claude Opus 5 and GPT-6 Astra on StepFun's own software-engineering evaluations and carries a listed price of $1 and $2.70 per million tokens, with open weights due in four weeks 6. CXMT's G5 platform closes the distance to the leading memory process and lifts dies per wafer by at least half, adding a fourth supplier at the top node of a DRAM market that TrendForce measured growing 59.5% in a single quarter 8. Capability that costs less and memory that more companies can buy are the conditions the three pace-setting efforts are arguing over.
Watch next
- What the "AI Force" turns out to be, and who leads it. Trump's post named a unit and a czar and gave neither a budget, a statutory basis, or an appointee 1.
- Thursday's summit. Bessent, He Lifeng and Greer met to prepare agreements on AI, tariffs and critical minerals for Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping in Washington. Xi will go there in place of addressing the General Assembly in New York 25.
- AI at the General Assembly. Guterres has put AI among the assembly's major topics and wants "common guardrails in order to avoid this race to the bottom that could lead one day to a gigantic disaster at the global level," and diplomats say the 15-member Security Council may hold a high-level meeting on AI during the week 2.
- October 15. StepFun has said it will publish Step 5 Preview's weights openly that day; the paid API is the route to the model until then 6.
References
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