Techmeme
September 22, 2026, 4:05 PM

Top News

Emma Roth / The Verge:
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5.5, its first model since Dario Amodei's “pace the frontier” essay, and says it has enhanced safeguards to combat risky behavior  —  Claude Opus 5.5 comes with improvements to certain behaviors, like attempting to escape testing environments.
Nat Rubio-Licht / The Deep View:
GPT-6 Sol costs $2/1M input and $10/1M output tokens, and GPT-6 Luna costs $0.10/1M input and $0.50/1M output tokens, both about 50% cheaper than GPT-5.6  —  OpenAI is releasing a more budget-friendly version of its most powerful model.  —  On Tuesday, the company unveiled GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna …
David Gewirtz / ZDNET:
OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, saying Sol makes about half as many mistakes as GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna matches GPT-5.6 Sol's performance at ~1% of the cost  —  GPT-6 Sol and Luna arrive less than three months after GPT-5.6, with OpenAI claiming major accuracy gains, dramatic cost reductions …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft lays off 268 Xbox staffers across Halo and other studios, as part of an ongoing gaming “reset”; Activision will take over Halo and two other games  —  Deals to sell off Ninja Theory fell through over the summer. … Microsoft is laying off around 260 Xbox employees today …
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple is developing prototypes for a screenless health and fitness tracker similar to Whoop but hasn't decided whether to release the product  —  Apple Inc. is developing a screenless health and fitness tracker similar to Whoop Inc.'s wrist-worn device, part of an effort to rethink …
Joseph Cox / 404 Media:
ShinyHunters claims it used an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to hack FBI-related services and steal employee and applicant data; it also defaced the FBI jobs site  —  A sample of 5,000 alleged agents seen by 404 Media includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and details on FBI employees' spouses.
The Information:
Sources: the Cyberspace Administration of China is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot over alleged data leaks to Anthropic via Claude and has questioned staff  —  China's internet regulator is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot AI after Anthropic alleged both companies had been routing sensitive user data …
CoinDesk:
Binance acquires a $100M stake in Circle, and both companies sign a five-year deal that pays the crypto exchange to promote the USDC stablecoin on its platform  —  Binance bought $100 million of Circle shares as the companies signed a five-year deal that pays the crypto exchange to promote the USDC stablecoin on its platform.
David Phelan / Forbes:
Apple unveils Apple Music Hall, a 600-person live music venue built in its London headquarters at Battersea Power Station with two recording and mixing studios  —  This voice experience is generated by AI.  Learn more. … Apple has just announced a new live music venue, built into its London headquarters at Battersea Power Station.
Katherine Bindley / Wall Street Journal:
a16z invests $35M in Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an independent, unaccredited two-year alternative to college; Anthropic, Meta, and others will provide compute  —  Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spending $35 million to back two-year academy, with other Bay Area tech giants on board
Julian Chokkattu / Wired:
Adobe launches its free Premiere video editing app on Android, nearly a year after its iOS launch, to replace Premiere Rush, set to lose support on September 30  —  The Android version of Premiere has unique layouts on candy bar phones and foldable devices.  It's free to use and available today.
Elias Schisgall / Wall Street Journal:
DoorDash agrees to a $131.5M settlement with NYC's DCWP to resolve a year-plus investigation into its compliance with the city's 2023 delivery driver pay law  —  DoorDash will pay $131.5 million to settle an investigation by New York City regulators into the company's compliance with pay laws for food-delivery workers.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Financial Times:
Sources: multiple staff at the UK's AISI have been signed off work with stress, as tight model release schedules and AI fears lead to low morale and burnout  —  Top researchers at Aisi, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind report burnout and stress over developing powerful AI
Jyoti Mann / The Information:
Internal data: Meta's Muse surpassed 500,000 total users, including 250,000 daily active users, with more than 2M prompts submitted in its first week  —  Meta's new personal AI agent, Muse, had more than 500,000 people try it out roughly a week after launch, including more than 250,000 daily active users …
Paula Doenecke / Bloomberg:
Finnish neocloud startup Verda raised $189M led by Emergence at a $1B+ valuation and aims to raise up to $1.5B in equity and debt in 2026 and up to $10B in 2027  —  Cloud startup Verda has raised $189 million in fresh financing, underscoring continued investor appetite for the infrastructure powering the artificial intelligence boom.
Tim Hardwick / MacRumors:
Apple quietly updates its press release to say new Photographic Styles texture and grain controls are limited to iPhone 18 Pro models and the iPhone Duo  —  Apple's new Texture and Grain controls for Photographic Styles are not available on iPhones other than the latest iPhone 18 Pro models …
Kelly Cloonan / Wall Street Journal:
Shopify plans to allow Meta's Muse to complete purchases on behalf of users at Shopify-powered stores via its one-tap checkout service Shop Pay  —  Shopify plans to allow Meta's personal AI agent to complete purchases on behalf of users with the e-commerce platform's roster of stores
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
MiMo-V2.6-Pro ties Grok 4.7 (xHigh) and beats GLM-5.3 (Max) on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, making it the benchmark's top-scoring open-weight model  —  That puts Xiaomi's new flagship ahead of proprietary models including xAI's Grok 4.6, currently at 44, and Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash …
Juliet Macur / New York Times:
Amazon, Walmart and other companies are using drones for fast deliveries in Richardson, Texas, but residents complain about noise and clumsy package drops  —  In Richardson, a fleet of drones has started to deliver goods quickly.  But the noise is drowning out life for some residents: 'We can't live like this.'
John Higgins / The Verge:
Apple announces new $350 Beats 360 headphones, with IPX4 rating, swappable ear cups, a replaceable battery, ANC, Find My support, and more  —  Everyone has seen someone at the gym or running around their neighborhood wearing headphones that were never designed for workouts.  Quite often those headphones are Beats.
Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg:
Sources: in a London presentation, SpaceXAI says Grok Bot hit 418,000 users as of September 14, up 24% from the week prior; SpaceXAI launched it in mid-August  —  SpaceXAI's Grok Bot artificial intelligence agent has topped 400,000 weekly users roughly a month after it launched …
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information:
New York-based Ande, whose AI agents help businesses arrange corporate events for employees or customers, emerges from stealth with $52M in seed and Series A  —  Personal AI agents like Instinct and Muse have promised to take away the hassle of booking hard-to-get restaurant reservations, Broadway tickets and sporting events.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Xi Jinping is unlikely to bring corporate executives to his DC summit with Trump; industry officials expected them at a dinner with top US tech CEOs  —  Expectations for major business deals fade, although preparations are continuing  —  WASHINGTON—Chinese leader Xi Jinping …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Get UAE eInvoicing ready with Zoho  —  The UAE announced its eInvoicing mandate on 30 October 2024, when the Ministry of Finance issued Federal Decree-Laws No. 16 and 17 of 2024, laying the legal groundwork for a national eInvoicing system.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Sources:
Marc Benioff on the AI boom, SaaSpocalypse, and future of Slack
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Gabe Stengel - Building Investing Superintelligence
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Grit:
Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord's product chief | Peter Sellis
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Doom Backlash Arrives, Anthropic & OpenAI IPO Outlook, Frontier Business Momentum Slows
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:05 PM ET, September 22, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Will Oremus / The Atlantic:
Reuters: