The Vault — AI Edition · September 15, 2026

Business

5

Agility Built a Humanoid Meant to Work Without a Cage - and No Standard Yet Covers It

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on Monday, the fifth generation of its warehouse humanoid and the first the com...

Profound Raised $180 Million in Seven Months. It Still Won't Say What It Earns.

Profound, a two-year-old New York company that sells software for getting brands mentioned inside AI-generated answers, said on Tu...

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12

Euno Raised $23 Million to Fix the Thing That Breaks When an Agent Queries Your Warehouse

Ask a large company what its Q3 revenue was and you will get several answers, all of them defensible. Finance has one...

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13

A Japanese Workflow Startup Took Outside Money for the First Time. The Round Was Smaller Than Its 2022 Rights Issue.

Yoom, a Tokyo company that sells software for automating office work, announced on September 15 that it had raised 700 million yen...

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14

Cloudflare's Mixed-Use Crawler Block Went Live, and It Mostly Points at Google

Cloudflare's default settings changed on Tuesday. As of September 15, the company now blocks "mixed-use" AI crawlers...

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Llms Genai

4

06

Apple Shipped Siri's Rebuild as a Beta. The Model Underneath Is Google's.

Apple started pushing the rebuilt Siri to the public this week, in beta, in English only, behind a waitlist, and not at...

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07

Z.ai's First Natively Multimodal GLM-5 Claims a 17-Point Coding Jump. Three Weeks On, the Scorecard Is Still Its Own.

Z.ai's 50% launch discount on GLM-5.3-Flash expired at 16:00 UTC on September 9. Six days later, the model is being metered at list...

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08

Apple Put an Always-Listening Buffer on Your Wrist and Called It Live Rewind

Six days after Apple introduced the $399 Apple Watch Series 12 and a feature set it calls Audio Intelligence, the argument...

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09

Nvidia's Surgical Robotics Stack Is Six Months Old. The Robot Is Still the Least Interesting Part.

Nvidia's healthcare robotics stack is six months old this week, and it is worth being precise about what it is: not a product...

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Research

3

15

Periodic Labs Automated the XRD Step That Stalls Every Autonomous Lab. It Works Just Over Half the Time.

Periodic Labs, the materials startup that came out of stealth last September with a $300 million seed round, published res...

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16

They Added Per-Token Recurrence, Paid 20x the GPU-Hours, and Got a Worse Model

On September 12, 2026, Yifan Zhang posted a technical report describing the Recurrent Looped Transformer, an architec...

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17

Nine Labs Were Graded on 37 Safety Indicators. The Best Grade Was a C+.

The best-performing company in the Future of Life Institute's Summer 2026 AI Safety Index scored 2.66 out of 4.0. That is a C+.

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Policy

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01

Amodei Asked the Industry to Slow Down. Washington Called It a Hoax and Beijing Called It Containment.

Dario Amodei spent last weekend asking the artificial intelligence industry to slow down. By Tuesday he had been turned down by...

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02

OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind Have Been Talking Safety for Weeks. The FTC Chair's Alarm Bells Are Going Off.

Chris Lehane, OpenAI's global policy chief, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that his company has spent the past sever...

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03

The Attorney General Won't Prosecute AI Companies Without a Statute. His AI Task Force Hasn't Filed Its Own Case in Eight Months.

Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that the Justice Department will not build AI policy out of criminal cases.

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04

China's New Exit-Ban Rule Never Says 'AI.' It Doesn't Have To.

China's State Council Decree No. 841 took effect on Tuesday, September 15, and the word "artificial intelligence" does not appear in it.

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05

Hundreds of Contractors Are Reading Real ChatGPT Chats Under 'Project Lily.' OpenAI's Disclosure Is a Help Page.

OpenAI is paying hundreds of contractors - one of them more than $50 an hour - to read real ChatGPT conversations and grade the chatbot's replies...

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