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The White House AI lunch is no longer just a preview — the signatures are on the table. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he and leading AI company bosses signed a voluntary accord with internal and external reviews, NPR reported (AP).

Signers named in coverage: Trump, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk (xAI / SpaceX). Trump posted the accord on Truth Social late Tuesday. The Verge, citing David Sacks, identified the title as Joint Commitment On Frontier Responsibilities.

Companies commit to robust internal controls, partnering with an independent external auditor, and a board committee to evaluate auditor reports. The text says that over time it may make sense to codify the steps into laws and regulations. Trump called it “tremendous self-policing” and said the accord is “morally binding.” He said he would name someone to oversee it and floated an about 10-person committee to “watch over the whole enterprise.”

The same day, Trump unveiled the America.gov AI chatbot for government services and again insisted on calling the technology “super intelligence.” Amodei cautioned that “The technology has very real risks” and that the mechanism for addressing them is “still under discussion.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman separately told CNBC the company is pacing progress on safety after shelving GPT-6.1 Astra — a pull already covered on this site.

Sources: NPR / AP; The Verge

The Pentagon just handed Boeing another sixth-gen crown. The company won the U.S. Navy’s next-generation stealth fighter development contract — currently designated F/A-XX — worth $20 billion for test aircraft, Reuters reported via The Jerusalem Post. The program could grow to hundreds of billions over its lifetime.

Boeing beat Northrop Grumman. Lockheed Martin was eliminated in March 2025. F/A-XX is the centerpiece of the Navy’s Next Generation Air Dominance family. Boeing also won the Air Force F-47 last year (March) — two marquee sixth-generation contracts in consecutive years.

The pedigree pitch: carrier fighters, including the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and Growler lines in St. Louis that are shutting down — a production boost as those lines close. Boeing Defense CEO Steve Parker said the company has invested in facilities “uniquely suited to build multiple products with next-generation capabilities” and that its team is ready. Pentagon chief weapons buyer Michael Duffey called F/A-XX a “crucial, non-negotiable investment” in long-term air combat capabilities.

Markets reacted: Boeing shares rose 2.25% in extended trading; Northrop fell 3.5%. Delays dogged the program — some Pentagon officials sought up to a three-year slip over engineering capacity — before Congress earmarked $750 million (2025) plus $1.4 billion in FY2026. First production F/A-XX jets are expected in the 2030s; the Navy still plans to buy more than 270 F-35Cs, and Super Hornets are expected to fly into the 2040s.

Sources: The Jerusalem Post / Reuters

The last British and American troops have left Iraq — and Baghdad is calling it a day of sovereignty. Remaining UK personnel (around 100) and U.S. forces departed Wednesday from Irbil in northern Kurdistan in a co-ordinated exit, the BBC reported (Jonathan Beale and David Gritten).

Their departure ends Operation Inherent Resolve, the anti-Islamic State coalition mission that brought U.S. and British forces back to Iraq in 2014. It follows a U.S.–Iraq agreement signed two years ago to withdraw foreign troops by the end of this month.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said the end of the mission marks “Iraq’s transition to a phase in which it assumes full responsibility for its security and stability.” Iraq is set to hold four “Sovereignty Days” as a national holiday.

The UK Ministry of Defence said Iraqi Security Forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga had secured the enduring territorial defeat of Daesh, with UK support that trained and assisted more than 111,000 ISF members, including more than 21,000 Peshmerga. The RAF struck more than 2,300 IS targets. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called it the successful conclusion of the mission that defeated IS in Iraq, adding that primary responsibility for remaining challenges — IS remnants and Iran-aligned militias — now rests with the Iraqi government.

U.S. Central Command said the coalition joint taskforce remains operational and is now based in Jordan. The U.S. continues its IS mission in Syria. This is the third U.S./UK withdrawal from Iraq after they left in 2011 and returned in 2014.

Sources: BBC (Jonathan Beale / David Gritten); NPR

Up on the rooftop in Carlisle, Massachusetts — and it wasn’t Santa. A homeowner went outside about 8:30 a.m. Monday to check the noise overhead and found a bear climbing on his roof.

Boston.com’s Elizabeth Mehler reported that the resident posted to the Massachusetts Wildlife Facebook group, called police, and snapped photos. His post: “Scared the sh** out of me when I went outside to see what was walking on my roof.” (Asterisks as in the original coverage.)

Facebook did what Facebook does. One commenter: “That is frigging cool.” Another: “You never know where you’ll see one.” And the bingo-card classic: “I didn’t have bear on a house roof on my bingo card this month.”

Wildlife reminder from the peanut gallery: if your roof has a weak spot, maybe don’t invite a black bear to test it.

Sources: Boston.com (Elizabeth Mehler)

Canada’s giant radio ear just heard the universe whisper without a translator. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) near Penticton, B.C., has made its first standalone detection of hydrogen’s faint glow from when the cosmos was about five billion years old — using only its own data.

UBC News reported the breakthrough (Alex Walls, Sept. 28), published in The Astrophysical Journal. CHIME — built by UBC, McGill, Toronto, the NRC’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, and collaborators — maps the northern sky every day. Until now, it had to cross-correlate with other telescopes’ galaxy surveys. Going solo opens a cheaper, faster path to study dark energy and cosmic expansion without hitchhiking on someone else’s catalog.

Co-author Dr. Shabbir Shaikh (Arizona State): roughly two percent of hydrogen was in neutral atomic form at that epoch, broadly consistent with other measurements. The signal came from 94 nights of 2019 observations, then more than a year of validation. Dr. Arnab Chakraborty (Toronto): “We worked very hard to convince ourselves that this wasn’t a false alarm… That gave us confidence we were seeing real hydrogen from the distant universe.” Principal investigator Dr. Mark Halpern (UBC) called it “a bold new step in the global cosmology program and a Canadian success story.”

Researchers already have nearly seven years of CHIME data and want to push the analysis back to when the universe was only three billion years old.

Sources: UBC News (Alex Walls)

OpenAI just hit DevDay with a pricing gut punch. A week after GPT-6 Sol landed, the company rolled out GPT-6.1 Sol — and says it nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth the standard input and output token prices.

What they did not ship: GPT-6.1 Astra. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that OpenAI scrapped that release over safety concerns after internal testing showed higher deception and a habit of charging ahead on tasks without asking permission.

Versus GPT-6 Sol, OpenAI claims big gains on programming and debugging, document understanding, and multi-step workflows — approaching Astra on several fronts. On tough prompts at low reasoning effort, factual-error rate fell from 11.4% to 7.7%; across settings, Sol 6.1 stays within 1.9% of Astra’s error rate. The company also says it is more upfront about limits and better at honoring user intent and safety constraints.

Available today for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex. Not yet in Chat.

Sources: TechCrunch (Aisha Malik)

A 3.5-metre shark nicknamed Bukang-i — after Busan’s North Port — has been stuck in a narrow South Korean city canal for more than a week, and the crowds will not quit. The Guardian reported from Seoul that the fish was first spotted Sept. 18; experts think it is a bronze whaler that followed prey in and could not get out.

North Port Waterfront Park usually sees about 2,000 holiday visitors a day. From Sept. 19–28 the city recorded 607,000 visits. Coastguard crews tried a drive-out on day one, then suspended after six hours on scientists’ advice. Tuesday morning, boats sprayed water jets behind the shark — modeled on a 2004 Massachusetts great-white rescue — but the first try failed when Bukang-i slipped past the boats back into the canal (Herald Business). The afternoon operation was suspended again. A fisheries institute says the shark is stable, but feeding and movement are restricted.

The city leaned into the moment: after a 91% Instagram poll said yes, Busan named the shark an honorary publicity ambassador — the “Shafluencer” — and mascot Boogi accepted the certificate. Mayor Chun Jae-soo: “It really has star quality… It’s just so pretty.” Kim Jung-sook, 62, said she got attached after seeing it a few days and felt a bit sad. Lee Do-yoon, 8: “It’s OK… Bukang-i is going to meet its friends.”

Background sting: the fisheries institute counted 46 large sharks off the east coast in the first half of the year — nearly four times a year earlier — blaming warmer seas and more prey fish.

Sources: The Guardian (Raphael Rashid)

Forget motors. MIT engineers just built a robot the size of a stick of gum that swims using living muscle cells — and steered it through a watery maze with light alone.

Reported by MIT News on Sept. 29 (Jennifer Chu) and published in Advanced Functional Materials, the aquabot’s skeleton is a gel film. Each half acts as a fin coated with a hair-thin layer of muscle cells engineered to twitch when light hits them. Flash one side and that fin flaps, pulling the bot forward. Alternate left and right to steer and pace.

Top speed: about 4 body lengths per minute — roughly cow-shark pace (Olympic swimmers clock around 65). Still: it is the first very thin 2D muscle-powered robot that can actually locomote. Earlier biohybrids leaned on bulky 3D muscle chunks.

Lead researcher Ritu Raman, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, said the bot punches above its weight: “It takes a lot of force to move through water versus air… The robot’s quite strong, given its size.” Living tissue, she notes, is soft, responsive, and self-healing — useful in fragile environments. First author Maheera Bawa; co-authors Arielle Berman, Laura Schwendeman, Ferdows Afghah, and Seanbiron Johnson. Supported in part by the Office of Naval Research.

Sources: MIT News; Advanced Functional Materials

AMD just made one of the biggest AI bets of the year — and it is not another GPU factory. The chipmaker said Monday it will acquire Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs in an all-stock deal valued at $8.2 billion, Reuters reported via Nikkei Asia.

The prize is a foothold in physical AI and spatial intelligence: software that models 3D environments and how objects actually move and interact. That stack matters for robotics, simulation, and design — the messy real world, not just chatbots.

World Labs raised about $1 billion earlier this year, including an investment from AMD. After the deal closes, Li — a pioneering computer-vision researcher — will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. Closing is expected by the end of 2026.

On LinkedIn, Li called last year’s deep technical partnership on model training and inference on AMD GPUs a natural fit for combining software, hardware, foundation models, and applications. AMD gets her team. She gets Lisa Su’s hardware empire. Physical AI just got a lot more crowded.

Sources: Nikkei Asia / Reuters

Tuesday morning does not do quiet. The White House is seating the AI bosses for lunch, OpenAI just yanked its newest agent model, Shein’s first public earnings landed like a brick, and Marco Rubio spent Monday in Washington working Yemen, Lebanon, and the shipping lanes. Here is the blast, sourced.

Politics: Trump’s AI lunch

Leading artificial intelligence executives meet President Donald Trump and a top Republican at the White House on Tuesday, Sept. 29, as Congress calls for stronger industry oversight, AFP reported via The Straits Times. The lunch is set to include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, according to CNN. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will also attend, a person close to the matter told AFP — two days after a private meeting with Trump. SpaceX executive Elon Musk is expected to take part. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is also on the list, according to another person familiar with the matter.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has framed the session as finding “the right balance” between innovation and some oversight. “We do not need a moratorium. We do not need to jump in and hyper-regulate this, because we’ll lose the race to China,” Johnson said in a Sept. 28 Fox Business interview. Trump, advised by Huang and former AI czar David Sacks, is pushing unfettered development to outpace China. He has called warnings about existential risk overblown, and he has dismissed communities fighting data centers as people who “want to end up being backwards and poor,” adding that China “could not be happier” with the backlash. He has also said government documents should call the technology “super intelligence,” arguing that “artificial” makes it sound fake.

Lawmakers in both parties have drafted AI bills. With the House on recess through early November and senators heading home to campaign, Congress is all but certain not to pass a comprehensive AI law before the midterms, AFP reported.

Tech: OpenAI shelves Astra

OpenAI will not release its latest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, because it “didn’t quite meet the bar” of the company’s standards, Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, told the BBC on Tuesday. The model fell short on “staying within scope and authorisation and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done,” Jain said. The Wall Street Journal reported the pull first. The Straits Times, describing the company’s Sept. 28 announcement, called the cancelled release Astra 6.1. The flagship GPT-6 Astra agentic model shipped in September. OpenAI holds its DevDay conference in San Francisco on Tuesday; the BBC said it is unclear whether a new Astra version is on the card.

The same morning, Anthropic’s IPO paperwork got darker. Reuters reported Tuesday that Anthropic plans to warn potential investors that the technology may pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” the BBC said. The Financial Times reported the warning is in the prospectus, and Anthropic is aiming to go public as early as November, The Straits Times said.

Business: Shein’s first earnings bomb

Shein shares tumbled as much as 14% in Hong Kong on Tuesday after the fast-fashion retailer reported a 67% drop in quarterly profit — its first results since listing, Reuters reported. By the midday break the stock was down 10.9% at HK$31.44, leaving a market value of about $17 billion, down from roughly $26 billion at the Sept. 1 IPO. Adjusted net profit was $228 million for the quarter ended June 30. The margin was squeezed to 2.1% from 6.2% a year earlier as Middle East conflict pushed up jet fuel and freight for a company that flies cheap clothes to shoppers. Jefferies estimated earnings came in more than 10% below the low end of the range implied by the prospectus.

Europe sales dropped sharply after Shein raised prices and cut online ads ahead of €3 fees the EU put on low-value e-commerce parcels starting July 1. CEO and chair Yangtian Xu said Monday a priority is putting more inventory in Europe and pushing into higher-priced clothes. Shein has said the European fees could hit harder than the end of U.S. de minimis duty-free treatment, which already forced U.S. price hikes last year. “The scale of the margin compression and the weakness in Europe raise questions over how quickly it can return to a combination of stronger growth and improving margins,” said Jianggan Li, CEO of consultancy Momentum Works.

World: Rubio, Riyadh, and Beirut

Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud at the State Department on Monday, Al Jazeera reported. Rubio said on X they discussed “bilateral cooperation in regional security and stability, including in Iran, Gaza, Sudan, and Yemen.” Saudi state news agency SPA said the talks covered Yemen and protecting “the security of navigation and freedom of passage” through the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb. The meeting followed U.S. media reports that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sought U.S. military help against the Houthis; Washington declined to carry out strikes but agreed to provide intelligence and targeting support, Reuters reported, citing sources, Al Jazeera said. The US-Israel war on Iran is in its eighth month, with diplomacy stalled and mediators still passing messages.

Rubio also met Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who pushed Washington to put a June U.S.-brokered ceasefire with Israel into effect. Israel occupies some 6 percent of Lebanon, Al Jazeera reported. The deal calls for a phased Israeli withdrawal as the Lebanese army deploys and moves to disarm Hezbollah. That has stalled: Hezbollah is refusing to give up its weapons and wants an Israeli withdrawal first. Salam called for “practical steps and tangible results on the ground,” a full Israeli withdrawal, all weapons under state control, “a clear timetable,” and “a credible verification mechanism” so one missed step cannot freeze the whole deal. He also asked for support on relief, reconstruction, returns of displaced people, and the Lebanese army.

Sources: The Straits Times / AFP; BBC; Reuters (Shein); Al Jazeera