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Oracle has declared force majeure on a large US data center under construction, after local officials delayed the permits needed to power the project.

According to Semafor, the officials held up permits necessary to power the facility, and Oracle may seek to delay lease payments as a result. The report does not name the site or its size.

Hyperscalers are racing to build data centers while facing mounting public opposition and pushback on power plans; if one element in the patchwork of loans, insurance policies and milestone-triggered payments falls out of place, financial backers and insurers can take losses.

Akamai has signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion agreement to supply computing capacity to Anthropic, and its shares jumped more than 20% in after-hours trading.

Per Akamai's announcement and SiliconANGLE's report, the deal is built around CPU workloads, served from Akamai Cloud's distributed network of thousands of points of presence. Anthropic can add up to $9 billion in further commitments, for a potential total of about $20 billion. Akamai also issued a warrant convertible into up to about 5% of its common shares at an exercise price of $111.33, with roughly 2% vesting on today's commitment.

To secure supply chain components including memory, Akamai is raising its 2026 capital expenditures by about $1.7 billion, with total capex tied to the deal estimated at about $5.5 billion. The company said the deal will not change its 2026 revenue guidance.

In May, Akamai disclosed a $1.8 billion, seven-year commitment from an unnamed frontier model company; Bloomberg reported the next day, citing a person with direct knowledge, that the customer was Anthropic. The cloud infrastructure services business posted $99 million in second-quarter revenue, up 39% year over year. Anthropic also signed a 20-year lease this year for about 401 megawatts at a TeraWulf data center campus.

Microsoft has merged its consumer and enterprise Copilot products into a single client, and the September 25 update adds coding and agent tabs.

For years Microsoft's Copilot lineup was fragmented: consumer and enterprise tools shared one name while differing sharply in interface and features. The unified app began rolling out on mobile last month and now has three tabs, Home, Code and Autopilot; work accounts can reach company data stored in Outlook, SharePoint and other Microsoft-hosted systems through the Work IQ APIs.

Microsoft says Code runs on the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, with generated apps executing in a sandbox inside the enterprise tenant; Anthropic's Claude Code runs locally. Autopilot, previously called Scout, is an autonomous agent with its own memory and accounts, managed by IT with permissions and an audit trail. ZDNet senior contributing editor Ed Bott notes he has had no hands-on experience with the new apps.

Price is the biggest unknown: Microsoft says only that it is evolving Copilot pricing, with usage-based billing for key features, and has given no numbers.

The U.S. current-account deficit widened 15.7% in the second quarter to $246.0 billion, rising from 2.7% to 3.0% of GDP.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the figures on September 24. The deficit grew by $33.4 billion from the quarter before, driven mainly by a wider goods deficit; imports and income payments rose $92.2 billion, outpacing the $58.8 billion increase in exports and income receipts. The first-quarter deficit was revised up to $212.6 billion.

On the liability side, the U.S. net international investment position fell to negative $22.42 trillion, down about $1.15 trillion from negative $21.27 trillion at the end of the first quarter. The agency notes the asset and liability changes were driven mostly by price revaluation; net financial-account transactions were negative $369.7 billion, meaning the U.S. borrowed net from foreign residents during the quarter.

The next release is due December 18, when the second-quarter figures will be revised.

Carnegie China, a think tank, released a study this week saying China employed 41 per cent of the world’s leading AI researchers last year, ahead of the United States at 34 per cent.

The same study’s comparison: in 2022 the US still led decisively at 46 per cent to China’s 27 per cent, a reversal within three years. The report attributes the shift to a booming domestic AI industry and tighter US visa restrictions.

The study is titled “Who’s ahead in the global AI talent race”. The shares rest on the think tank’s own tracked sample of researchers; the report does not state the sample scope or methodology, so read the figures with that caveat.

The Hunan Jinfurong Dachen Future Industries Fund, with a total size of 10 billion yuan, has been formally launched and settled in Hunan's Xiangjiang New Area, with a first tranche of 3 billion yuan.

According to Zhidx's on-site report from the Yuelu Conference held September 23-24, the fund focuses on four directions: artificial intelligence, life engineering, quantum technology and advanced materials, combining government guidance capital with a market-based venture firm.

A separate Hunan AI sub-fund completed filing this September, with a target of 1 billion yuan and a first close of 700 million yuan. The deployment pace and project selection criteria of the new fund have not been disclosed.

According to The Information, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are closer to setting up an independent body to develop safety standards for frontier AI, tentatively called the Standards Authority for Frontier AI (SAFA).

The report says the body would operate independently and address gaps in government oversight. The companies have also discussed an arrangement to test each other's commercially available AI models for vulnerabilities and unexpected behaviour, while restricting retention of data obtained during those evaluations.

No company has officially confirmed the plan, and the name is tentative. The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei addressed the UN Security Council on AI safety: Altman said major AI decisions should be shaped through democratic institutions and governments, while Amodei called for international agreements on testing new models.

US Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on September 23, which would permanently ban the development and use of artificial superintelligence.

The bill would also immediately freeze development of advanced AI systems until a new cabinet-level AI agency sets safety rules. Companies that violate it could face forced dissolution; individuals up to 20 years in prison.

It is only a proposed bill, not yet in committee, and far from becoming law; the thing to track is whether it gains cosponsors and a hearing.

Meta's macOS personal agent Muse was found to have a zero-day flaw allowing full account takeover, and Meta shipped a hotfix after the disclosure.

The finder is macOS security researcher Patrick Wardle, founder of the Objective-See Foundation, who named the flaw "Not-a-Mused." The problem sits in voice input: Muse sends voice data to the cloud, and a hidden configuration item could be repointed by a script running with user privileges to an attacker's server, capturing voice commands and the auth token — then using Muse's existing permissions to read mail, calendar and other connected apps.

David Singleton of Meta Superintelligence Labs confirmed the company pushed a hotfix removing the debug voice configuration item. Per IT之家's report, Wardle demonstrated the attack needs only a social-engineered terminal command, no sophisticated malware.

Clare Schramm, Managing Director of Transaction Banking Technology Platforms at Lloyds Banking Group, told diginomica that the bank is trialing agents in its payment journeys, but the use cases are small and always supervised by humans.

The pattern: generative AI reasons and problem-solves, then hands off to a deterministic workflow for execution — for example, proactively correcting address errors in payments before they go through, freeing staff for higher-value work. In foreign exchange, AI predicts favorable rates for customers; Schramm says there has been real bottom-line impact, without giving numbers.

She stressed that AI at the bank is "still very much in research and development mode" and that customer trust demands heavy guardrails. The bank uses Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic's Claude Code and Google Gemini. She also advocates open standards for agentic payments, convened through the open source community; without a common protocol, she says, the whole agentic promise collapses.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, announced that he has not hand-written a single line of code since around March 2026.

According to The Decoder, he told the Rails World 2026 keynote audience that "English is a better programming language than Ruby." He argued manual coding no longer makes economic sense for most programmers and companies, and that by year's end that will apply to practically every domain.

The reversal is striking: just over a year ago he was openly pushing back against AI coding. He called it "the biggest thing that has happened in the history of computing," said programmers will become "professional makers of things," and argued traditional software abstractions lose value when AI agents are the ones changing code.

Simon Willison says the more he works with coding agents, the more convinced he is that they make software engineering harder.

Willison is a prominent developer who has long tested and written about LLM tools. In a two-sentence note on his weblog on 24 September, he wrote that these tools can do amazing things, but unlocking their full potential requires "extraordinary discipline and knowledge."

The note offers no argument or data beyond the personal judgment. It runs counter to recent public declarations by other developers of going all-in on AI coding, and reads best as a counterpoint.