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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.

Research firm Counterpoint forecasts that annual global shipments of smartphones priced under $200 will fall by more than 230 million units between 2025 and 2030, a drop of about 40%.

The report attributes the shift to rising memory and chipset prices, a higher minimum specification floor, and vendors pulling back from non-strategic markets. Counterpoint notes the lost volume will not simply migrate to higher price tiers: some consumers will delay upgrades, and some demand will disappear entirely.

The overall market is expected to recover to roughly 1.2 billion units by 2030, with premium phones growing about 7% a year. In low- and middle-income countries, phone price is a main barrier to internet adoption, so the entry-tier shrinkage will slow the move from feature phones to smartphones.

Microsoft's 2026 Surface PCs no longer carry the Copilot+ PC label, according to an IT Home report citing Windows Central's September 24 post.

Copilot+ PC is the Windows hardware category Microsoft created with Qualcomm in 2024, setting a baseline for AI-first devices with a dedicated Copilot key. After the core Recall feature was delayed over security concerns, the brand's reputation suffered, and over the past two years a growing number of OEMs have dropped the label from marketing and product names.

Microsoft Surface vice president Brett Ostrum confirmed the new devices still meet all the original hardware standards despite the dropped name; Qualcomm computing chief Kedar Kondap said the term may simply no longer be used.

At the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm executive Chris Lattner announced that Microsoft will partner with Modular to provide native Windows support for the Mojo programming language.

Mojo is a language for AI and high-performance computing, developed by Modular, with Python-like syntax aimed at systems-level performance; version 1.0 has been open-sourced. Qualcomm completed its all-stock acquisition of Modular on July 29 at a valuation of roughly $3.9–4.0 billion, aiming to let the same AI software run across GPUs, NPUs and data-center chips.

Qualcomm said the Modular software platform will enter its full Snapdragon portfolio, spanning phones, PCs, cars and wearables. These remain vendor statements from the keynote; no timeline for the adaptation work was given, and actual delivery needs to be tracked.

Google has added a Live Avatar feature to Gemini 3.8 Live voice conversations: while talking, users can watch a real-time animated persona that lip-syncs and changes facial expressions.

According to The Verge, the feature is currently available only to Gemini Enterprise customers. Google says the avatar can switch among the 97 languages it supports without degrading video fidelity, and organizations can build their own avatars. The demo videos are Google's own.

The launch comes about a week after the Gemini 3.8 Live model was revealed, and output carries an invisible SynthID watermark. There is no independent feedback yet on lip-sync or multilingual quality; enterprise adoption is the thing to watch.

Google has started testing a new feature called "Call for Me" that lets Gemini call businesses on a user's behalf. It is initially available to Pixel 11 owners in the U.S. who pay for a Gemini subscription, and requires the beta version of Google's Phone app for Android.

Unlike last year's "Ask for Me," which could only inquire about pricing or services, Gemini can now share personal information the user approves, letting it handle more complex tasks such as checking whether a product is in stock, making a restaurant reservation, rescheduling an appointment, or placing items on hold. Calls are dialed from the user's own number, and users can follow a live transcript and take over at any time.

Google says it is starting at a small scale because "real-world conversations are nuanced." Meta's Muse and similar agents already make calls on users' behalf, and how well this feature actually performs remains to be seen.