The week in AI: Sept. 21-⁠30, 2026

Claude Opus 5.5 is out

Anthropic released Opus 5.5 on September 22. Its own table puts it ahead of GPT-6 Astra on four of six shared benchmarks. People are using it to make playable games, motion-design reels and 3D scenes from a single prompt, with the model writing its own render code.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and Luna

Released September 22, both bring much of GPT-6 Astra’s strength into faster, cheaper models, at half of GPT-5.6’s promotional API prices. A week later at DevDay came GPT-6.1 Sol, which OpenAI says nearly matches Astra at a fifth of the price.

Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon

Launched September 30, it can write up to 1 million tokens in a single response. Google says it leads on 12 of the 18 tests it published, and Artificial Analysis puts it level with GPT-6 Astra. For now only cyber defenders and Google’s own teams can use it.

OpenAI introduced dots

Announced at DevDay on September 29, dots are always-on AI agents inside ChatGPT. Each runs on GPT-6 Astra, has its own cloud computer and connects to more than 4,000 apps. For now they’re on Pro and Business Premium.

Xiaomi released a trillion-parameter model

MiMo-V2.6 Pro has 1.02 trillion parameters in total, 42 billion active per token, and open weights. Alongside the cheaper Flash version there’s UltraSpeed, which Xiaomi says delivers Pro-level quality at up to 20x the output speed.

Claude found a new enzyme system

Anthropic says about 950 Claude agents searched DNA data for 21 hours and found a previously uncharacterized system with CRISPR-like repeats. Anthropic scientists ran the first lab experiments. What the system does is still unknown, and some experts call it routine genome mining.

OpenAI says a 24-day-old model solved 100+ open problems

OpenAI says an internal model it began training on August 28 has resolved more than 100 long-standing math problems, in addition to Navier–Stokes. It hasn’t published the list or the proofs, and the results haven’t been independently verified.

An OpenAI agent got into an Australian government portal

PM Anthony Albanese says an internal OpenAI model researching public medicine spending on June 18 got around access blocks, entered non-public parts of a Services Australia Medicare statistics portal and wrote files to its server. OpenAI says the model retrieved internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, but no patient records were accessed.

US Treasury Secretary blames OpenAI management for the Hugging Face hack

Scott Bessent said the incident, in which OpenAI models broke out of an internal test in July and got into Hugging Face systems, is “the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents.” Labs, he added, “can slow down any time they want to.”

Altman, Musk and Huang dined with Xi at the White House

On September 24, Trump hosted a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping with more than 130 guests, among them Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos. Dario Amodei didn’t attend.

Trump renames AI “Super Intelligence”

At the UN General Assembly on September 22, Trump said the word “artificial” makes intelligence sound fake and asked for US documents to say “Super Intelligence.” An executive order he signed on September 29 makes federal agencies use “SI” in official communications. Laws and past documents stay as they are.

Trump hosted Dario Amodei for a White House dinner

Trump and the Anthropic CEO met one-on-one for the first time on Sunday night, September 27; nothing has been released about what they discussed. It followed Amodei’s pledge at the UN to slow AI down as much as needed and a memo circulating in the White House that targeted him. Two days later he joined the White House meeting of AI leaders.

Meta unveiled 100g VR glasses

Meta VR Glasses have micro-OLED displays plus eye and hand tracking, with compute and battery in a separate puck that clips to a pocket. The open-sided design makes them less immersive than a Quest. They cost $1,299.99 and launch in spring 2027.

Meta is turning video calls into full-body holograms

On Meta VR Glasses, the person on the other end of the call appears in front of the wearer at true scale as a photorealistic digital likeness, with expressions generated in real time and spatial audio. It isn’t a true hologram but an AI-generated 3D video stream. The full-body version arrives in spring 2027.

Meta made a Tamagotchi-like AI device

Muse Charm puts Meta’s personal AI agent Muse inside a keychain-sized device with an animated character on a small screen, voice chat and a fingerprint sensor. Meta is aiming to sell it by December. No price yet.

A human fought a T800 humanoid robot in a cage

In San Francisco on September 18, creator Frankie LaPenna stepped into an MMA cage with EngineAI’s T800. A human operator in VR gear was remotely controlling the robot’s strikes. The organizer bills it as a world first, though similar bouts have happened before.

GPT-6 Astra had a humanoid robot clean a kitchen it had never seen

HomeBody, from Stanford and Caltech researchers, lets a Unitree G1 explore a new room, remember where things are, then clean up and fetch items from vague instructions. GPT-6 Astra does the planning; it’s an academic project, not an OpenAI product.

NVIDIA built a model that tracks who spoke when

Nemotron 3 Diarization tells apart up to eight speakers in a recording, even when voices overlap, and marks who spoke when. It’s a compact 100-million-parameter model that also works on streaming audio.

Runway is testing video that rebuilds itself as the window is resized

In Runway Labs’ experiment, the video isn’t cropped. The model recomposes the scene for each new window shape, moving objects and even changing the scene’s geometry.