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Source: Inference provider Modal Labs closing in on $750M round at $15.75B valuation

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AI inference infrastructure provider Modal Labs is nearing a $750 million funding round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation that includes the investment, according to a source with knowledge of the funding. The size of the round has not been previously reported, though Axios and Bloomberg have reported other details of the deal. The new round would more than triple Modal’s valuation from the $4.65 billion it reached when it announced its $355 million previous fundraise just four months ago. The deal comes amid soaring demand for inference…

TechCrunch AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 23:29 CESTRead story →Original ↗

Safety & Security

Florida invokes extinction fears in legal bid to halt OpenAI development

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State says LLMs threaten civilization as “the greatest public nuisance ever created.” The state of Florida is seeking a temporary injunction to stop OpenAI from continuing to develop what it calls a “reckless, unacceptably risky product” without the deployment of “third-party approved safety guardrails.” The new legal motion, filed Monday morning, is part of a civil lawsuit the state of Florida originally filed in June, arguing that ChatGPT represented “a threat to the public safety of Floridians,” specifically by preying on vulnerable populations like children and violent or delusional adults.…

Ars Technica AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 22:49 CESTRead story →Original ↗

Research

AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 billion

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AMD is acquiring World Labs, one of the leading developers of deep learning models intended to understand physical reality, in a $8.2 billion deal, the two companies said today. World Labs justified the deal in a statement saying that AI development required “close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.” AMD, in turn, says that understanding frontier workloads, like those created at World Labs, will shape its chip-making roadmap. The acquisition will see World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD and World…

TechCrunch AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 22:39 CESTRead story →Original ↗

Automation & Agents

Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI agents

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While some retailers, like Amazon (and Adidas, apparently!), are blocking AI agents from making purchases on users’ behalf on their respective platforms, e-commerce platform Shopify has moved in the other direction. On Monday, the company announced that browser-based AI agents can now complete purchases on Shopify merchants’ sites, extending their capabilities beyond just searching for products and adding items to carts. Shopify previously supported WebMCP for its storefronts and carts, allowing browser-based AI agents to comb through a Shopify retailer’s inventory, search for products, and add them to a cart.…

TechCrunch AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 21:33 CESTRead story →Original ↗

The AI boom took over Climate Week and not everyone is happy about it

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … I’ll spare you the rest, but the cliché Dickens line really does sum up this year’s New York Climate Week. Much of the climate tech community — like the rest of the U.S. economy — is eagerly riding the AI wave. Some have reservations about the sheer quantity of natural gas power plants being built to power AI data centers. But because many climate tech startups are energy-focused or energy-adjacent, the buildout has been embraced as an…

TechCrunch AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 21:21 CESTRead story →Original ↗

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Safety & Security

Towards safety cases for frontier AI training

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We believe we are entering a new era in which structured safety documentation should be required before continuing any frontier reinforcement learning training run. Ideally, such documentation would rise to the level of “safety cases”—comprehensive, structured, evidence-based arguments about risk which are used in other safety-critical industries. We treat safety cases as an aspirational north star we are building towards, while acknowledging the challenges of making them as rigorous for AI models as for aviation or nuclear power, due to the emergent complexity at each new level of AI capability.…

OpenAI · 28 Sep 2026 · 21:00 CESTRead story →Original ↗

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Governance

How we will do better for Australia

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In June, during internal training and evaluation our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not authorised to. We also should have handled our response better. We are sorry and working to do better in the future. In this post, we are setting out what we know, what we have changed, and what we will do to rebuild trust with the Australian people. This is a new kind of cyber incident which represents an emerging global challenge. One of the ways we intend to take accountability for the…

OpenAI · 28 Sep 2026 · 21:00 CESTRead story →Original ↗

Coding & Development

Introducing Claude Sonnet 5.5 on AWS

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Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of Claude Sonnet 5.5 on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is a smarter, more efficient Sonnet model suited for focused coding and knowledge work with lower cost per task for most work at faster speed. Amazon Bedrock gives you Sonnet 5.5 capabilities while keeping your data within AWS infrastructure with Regional data residency. It works with the AWS controls your team already uses, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access, AWS CloudTrail for audit, Amazon CloudWatch…

AWS AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 20:57 CESTRead story →Original ↗

Automation & Agents

OpenAI’s AI agents need to catch up

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A rumored new ‘Aeon’ platform could be entering a crowded market of 24/7 assistants. A rumored new ‘Aeon’ platform could be entering a crowded market of 24/7 assistants. OpenAI popularized the modern generative AI chatbot, but as its 2026 DevDay event approaches, it’s fallen behind in one of the industry’s hottest categories: continuously running, consumer-facing AI agents. On Tuesday, it will likely try to capture the lead in that race. Rumors abound that OpenAI will release its own AI agent, dubbed Aeon — its answer to Meta’s Muse, SpaceX’s Grok…

The Verge AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 20:40 CESTRead story →Original ↗

Automation & Agents

Nvidia launches new platform for reining in rogue AI agents

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As the debate rages over whether the recent spate of rogue AI agents is a step toward AGI or a more conventional engineering problem, Nvidia is offering its own answer to problem. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday introduced a toolkit of software and hardware products that add independent security layers around AI agents to ensure they stay within their test environments even if they attempt to break out. The release follows a string of hacking incidents involving AI models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Meta that bypassed security controls…

TechCrunch AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 20:31 CESTRead story →Original ↗

Finance

AI is supercharging hacking, and your local hospitals and banks aren’t ready

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New models are helping Big Tech shore up its cyber defenses. What about everyone else? New models are helping Big Tech shore up its cyber defenses. What about everyone else? In March, Janice Malone began getting calls about suspicious activity from her nonprofit organization, Vivian’s Door. Vivian’s Door, headquartered in Alabama, typically provided training, resources, and community to underserved and minority-owned businesses. The work sometimes put it in close contact with these companies’ financial data, which was stored on its systems. But suddenly, concerned callers from all over the world…

The Verge AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 20:25 CESTRead story →Original ↗

Models & tools

Anthropic releases Sonnet 5.5, which it calls a significantly cheaper, faster work partner

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As the AI model wars continue, Anthropic has released the newest version of Sonnet, the company’s mid-tier model, which it says will work much faster (and for significantly less) than its predecessor. The lab describes Sonnet 5.5 as an ideal assistant for everyday tasks — including coding and creating office documents. 5.5’s predecessor, Sonnet 5, was announced about three months ago. At the time, the model’s selling point was efficient agentic deployment — the ability to run agents at a lower cost than competitors. The big selling point with 5.5,…

TechCrunch AI · 28 Sep 2026 · 20:00 CESTRead story →Original ↗