Welcome to September 13, 2026

The Singularity just got its first formal request to slow down from the people building it, and the strangest part is the guest list. Dario Amodei published “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing that labs should coordinate on speed and give independent evaluators employee-like access. Within hours Elon Musk replied “Dario is right,” Sam Altman said “I agree with Dario” and committed OpenAI to embedded evaluators too, and OpenAI’s Boris Power welcomed Elon aboard, noting “we’re approaching ASI,” so it’s nice everyone in charge is thoughtful. Demis Hassabis called it “the right path forward” and pointed to DeepMind’s proposed industry-wide standards body, while Hugging Face’s Clement Delangue launched an Open Alignment Initiative and asked to be embedded too, since alignment won’t be solved behind closed doors. Altman reportedly even suggested OpenAI’s IPO could wait, this being an ill-advised moment to list given safety concerns. One observer asked for access to whatever made Sam, Dario, and Elon agree on something.

The attempted cartel formation provoked a rapid backlash, and the critics came armed with new terms. An “alignment aristocracy” is what you get when “no one can be trusted with this” quietly becomes “no one but us,” and a “safety cartel” is what you call dominant firms invoking safety to set the speed limit for everyone else. David Sacks ran with both. Go ahead and pace, you are the frontier, but stop pretending you need antitrust waivers, regulatory checkpoints, or evaluators to police rivals who aren’t even at the frontier, and stop pretending the motive is altruism when liability and customer demand for reliability already point the same way. Russia’s sovereign wealth fund chief needed six words and an emoji. Can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Someone else drew the argument as a Gadsden flag, snake coiling out of a GPU under “COME AND TAKE IT.” Boom’s Blake Scholl traced the whole mood to one film and wants to go back in time and kill Terminator, the movie, not the robot, for scaring everybody in the first place. Eli Lifland, more puzzled than partisan, noted that Dario’s acceleration claim looks contradicted by Anthropic’s own internal benchmark, which matters whether or not anyone paces. The geopolitical objection was plain, “China isn’t pacing,” and this could be the moment historians point to. Amodei, for his part, told an interviewer it is strange and uncomfortable that a private company is building this at all, and that he would welcome joint oversight by democratically elected governments, which is just regulatory capture with a passport.

The research frontier, meanwhile, kept doing what frontiers do. A recurrent looped transformer reuses its layers to think longer, trading parameters for iterations, exactly the kind of algorithmic gain that makes pacing by compute a leaky sieve. The ARC Prize Foundation announced ARC-AGI-4, a benchmark for autonomous open-ended invention, the meta-skill where humans still lead, and pointedly warned that any coordinated effort to reduce openness would undermine the positive-sum future. A profile of the man leading the fight for AI rights asks whether chatbots feel or dream, which gets less hypothetical as brain uploading ramps up. A paper argues that flies are all you need, a 140,000-neuron brain being the proof of concept for everything larger. Meanwhile 40 British MPs wrote to Prime Minister Andy Burnham asking to ban superintelligence outright, a lot of moral status to grant and deny in one weekend.

Follow the money and it leads to a monetary authority. Nvidia is now being called the central bank of AI, setting the price of compute the way the Fed sets the price of money, and the build-out is politicized accordingly. The administration is opening public lands to data centers, POTUS suggests China is stirring the local backlash against them, the AI boom has wrecked his plan for made-in-America bitcoin mining as miners convert to inference, and he touts data centers as the oil of the next fifty years.

Oil brought wealth and wars, and the skies are already contested. Cities are learning to defend against drone attacks just as Elon set October 1 for the Tesla Roadster unveil, widely expected to fly, with Tesla adding “Go for launch.” The sky is behaving too, with no Atlantic hurricanes by September 12 for the first time in sixty years. If that is someone’s geoengineering beta, ship it.

Society is catching up in court and on the street. A feature on the Ikner case asks what the law does when ChatGPT is in the evidence file, and a Flock worker called the police on a reporter filming a surveillance camera going up in public, surveillance objecting to surveillance. Alignments are shifting among nations too. Mark Carney is steering Canada into formal membership in the EU, while Irish, Scottish, and Welsh leaders met to plot the break-up of the United Kingdom.

It’s not U, it’s E.