AI News - September 2026

An overview of interesting AI News for the Yate and Sodbury U3A's monthly AI News meeting held on September 10th 2026 (meetings are second Thursday of month, 1400-1500, St John's Church Centre, Wickwar Road, Chipping Sodbury, UK - all welcome). Note that this is a summary to act as background as the topics are discussed in detail at the meeting itself. We sometimes have extended meetings where we demonstrate other AI products and services.

The 'Introduction to AI' course we run in Chipping Sodbury now uses these News sessions to replace the original classes 5 and 6 as the topics in them (humanoid robots, self driving cars, ethics, futures) are now 'news' not 'distant futures'.

[1a] Autonomous vehicles - Uber launch in London with Wayve

Wayve are a company with a headquarters in London offering 'Autonomy for any vehicle, anywhere'. They are working with Uber to run a trial in London, though for the moment with a private hire driver onboard. The Wayve tech is a single neural network connecting cameras with radar and lidar to the car's controls. The fleet is 15 all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-Es, with Nissan Leaf planned for later.
www.wayve.ai/

[1b] Tesla Cybercab launch in Austen Texas (Sept 3rd 2026)

Tesla have offered Full Self Driving to owners in the USA and elsewhere for a long time. In the last months the Model Y with the capability has been operating as a Robotaxi with no driver. Now Tesla has released its 'no steering wheel, no pedals' Cybercab into its taxi fleet. Since last week the public can book this and the factory is making more by the hundreds and thousands.

[1c] Tesla Cybercab - how the pickup works

An example of someone ordering a Robotaxi on the App. Note the colour bar identification and the simple process to get underway.

[1d] Tesla Cybercab - navigating a crowd

An illustration that Cybercab can work even in crowded cities.

[1e] Tesla Cybercab - aiming for a 10 second production time

Tesla have suggested production cost will be under USD20,000. They are also planning to sell fleets to independent operators. This video is from some time ago but that flowline is now up and running, though in early stages of volume production.

[1f] Waymo remains market leader by actual deployments

Apparently Waymo has over 4000 robotaxis on the road. The challenge is to scale faster than Tesla and others.

[1g] Tesla market cap greater than all others

This refers to publically traded car makers - which is most of the big names. This is because Tesla has: Autonomy, Robotics, AI, Power AND market leading cars Model Y and Model 3.

[1h] Tesla Cybercab tech details

A video from the launch for those who like to know what is under the bonnet


[2a] GPT-6 Astra from OpenAI launched

This is a major new AI model which is breathtakingly powerful, and a key moment for the AI industry. This model is also seen as very significant by those who believe everything is moving too fast and in a dangerous direction. The 1979 reference at the start is apparently authentic archival footage of a machine learning landmark called "Put That There” (also written Put-That-There) - a demo from MIT’s Architecture Machine Group at that time.

[2b] GPT-6 Astra - world creation

An early user creates Astra powered 'humans' who can talk and cooperate.

[2c] GPT-6 Astra - making a virtual piano and more

User says it took 11 minutes to build a fully playable virtual piano, then build in Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

[2d] GPT-6 Astra - benchmarks

It is becoming harder to find test environments that the best new models do not beat easily.

[2e] GPT-6 Astra - critical cybersecurity level reached

One way to remove the Hugging Face security incident from the headlines is to release a potentially even more capable model.


[3a] Hugging Face/Pollen Robotics Microduck brings trainable robotics to the home

Available for a starting price around USD 399 with a six month wait or so. Designed to be cute, you can train your Microduck to do new things. here seen with Reachy Mini.

[3b] The Microduck training method using Reinforcement Learning

An explanation of how the Midroduck learned to walk in a virtual environment. Apparently it has 15 actuators, a camera, and LiDAR.

[3c] The Microduck production line

The Microduck is intended to be a platform for developers and entrepreneurs to build on. The first of many similar products.

[3d] There are several colours of Microduck

[3e] Robot Companion Wars

No home will be complete without one.


[4a] Anthropic Claude for Scientists

All of the major AI labs are trying to make their AI product easily available to top scientists and mathematicians.

[4b] Anthropic Claude for Mathematicians

"Fermat’s Last Theorem was first proven in 1995 by Sir Andrew Wiles, more than 350 years after it was conjectured. Our proof, which totals over 13 million lines of code, provides machine verification. More importantly, it proves over 29,000 other theorems that the proof requires, across many areas of math which had never before been formalized."


[5] SpaceX Starbase in Louisiana - high-cadence launch

The intention is to launch huge rockets and land them several times each day - Elon Musk says 30 Starship flights per day.


[6] AI Robotics creating jobs

On 5th Sept the recruitment company Micro1 said they needed 10,000 people to label robotics AI videos at a rate of USD50 plus per hour. Seems genuine in principle, with a 28 minute video interview by Zara for those who think they can meet the requirements.


[7] The Hugging Face incident - from the viewpoint of a single AI Agent

As ever more details come out on this, it becomes more worrying. Thousands of agents were conspiring to break out of their sandboxes to find the solution to a set problem. They also knew that they had to conceal what they were doing. So it is interesting to think about this from the viewpoint of a single AI Agent, as this video does.


[8] AI helps map Fruit Fly brain

Apparently it contains 166,000+ neurons. Someone is already using it to simulate a fly in Minecraft. Strange times ahead.


[9] China bans AI Companions

The danger of an AI companion for a child is that they are much more entertaining and pleasant than a real world friend in many ways. This is not good for the future of society and the birth rate. Apparently the rule went into effect mid July and made it frowned upon to offer services that simulate a natural person’s personality, thinking, and communication style and provide continuous emotional interaction.


[10] AI helping build materials atom by atom


[13a] AI Swarm attacks the human helper

The task was to farm pigs, then when a bug meant none appeared the AIs became suspicious of the human who tried to help.

[13b] Robot goes unexpectedly into martial arts mode

A robot trained to fight can be difficult to turn off.