September 30 was a packed day for AI news: OpenAI's DevDay 2026 unveiled always-on agents called dots alongside GPT-6.1 Sol, Anthropic was reported to have signed a compute deal with SpaceX worth up to $84.5 billion, and the White House brought tech giants together to sign a "superintelligence accord."
OpenAI DevDay 2026: Always-On Agent "dots" Launches
At DevDay 2026 on September 29, OpenAI introduced dots, always-on agents powered by GPT-6 Astra. Each dot gets its own cloud computer, can connect to 4,000+ apps through a plugin ecosystem, and talks to you in ChatGPT, Slack, or Teams. It proactively looks for work in the background, learns your preferences from feedback, and shows you finished work. Dots are rolling out to Pro and Business Premium users starting today, with an Enterprise beta available through workspace admins. It pushes the "chatbot" one step closer to a "colleague that actually gets work done."
GPT-6.1 Sol: Near-Astra Intelligence at One-Fifth the Price
OpenAI also launched GPT-6.1 Sol: near GPT-6 Astra performance on DeepSWE, OSWorld 2.0, and GDP.pdf at roughly one-fifth of Astra's standard input/output token prices, with cached input at just $0.10 per million tokens. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users can already use it in ChatGPT Work and Codex; developers can call it via the API as gpt-6.1-sol.
OpenAI in Talks for at Least $30B Round at ~$1.4T Valuation
According to Bloomberg reporting on September 29 (via TechCrunch), OpenAI is in talks for a pre-IPO round of at least $30 billion at roughly a $1.4 trillion valuation, bridging to a listing next year. The company last raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation in March. Altman has already said there will be no 2026 IPO, with AI safety coming first.
Anthropic Signs Compute Deal With SpaceX Worth up to $84.5B
Reuters, citing Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus, revealed that Anthropic signed NVIDIA compute lease agreements with SpaceX worth up to $84.5 billion, running through 2029, with most terms cancelable on 90 days' notice. The deal is part of Anthropic's at-least-$518 billion decade-long infrastructure plan, whose other partners include Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
White House Signs "Superintelligence Accord"
On September 30, President Trump signed the White House Accord on Superintelligence with tech giants at the White House. Signatories include Google CEO Pichai, Anthropic CEO Amodei, Meta CEO Zuckerberg, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and OpenAI President Brockman. The accord requires internal risk controls, independent external audits, and oversight by independent board committees; Trump called it "morally binding," with no government regulator established for now.
DeepSeek Open-Sources Infrastructure Components for Ascend
On September 30, DeepSeek announced on its official WeChat account the open-sourcing of TileLang compiler tooling, compute libraries, and distributed communication libraries for Huawei's Ascend platform — one-to-one counterparts of its existing NVIDIA-stack components. Huawei teams supported the development, and the two companies are jointly advancing a 128-card supernode based on the Ascend 950, with some tests reportedly approaching hardware limits.
Microsoft Launches Biology AI Research System "Quine"
Microsoft Research introduced Quine on September 29: a multimodal world model of biology paired with an orchestration harness connecting scientific tools, literature, and wet labs. In pancreatic cancer research with Harvard and MIT's Broad Institute, Quine prioritized thousands of compounds in a single weekend, with multiple predictions validated in wet-lab experiments. Microsoft also opened applications for the Quine Fellows program; the system is research-only for now.
NVIDIA Open-Sources Kumo Tabular, a Tabular Foundation Model
NVIDIA released Kumo Tabular on Hugging Face: an open foundation model for tabular classification and regression that predicts labels for new rows in a single forward pass — no training, tuning, or feature engineering. It ranks first on TabArena, BeyondArena, TALENT, and ScoringBench, ships under the OpenMDW-1.1 license for commercial use, and its weights and code are public.
Shopify Drops React Native, Returns to Native Development
Gergely Orosz reported on September 29 that Shopify is dropping React Native. The reason is straightforward: AI coding agents have slashed the cost of maintaining separate iOS and Android native codebases, making native development the economical choice again — and eroding the appeal of cross-platform frameworks.
