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Daily · 2026-09-14 00:00 UTC

GPT-6 Astra runs a vending machine; Altman and Musk back an AI slowdown — 2026-09-14 00:00

GPT-6 Astra tops two long-horizon agent benchmarks, Altman and Musk back Amodei's slowdown call as Trump dismisses it, Ellison cancels a $7.5B Oracle stock sale, and ElevenLabs ships Music v2.5.

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Ten stories from the last 24 hours. The through-line: the AI industry is arguing with itself about speed, while the models keep getting better at doing actual work.

1. GPT-6 Astra beats every frontier model on two long-horizon agent benchmarks — Andon Labs tested OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on Vending-Bench, where each model gets $500 and has to run a simulated vending machine business for a year — finding suppliers, negotiating prices, ordering stock and setting retail prices. Across six runs Astra averaged $15,515; Claude Fable 5.1 averaged $5,422, and Fable's best run at $9,874 fell short of Astra's worst. On Drone-Bench, Andon Labs says Astra is the first model whose best attempts beat the human-AI baseline across all five subtasks, though its success rate remains unreliable. The Decoder · Sep 13
2. ElevenLabs releases Music v2.5 for its AI music generator — In a blind test with 47,885 comparison pairs, listeners preferred v2.5 most of the time, especially for R&B, soul, hip-hop, rock and orchestral music. The free tier includes five lossless downloads per day and Pro gets 400 per month; users keep the rights to their tracks, though the free tier requires attribution. The company says it trained its Music models on "licensed stems and music", and that a recent Universal Music licensing deal applies only to future products. The Decoder · Sep 13
3. Altman and Musk back Amodei's call to slow AI development — Trump dismisses it — Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the Anthropic chief's appeal to "slow the pace" of AI development. Musk replied to Amodei's slowdown plan with a series of posts on X: "Dario is right." Amodei also called for safety coordination with China. President Trump, speaking on a visit to his golf course in Ireland, played down the warnings as "things that won't happen" and said: "Whoever wins AI, wins." The Guardian · Sep 13
4. 'Too little, too late': critics are skeptical of the slowdown pitch — The plans to boost safety have drawn a largely negative response, from the Trump administration to AI experts. The Guardian notes the debate was seeded days earlier by Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned warning that the people building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade", and by Amodei's own claim that an AI agent swarm could otherwise become capable of "taking over the entire internet" within a year — a claim some experts disputed as implausible. The Guardian · Sep 13
5. Obama urges Democrats to have a 'clear plan' for AI safeguards — Former President Barack Obama said Democrats need to make artificial intelligence one of their "central agendas" and "have a very clear plan" to address concerns about the technology's economic impact and safety, according to The New York Times. He made the comments at a Democratic fundraising event where he was interviewed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries; Obama's office provided a partial transcript. TechCrunch · Sep 13
6. Larry Ellison cancels a $7.5 billion sale of Oracle stock — Oracle announced that its co-founder and executive chairman canceled a planned sale of 50 million shares worth around $7.5 billion, which the company had previously disclosed in a regulatory filing. Oracle did not give a reason for the change, saying: "No Oracle stock was sold under that plan, and he has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock." Oracle stock is down 22% since the beginning of the year. TechCrunch · Sep 13
7. Apple is reportedly working on iPhone game controllers — Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple is developing two game controllers for the iPhone and will likely sell them under the Beats brand, with Beats executives leading the effort. Last week MacRumors reported finding references in macOS 26.7's code to two controllers identified as first-party devices; Gurman says that despite being found in macOS, the controllers are designed for iPhones. The Verge · Sep 13
8. A Waymo pulled over and called the cops on riders with a ghost gun — Two juveniles in San Francisco were arrested while riding in a Waymo robotaxi after the vehicle pulled over and alerted authorities; they were in possession of a loaded AR-style ghost gun and were taken to juvenile hall. Waymo confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that it was one of its vehicles, and a spokesperson said a "violation of our terms of service involving a firearm" had been detected. The Verge · Sep 13
9. Security through obscurity is dead, and AI delivered the fatal blow — Software vendors and independent researchers are using AI agents to find bugs — some decades old — across products and open source code, producing record numbers of security disclosures and patches, and a massive backlog for maintainers. Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, told The Register that the latest models were able to break libraries relied on by most of the web. The Register · Sep 13
10. Supio pitches long-horizon agents as a new operating model for law firms — SiliconANGLE argues the next phase of legal AI won't be defined by a better chatbot but by whether AI systems can take responsibility for real work that unfolds over days or weeks, spans multiple systems and returns control to an attorney when human judgment matters. Supio describes its broader platform as a "Firm OS" — a system of action, not just another system of record. SiliconANGLE · Sep 13

🧪 Try This Next

• 🔧 Read Andon Labs' Vending-Bench results — long-horizon agent performance is where the hype meets the ledger
• 🎥 Listen to ElevenLabs Music v2.5 on a genre you care about — 47,885 blind comparisons is a rare, honest test
• 📝 Save The Register's security-through-obscurity piece — AI-driven bug hunting is about to flood every maintainer's queue

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