Introduction
September 2025
Major events
September was the month AI’s costs and consequences came due in court, in law and in the data center. Anthropic agreed to settle authors’ claims over pirated books for at least $1.5 billion, and Warner Bros. Discovery sued Midjourney. California passed SB 53, a disclosure law for frontier developers, and the Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry into companion chatbots. Protesters went on hunger strike outside Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
The infrastructure plans grew larger still. Nvidia and OpenAI outlined a partnership for at least 10 gigawatts of computing, Stargate named five more US sites, OpenAI was reported to be building its own chip with Broadcom, and Nvidia and Intel agreed to design products together. Federal agencies, already offered OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s tools in August, gained access to Meta’s Llama through the GSA.
Patterns and trends
Research had a strong month. DeepSeek’s R1 work appeared in Nature with details of its training; OpenAI researchers examined why models guess rather than admit uncertainty; a model called Delphi forecast the risk of more than 1,000 diseases; and Gemini reached gold-medal level at an international programming contest. Products moved into everyday tools: Gemini in Chrome for all US desktop users, generated video and sound into YouTube Shorts, and a display into Meta’s glasses. Sam Altman, asked how much of the economy AI could take on, was reported to put it at 30 to 40 percent of tasks.
Long-term threads
SB 53, passed here, was signed on September 29, the first day of the October chapter. The Nvidia–OpenAI letter of intent opened a run of computing agreements: AMD and Broadcom in October, AWS in November. OpenAI’s reported chip with Broadcom became a 10-gigawatt deployment plan in October. Gemini’s wider rollout in Chrome anticipated the browser contest of October, when Perplexity made Comet free and OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas. The FTC inquiry was followed by OpenAI’s Teen Safety Blueprint in November, and work on how models report on themselves continued in November with Anthropic’s introspection experiments and OpenAI’s sparse-circuit research.