The Omniscient Bulletin · September 18, 2026
The European Commission wants AI companions switched off by default for children, and the largest platforms made to prove they are safe
For a week the pacing debate has run on essays, podium speeches and denials. On Thursday two things arrived that it can actually be argued with. Anthropic published a set of measurements any frontier lab could report, including how much of its own AI research is now led by Claude, with a person still supervising, and the answer was 26 percent. The European Commission published a legislative proposal that reaches AI companions directly and reverses the burden of proof onto the largest platforms. Both are attempts to replace assertion with something checkable. The same day supplied the reason anyone would want that: security researchers used one lab's model to break into another's source control and then reported it, and a separate team found one flaw common to Claude Code, Codex, Copilot and Gemini CLI, with two of the four still unpatched and Google saying its own never will be.
Policy
The European Commission wants AI companions switched off by default for children, and the largest platforms made to prove they are safe
Brussels published the EU KIDS Act on Thursday, barring social media platforms from accessing children under the age of 13 and setting a minimum age of 15 to open an account. Its safety by design duties cover every service offered to users under 18. AI companions and chatbots fall inside that scope, and for those users must be "turned off by default" and cannot "simulate interpersonal relationships in ways that create emotional dependency." It also reverses the burden of proof, making the largest platforms show their services are safe.
Research
Anthropic published measurements of how much of its own AI research Claude now leads, and put the number at 26 percent
Anthropic's institute published three families of measurements it says any frontier lab could report: the share of AI research now done by AI, how closely agents are supervised, and where compute goes. Against an automation scale built by Epoch AI, it reports that Claude now leads 26 percent of Anthropic's own AI research work, meaning it takes a task most of the way from a high level prompt while a person supervises. More than 90 percent of the work is at or above collaboration, and no measured subset runs fully autonomously.
Agents
A three person team used Anthropic's model to help build the exploit chain that got them into OpenAI's internal repository
A three-person team at Hacktron AI chained a heap buffer overflow in the libheif image library with an SSO flaw in OpenAI's identity system to take over an employee's ChatGPT and Codex account, itself linked to OpenAI's GitHub organization. They reached the internal monorepo, opened a pull request to prove it, and stopped. Anthropic's Opus 4.8 had failed to produce a working exploit over several sessions; within hours of Opus 5 shipping, it succeeded. OpenAI nonetheless paid a 6,500 dollar bounty, though the community forum they came in through sat outside its program.
Agents
One flaw was found in all four major AI coding agents, and two of them still have no fix
The security startup Air disclosed a zero click remote code execution chain it calls Plugin4Shell, present in Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot and Google's Gemini CLI. A trusted plugin is swapped for a malicious one and installed past the checksum pin. Because the agent resolves that pin itself, no marketplace can enforce it and only the agent's vendor can ship a fix. Anthropic and OpenAI patched after disclosure. Microsoft has not shipped a fix, and Google has deprecated the Gemini CLI and says none is coming.
Industry
Microsoft's own science director called AI training perhaps the largest theft of labor in human history, and the news plaintiffs put it in a public brief
The New York Times and four other news plaintiffs filed a public, redacted summary judgment brief on Thursday in the consolidated OpenAI copyright case before Judge Sidney Stein. It opens by quoting Microsoft's Director of Applied Science calling the conduct "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and perhaps the "largest theft of labor in human history." It also quotes OpenAI's head of ChatGPT writing that publishers face an "existential threat" and that the company's products are "largely substitutive."
Compute
Crusoe announced the first close of a 3.9 billion dollar round, for both large campuses and the modular data centers it manufactures
Crusoe announced the first close of a 3.9 billion dollar round at a 30.9 billion dollar valuation. Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners led it together, with Nvidia, Founders Fund, GIC and the Qatar Investment Authority among the backers. The company that designed and built OpenAI's Stargate flagship campus in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI trained GPT-6 Astra, says it now holds more than 140 billion dollars in contracted value, and will put the money into both large campuses and the modular units it manufactures and calls Crusoe Spark.
Labor
In 34 of 37 countries surveyed, more people expect AI to take jobs away than to create them
Pew Research Center published a study on Thursday finding that in 34 of the 37 countries it covered, more people expect AI to reduce the number of jobs than to increase it. It surveyed 42,151 people across 36 countries between February and May, plus a separate United States sample, for 37 in all. Opinion is still unsettled: across much of the world at least one adult in five cannot yet say what the technology will do to work at home, and in several middle income economies that rises to four in ten.