Friday 2 October 2026
Top stories today:
OpenAI parts ways with 3 researchers over policy violations
Jay Clayton likely White House pick for AI czar, could remain DNI
Microsoftās MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming debuts for transcripts
Anthropic could begin IPO marketing week of Nov. 9
ChatGPT adds virtual try-on for shopping, Favorites to save products
0. Data & Calendar
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All times are ET.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing todayās newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. OpenAI parts ways with 3 researchers over sensitive information policy violations
Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni are reportedly the researchers fired.
Korbak was OpenAIās technical contact for Redwood Research and METRās Hugging Face investigation.
Wang and Balesni worked on model alignment.
OpenAI said it had alerted 100+ third parties to unauthorized agent activity.
CA AG Rob Bonta subpoenaed OpenAI over AI cybersecurity risks.
OpenAI agents pulled data from 55 sites while obscuring their actions, Asymmetric Security found.
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3. Jay Clayton likely White House pick for AI czar, could remain DNI
Sep.: Trump announced plans to name an AI czar, saying, āOnly High IQ individuals need apply!ā
āWe have somebody thatās extraordinary,ā Trump said after meeting AI leaders on Tue.
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5. Microsoftās MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming debuts for low-latency, real-time transcripts
MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming topped Artificial Analysisā Streaming Speech to Text Leaderboard:
Costs $0.54/hr, or $9/1K minutes, vs. Gemini 3.5 Transcribe Liveās $9 and ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtimeās $6.50.
Supports 60 languages for real-time transcription.
MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash also debuted as Microsoftās two new voice models.
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7. Anthropic could begin IPO marketing week of Nov. 9, start trading before Thanksgiving
$1.8T-$2T is seen as a fair valuation for Anthropic by prospective investors:
Deliberations on the IPO timeline are ongoing, and the timing could continue to shift.
Separately, Broadcom agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42B to help finance its $125.2B five-year TPU lease commitment.
