I never thought I’d read something like this in The Economist.

EXCLUSIVE footage. Unbelievable scene. Coaches that were planned for migrants to get on in Gosport being escorted from Hampshire by a larger motorcade than what the prime minister or king would get. This has to be seen to be believed. The money spent 🤯 This countries broken

Fantastic essay about Chinese AI labs: “If there is one thing I’d want to delete from the American discourse, it’s the phrase “China’s AI strategy.” Every single meeting, be it labs, investors, media, all independently, without my prompting, described domestic competition as more brutal than competing with American labs. When I described the US framing of Chinese AI as a coordinated bloc moving at the direction of the state, people laughed. Not defensively. They found it funny. I was called a stupid ABC (American-born Chinese) more than once because of this. These labs are actually far less coordinated than US labs are, which should have been obvious to anyone who watched the previous cycles of Chinese tech. I said no analogies, but I’ll allow one because it’s theirs. The last cycle had a name: 百团大战, the War of a Hundred Groupons (it was actually 5000). Hundreds of group-buying companies raised money, undercut each other into oblivion, and Meituan emerged as the victor. This cycle already has one too: 百模大战, the War of a Hundred Models. What actually exists is an ecosystem of labs relentlessly undercutting each other on price, stealing each other’s researchers, raising against each other, and trying to win a local arms race. Hundreds of labs and neolabs have raised, died, and been replaced, continuously. The things we experience in the US as hostile acts are mostly the exhaust of that domestic fight. The distillation attacks and the collapsing token prices are not a strategy aimed at American incumbents. They are what a hundred companies do to each other when none of them can win and none of them can stop.”

A top civil servant has ordered a review of his department’s decision to destroy evidence submitted to devise a new Islamophobia definition 🔗 telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09…

Anthropic has set up a wet lab in San Francisco, their bio research has advanced beyond in silico. They are now conducting physical research both in-house and with external partners. The NYT also broke the news this morning that Anth now plans to scale its compute to 5 GW by the end of the year, and 10 GW within the next 16 months. Bio is next after math, and I think we are going to see some medical announcements much sooner than people are expecting.

After warnings that AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade", Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy tells @BethRigby that the government will do more to properly regulate AI - and we will hear about it very soon. But what can they do to protect us? 🎙Listen to Electoral Dysfunction: trib.al/SzOjoOg

My @thetimes column: AI risks are real - but they’re also hyped, and nearly all the suggestions to fix them are bunk times-comment.com/d7795580