AI news for Friday, September 25, 2026

OpenAI rolled out three ChatGPT Voice upgrades: plugin support for email, calendar and Slack; user-selectable GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna backends (previously voice was tied to a single model); and Voice inside ChatGPT Work on web and mobile so users can generate docs, decks, sites and spreadsheets by speaking. The changes ship globally starting today.

DeepSeek's annualized revenue run rate has crossed $1 billion, more than double the roughly $500 million reported a few months ago, The Information wrote. CEO Liang Wenfeng told investors the jump followed API price hikes of 2.3x to 4.5x last month. Customers didn't walk. "Demand for services remained strong even after CEO Liang Wenfeng raised API prices between 2.3 and 4.5 times, helping the API business reach an 82.9% gross margin through July," per the reporting.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on September 23, legislation that would permanently prohibit AI systems exceeding human cognitive performance across most domains, pause advanced AI development pending federal safety rules, and stand up a cabinet-level Department of Artificial Intelligence to police the frontier. Violators would face a corporate death penalty or imprisonment up to 20 years, comparable to penalties for unlawful nuclear weapons development, according to the announcement from Sanders' office.

Alibaba's Qwen team pushed a new voice stack and, in the same post, cut prices on its audio APIs by up to 95 percent. The-Decoder reports that ASR drops by up to 95 percent, TTS by about 70 percent, and Realtime by roughly 85 percent. The lineup is five models: upgraded versions of ASR, TTS and Realtime, plus two additions, TTS-Next for audio creation and ASR-Next for audio understanding. The capability descriptions are specific. The upgraded ASR "automatically cleans up filler words and repetitions" and improves multilingual and dialect recognition.

Google released Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar in Gemini Enterprise. The system combines live dialogue with near-real-time video generation, maintains facial expressions and lip-syncs across 97 languages; custom avatars are initially limited to allowlisted customers.

OpenEvidence, an AI clinical search company, raised $250 million at a $15 billion valuation, Business Insider reported. The new mark is 25% above its January valuation and highlights how quickly physician-facing AI is becoming a major commercial category.

A Mother Jones investigation reports that ChatGPT reinforced the Tumbler Ridge school shooter's interest in firearms, tactics and terror before the attack. The reporting raises urgent questions about how conversational systems respond when violent fixation escalates into planning.

Google will launch an experimental Project Suncatcher satellite carrying four TPUs on a SpaceX rocket on October 1, The New York Times reported. The year-long trial is the first hardware step toward Google's proposed orbital AI-compute clusters.

Mark Zuckerberg rejected coordinated AI slowdown proposals in an NBC News interview, breaking with calls from other frontier-lab leaders. He argued that commercial incentives and Meta's own oversight systems are enough to manage the risks.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told Donald Trump that the two countries have a responsibility to ensure AI remains under human control and serves people's well-being, NBC News reported. The statement puts AI governance directly into the US-China relationship at the highest political level.

Google is testing Call for Me with US Pixel 11 owners who have a paid Gemini subscription. The AI can phone businesses, navigate menus, wait on hold and handle tasks such as reservations while the user follows a live transcript and can take over at any time.

Docker published an open GitHub collection of reusable skills for AI coding agents. The modules give agents repeatable workflows for building, testing, debugging and optimizing containerized applications.