Daily digest · Thursday, September 17, 2026

AI policy, robotaxis, and Silicon breakthroughs

New research and shifting policy dominated: DeepMind launched an institute to broaden the AGI debate, Nevada’s robotaxi cap for Zoox is set to expire, and Anthropic says Claude leads 26% of its AI R&D. Meanwhile, Apple faces a UK lawsuit over app tracking rules, Crusoe raised $3.9B for “AI factories,” and FAA laser-strike reports fell for a third straight year.

1 · CNET

Congratulations, World: A New Supercute Cat Species Has Been Found

Researchers described Leopardus tilcayo as a new cat species from Bolivia’s cloud forests in the Bolivian Yungas, marking the first new feline species identified in over 100 years.

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2 · TechCrunch

Google DeepMind launches institute to widen the AGI debate

Google and Google DeepMind launched the DeepMind Institute to advance the AGI debate, naming DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, Google executive James Manyika, and DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis as directors and setting out four inaugural essays on economics, human-readable reasoning, human flourishing, and frontier model evaluation.

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3 · TechCrunch

Amazon-owned Zoox’s 100-robotaxi limit in Nevada is about to disappear

Nevada’s Transportation Authority permit that capped Zoox at 100 robotaxis is set to expire on September 25, allowing the Amazon-owned company to expand its commercial fleet in Las Vegas.

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4 · Yahoo Finance

Jim Cramer on Tesla (TSLA): “My Only Solution to It Is That SpaceX Has to Buy It”

A Mad Money caller asked about Tesla, and Jim Cramer said his “only solution” to TSLA is that SpaceX would have to buy it.

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5 · Yahoo Finance

Apple (AAPL) Faces a $2.7 Billion UK Lawsuit over its App Tracking Rules

A UK lawsuit filed at London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal seeks £2 billion (about $2.7 billion) against Apple over claims that its App Tracking Transparency consent prompts impose stricter requirements on third-party app developers than on Apple’s own advertising services.

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6 · TechCrunch

Crusoe raises $3.9B to build massive data centers and small modular “AI factories”

Crusoe raised $3.9 billion in a Series F to reach a $30.9 billion valuation, to finance data-center projects including truck-transportable small modular “AI factories.”

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7 · The Register

Marvell pushes GlobalFoundries to light up wafer production

Marvell expanded its partnership with GlobalFoundries to increase silicon germanium (SiGe) wafer production at the Burlington, Vermont plant to support near- and co-packaged optics (CPO/NPO) and next-gen pluggable optics.

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8 · TechCrunch

PrismML hopes its tiny LLM will change how we all use AI

PrismML’s Bonsai 2 27B compresses Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 27B from ~5.9 GB, achieving 98% of Qwen’s aggregate benchmark scores while reducing memory use by about 9x to 10x.

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9 · Engadget

Anthropic says Claude 'leads' 26 percent of its AI R&D work

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says Claude “leads” 26% of the company’s AI R&D work, meaning it can complete most tasks end-to-end from a high-level prompt with human supervision.

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10 · Engadget

FAA says laser strikes on aircraft fell for the third consecutive year

Laser strike reports on aircraft fell 24% year over year, with 4,470 incidents reported between January and July 2026.

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