ai weekly · September 19, 2026
The Slowdown Gets a Manifesto & Self-Improvement Gets a Number - AI Week in Review (September 13-19, 2026)
This week in AI (Sep 13–19, 2026): Dario Amodei publishes 'We must pace the frontier' and the fight over who sets the pace begins; recursive self-improvement gets measured as Anthropic says Claude leads 26% of its AI R&D tasks and OpenAI calls RSI its top priority; benchmarks lose authority with Real-SWE, rising cheating audits, and a fivefold harness cost tax; an AI-assisted intel error nearly triggers a US military interception as agents reach Siri, Android, and the smart home; and the web sends an invoice via Cloudflare's training block, pay-per-crawl, and the NYT's unredacted 'theft of labor' filings.
The slowdown gets a manifesto Self-improvement gets a number Benchmarks lose their authority
