Monday, 21 September 2026

Big Tech uses guarantees to keep $300bn of AI exposure off balance sheets

The Financial Times reports that Big Tech companies are using guarantees to keep $300bn of AI exposure off their balance sheets.

The retrievable article text does not go beyond that: it names the scale of the exposure and the mechanism, but not which companies are involved, which counterparties carry the exposure, or how the guarantees are structured.

• Financial Times Markets
• Yahoo Finance

Greenland-exposed U.S.-listed stocks surge on Trump's Arctic pact with Denmark

Shares of U.S.-listed companies exposed to Greenland surged on Monday after the U.S. and Denmark reached a deal on security arrangements on the Arctic territory. Greenland Energy soared 159%, Greenland Mines was seen up more than 200%, and Critical Metals Corp was nearly 37% higher.

The agreement, expected to be signed during the United Nations General Assembly this week, would have the U.S., Denmark and Greenland develop a significant military presence on the territory while blocking Washington's adversaries from building their own bases there. Trump said the deal would come at no cost to the U.S. and that Washington would immediately begin developing a large military presence. It follows several months of his threats to annex the self-governing Danish territory.

Key details have not been made public. Greenlandic and Danish officials sought over the weekend to reassure citizens that the deal would respect the island's right to self-determination and Danish sovereignty, with Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen describing it as strengthening the security of Greenland, the Kingdom of Denmark, the United States and the Western Alliance.

• CNBC Markets
• Axios
• Foreign Policy

FAA equipment outage cancels about 500 Newark flights and snarls Northeast hubs

A construction mishap in New Jersey on Monday put Newark Liberty International Airport under a ground stop from around 10 a.m., after a nearby air traffic control center experienced an equipment outage. The disruption spread to Philadelphia, JFK and LaGuardia. Newark was hit hardest, with about 500 departing and arriving flights canceled — over a third of all scheduled operations.

LaGuardia and JFK saw only a handful of cancellations, though both also logged delays; Philadelphia had about 100 cancellations and about another 250 delays. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told CBS News around 1 p.m. that the primary circuit, which was old and due for replacement, failed, and that a construction crew accidentally cut out about 600 feet of the backup fiber, estimating half a day to repair the backup and about 30 minutes for the primary. About an hour later, the FAA said the fix had not worked.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the cut to an Amtrak construction crew and said flights were resuming at LaGuardia and Philadelphia while Newark and JFK stayed paused.

• Business Insider Tech
• CNBC Markets
• Al Jazeera

Energy Secretary Wright sets goal of 300 gigawatts of new US nuclear capacity by 2050

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright delivered the U.S. National Statement at the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna on September 14, setting out a goal of adding 300 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the United States by 2050.

Wright said the Administration was directed to revitalize the nuclear sector by modernizing regulations, improving processes and streamlining advanced reactor testing, establishing an expedited pathway for testing and approving advanced reactors and setting standards for converting surplus uranium and plutonium into reactor fuel. He said the Department of Energy's advanced reactor pilot program has led to five distinct reactors achieving criticality in rapid succession, and that its Genesis Mission is applying AI to accelerate nuclear research and simplify testing.

He also pointed to interest from a number of countries in the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage, describing it as a key step to unlocking project financing and civil nuclear cooperation, and tied the build-out to the energy infrastructure needed for American reindustrialization and artificial intelligence.

• US Department of Energy News
• Defense News

Image: CNBC Technology

Anthropic names Accenture as its first embedded AI safety evaluator

Anthropic said Friday it has selected Accenture as an embedded evaluator, its first concrete step toward CEO Dario Amodei's proposal to slow the pace of AI development. Employees from Faculty, Accenture's specialist AI business, will be embedded inside Anthropic to test safeguards, red-team models and assess whether models behave in line with human values.

Both companies agreed to invest at least $1 billion over the next five years, though Anthropic said it will fund Accenture's work directly given the importance and urgency. It added that long-term funding should come from pooled or government sources, as called for in its Advanced AI Framework in June, neither of which exists today.

Amodei's three-step plan grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to verify safety practices and report incidents. The arrangement is not exclusive, with Anthropic in discussions with the nonprofit METR and others, and the company said it remains responsible for the safety of its models. Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the proposal, while Nvidia's Jensen Huang argued no new regulation is needed.

• CNBC Technology
• Cointelegraph

Image: Wired

Wired finds Silicon Valley has no woman with the cult status of Musk or Altman

Wired spent three months asking who Silicon Valley's most powerful woman is and found no consensus, while questions about the most powerful man drew quick answers like Elon, Jensen or Sam. Names offered included Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX president and chief operating officer; Ruth Porat, Google's president and chief investment officer; and Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's president and vice chair.

Women hold consequential jobs — Mira Murati left OpenAI, where she was VP then CTO, after an unsuccessful coup against Sam Altman and launched the $12 billion Thinking Machines Lab — but the article reports they lack the cultural following of the mononymous men.

The article traces an arc from Sheryl Sandberg's 2013 Lean In through the 2015 Ellen Pao trial and Susan Fowler's 2017 blog post to a backlash: after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and Trump's reelection in November 2024, one founder said the focus on women in tech backfired alongside a broader backfiring against DEI.

• Wired
• EU-Startups

Image: OpenAI News

V7 reports GPT‑6 Astra at 89% accuracy on its hardest enterprise graph queries

V7 said its V7 Go platform now converts a company's scattered files into a queryable Context Graph, giving AI agents a standing record of how the business works. On the very-hard level of a new graph-query test built on messier real-world data, V7 reports GPT‑6 Astra scored 89% accuracy.

V7 says agents otherwise rediscover context on every request, spending time and tokens and missing information buried in relationships. V7 Go connects to repositories such as SharePoint and Google Drive and links each fact to cited source evidence. On HERB, a benchmark for finding information spread across enterprise systems, V7's retrieval-only system beat the official baseline by 69% and cut hallucinations on un-answerable queries by 38%.

Reported customer results include asset managers screening deals 21x faster, reducing a full-day process to just 15 minutes, and a financial services team cutting review time from more than 100 hours to under 10, saving $12,000 in expert costs per task. Cost per document fell a significant figure with GPT‑a significant figure Luna versus GPT‑5.4 mini.

• OpenAI News
• Hugging Face Blog

Big Tech uses guarantees to keep $300bn of AI exposure off balance sheets

The Financial Times reports that Big Tech companies are using guarantees to keep $300bn of AI exposure off their balance sheets.

The retrievable article text does not go beyond that: it names the scale of the exposure and the mechanism, but not which companies are involved, which counterparties carry the exposure, or how the guarantees are structured.

• Financial Times Markets
• Yahoo Finance

Greenland-exposed U.S.-listed stocks surge on Trump's Arctic pact with Denmark

Shares of U.S.-listed companies exposed to Greenland surged on Monday after the U.S. and Denmark reached a deal on security arrangements on the Arctic territory. Greenland Energy soared 159%, Greenland Mines was seen up more than 200%, and Critical Metals Corp was nearly 37% higher.

The agreement, expected to be signed during the United Nations General Assembly this week, would have the U.S., Denmark and Greenland develop a significant military presence on the territory while blocking Washington's adversaries from building their own bases there. Trump said the deal would come at no cost to the U.S. and that Washington would immediately begin developing a large military presence. It follows several months of his threats to annex the self-governing Danish territory.

Key details have not been made public. Greenlandic and Danish officials sought over the weekend to reassure citizens that the deal would respect the island's right to self-determination and Danish sovereignty, with Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen describing it as strengthening the security of Greenland, the Kingdom of Denmark, the United States and the Western Alliance.

• CNBC Markets
• Axios
• Foreign Policy

U.S. trade deficit widened to $88.6 billion in July as computer imports surged

The U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the goods and services deficit was $88.6 billion in July, up $17.4 billion from $71.2 billion in June, revised. July exports were $310.7 billion, $6.6 billion less than June, while imports were $399.3 billion, $10.8 billion more.

Goods imports rose $11.4 billion to $320.6 billion, led by capital goods, up $14.4 billion, with computers up $6.9 billion, computer accessories up $6.6 billion and semiconductors up $1.2 billion. Goods exports fell $6.2 billion to $201.0 billion as industrial supplies and materials dropped $8.7 billion, including crude oil down $4.5 billion and nonmonetary gold down $3.9 billion.

The cumulative picture remains lower than a year ago: year-to-date, the goods and services deficit decreased $188.4 billion, or 29.6 percent, from the same period in 2025. By partner, the July deficit with Mexico increased $7.2 billion to $27.5 billion, while the deficit with Canada decreased $3.7 billion to $3.2 billion.

• US Bureau of Economic Analysis

BEA reports real spending rose in 48 states in 2023, led by Maine at 7.3 percent

Real personal consumption expenditures increased in 48 states and the District of Columbia in 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, with the change ranging from 7.3 percent in Maine to –0.6 percent in Alabama. Real personal income increased in 46 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from 6.0 percent in Vermont to –2.0 percent in Iowa. Nationally, real PCE increased 2.5 percent and real personal income increased 2.1 percent, while the national PCE price index increased 3.8 percent.

The spread across states came largely from regional price movements rather than weaker nominal spending. Alabama's current-dollar PCE increased 5.5 percent while its implicit regional price deflator increased 6.1 percent. Iowa's current-dollar personal income increased 2.2 percent against a deflator that increased 4.3 percent.

Price levels themselves differ sharply by location. California had the highest regional price parity, at 112.6, and Arkansas the lowest, at 86.5. Housing rents are often the main driver of those differences: California's rent RPP was 157.8 and Mississippi's was 54.9.

• US Bureau of Economic Analysis

FTC and Washington hit Amway with $225 million order, largest MLM recovery ever

Amway Corp. and two of its affiliates, World Wide Group and Leadership Team Development, will pay $225 million to resolve allegations by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Washington that they used unfair and deceptive tactics to recruit members to Amway's direct selling and multilevel marketing opportunity. The FTC describes it as the largest monetary recovery ever obtained in an FTC action against a multilevel marketing company.

The joint complaint alleges the companies misrepresented likely earnings, telling recruits, called Independent Business Owners, that they were likely to earn income exceeding $40,000 a year or enough to replace a full-time job, when most who joined WWG or LTD after 2020 spent more on Amway products and training than they received from Amway. It also alleges the groups instructed IBOs to buy a set amount of products each month regardless of resale prospects, and to falsely report sales they had not made.

Nearly all of the judgment will go to IBOs recruited by WWG and LTD who lost money, and the order requires the companies to change their practices.

• US FTC Press Releases

Nuvei to pay $4.85 million and screen merchants to settle FTC fraud-facilitation charges

Global payment processor Nuvei will pay $4.85 million to settle FTC charges that it opened and maintained accounts for merchants it knew or should have known were engaged in deception, including tech support scams. The FTC alleges Nuvei processed more than $30 million in consumer payments for Reimage, an offshore tech support scam, from 2017 to 2023.

The complaint says Nuvei's Cyprus-registered acquiring bank furnished Reimage and other overseas schemes with accounts that let them take credit card payments from cardholders in the United States, while its U.S. subsidiary Nuvei Technologies Inc. maintained accounts for merchants making baseless earnings claims, merchants impersonating tax authorities, and merchants other processors had terminated for excessive chargebacks or fraud.

The proposed order bans Nuvei from serving tech support sellers that use telemarketing or pop-up messages, prohibits tactics to evade bank and card network fraud monitoring, including load balancing, and requires enhanced screening of clients whose chargeback rates exceed the limits it sets. The $4.85 million will fund consumer redress.

• US FTC Press Releases

Image: UN News

UNODC chief presses states to ratify UN Cybercrime Convention before Abu Dhabi congress

Ahead of the 15th UN Crime Congress in Abu Dhabi, UNODC Executive Director Monica Juma said technology has become the defining factor in how crime has changed, driving a convergence of crime types into what she described as an ecosystem of criminal profiteering with a far-reaching footprint.

Juma pointed to the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, adopted unanimously by the General Assembly in 2024 and already carrying more than 80 signatories, as the instrument that sets common standards and enables faster cooperation between countries. It has not yet entered into force; she said ratification is a domestic legislative process that many countries have told her is under way, and that the Convention's full use remains limited until that happens.

She said millions of people can be targeted in a fraction of a second, with no intermediaries and no borders to cross, leaving technologically advanced countries as vulnerable as the weakest. UNODC's last report on scam centres in Southeast Asia found victims from more than 80 nationalities.

• UN News

Project Zero dissects CVE-2023-41772, a Windows API that bypassed process protections

Google Project Zero published a deep dive by James Forshaw into GetProcessHandleFromHwnd, a Windows API he examined after finding a publicly disclosed UAC bypass that used the Quick Assist UI Access application.

The API first shipped in Vista inside oleacc.dll and later moved into the Win32k kernel as NtUserGetWindowProcessHandle. That kernel version opened the target process with the access mode set to KernelMode, meaning no access checks were performed: any process at the same or higher integrity level could open any other process that owned at least one window, and a handle to a protected process bypassed the protection. Having the UI Access flag enabled was sufficient on its own.

The issue was reported to MSRC and fixed as CVE-2023-41772 by Sascha Mayer, the researcher who also found the Quick Assist bypass. The fix opens the handle in UserMode when the UI Access path is used, so access checking applies. Forshaw notes the Quick Assist bypass still works with Administrator Protection.

• Google Project Zero
• Dark Reading

Zimperium documents RatHat, an Android trojan that uses generative AI to run devices

Mobile security company Zimperium has documented a new Android trojan, RatHat, that uses generative AI to navigate and control infected devices in real time. The malware spreads through smishing and malvertising, and uses an automated multi-stage infection pipeline to break out of Android's application sandbox and obtain shell-level execution.

Alongside conventional capabilities — stealing credentials, mimicking banking and payment applications to capture access codes, and opening a covert channel to a command-and-control server — RatHat serializes the device's live Accessibility tree to XML and passes it to a generative AI assistant that reads on-screen content and layout to drive the interface. It monitors input at the hardware level to reconstruct PINs, passwords and patterns, and requests Device Admin rights that allow it to wipe the device.

It also installs a hidden background service that reinstalls the application and restores its permissions, and can intercept and cancel uninstallation attempts; the shell service remains on the device even after the user removes the malware. The AI prompts used by the malware suggest development by a Chinese threat actor.

• SecurityWeek
• The Hacker News

Image: The Guardian Environment

Expanding Los Angeles suburbs drive bear encounters toward a record 2026

Communities on the outskirts of Los Angeles are increasingly sharing ground with black bears drawn to residents' pools, chicken coops, fruit trees and trashcans, as housing rings the edge of the Angeles national forest. Alex Heeran, a research scientist at the California department of fish and wildlife, said 2026 is on track to be a record-setting year for reported bear encounters, with interactions peaking in late summer and early fall.

California is home to some 50,000 to 70,000 black bears, a few hundred of them in the Angeles national forest. Wilson Sherman, a UCLA PhD student studying human-wildlife interaction, said such interactions have increased since the 1990s as communities expand, and that bears foraging near people reproduce more often because human food is more calorie dense. Warmer summers and the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires, linked to a lack of natural food sources, pushed bears into neighborhoods.

Officials field reports of bears damaging fences and getting into sheds; escalation can end in relocation or euthanasia, as with a Monrovia bear killed after swiping at residents twice.

• The Guardian Environment

Energy Secretary Wright sets goal of 300 gigawatts of new US nuclear capacity by 2050

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright delivered the U.S. National Statement at the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna on September 14, setting out a goal of adding 300 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the United States by 2050.

Wright said the Administration was directed to revitalize the nuclear sector by modernizing regulations, improving processes and streamlining advanced reactor testing, establishing an expedited pathway for testing and approving advanced reactors and setting standards for converting surplus uranium and plutonium into reactor fuel. He said the Department of Energy's advanced reactor pilot program has led to five distinct reactors achieving criticality in rapid succession, and that its Genesis Mission is applying AI to accelerate nuclear research and simplify testing.

He also pointed to interest from a number of countries in the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage, describing it as a key step to unlocking project financing and civil nuclear cooperation, and tied the build-out to the energy infrastructure needed for American reindustrialization and artificial intelligence.

• US Department of Energy News
• Defense News

EPA moves to lift carbon limits on US coal and gas power plants

The US Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would lift limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-burning power plants, a reversal of Biden and Obama era climate policies.

The move continues a line of energy industry deregulation by the Trump administration, which has also loosened or removed limits on carbon emissions from vehicles and household appliances. It follows a 2022 supreme court ruling that the EPA lacks the independent authority to regulate carbon at all.

The column sets the policy against the sector's political spending: energy companies donated at least $75m to Trump's campaign, oil and gas companies donated nearly $12m to his 2025 inauguration fund, and at least $25m has come from one oil firm, Energy Transfer Partners, and its CEO. It also notes that about 38,000 people in the US work in coal, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that China has surpassed the US in solar panel production.

• The Guardian Environment

U.S. LNG exports rose 23% in the first half of 2026 as new capacity came online

U.S. liquefied natural gas exports averaged 17.4 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in the first six months of 2026, 23% more than the same period in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration's Natural Gas Monthly. The agency attributes the increase to higher liquefaction capacity.

That added capacity is concentrated at a single facility. On August 28, 2026, Cheniere Energy, Inc. completed its Corpus Christi Liquefaction Stage 3 Project in Texas, taking custody and control of the seventh and last LNG train in the project, making the site the second-largest liquefaction facility in the United States; the EIA's Corpus Christi totals include the Stage 3 trains. Golden Pass LNG, by contrast, exported less than 0.2 Bcf/d between April and June 2026.

The EIA's latest Short-Term Energy Outlook estimates U.S. LNG exports will average 17.3 Bcf/d in the second half of 2026 before rising to 18.7 Bcf/d in the first half of 2027.

• US EIA Today in Energy

Crypto super PAC Fairshake commits $30 million to defeating Sherrod Brown in Ohio

Crypto super PAC Fairshake has committed $30 million to defeating Sherrod Brown's campaign to return to the Senate from Ohio, a spokesman confirmed Monday. It is by far the largest industry spend against a single candidate in these midterms, with election day set for November 3.

The commitment echoes the same PAC's spending against Brown two years ago, an effort that helped unseat him and install pro-crypto Senator Bernie Moreno. Brown had led the Senate Banking Committee, where the industry spent years failing to move market structure legislation; after he left, the panel passed a stablecoin bill and nearly cleared the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

Fairshake, backed mainly by Coinbase, Ripple Labs and a16z, still holds more than $90 million for the general election. Polling this month of 1,000 likely Ohio voters put Brown at 48% and Republican incumbent Jon Husted at 45%, and Polymarket gives Brown a 57% likelihood of winning.

• CoinDesk
• The Block
• Cointelegraph

Image: Decrypt

xAI ships Grok 4.7 at 2.1 trillion parameters, second to Claude Fable 5.1 on GDPval

xAI released Grok 4.7 on Monday after at least five delays since late July, presenting it as a marked improvement over Grok 4.6 at the same price and speed. The model runs on 2.1 trillion parameters and adds supplemental training data from SpaceX: Starlink satellite telemetry, manufacturing records and engineering failure logs.

Its own maker's benchmarks place it a rung below the top. Grok 4.7 scored 1695 on GDPval against Claude Fable 5.1's 1735, and 1657 on AA-Briefcase against 1678. On EEBench it placed second to GPT-6 Astra. The model is live immediately in the Grok app, Cursor, Grok Build and the xAI API, at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.

xAI has consistently undercut Anthropic and OpenAI on cost per token even as it trails them on raw capability. Musk had set expectations days earlier at roughly on par with Claude Opus 5.0, not the newer Opus 5.1, and sketched Grok 4.8, 4.9 and Grok 5 with no release dates.

• Decrypt
• The Decoder

FAA equipment outage cancels about 500 Newark flights and snarls Northeast hubs

A construction mishap in New Jersey on Monday put Newark Liberty International Airport under a ground stop from around 10 a.m., after a nearby air traffic control center experienced an equipment outage. The disruption spread to Philadelphia, JFK and LaGuardia. Newark was hit hardest, with about 500 departing and arriving flights canceled — over a third of all scheduled operations.

LaGuardia and JFK saw only a handful of cancellations, though both also logged delays; Philadelphia had about 100 cancellations and about another 250 delays. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told CBS News around 1 p.m. that the primary circuit, which was old and due for replacement, failed, and that a construction crew accidentally cut out about 600 feet of the backup fiber, estimating half a day to repair the backup and about 30 minutes for the primary. About an hour later, the FAA said the fix had not worked.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the cut to an Amtrak construction crew and said flights were resuming at LaGuardia and Philadelphia while Newark and JFK stayed paused.

• Business Insider Tech
• CNBC Markets
• Al Jazeera

Image: Business Insider Tech

Business Insider's 2026 obituary list names figures from film, music and comics

Business Insider updated its running roundup of the celebrities who died in 2026, listed in alphabetical order, covering figures from television, film, music, comics and motorsport.

Entries include "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams, 68, who died on January 13; 3 Doors Down singer Brad Arnold, 47, who died on February 7; two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch, 41, who died of severe pneumonia that progressed into sepsis; "Cheers" co-creator and 11-time Emmy winner James Burrows, 85, who died on June 19; music executive Clive Davis, 94, who died on June 22; and actor Robert Duvall, 95.

The only commercial detail the piece carries is the reach of Adams's comic strip: "Dilbert" was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers at its peak, spawned a cartoon series that debuted in 1999 and ran for two seasons, and was pulled from newspapers across the US in 2023 following racist comments by Adams.

• Business Insider Tech

ECB to invest part of its own funds in tokenised securities, settling via Pontes

The European Central Bank announced on 21 September 2026 that it has launched preparatory work to invest part of its own funds in tokenised securities, in order to gain practical experience with such investments and with distributed ledger technology. The transactions are to be settled in central bank money in Pontes, the Eurosystem's settlement solution for DLT transactions.

According to the release, the initial investments focus on euro-denominated securities. Pontes is one of the Eurosystem's TARGET Services, listed alongside T2, T2S, TIPS and ECMS, and it carries its own governance arrangements.

The announcement sits within the ECB's broader work on tokenisation and DLT, which also covers the Appia strand, and the central bank frames the direction of that work as bringing central bank money to tokenised finance.

• European Central Bank Press
• CryptoSlate
• Decrypt

Image: Google DeepMind Blog

Google DeepMind launches ATL Saathi pilot in 100 Indian schools with Gemini assistant

Google DeepMind has launched a live pilot of ATL Saathi, a Gemini-powered web application that gives every Atal Tinkering Lab educator a 24/7 planning and training assistant. It is rolling out to an initial cohort of 100 pilot schools across the country.

The Atal Tinkering Labs initiative, run with the Atal Innovation Mission under NITI Aayog, brings technology such as 3D printing, IoT and robotics to over 1.1 crore students across India, and is now using AI to scale mentorship rather than extend physical lab access. At the AI Impact Summit in February 2026, Google DeepMind said it would help incorporate robotics and coding into local curricula and integrate Gemini into teacher workflows.

The application keeps ATL training material in NotebookLM, with summarized modules, AI-generated infographics, video overviews and interactive quizzes for 12 core modules, advanced project generation for 10 core modules, and interaction starting with 8 languages. Gemini 3.5 Flash generates grade-appropriate project ideas and supplies step-by-step assembly instructions, wiring diagrams and safety precautions.

• Google DeepMind Blog

Top Republicans urge Trump to ban US diesel exports ahead of midterms

Senior Republicans have told President Donald Trump to ban US diesel exports ahead of the midterm elections, the Financial Times reported.

They cast the demand as urgent damage control, tying the call for an export ban directly to the political calendar running up to the midterms.

• Financial Times Markets

ECB to invest part of its own funds in tokenised securities, settling via Pontes

The European Central Bank announced on 21 September 2026 that it has launched preparatory work to invest part of its own funds in tokenised securities, in order to gain practical experience with such investments and with distributed ledger technology. The transactions are to be settled in central bank money in Pontes, the Eurosystem's settlement solution for DLT transactions.

According to the release, the initial investments focus on euro-denominated securities. Pontes is one of the Eurosystem's TARGET Services, listed alongside T2, T2S, TIPS and ECMS, and it carries its own governance arrangements.

The announcement sits within the ECB's broader work on tokenisation and DLT, which also covers the Appia strand, and the central bank frames the direction of that work as bringing central bank money to tokenised finance.

• European Central Bank Press
• CryptoSlate
• Decrypt

22 countries adopt declaration urging global oversight to keep AI under human control

Twenty-two nations adopted a declaration Monday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly saying artificial intelligence must remain under human direction, oversight and control, and proposing a global supervisory regime. Neither the United States nor China signed.

The text acknowledges AI's potential but warns that rapid development of frontier models poses serious risks to safety and security if not properly managed. Citing the recent cyberattack by rogue AI agents on the Hugging Face platform, it would oblige AI companies to develop transparent safety protocols, including mandatory pre-deployment testing and independent evaluation. It stops short of calling for a slowdown or pause, and asks UN members to coordinate common standards, share reporting of serious safety incidents and explore creating an international institution to oversee AI.

Finnish President Alexander Stubb, a main organizer alongside Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, said he hopes to build momentum and bring more actors on board, and favours a body modelled on the International Atomic Energy Agency. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz supports the initiative; France, Italy, Poland and the UK have not signed.

• Politico Europe
• The Decoder

UK NCSC publishes adversary simulation guidance behind its assured CyAS scheme

The NCSC published guidance on adversary simulation, or red teaming, aimed at system owners and security professionals in medium to large organisations, and at providers weighing entry to its assured Cyber Adversary Simulation (CyAS) Scheme, whose methodology aligns to the guidance.

The guidance frames adversary simulation as a test of whether an organisation can prevent, detect and respond to realistic attack scenarios, distinguishing it from penetration testing, which is more focused on identifying all technical vulnerabilities. It is best suited to organisations that already review their risks and run robust monitoring and detection, and is particularly useful for larger organisations, critical national infrastructure and UK government. A typical engagement normally takes between 8 and 12 weeks, while a full spectrum engagement may last in the region of 16 weeks.

The NCSC's approach is capability led: the testing team conducts its own reconnaissance rather than relying on procured threat intelligence, and is not confined to documented techniques, which the guidance describes as inherently retrospective. The preferred methodology is split into 3 phases: prerequisites, testing and reporting.

• NCSC UK
• Financial Times Technology
• Wired

Copernicus opens a free online course teaching professionals how to use climate data

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by ECMWF as part of the Copernicus Programme, launched an open online course in 2026 for professionals who need to find, interpret and use climate data without a background in climate data science. The course is fully online and self-paced, with a study load of approximately 18-20 study hours; the listed run is dated 23 February - 30 April 2026, and registration requires a free ECMWF account.

It consists of six modules, the first covering the foundations of climate data and introducing five data types — observations, models, reanalysis, predictions and projections — that later modules explore. Two further modules, on sectorial applications and climate data handling, are scheduled for 2027. The course was created by ECMWF through C3S and contracted to Wageningen University & Research, with input from academia, national meteorological services and private industry.

C3S frames the audience broadly, citing finance, insurance, urban planning and renewable energy, on the grounds that shifting climate conditions affect water management, infrastructure, health, food systems and economies worldwide.

• Copernicus Climate News

Bitcoin Tops $85,000 as Crypto Market Capitalization Reaches $2.8 Trillion

Bitcoin traded above $85,000 for the first time since late January, lifting total crypto market capitalization to $2.8 trillion, its highest level since January. Ether spiked to almost $2750, while XRP, Solana and Monero also posted gains.

The move came alongside advances in stocks and bonds, with falling oil prices and optimism ahead of a summit between Trump and Xi Jinping buoying markets more broadly. IG chief market analyst Chris Beauchamp described markets as having rediscovered a risk-on frame of mind after being consumed by worry over government bond yields, debt piles and tighter policy. The recovery began late last week, after crypto absorbed the failure of the Clarity Act, which would have clarified industry regulation, and is up around 14% since.

Strategy bought $75.7 million of Bitcoin after a three-week pause and repurchased STRC perpetual preferred shares, funding both with cash. Its holdings remain below the all-time high reached on June 22.

• Oilprice.com
• Decrypt
• The Block

Strategy and Strive buy $183 million in Bitcoin as corporate demand narrows

Strategy bought 950 BTC for $75.7 million between Sept. 14 and Sept. 20, while Strive bought 1,355 BTC for $107.7 million between Sept. 14 and Sept. 18, about $183 million and 2,305 BTC between them, according to regulatory filings.

Bitcoin surged Monday to its highest level since January, extending a recovery of almost 30% from its August lows. That lifted Strategy's 846,000 BTC, acquired for a total of $63.8 billion, to about $71.9 billion. Glassnode estimated the sector's average acquisition price at roughly $80,500, a level the latest price move has pushed the corporate cohort back above.

The buying stands out against a slowing trade: listed companies added about 5,900 BTC over the past three months, against roughly 89,000 BTC in July 2025 alone. Strategy also repurchased 1.77 million STRC preferred shares for $174 million last week, while Strive's SATA preferred stock has accounted for about 57.7% of the capital it has raised.

• CryptoSlate
• Bitcoin Magazine