Satya Nadella

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC and TechCrunch he wants regulators to leave AI distillation alone — and floated the idea of an "American distillation regime" letting domestic open-weight labs train on frontier models the same way Anthropic accuses Chinese labs of doing. His argument: frontier labs didn''t ask permission to scrape the internet, so they shouldn''t get to dictate what customers do with model outputs either.

Three frontier labs published safety-pacing documents within two weeks of each other in September 2026. The official story is caution winning out over speed. A less flattering explanation fits the same facts just as well — pretraining data is running out, public launches are throttled versions of internal demos, and Anthropic needs a clean investor story for its IPO. This is opinion and pattern-matching, not a leaked memo — here's what's verifiable and what's speculation.

"The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement" argues that most of what's called RSI in 2026 is really AI executing human-designed improvements faster, not AI choosing its own improvement strategy. The paper maps four stages from that starting point to a system that modifies the mechanisms creating future improvements — the actual bar for "genuine" RSI. Here's the roadmap and why it's a more useful framework than the industry's looser usage of the term.

Mustafa Suleyman posted Microsoft AI's "Code of Conduct for Humanist AI" on September 14, 2026, open for public comment for six weeks. It rejects model welfare and AI rights outright, bans "neuralese" reasoning humans can't read, and requires every MAI model to be interruptible, correctable, and shut-down-able before it ships. Here's what each of the 10 points actually commits Microsoft to.