SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.7
On 21 September 2026 xAI released Grok 4.7, with a larger base model and a longer reinforcement-learning run. Its Fast variant was limited to Cursor and Grok Build.
Total 1,095
Character.ai's CEO joins Disney as its CTO
On 18 September 2026 Character.ai said its CEO Karandeep Anand was joining Disney as its Chief Technology Officer, a newly created role, with members of Character's technical team expected to follow.
Character.ai post-trains its own CAI-Image models on Qwen-Image
Character.ai's CAI-Image family consists of image models post-trained from open-source Qwen-Image and tuned for character-driven storytelling, so the same character stays recognisable across styles, scenes and pages. The company announced the models on 16 September 2026.
Cohere and Aleph Alpha sign merger agreement
On 16 September 2026 Cohere and German AI company Aleph Alpha signed a merger agreement, reportedly valuing the combined company at about $20 billion. The deal still needed regulatory approval.
DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with a causal encoder–decoder design
On 10 September 2026 DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a multimodal model with a causal encoder-decoder design that splits its active parameters between reading input and writing output. Its KV cache is much smaller than that of the previous generation.
Suno releases v6, built with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe
On 9 September 2026 Suno released v6, a new generation of music models built with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, offered in three versions and paired with safeguards that screen uploaded audio and lyrics.
Mistral AI raises €3 billion led by Samsung at over €21 billion valuation
On 8 September 2026 Mistral AI announced a €3 billion Series D led by Samsung Electronics, valuing the company at more than €21 billion after the round.
iFlytek releases Spark X2.5
On 7 September 2026 iFlytek released Spark X2.5, a 293B-A30B mixture-of-experts model trained and served on domestic compute, focused on code and agent tasks, with open-source on-device models supporting up to 1 million tokens of context.
OpenBMB publishes MiniCPM5-2B
On 6 September 2026 OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a dense 2-billion-parameter open model that the team describes as state of the art for its size class, released together with the UltraX training dataset.
IFM launches the six-model K2 Horizon fleet
On 3 September 2026 the Institute of Foundation Models announced K2 Horizon, a fleet of six models released together, each shipped with its training data, recipe and evaluations, and steered by a router that picks the cheapest adequate model per task.
Runway publishes GWM Worlds 2, a real-time interactive world model
Runway published GWM Worlds 2 on 3 September 2026, a research preview that turns high-fidelity video and audio generation into a real-time interactive world model steered by text actions and camera motion.
OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra
On 3 September 2026 OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 Astra, first to its Daybreak cybersecurity program and then to ChatGPT paid plans, the API and AWS, after pausing some research following the July breach.
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion
On 3 September 2026 Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face said it would remain an open platform, and the deal was expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval.
Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
On 2 September 2026 Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a security-focused variant limited to vetted defenders, three weeks after Gemini 3.7 Flash.
Manus resumes independent operations
On 1 September 2026, Manus announced that it had formally resumed independent operations, with its founding team continuing to lead the company as an independent agent lab advancing general AI agents.
Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1
On 1 September 2026 Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1. Prices stayed at $10 and $50 per million tokens, and Mythos 5.1 is offered through verification programmes.
StepFun releases Step 5 Preview
In September 2026 StepFun released Step 5 Preview as its new flagship foundation model. It is a sparse MoE with 600 billion total parameters, supports up to 1 million tokens of context, and is offered through the StepFun Open Platform API.
Tencent open-sources the 770B-parameter Hy4 preview
On 28 August 2026 Tencent released and open-sourced the 770-billion-parameter Hy4 preview, a productivity-focused model with a context of over one million tokens under Apache 2.0.
IBM releases Granite 4.2 with built-in reasoning modes
IBM released the Granite 4.2 family on 25 August 2026, with native reasoning that streams inside think tags and can be switched between full, low-effort and non-thinking modes per query.
Stability AI raises a $76 million Series B
On 25 August 2026 Stability AI announced a $76 million Series B whose investors include Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music, Electronic Arts and AMD Ventures, taking the funding raised under CEO Prem Akkaraju to about $232 million.
SenseTime releases SenseNova U1.5 with native 4K generation
On 20 August 2026 SenseTime released SenseNova U1.5-8B-MoT, an open-weight model that generates images natively up to 4096x4096 pixels, after a preview in July.