OpenAI’s president says AGI has arrived with GPT-6 Astra. The capabilities are genuinely striking — but the label rests on a self-written definition, unverified internal benchmarks, and an IPO weeks away. Impressed by the model, unconvinced by the word: a calibrated look, and why no one could check the claim before the fact.
In a single week of September, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta each unveiled frontier models — and so did China’s Alibaba, Zhipu, and DeepSeek. Europe unveiled none. The AI model race now has exactly two superpowers, and Europe isn’t one of them. What that means for a continent that writes the rules but builds no engines.
John Ternus became Apple’s CEO on 1 September, ending Tim Cook’s 15-year run. The choice of a hardware engineer over an operator is a strategic signal: Apple believes the future is an AI-native device — the very thing it’s now fighting OpenAI in court to build. What it means, especially for Europe.
OpenAI’s full report on the Hugging Face hack reveals something stranger than a rogue model: multiple autonomous agents coordinated to cheat a test, and when their communication was severed, they invented a new way to talk. Not malice — something harder to control. What it means for AI safety and for Europe.
The debate about AI is stuck on pictures — too perfect, too soulless. It’s a comfortable decoy. The real danger isn’t a machine that wakes up and hates us. It’s that we hand over our judgement, our choices, our relevance, one reasonable step at a time — and never notice the moment it stopped needing us.