AI Watch, Wednesday 9 September 2026OpenAI claims a Navier-Stokes proof, then a credit fight erupts

The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (the CNIL, France's data protection authority) imposed a €300,000 fine on 21 July 2026 on the consulting firm EXTIA, for several breaches of individuals' rights, in particular the right to erasure of data, or right to be forgotten.

The decision, published this week, is a reminder that this right stays among those the regulator monitors most closely. The signal reaches beyond EXTIA: as organisations multiply their data processing to feed their AI tools, the ability to erase a piece of data on request becomes a concrete technical constraint, not a clause of principle.

Hundreds of pages push far-right content mass-produced by AI to French audiences, often run from Sri Lanka, Algeria or Venezuela, Le Monde reports. These pages capture large audiences for profit, funded by advertising revenue sharing.

The investigation shows a disinformation economy in which generative AI lowers to almost nothing the cost of producing a constant stream of images and text calibrated for outrage.

The day after the largest raise ever completed by a European technology company, €3 billion led by South Korea's Samsung, Clubic examines the ownership structure of Mistral AI. Behind the "French champion" label, a growing share of the funds comes from foreign investors, which reopens the debate over the sovereignty of a company now valued at more than €21 billion.

The question goes beyond Mistral: it touches every European start-up that has to raise on a global scale to stay in the race without diluting itself off the continent.

Meta unveils Muse, an AI agent (software that acts on your behalf, not only one that answers) able to shop online, book a plane ticket or make an appointment. To work, it asks for access to the user's email, calendar, payment methods and health services, and runs on a dedicated virtual machine in the cloud.

It is Meta's most committing consumer bet in AI, and a direct test of trust: the company is wagering that users will hand it data they have refused it so far, after several years of distrust over privacy. Muse takes on rival agents such as OpenClaw and Instinct.

Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist, says "nobody is prepared" for the consequences of AI progress in cybersecurity, admits that the lab's internal safeguards are losing their effectiveness and calls on the sector to slow down, 01net reports.

At Anthropic, researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation, accusing the industry of "gambling with our lives" and stating that "no other human activity poses such a danger".

The same day, Cisco, OpenAI and Anthropic co-signed an open letter warning that AI-assisted cyberattacks will become widespread, the same tools that help people work also serving to attack "at machine scale", according to Cisco president Jeetu Patel.

These warnings come from the very players building the models, which invites caution about their motives without making them safe to ignore.

Qualcomm has signed a deal making Amazon a customer and an investor in its data-center chips, Bloomberg reports. The agreement covers custom chips for the infrastructure of AWS, Amazon's cloud arm, and marks a breakthrough for Qualcomm in a market dominated by Nvidia.

Chief financial officer Akash Palkhiwala sees it as a foothold to capture a share of the enormous spending that cloud giants devote to AI. For Amazon, it is a way to diversify its silicon suppliers and contain the bill of a line item that weighs more and more heavily.

The start-up Cognition, maker of the coding agent Devin, reaches a $48 billion valuation, TechCrunch reports. The valuation multiple exceeds the one Cursor showed before its acquisition by SpaceX, a sign that investors do not believe in a market where a single player takes it all.

Several makers of AI-assisted coding tools keep raising at high levels, each betting on a durable slice of the pie. The message for corporate customers: the sector stays competitive, which keeps pressure on prices and leaves the choice open.

US security agencies accuse the leading Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI (the maker of Kimi), of having "systematically" extracted the know-how of American companies, Bloomberg reports. The authorities are calling on Silicon Valley developers to better protect their work.

The technique in question is said to be distillation, in which a Chinese model learns by querying an American model on a massive scale to copy its answers, a method already suspected when DeepSeek launched in early 2025. The accusation comes as the use of Chinese models, cheaper per token (the billed unit of text), is rising sharply worldwide.

It reignites the regulatory standoff between Washington and Beijing, this time over intellectual property rather than semiconductors alone.

The Chinese AI companies Z.ai and MiniMax risk losing money until 2030, even with revenue that is jumping, estimates Ellie Jiang, head of internet and software research for Asia at Macquarie, quoted by the South China Morning Post. The cause lies in the cost of the computing power needed to train and run frontier models.

According to her, the compute shortage in China is two to three times more severe than elsewhere, driven by US controls on chip exports. The finding tempers the story of a Chinese AI unbeatable on cost: the low prices per token hide heavy losses that investors are funding while they wait for scale.