AI Watch, Thursday 10 September 2026Apple's first Ternus keynote and the OECD's student warning

On 9 September, the opening day of the international space summit in Paris, the start-up Loft Orbital announced a $1 billion investment from the United Arab Emirates, provided by a subsidiary of the Emirati royal family's conglomerate, to fund an Earth-observation constellation equipped with AI.

The project brings together Mistral and the Emirati firm Marlan Space, around some fifty satellites, and describes itself as heralding "the advent of agentic space AI". The deal places a French player at the heart of a space programme funded from the Gulf, and shows the entry price of a technological sovereignty that is now playing out in orbit.

Nearly one employee in two already turns to AI tools their company has not authorised, what's called shadow AI (AI installed in the shadow of the IT department), according to a study relayed by ZDNet. The practice is growing, driven by staff who find the consumer tool faster than the internal solution.

The risk is twofold: sensitive data poured into unmanaged services, and compliance that slips out of the organisation's hands. ZDNet details the measures for taking back control without antagonising teams.

AI's appetite for energy is benefiting the nuclear sector: Google is about to bring back into service a US plant that has been offline for six years to power its data centres, Clubic reports. In the same move, the group signs its first nuclear deal outside the United States, in Finland.

Every AI data centre is now measured in reactors, and the big cloud players are securing their electricity over decades before they even build.

According to data from a global OECD education report, students who lean on AI to study tend to get worse results than those who do without. The picture is more nuanced than it seems: some uses bring a slight gain, particularly among students taught to critically assess what the tool produces and when to be wary of it.

Correlation does not tell the whole story, The Verge warns, because struggling students also turn more readily to AI. The signal remains clear: access to the tool is not enough, how you use it decides the result.

The amounts spent on AI per employee dropped in August at the most advanced firms, TechCrunch reports. Three factors combine: the fall in the price of tokens (the billed unit of text), the arrival of cheaper models, and a declining average spend per employee.

The article raises the question without settling it: a simple summer lull, or a first sign that adoption is not following the trajectory infrastructure providers had hoped for. For the cloud giants that built their forecasts on ever-growing consumption, the doubt is uncomfortable.

The same volume of work costs less and less, which shifts the value from the price of the tool to the quality of its use.

Besieged by copyright infringement suits, the music generator Suno has replaced its models with a new one, Suno v6, presented as trained with the help of the record industry and without the data used for previous versions. "It was trained from scratch, with a dataset that does not include the same data as our previous models," Suno's Jack Brody tells The Verge.

This time the corpus includes licensed content. The reversal is stark for a company that had until now defended training on unauthorised works, and it marks a path other content generators may have to follow: paying for the raw material rather than hoovering it up.

Microsoft, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, the second-largest teachers' union in the United States) and its New York affiliate UFT announced a "National AI Safety & Privacy Standard" to protect students, families and staff in schools. The agreement sets principles of safety and privacy for the use of AI in the classroom.

It comes a week after two large school networks banned AI in direct contact with students, a sign of an education sector split between adoption and wariness. Where the OECD measures the damage of unframed use, these players are trying to write the rules before practice imposes them.

The Chinese online-commerce giant JD.com is accelerating its shift to robotics: at an event in Beijing on Wednesday 9 September, its logistics arm unveiled its "Wolf" line of industrial robots.

Over five years, JD Logistics plans to acquire 3 million robots, 1 million driverless vehicles and 100,000 delivery drones to automate its entire national network, the South China Morning Post reports. The company promises to retrain its vast workforce of couriers into technical roles as the machines take over field tasks.

The commitment is worth watching in practice: automating three million gestures and training as many people for another job do not happen at the same pace. China's trajectory puts a figure on a question that matters everywhere, namely what to do with the people whose task disappears.

The AI start-up DeepSeek has retained banks, including Citic Securities, for a stock-market listing on the Star Market of the Shanghai exchange, aiming to launch the process this year, La Tribune reports. The operation becomes the first test of new Chinese rules designed to finance large-model developers even before they turn a profit. It gives Beijing a domestic financing route for its AI champions, away from US markets.