AI Watch, Monday 14 September 2026AI leaders call for slowing the race, the White House refuses: Dario Amodei argues for \"pacing the frontier\", Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis agree, Donald Trump replies that he will not hand his lead to China, and Asian markets fall. Anthropic is eyeing the Nasdaq for a listing that could exceed $86 billion while OpenAI backs away from its own, SoftBank borrows $11.9 billion to fund OpenAI and Christine Lagarde warns about the financial cost of AI. In China, Z.ai returns to raise $5 billion in Hong Kong and the intelligence chief warns about the risks of AI.

In an interview with Ouest-France, the president of the European Central Bank warns that the funding needs of the tech giants are starting to compete with those of states on the bond markets, where governments and companies borrow.

When OpenAI, Microsoft or Anthropic raise tens of billions to build their data centres, they capture savings that would otherwise fund public debt, at the risk of making it more expensive. The warning places the AI bill on the terrain of financial stability, beyond innovation alone.

According to a ranking relayed by Maddyness, the French capital is among the top ten cities in the world by number of start-ups specialising in artificial intelligence. The presence of Mistral, of H Company and of a talent pool from Inria (the French national research institute for digital science) and the grandes écoles feeds this ecosystem.

The ranking bolsters France's ambition of a world-class AI hub, even if the funding gap with the San Francisco Bay Area remains wide.

According to an Anthropic report relayed by Clubic, a French-speaking hacker acting alone targeted around forty organisations linked to the French far right and broke into at least fourteen of them, including an unidentified political party, relying on Claude to build the attack infrastructure.

Anthropic says it detected the activity and cut off access, but acknowledges the same blind spot as in its inventory of misuse published last week: it blocks what it sees passing through its servers, not what runs elsewhere. For security teams, the episode confirms that the assistant that helps write code also helps attack.

According to Bloomberg, Anthropic has chosen the Nasdaq as its listing venue for an IPO targeted as early as October, with the ambition of raising an amount equal to or greater than the $86.3 billion gathered by SpaceX in June, which would make it one of the largest deals in history.

The company also told a small circle of shareholders that it would post an adjusted operating profit this quarter, a second consecutive quarter in the black, the Financial Times reports. This profitability, rare among labs that burn through billions, strengthens the case ahead of the deal.

The contrast is sharp with OpenAI, which has just ruled out any listing before 2027 in the name of safety risks.

The Japanese group SoftBank has obtained a loan of $11.87 billion, above its initial target of $10 billion, to support its investment in OpenAI, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. The borrowing illustrates the growing use of debt to fuel the AI race, as the amounts exceed what equity can cover.

SoftBank, already committed alongside OpenAI in the Stargate infrastructure project, thus increases its exposure to a bet whose return depends on valuations holding up. Christine Lagarde has just warned precisely about these arrangements that load AI onto the debt markets.

OpenAI has published a customer case in which the search engine Perplexity uses its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, to write communications, modify its own software and monitor systems in production, with human oversight far more spaced out than with previous models.

The argument put forward: Astra can hold long, chained tasks without close supervision, where earlier generations required frequent human takeover. The example serves OpenAI's commercial thesis, that of autonomous agents able to manage whole swathes of a technical system. It also feeds the weekend's worry: the more a model acts alone, the less a human sees what it is doing.

The former US president urged his side to make artificial intelligence one of its "central priorities" and to formulate a clear position on its economic effects and its risks, TechCrunch reports. The call comes ahead of the midterm elections, as AI regulation settles in as a political subject in the United States.

It breaks with the White House line, which refuses any brake in the name of competition with China.

The Chinese model developer Z.ai, listed in Hong Kong, is seeking to gather about $2 billion through a placement of 22 million new shares at HK$714 each, and a further $3 billion via a convertible bond issue, according to stock filings cited by the South China Morning Post and Bloomberg.

The company, formerly Zhipu AI, returned to the market as soon as its lock-up period expired, a sign of rapid cash burn. Its shares closed at HK$793 on Friday, down 73% from their high. The move shows that China's AI champions face the same equation as their US rivals: training and inference costs (the cost of running a model once it is trained) that force repeated raises.

China's top intelligence official delivered one of Beijing's most detailed warnings on artificial intelligence, judging that its rapid progress could threaten the country's political stability and critical infrastructure, according to Bloomberg.

The statement echoes, within a few hours, Dario Amodei's call to slow down: on both sides of the Pacific, authorities and labs are expressing the same fear of a technology that escapes control. It qualifies the image of a China racing ahead without restraint, which Donald Trump invokes to refuse any US pause.

Beijing encourages its champions while closely watching domestic risks of destabilisation.