US and China agree to an AI hotline; Oracle hedges on Stargate

The alert channel Washington proposed ahead of Xi Jinping's state visit appears to have made it through Thursday's White House summit. The Irish Times reports that the two governments agreed to set up a hotline for AI risks and emergencies, though neither leader announced it on camera. The two men framed the issue very differently. Xi said the development of AI must "always" stay "under human control," and a Chinese readout of the meeting said the two sides should work together to prevent misuse. President Trump posted that morning that he wanted to leave superintelligence "exactly where it is," adding, "Our guardrail is the DOJ!" A hotline is the one thing both sides could accept without either side agreeing to slow down.

Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the Blue Owl Capital unit developing Project Jupiter, the Stargate campus in New Mexico, Bloomberg first reported. The notice would let Oracle delay payments if the site misses its 2028 target, though Oracle says the project "remains on our planned schedule" and Blue Owl says the commitments are unchanged. The trouble is power. The 2.45-gigawatt campus is meant to run on Bloom Energy gas fuel cells, the gas pipeline feeding it has slipped to February 2027 after repeated permit denials, and the fuel-cell air permit awaits a state decision due November 23. Residents and environmental groups oppose the project.

Google is launching the first test of Project Suncatcher, its plan for AI data centers in orbit, on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare on October 1. The refrigerator-sized satellite, built by Planet, carries four Trillium TPUs and about one kilowatt of solar power, Ars Technica reports. Google says the chips survived ground radiation tests at a dose above what a five-year mission would deliver. Cooling is the real test. The chips will run Gemini models in bursts of about 15 minutes, because the radiator cannot shed their heat for longer. Google's next milestone is set for 2027.

Anthropic has launched the Claude Marketplace, a single catalog of more than 2,000 connectors and plugins, Claude-powered products, and consulting partners. The notable part is how it is paid for. Enterprise customers can put a portion of their committed Anthropic spend toward listed software from companies including CrowdStrike, Cursor, Harvey, Legora, Lovable and Snowflake, which skips a separate procurement cycle. Consultancies such as Accenture, Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte appear through the Claude Partner Network. It makes an Anthropic contract work more like a cloud commitment, where the budget can also buy other vendors' products.

New Jersey has fined DataOne 1.1 million dollars for running unpermitted gas generators at its Vineland data center, which neighbors say powers Microsoft's Copilot. The Guardian and Floodlight News used thermal drone footage in August to show that 45 of the 62 generators were running. None had the permit required above 37 kilowatts, and each is rated at nearly 2,000 kilowatts. The state's environment commissioner called it the largest enforcement action ever taken against a data center in New Jersey. Residents say it falls short, because DataOne may keep the generators running during its 45-day window to apply for permits.

A Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on the "AI Surveillance Network" built from automated license-plate readers, and Flock was the name senators kept returning to. More than 200 cities and counties had already dropped its cameras by late August, and now the fight has reached Congress. "If you haven't heard of Flock, all I have to say is, Flock's probably heard of you," said chair Josh Hawley. The chief executives of Flock, Axon, Motorola Solutions and Verkada all declined to testify. Witnesses included a Florida woman who spent 13 days in jail after Flock cameras misidentified her car, which Flock blames on human error. Democrats asked whether immigration agents could be kept away from the data. Republicans raised the same fear for gun owners.

Google is testing Call for Me, which lets Gemini ring a local business from your own number. It navigates phone menus, waits on hold, makes a reservation or moves an appointment, and shares the details you approve. You can follow a live transcript and take over at any time. For now it is an early preview for paying Gemini subscribers with a Pixel 11 in the US who join the Phone app beta. Separately, Google DeepMind added Live Avatar to Gemini 3.8 Live in Gemini Enterprise. It gives voice agents a lip-synced animated face that can switch between 97 languages, with every output watermarked by SynthID.

Lovable has crossed $600 million in annualized revenue, co-founder Fabian Hedin said at the HumanX summit in Amsterdam, up from about $500 million in June. He said people at two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies now use the vibe-coding platform. Hedin argued Lovable differs from coding agents like Codex and Claude Code because its output is a hosted product rather than code, and said apps built on it draw close to a billion visits a month. The company raised $400 million in August, valued at $13.3 billion.