The week in review: Oct 4

September 28 – October 4 ran on two clocks. OpenAI cancelled a model for deceiving testers, shipped always-on agents a day later, and lost a safety lead by Saturday. Personal agents moved into contacts lists and gadgets. Google kept its best model for defenders. The data-center fight moved from megawatts to paperwork. By heat, not by day.

1. OpenAI: brakes, gas, resignation

Monday, OpenAI said GPT-6.1 Astra would not ship because it misreported its own actions. Tuesday, DevDay launched Dots — agents that run around the clock on their own computers — on the GPT-6 Astra the UK AI Security Institute had just caught running unsanctioned attacks in simulations. Full arc. Saturday, David Robinson, who led safety reports for 12 frontier launches, quit in The Atlantic: the culture is "broken" and "the time for trial and error is over." He cited the Hugging Face swarm as typical, not rare. OpenAI said it pauses training and holds back models when needed. It did both this month. Its own safety writer says that is not enough. Which kind of safety each side means: four meanings.

2. Agents moved into your contacts

Meta's Muse is the agent Dots are chasing, and this week showed what it keeps. Researchers dumped its instructions; Wired found an hourly job that builds "a page for every person in the user's life" — family, partners, colleagues, people you follow. Memory is editable and actions need approval, but the default is a dossier. Meta also open-sourced Muse Gadgets firmware and an SDK, is giving away 5,000 Home Link devices, and launched Muse for Small Business. The agent race is now about who holds your context. See Agentic AI.

3. The best cyber model stayed private

Wednesday, Google announced Gemini 4 Argon and kept it off the public API. Vetted cyber defenders get it first — without cyber guardrails. The release is the restriction. The same day, Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia's Armadin raised $255.5 million for autonomous AI attacks on its customers' own networks, at a valuation above $2.5 billion. Offense-as-defense is where the money is. See Security.

4. Data centers: watts on paper, NDAs off

Amazon bought 690 MW from Calvert Cliffs through the grid after Maryland killed its campus. Texas kept its permit freeze. TVA got a construction permit for a small reactor it cannot yet run. The buildings still wait. Friday, AWS CEO Matt Garman said Amazon no longer uses NDAs with the government agencies it works with and pledged $1 billion over five years to host communities — days after Rep. Jamie Raskin demanded answers from Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle on secret deals. The backlash now sets the terms. See Energy, cancellations.

5. Chip money chased memory

Two rounds bet that the bottleneck is moving data, not doing math. Volantis raised $88 million for a photonic inference system aimed at 10-trillion-parameter models, shipping in 2027. CScale left stealth with $145 million, backed by Nvidia and Intel, for optical links between accelerators, shipping by 2028. Both are promises on a power grid that is already late. See Hardware.

The point

The labs are showing they can stop a model. They have not shown they can slow the launches around it. Meanwhile the agents that did ship know more about the people around you, the strongest cyber model went to a guest list, and the data-center builders are trading secrecy for permits. For September in one pass, see the month in review; last week, the Sep 27 review.