XPRIZE
AI short The Gifted wins the first Future Vision XPRIZE
Jeff Synthesized's film about a boy who rebuilds his late mother from her texts took the top prize from more than 2,500 entries.
News
Launches, updates, demos and everything that shipped.
AI safety
OpenAI and DeepMind staff say AI could kill everyone
A nonprofit published 12 filmed interviews in which current and former employees of the two labs call human extinction plausible, and Reuters gave the project its exclusive.
OpenAI
OpenAI's DevDay ships always-on agents and a cheaper GPT-6.1
dots run on GPT-6 Astra with their own cloud computer and reach more than 4,000 apps, while GPT-6.1 Sol brings near-Astra results at a fifth of the price.
AI LENS
AI LENS screens three films shot through a generative camera
The University of Nottingham research project generates imagery in real time while a cast and crew shoot, and its first three films get a free screening on September 29.
AI-generated video
Fake AI videos of full mosque demolition sparked Ujjain clashes
Madhya Pradesh police say AI-generated clips falsely showing Ujjain's Shahi Masjid fully torn down helped draw the crowd that clashed with officers on September 28, 2026.
Google
Google makes Live Avatar generally available in Gemini Enterprise
The feature layers generated video, lip-sync and facial expressions onto Gemini 3.8 Live's speech model, and it supports 97 languages, Google said in a Cloud blog post.
Bona Film Group
Sanxingdui: Future Past sets October 23 China release date
Bona Film Group's AIGMS team says the 100-minute AI-produced sci-fi feature drew on 1.2 million source images over about two years of production.
Kling 4.0
Kling 4.0 doubles its AI video clip length to 30 seconds
Kuaishou's video unit says Kling 4.0 is in testing with selected users, a lite version is open to annual subscribers, and the full model ships in October.
deepfake
A White House aide's fake AI clip of his own party backfired
Dan Scavino posted a generated video of himself and Trump family members celebrating two days after a state dinner, and much of the criticism came from conservatives.
anthropic
Anthropic is watermarking Claude's output for the EU AI Act
New Claude models launched in the EU carry embedded text watermarks and Content Credentials in files, with detection limited to vetted organisations for now.
Claude Fable 5.1
Claude Fable 5.1 is the left brain, GPT-6 Astra the right
Neither model can make a single frame of video. The benchmarks that pull them apart measure language and spatial sense, which is where the old split-brain research drew its line too.
Salman Khan
Salman Khan calls for jail over fake AI videos of actors
The actor asked for social media censorship on his show, as Indian courts keep ordering platforms to take down AI deepfakes of public figures.
Synthesia
Synthesia built a TechCrunch reporter an interactive avatar
The avatar answers questions about one of her articles and redirects everything else. Davis says it is the first Synthesia has made for anyone besides its own head of corporate affairs.
Qwen-Image-2.1
Viggle distills Qwen-Image-2.1 into a six-step student
A six-step distilled student of Qwen-Image-2.1 has been downloaded 133,151 times since September 22, and the research-only license keeps the output out of client work.
Austin
Austin AI Film Festival returns to a city split over AI
The AI festival runs October 16 and 17 at Zach Theater, less than two weeks before the Austin Film Festival, which says it accepts no films made with AI.
ACE-Step
ACE-Step 1.5 sft gets an 8-bit Mac build under MIT
An 8-bit MLX conversion of the MIT-licensed music model sings intelligible lyrics on Apple Silicon, and its author's notes say the default toolkit settings produce cacophony.
SparkDiffusion
Alibaba's SparkWan checkpoints skip up to 97% of Wan attention
Six checkpoints on Hugging Face take the Wan 2.1 and 2.2 video models to 90%, 95% and 97% attention sparsity, all of them under Apache 2.0.
WanPE
WanPE boosts AI video preference 50.86 points at 30 seconds
A 397B prompt enhancer trained on 1.05 million real videos beats raw user requests by a far wider margin at 30 seconds than on shorter clips, and the Wan team has published no weights.
AI political ads
Midterm AI ads hit $80 million and 69% carry no disclosure
The Wesleyan Media Project counted at least 164 political ads generated or enhanced by AI this cycle, up from 33 in May, and 80% of them came from Republican or pro-Republican sponsors.
AI film festival
San Francisco festival screens films without saying which are AI
Four sessions run today at the Delancey Street Screening Room, and the audience learns only at the end of each short whether a human filmmaker or a generative model made it.