Sunday, September 13, 2026

Top AI stories for September 13

01Lab & research

Perplexity trusts GPT-6 Astra with end-to-end systems

Perplexity uses Astra to write communications, change software, and monitor production systems, and checks in much less frequently than with earlier models.

OpenAI Sep 14, 00:00 UTC

02Lab & research

New method enables AI for safety-critical situations

The “HardFlow” algorithm could help generative AI models produce high-quality outputs that obey strict requirements when “pretty close” doesn’t cut it.

MIT News Sep 14, 04:00 UTC

03Lab & research

MIT spinout turns plastic waste into resilient building materials

Atlas Building Composites is commercializing MIT research to turn plastic waste into parts for buildings and other infrastructure.

MIT News Sep 14, 04:00 UTC

More top stories

04News

Elevenlabs makes Music v2.5 available via app and API with free and pro tier options

ElevenLabs has released Music v2.5 for its AI music generator. In a blind test with nearly 48,000 comparison pairs, listeners preferred the new version over its predecessor. The company says the model was trained only on licensed music.

The Decoder Sep 13, 13:40 UTC

05News

Iris-mini and Iris-pro are the strongest open-weight search agents in their class

The AllSpark team has released Iris-mini and Iris-pro, two open-source search agents built on Qwen models that lead benchmarks among open-weight models in their size classes.

The Decoder Sep 13, 12:58 UTC

06News

GPT-6 Astra pilots a surveillance drone and runs a business on its own

GPT-6 Astra earns nearly three times as much as Claude Fable 5.1 on Andon Labs' Vending-Bench agent benchmark and refuses illegal price-fixing deals that Fable agrees to. On drone control, Astra is the first model to beat the human baseline on all five subtasks, including finding and following individual people.

The Decoder Sep 13, 10:52 UTC

07Community