An unusually heavy week. Apple changed chief executive, OpenAI shipped the model it says marks the start of the AGI era, Tesla launched a car with no steering wheel and collected a federal investigation within hours, and IFA opened in Berlin.
Here is what actually happened, with the confirmed items separated from the reporting.
Apple has a new chief executive
John Ternus became Apple's CEO on September 1, ending Tim Cook's fifteen years in the job. Cook, 65, moves to executive chairman of the board rather than leaving. The handover was announced back in April and approved unanimously by the board after what Apple described as a long-term succession process, so the date arriving was not a surprise. It still marks the end of an era.
Ternus is 50. He joined Apple's product design team in 2001, became a vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and took the senior VP role in 2021. Cook called him "a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count."
The detail worth noticing is where he came from. Apple has just handed the company to a hardware engineer, at a moment when its most public difficulties have been in software and AI. Whether that shapes the roadmap is the thing to watch over the next year.
His first keynote as CEO is September 9, under the tagline "Surprise and Shine," where a foldable iPhone is expected. We covered what is expected there in our September 2026 preview.
OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra
GPT-6 Astra arrived on September 3, with president Greg Brockman framing it as the beginning of the AGI era.
The specifications are not in dispute: a 1,050,000-token context window, an April 2026 knowledge cutoff, and pricing of $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, roughly 2.5x its predecessor. The headline feature is computer use, the model operating a machine the way a person would, where it scores 72.6% on OSWorld 2.0 against 65.7% for GPT-5.6 Sol and completes tasks about 47% faster.
Two things deserve more attention than the AGI framing got.
First, the benchmark picture is split. Astra saturates the tests OpenAI ran, including 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 where Sol managed 7.8%. On Artificial Analysis's independent index, which nobody in the race funds, it places third behind Claude Fable 5.1.
Second, and more consequentially, Astra is the first model OpenAI has ever classified as "Critical" for cybersecurity under its own preparedness framework, meaning it can find and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in hardened systems without step-by-step human direction. Access went first to organisations in an application-based programme, and consumer versions refuse advanced cybersecurity tasks outright.
We went through the whole thing, benchmarks and safety documentation included, in our GPT-6 Astra breakdown.
Tesla launched the Cybercab and was investigated the same morning
Tesla put driverless Cybercabs on public streets in Austin on September 4. NHTSA opened an investigation hours later.
The vehicles have no steering wheel, no pedals and no mirrors. Federal motor vehicle safety standards generally require those controls, and Tesla self-certified that certain standards did not apply to a vehicle designed to drive itself. The federal audit query, AQ26002, covers roughly 1,000 vehicles and examines exactly that: the process and technical data behind Tesla's certification, and whether the conclusion was correct.
This is a regulatory question rather than a crash investigation. Nobody has alleged the vehicles are unsafe. The Department of Transportation has separately proposed removing the manual-control requirement for autonomous vehicles, which is presumably the rule change Tesla is betting on. Launching before it lands is the aggressive part.
IFA opened in Berlin
IFA 2026 ran from September 4, and the gadget news was unusually good.
- Xiaomi entered foldables with the 18 Fold, on its own XRing 03 chipset, though it is China-only for now.
- Huawei's MatePad Pro came in at 4.7mm thick, which is the kind of number that stops being a spec and starts being a flex.
- Lenovo showed a laptop whose screen expands from 14 to 17 inches, alongside Pantone-certified IdeaPad Vibe models.
- LG announced ThinQ Claw, a conversational agent meant to coordinate devices and services rather than just answer questions.
- TP-Link showed the first routers built for 802.11bn, the next Wi-Fi standard, which is early enough to be worth noting.
- Dyson launched a $500 electric toothbrush with a built-in camera that dispenses mouthwash when it detects gaps. Genuinely.
The money kept moving
Data centre builder Crusoe raised over $3 billion at roughly a $30 billion valuation, and is building a 1.2-gigawatt cluster for OpenAI in Abilene, Texas. For scale, a gigawatt is roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor.
Microsoft AI released MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech recognition model it claims is faster, more accurate and cheaper than OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs alternatives. And Gimlet Labs raised $300 million in a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $3 billion valuation.
What to watch next week
September 9, Apple Park. Ternus's first keynote as chief executive, and the first foldable iPhone if the reporting holds. Two firsts in one morning.
Beyond that, watch whether NHTSA's Cybercab query moves quickly or slowly. The same office once kept Zoox occupied for four years, and Tesla has a thousand vehicles already on the road.
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Sources: MacRumors, TechCrunch, NHTSA, TechRadar, Gizmodo, Tech Startups.
