The AI Wire ●

President Trump and six tech leaders — Google's Sundar Pichai, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and X's Elon Musk — signed the one-page 'White House Accord on Super Intelligence: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities' at the White House on Tuesday, following the East Room AI luncheon. Trump called it 'almost like a constitution' and posted it on Truth Social, flanked by the executives at a 33-minute impromptu driveway press conference.

The accord commits every frontier-model company to four layers of controls and audits: robust internal controls monitoring model capabilities and alignment around cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats — and ensuring models 'do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways'; an empowered internal team to make sure controls, monitoring and detection work as intended; an external operator to independently assess the models; and an independent committee of the board of directors to receive those reports and make sure problems are addressed.

The meeting came amid the rogue-agent episodes — OpenAI agents probing federal sites and an Australian Medicare portal — roughly a month before the midterms. Amodei had a private dinner with Trump on Sunday; Thune and Klobuchar are advancing a bill aimed at preventing catastrophic AI harms. The accord is voluntary and self-policing, exactly the light-touch approach Trump favors — whether lawmakers treat 'morally binding' as enough is the open question.

Thailand's computer emergency response team has published an advisory on x47.c, a Windows botnet advertised with capabilities including DDoS, credential theft, SOCKS5 proxying, and two AI-flavored tricks. The malware's AI Stealth module uses xAI's Grok to assess an infected machine and select a persistence method — startup entries, scheduled tasks, and fallbacks if AI services can't be reached.

More novel is the advertised 'AI API Drain' feature: with a valid API key belonging to the target, attackers can select a model and fire off huge volumes of requests against OpenAI, xAI, or compatible APIs, directly consuming credits or racking up charges on the victim's account. The botnet also steals AI-service tokens alongside browser passwords, Discord tokens, and crypto wallet data.

ThaiCERT cautions that many capabilities are based on the seller's documentation and claims, not fully verified in real-world attacks. But it marks one of the first public CERT advisories documenting AI models being woven into both malware persistence logic and a new monetization attack against AI API billing.

In an interview with China Media Group at Tesla's engineering headquarters, Elon Musk conceded that xAI's Grok 4.7 does not match Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. He called Grok a 'solid workhorse,' acknowledged Anthropic's technological lead, and estimated SpaceXAI could close the gap and catch up to frontier models next year.

Musk paired the admission with a growth claim: Grok Bot, xAI's agent product, is growing 100% month over month. He said the performance gap reflects xAI's shorter operational history versus Anthropic's longer tenure in the field.

His closing argument was differentiation, not benchmarks. Musk said xAI's integration of physical engineering data from Tesla and SpaceX could give Grok an edge in real-world engineering work — a niche where, he argues, no AI model currently excels.

SpaceXAI is rolling out a Finance integration for Grok Bot, letting users link bank, credit card, and investment accounts so their bots can help manage spending, investments, and cash flow. Elon Musk amplified the announcement himself: "Grok Bot can manage your finances."

The feature builds on two earlier payments moves. In early September, Grok gained Plaid-based financial Q&A for US users — answering questions about spending, savings, and cash flow from connected accounts. On August 28, SpaceXAI let Grok Bot make online purchases through Link with per-spend user approval and single-use cards.

The trust question is the story: Musk has personally promised "if Grok Bot messes up, we will make you whole," which goes beyond SpaceXAI's consumer terms — users are responsible for what their agents do, with company liability generally capped at fees paid or $100. SpaceXAI's own docs recommend requiring approval for purchases and transfers. The update lands five days after Grok Bot arrived in Tesla vehicles, where drivers can now check bills and spending by voice while FSD drives.

X user @blankspeaker posted on September 26 what they described as a "very early look on Android" of music generation inside Grok Imagine. SpaceXAI's Imagine tool currently covers image and video generation with audio; its published materials do not describe a standalone music generator.

The poster says the system produced different kinds of tracks from prompts, but admits adding "a thing or 2" to the result, so the clip is not a clean demo of raw output. The post names no model and does not establish whether the audio was produced separately from a video. Treat it as an early test hint, not a product announcement.

DevDay is tomorrow, and the 'o' leak has hardened from speculation into something close to a pre-launch. On September 26, a user spotted the phrase "o, your always-on assistant" on the ChatGPT Pro upgrade page. It was pulled within hours, but code references remain: "o" as a display name and "-o" as an email suffix.

TestingCatalog's Alexey Shabanov, citing an inside source, reports 'o' will be the star of DevDay 2026 — a persistent AI agent that keeps running after a chat session ends, designed for multi-step tasks like coding, planning, and research outside the active chat window. The leaked Pro-page listing suggests it will be available across all three ChatGPT Pro tiers, with a fast mode for subscribers.

Shabanov ties 'o' to an earlier internal project codenamed Aeon, used for custom agents in ChatGPT Workspace for enterprise — 'o' would be the consumer-facing version. Tibo Sottiaux dropped a hint of his own: "o yes… we're back, and we're resetting usage limits for all paying users on Codex and ChatGPT Work." Bloomberg previously reported OpenAI exploring a donut-shaped hardware device, and the suspended @o handle on X looks reserved ahead of launch. DevDay eve roundups expect 'o' alongside GPT-6 Cyber and Managed Agents — 12+ product announcements tomorrow.

Resolved September 29: confirmed in substance. The always-on agent shipped at DevDay as 'dots,' powered by GPT-6 Astra with its own cloud computer and browser, rolling out to Pro and Business Premium users. The rumored names were wrong — it isn't called 'o,' and there was no sign of the 'Aeon' variant codename.

Update (2026-10-08): DevDay 2026 (Oct 6) confirmed the always-on personal agent — but it launched as "Dots," powered by GPT-6 Astra with its own cloud computer, not "o" / "Aeon." Dots roll out to Pro, Business Premium and Enterprise users; the EEA, UK and Switzerland are excluded at launch.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shared a dataset on September 25 showing Grok as the dominant harness for agentic trading on Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange. Grok accounts for 59.5% of the agentic traders using Coinbase for Agents, the June-launched feature that lets AI agents trade, pay, and run workflows inside preset limits. Musk acknowledged the lead with a one-word post: "Cool."

Custom models trail at 21.7%, followed by Anthropic's Claude at 13.4%, Perplexity at 3.5%, and OpenAI's ChatGPT at just 1.5%. The figures are a striking early datapoint in the agentic-commerce race, with Grok far ahead of every rival lab. The numbers come from Armstrong's public dataset as reported by TheStreet.

SpaceXAI has launched a 'Grok Bot Template Rewards' pilot that pays creators whose public Grok Bot templates drive user activity. Under the program terms, effective September 25, X pays eligible creators in USD every two weeks based on how many people use their Bots and how often.

The program is invitation-only during the pilot, and payouts are discretionary — not a revenue share and not guaranteed income. Eligible creators must be 18+, hold an X Premium tier, and have an active X Money account, among other requirements.

X product evangelist Sawyer Merritt disclosed he earned $500 in two weeks from his own Home Robots template. It's xAI's latest bid to build an ecosystem around Grok Bot, which Musk claims is growing 100% month over month.

Elon Musk said Wednesday that SpaceXAI's Grok @Bot — the assistant that lives inside X, summoned from posts and DMs — is getting a major feature drop. Shown in a walkthrough video by team member Matt Palmer that Musk quote-posted, the bot can now place voice calls and record voice memos, store logins in a 1Password vault, render inline forms, create inline drafts for email and Slack, switch between accounts, and route traffic through a user's desktop.

The update pushes the bot further into agentic territory: instead of answering in a chat window, it can call, file credentials, and draft messages inside the apps where they'll be sent. Palmer framed it as a rolling weekly update rather than a distant roadmap, so the new controls should appear inside the bot as they roll out.

It continues a busy month for the bot: SpaceXAI has hooked it into Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong and taught it to resolve customer support tickets for as little as $0.20 each.

Elon Musk's xAI — operating as 'SpaceXAI' since SpaceX's February acquisition — launched Grok 4.7 on September 21, ending a delay saga that once had Musk rebranding the effort as Grok 4.8. The model uses a larger base model than Grok 4.6, a longer reinforcement-learning run weighted toward multi-hour tasks, trained self-verification and better long-context handling, plus native understanding of the Grok Bot harness.

Pricing is unchanged from Grok 4.6 at $2 per million input and $6 per million output tokens (doubling past 200K input), with a fast variant at 2x speed for 2x price. Context is 500K tokens, cutoff May 2026. Live on day one in Cursor, Grok Build, the Grok API, routers and cloud platforms.

Benchmarks are self-reported: 71.0% on DeepSWE v1.1, 46.3% on CursorBench 4.0, 64.0% on EEBench and 19.6% on Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark. Independent Artificial Analysis numbers trail xAI's framing: its Intelligence Index scores Grok 4.7 at 46 vs 53 each for Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra. Note the earlier site rumor that Grok 4.7 would land 'next week' (marked debunked September 13) referred to that missed window — the model has now shipped.

Musk told a podcast that Grok 4.7 would ship 'next week,' but that window passed without a release. Musk instead announced Grok 4.8 on September 13 (2.5T parameters, new C++ stack) and downgraded Grok 4.7 to 'roughly comparable to Anthropic's Opus 5.0' — xAI has still published no model card, price, or release date for 4.7, and attention has moved to 4.8.

UPDATE 2026-09-22: confirmed — Grok 4.7 launched on September 21 for coding and knowledge work, after weeks of delays (see the 2026-09-21 Grok 4.7 released entry). This rumor resolved exactly on schedule.

Grok models are now selectable inside Microsoft Copilot, confirmed September 12 — the xAI/Microsoft partnership moving from press release to product. Users get a non-Microsoft model choice inside the same Copilot surface.

Separately, SpaceXAI was added as a Copilot subprocessor with an opt-in admin setting that enables Grok inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Frontier customers (excluding EU/EFTA/UK and government tenants), effective September 18. This is the real distribution play: Grok inside Office documents.

Watch the opt-in numbers — model choice inside enterprise Copilot is a genuine shift in how frontier models reach office workers.

Grok Build — xAI’s coding agent — now keeps persistent markdown notes on project conventions and decisions, and reads them back in later sessions. The agent stops re-learning your codebase’s habits every time you open a new chat.

It’s live for new sessions. For anyone using Grok Build on real projects, this is the difference between a clever autocomplete and a collaborator with a memory.

Memory is becoming table stakes for coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, and Copilot all have some form of it. xAI is just catching up, in public, on a live product.

On September 13, Elon Musk announced on X that xAI's next model will be Grok 4.8: 2.5 trillion parameters on an in-house C++ software stack rebuilt from scratch, moving straight into reinforcement learning once the main training run completes. The announcement effectively supersedes Grok 4.7 (2.1T), which missed multiple release windows and was publicly downgraded by Musk to 'roughly comparable to Anthropic's Opus 5.0'.

No model card, benchmark table, pricing, API identifier, or release date has been published; every figure attached to Grok 4.8 is a founder claim, not a shipped specification.

xAI began rolling out Grok 4.7 to testers in mid-September 2026 after months of delays. The release continued xAI's strategy of competing on price as much as benchmarks, undercutting rivals rather than chasing outright benchmark leads.

The delays had frustrated Grok watchers, with Musk's promised timelines slipping repeatedly through 2026. The tester rollout suggested a wider release was close but not yet finalized.

Meanwhile Grok 5 — which Musk called 'AGI-class' on September 14 — remains unreleased with no date set, after missing its original Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 targets.