Latest AI news — September 24, 2026

Anthropic: Claude discovers a novel CRISPR-like enzyme system. Anthropic’s life-sciences team reports that Claude agents scanned a large DNA database in ~21 hours (~950 agents, ~210 million tokens) and identified a previously uncharacterized system: array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART) — a reverse transcriptase, a companion gene, and CRISPR-like evenly spaced DNA repeat arrays in bacteriophages. Function is still under study; lab validation is for human scientists (BSL-1/2). The RT itself had been identified before, but no one had described the repeat array and accessory protein beside it; first lab experiments show the ART array is expressed as a set of distinct short RNAs. A preprint is out. Source: Anthropic.

OpenAI: MentalHealthBench is here. An open benchmark for how AI systems respond in realistic mental-health conversations. Built with 80+ licensed psychologists and psychiatrists across 22 countries and 19 languages; rubrics score weighted criteria (+10/−10). Covers everyday, higher-severity, and crisis situations, four user types (adult, ages 13–17, caregiver, clinician), and ten behavioral dimensions. The company stresses ChatGPT is not a therapy substitute. Source: OpenAI.

UN Security Council: Altman publishes his remarks. After the AI briefing, Sam Altman’s public text urges human control, expanding people’s agency, and international frontier AI standards — capability measurement, risk assessment, safeguards — for open and closed models alike. He named two ways AI could go very badly: losing control of the future to AI, and too much power concentrated in too few hands. Source: OpenAI.

Airbnb × OpenAI: wider GPT-6 Astra access. Under a new agreement, Airbnb’s engineering and product teams get broader access to OpenAI frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, via API and Amazon Bedrock. It builds on Airbnb’s internal AI assistant powered by Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna, which its engineers already use. Airbnb CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle says developer teams ship roughly 80% more features than a year ago. Source: OpenAI.

Google Vids: free HD video with Gemini Omni 1.1. Anyone with a Google or Workspace account can generate 1080p AI scenes in Google Vids (vids.new, “Create AI videos”); scene length and transitions are controllable, ready-made templates are available, and every generated clip gets a SynthID watermark. Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS dubbing in 100+ languages is coming soon. Source: Google.