Feds Tell AI Labs to Quietly Downgrade Suspected Distillers — Sep 10

A joint NSA-CISA-FBI advisory names six Chinese AI firms in an alleged industrial-scale model-distillation campaign and recommends labs quietly downgrade suspected offenders rather than ban them outright, landing weeks ahead of a planned US-China AI safety dialogue. Scale SEAL's benchmark board now shows GPT-6 Astra opening a clear lead on Humanity's Last Exam even as it stays absent from the leaderboards that measure agentic and coding work, while enterprise AI spending per employee slipped as buyers quietly shift toward cheaper, older models. Elsewhere, Suno's new major-label licensing deal, a fresh funding round for AI-agent access governance, and Paul Christiano's move onto OpenAI's own safety board round out a day heavy on governance and monetization signals.