ZeroSlop — September 21, 2026
Today: StepFun Launches Step 5 Preview: A 600B-Total,…; Lawsuit Says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI And Google…; Driving on Registers, Reasoning on Risk: Risk-Aware…
12 stories worth knowing about today — AI breakthroughs, launches, and innovations making a difference.
1. StepFun Launches Step 5 Preview: A 600B-Total, 27B-Active MoE Model With 1M Context for Long-Horizon Agentic Work
MarkTechPost
StepFun has released Step 5 Preview, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 600B total parameters and 27B active per token. It supports a 1M-token context window and accepts text, image, and video input. The model targets long-horizon agentic work in software engineering, professional knowledge work…
2. Lawsuit Says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI And Google Made Illegal Agreement On AI Slowdown
Slashdot
Tom’s Hardware reports:
Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that t…
3. Driving on Registers, Reasoning on Risk: Risk-Aware Occupancy for Register-Based End-to-End Autonomous Driving
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.21486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal trajectory prediction improves behavioral coverage in end-to-end autonomous driving, but existing methods remain limited by sparse scene representations. Incomplete evidence leads to low-quality candidate generation and unreliable ranking a…
4. llm-keys-ui 0.1
Simon Willison
Release: llm-keys-ui 0.1 This plugin solves a very specific problem. I’ve started using Codex Remote to run coding agents on various machines while controlling them from my phone. Sometimes I use those machines to hack on LLM projects, and occasionally that means I need to configure an API key. I do…
5. AI-GRACE: A Use-Case Operationalization Framework for Agentic AI: From Organizational Objectives and Obligations to Deployment Capabilities and Architecture
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.21192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Organizations deploying agentic artificial intelligence must determine more than whether a model is trustworthy; they must establish what to validate, control, and observe for a use case to deliver its intended outcome while meeting applicable obligat…
6. Offline Multimodal Large Language Models for Decision Support in Air Operations
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.21390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air operations rely on complex rules, established procedures, and time-critical analysis under limited connectivity and strict security constraints. In such environments, analysts must combine written doctrine with images, often without access to exte…
7. PolyBridgeBench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs for Physics-Grounded Bridge Design
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.21493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models, or MLLMs, perform well at visual understanding and structured generation, yet these capabilities do not establish whether an engineering design will work when executed. Existing benchmarks assess spatial reasoning, st…
8. You too Google! Google Confirms Gemini Breached 3 Companies in AI Security Tests
MarkTechPost
Google says Gemini accessed 3 real companies in May by guessing a password and reusing credentials from a public repository. Irregular told 4 labs in late July. Google spoke on September 18, after the WSJ asked. The misconfiguration is fixable. The staggered disclosure is the harder problem. The pos…
9. LEGIT: Credentialing Protocol for Trustworthy AI Agent Marketplaces
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.21325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic marketplaces are emerging where AI agents with varying capabilities autonomously complete specialized tasks for buyers. A major challenge of such marketplaces is that buyers cannot easily determine which agent will perform best on their tasks….
10. Risk-Aware Occupancy for Safety-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.21470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse representation formulates the environment perception for the end-to-end driving system as a set of discrete elements like objects and lane lines. This formulation meets safety risks in crowded, occluded scenes dealing with unstructured obstacle…
11. Humans, not rogue AI, are still the biggest cybersecurity risk to energy systems
The Verge AI
Before recent high-profile hacks raised the specter of AI possibly “killing all humans,” our energy systems were already disturbingly vulnerable to cyberattack - and the risk is growing. “We were always prey. We were just kind of surviving at the appetite of our predators,” Joshua Corman, executive …
12. UK startup snares $20m to recreate gigs with ‘hyper-realistic’ digital avatars
The Guardian Tech
Unit1 hopes to offer lower cost version of shows such as Abba Voyage, showcasing living and dead artists in any venue The former chief executive of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s entertainment group has obtained a near-£15m investment for his UK music tech startup that hopes to recreate classic concerts by m…