Crusoe Hits $30B, Tesla Cybercab Under NHTSA Probe, OpenShot 4.0
Crusoe triples valuation to $30B, Tesla Cybercab draws an NHTSA probe on launch day, Microsoft ships MAI-Transcribe-2 at $0.10/hr, and more from this week in tech.
AI
Microsoft Ships MAI-Transcribe-2 at $0.10 per Hour
Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech recognition model covering 60 languages. It ranks first on the FLEURS benchmark with an average word error rate of 5.2%. Processing speed is up to 10x faster than leading competitors.
The introductory price is $0.10 per audio hour. That is a 72% drop from the $0.36 that MAI-Transcribe-1 charged five months ago. Features include diarization, word-level timestamps, and configurable transcription styles.
MAI-Transcribe-2 outperforms Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, GPT-Transcribe, and Whisper V3-Large on benchmarks. Microsoft is undercutting OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs on both price and latency in the speech recognition API market.
Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN Launches 428B Arabic Model on MiniMax Weights
Saudi state-backed AI company Humain unveiled HUMAIN M3, a frontier Arabic language model. It is built on MiniMax’s open M3 architecture with 428 billion total parameters and 23 billion active per token in a Mixture-of-Experts design. The model handles text, images, and video natively.
HUMAIN M3 tops five of seven Arabic benchmarks against the strongest frontier models available today. It is accessible via an OpenAI-compatible API on HUMAIN Node in limited preview.
The approach is notable: instead of training from scratch, Humain fine-tuned an existing open-weight model with Arabic-specific data. It is a case study in building a national AI platform on top of publicly available weights.
US Congress Introduces AI AGENT Act for Agent Security Standards
The AI AGENT Act (S.5051) has been introduced in the US Senate. It would require organizations deploying AI agents to maintain a continuous, machine-readable inventory of all agents. NIST would have one year after enactment to develop security standards.
Palo Alto Networks, GoDaddy, Infoblox, and the AI Policy Network support the bill. Federal contractors bidding for new deals would need to meet the NIST standards. The standards are voluntary for private companies but mandatory for federal civilian agencies under CISA oversight.
As agentic AI proliferates, this bill represents the first major legislative effort to track what AI agents do and what permissions they hold.
Big Tech
Crusoe Raises $3B at a $30B Valuation
AI data center developer Crusoe has raised over $3 billion in a round co-led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners. Mubadala Capital, the alternative asset arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, also participated. The round values Crusoe at roughly $30 billion.
That is a 3x jump from the $10 billion valuation at which Crusoe raised $1.38 billion just ten months ago. The company recently signed a five-year, $13 billion cloud contract with quantitative trading firm Jane Street for GPU and AI infrastructure.
Crusoe started in 2018 as a crypto mining operation powered by flared natural gas. It has since pivoted into a hyperscale data center developer serving OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta.
Tesla Cybercab Draws NHTSA Probe on Launch Day
Tesla began offering rides in its steering-wheel-free Cybercab in Austin, Texas. The same day, NHTSA opened an audit query (AQ26002) covering roughly 1,000 vehicles.
The core issue is certification. The Cybercab lacks a brake pedal, accelerator, steering wheel, and mirrors. Autonomous vehicle makers can seek an FMVSS exemption from NHTSA to deploy vehicles without conventional manual controls, but Tesla did not apply for one.
NHTSA plans to examine the process and technical data Tesla used when certifying the Cybercab. It is the first time a vehicle with no manual controls has entered commercial service and immediately faced a federal safety investigation.
Startups
Zeit AI Closes EUR 5M Seed with YC and Sequoia Scout
Munich-based Zeit AI closed a EUR 5 million seed round. Investors include Y Combinator, Oxford Seed Fund, Hasso Plattner VC, Sequoia Capital Scout Fund, and ACE Ventures. World Cup winner Mario Goetze and former German Finance Minister Christian Lindner joined as angel investors.
Founded in 2024 by Leopold von Waldthausen and Marvin Bornstein, both ex-Palantir, the company builds ZeitMind. ZeitMind connects to a company’s ERPs, CRMs, and databases, cleans the data, and automatically generates analytics dashboards.
The target market is European mid-market firms that lack large data teams. The pitch: bring Palantir-grade data capabilities to companies that cannot afford Palantir-scale budgets.
Backbone Raises EUR 4M Pre-Seed for Food AI Quality Platform
Brussels-based startup Backbone closed a EUR 4 million pre-seed round led by Pitchdrive. PROfounders Capital, Passion Capital, and 100IN participated. Belgian food industry families including Agristo and Darta also invested.
Founded in 2025 by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo, and Julien Steel, Backbone provides an AI quality and compliance platform for food and beverage manufacturers. The company aims to deploy across 250 production sites in Europe by 2028.
Food safety is a heavily regulated domain. Digitizing quality inspection records and automating compliance checks with AI can reduce human error and costs.
New Tech
US Signals Targeted Semiconductor Tariffs on Samsung, SK Hynix
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signaled targeted semiconductor tariffs at the G20 Innovation Ministerial on September 2. Companies manufacturing in the US would be exempt, while those that do not would face significant trade costs.
Samsung is investing over $37 billion in a foundry cluster in Taylor, Texas. SK Hynix is spending $4 billion on an advanced HBM packaging plant in Indiana. However, their combined US investment is 6.5 times smaller than TSMC’s $265 billion Arizona facility.
The administration is also reviewing plans to extend tariffs to finished products like data center servers and to set country-specific tariff rates and quotas.
China Removes 5.6 Million Pieces of AI-Abused Content
China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) removed 5.61 million pieces of unlawful or rule-violating content as part of its annual Qinglang campaign. It also took action against 49,000 accounts and sanctioned over 2,400 websites and apps.
Targets include AI-generated disinformation, violent or vulgar content, deepfake impersonation, and content infringing on minors’ rights. The 2026 edition of the campaign focuses specifically on AI misuse.
Major platforms including WeChat, RedNote, and Douyin are among those affected. The crackdown reflects China’s expanding content regulation in response to the proliferation of generative AI.
Open Source
OpenShot 4.0 Ships with Screen Recording and AI Masking
Open-source video editor OpenShot released version 4.0. Users can now record their screen, webcam, microphone, and system audio directly into a project. The web-based timeline has been replaced with a native Qt engine.
A new local AI object masking feature runs entirely offline without an internet connection. Professional color grading tools include color wheels, curves, LUTs, and video scopes.
Creator Jonathan Thomas describes this as the most ambitious upgrade since the project began. New effects include Film Grain, Denoise, and Beat Sync.
Haiku OS Releases R1 Beta 6 with Firefox and QEMU Support
The BeOS-inspired Haiku project shipped R1 Beta 6, its first beta in two years. The release lands one week before the project’s 25th anniversary.
Firefox and its derivatives now run on Haiku. QEMU hardware virtualization is supported through the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (NVMM). The built-in WebPositive browser has switched to a WebKit rendering engine.
Additional improvements include a Go language port, broader POSIX compatibility, and new hardware driver support. After 25 years, Haiku continues to carry forward the design philosophy of BeOS.
SGLang v0.5.16 Adds Speculative Decoding and MoE Balancing
LLM serving framework SGLang released v0.5.16. It introduces DSpark, a confidence-driven speculative decoding algorithm that drafts semi-autoregressively in blocks.
DeepSeek-V4 is now supported on GB300 hardware. The release includes MoE load balancing for DeepEP expert parallelism. CUDA 13 and Torch 2.11 upgrades are also included.
Developed by LMSYS, SGLang powers over 400,000 GPUs worldwide. It provides day-zero support for the latest models including Kimi K3 and Nemotron 3.
References
- MAI-Transcribe-2 announcement — Microsoft AI
- MAI-Transcribe-2 pricing comparison — VentureBeat
- HUMAIN M3 unveiling — HUMAIN
- HUMAIN Node playground — HUMAIN
- AI AGENT Act of 2026 (S.5051) — Congress.gov
- AI agent security bill details — Axios
- Crusoe $3B funding — Bloomberg
- Crusoe Jane Street deal — TechFundingNews
- Tesla Cybercab NHTSA probe — TechCrunch
- Tesla Cybercab FMVSS issue — Electrek
- Zeit AI seed round — EU-Startups
- Zeit AI founders background — TechFundingNews
- Backbone pre-seed round — Tech.eu
- US semiconductor tariffs on Samsung, SK Hynix — Korea Herald
- Samsung SK Hynix US investment gap — Seoul Economic Daily
- China AI content removal — Xinhua
- China platform crackdown — South China Morning Post
- OpenShot 4.0 release — OpenShot
- Haiku R1 Beta 6 release — Haiku Project
- SGLang v0.5.16 release — GitHub
- SGLang v0.5.14 MoE balancing — GitHub