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Agentic Wars Begin: Amazon Blocks Meta’s Agents As Muse Takes World By Storm

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Agentic Wars Begin: Amazon Blocks Meta’s Agents As Muse Takes World By Storm

Amazon.com has blocked Meta’s new AI agent from its retail site after the social media company declined a request to remove the bot, Bloomberg reported.

Meta’s Muse, which was introduced earlier this month and has taken the world by storm, quickly rising to the top of mobile app charts, a sign that the social media company is gaining traction in the increasingly crowded market for consumer AI assistants, and sent the company’s stock price soaring, is designed to help people carry out such common online tasks as shopping and booking appointments.

However, since it has its own agentic product, Amazon prohibits other companies from deploying automated tools to shop its site and started blocking Muse on Sunday night, a spokesperson said. Shoppers using Muse see a series of pop-ups saying its use violates Amazon’s terms of use.

“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” Amazon spokesperson Lara Hendrickson said in an emailed statement, adding that an opt-in requirement is standard practice for food delivery apps and online travel agencies. “Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience.”

Amazon builds its own automated shopping tools, but has sought to prevent rivals’ bots from browsing and making purchases from its catalog. The company last year sued Perplexity AI Inc., saying the widely used artificial intelligence startup sought to conceal its shopping agents after Amazon asked Perplexity to remove them. The legal skirmish is widely seen as a high-profile test case that could help determine the rules of the road governing agentic shopping.

So far, consumers are mostly using bots to research products rather than let them make purchases. So Amazon’s move to block shopping agents from accessing its site means the company is unlikely to lose much business. But if consumers start using AI agents to buy stuff, the bots could select other e-commerce sites, costing Amazon sales and advertising revenue.

Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said earlier this year that the agentic shopping experience left much to be desired, and that the bots often flubbed pricing or other data.

“We’re having conversations with all those folks to try and make that better and find something that works for customers and all the companies,” he said in April. 

Perhaps to offset the negative vibes from the angry Amazon response, late on Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he was “teaming up with Shopify to make shopping and checkout easier in Muse. Shoppers find more. Shops sell more. More partnerships like this coming soon.”

Maybe… but more likely the won’t be, since every retailer will want to have their own proprietary agents access to their own content and product offering. 

Hence agent wars. 

Meta’s Muse is ranked the No. 1 free app on the US Apple iOS App and Google Play stores as of Monday. The assistant, which is available for people 18 years and older, was downloaded more than 902,000 times in the six days after Meta introduced it on Sept. 8, according to Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower. That’s more than the 773,000 downloads of its predecessor, the Meta AI app, in the same post-launch period. 

According to Goldman, Meta’s Muse (powered by Muse Spark) represents a major leap because it delivers ready-to-use personal agents with simple chat interfaces, including deep WhatsApp integration for Muse, so no coding is required – unlike earlier Claude-style bots.

They actively handle tasks like booking holidays or restaurants, and go further by proactively chasing email follow-ups, flagging inconsistencies or conflicts in your inbox, monitoring threads, and advancing goals in the background even when you’re offline. Classic chatbots like ChatGPT stay reactive: they answer questions or draft text only when prompted, never independently act across your apps or keep working on your behalf. As Goldman’s TMT specialist Sean Johnstone writes, “the more I use Instinct the more I like it – its really is like having your own dedicated PA.”

The sudden surge of Muse means the frontier models’ agentic dominance just got another major competitor. It also means there will be an unprecedented demand for hardware: as Wccftech writes, “If Meta’s Muse Personal Agent Scales To Just 100 Million Users, It Would Require 1.58 Million AMD Ryzen CPUs, 800 Petabyte Of RAM, And 10,000 Petabyte Of SSD Under Ideal Conditions.” More: 

If you were wondering why everyone has suddenly turned so bullish on CPUs from Intel, AMD, and Arm, look no further than the underlying compute requirements for serving Meta’s Muse personal agent to just 100 million users, assuming minimal sharing, especially as Meta has promised each Muse user a dedicated VM that can work continuously in the background.

Also, Meta is currently allowing up to 100 million free tokens per week, with paid subscription tiers starting around $20 per month for heavy power users.

Of course, the agentic fee will only cover a tiny fraction of the hardware required to run the compute the agents will soak up, which means that – if successful in getting more people to use it – Zuckerberg is about to take Meta’s capex into hyperdrive. Which, for the company formerly known as Facebook before it changed its name to Meta after a catastrophic foray into the metaverse which cost it nearly $100 billion in wasted funds, won’t be the first time it has aggressively chased an overhyped concept only to crash and burn. 

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 23:15

China’s Rare-Earth Magnet Exports To US Plunge As Trump-Xi Meeting Looms

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China’s Rare-Earth Magnet Exports To US Plunge As Trump-Xi Meeting Looms

Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump are scheduled to meet in Washington on Thursday. UBS analysts quoted chief China economist Yu Song as saying the meeting between the leaders of the two global superpowers is largely about strategic stability and modest progress on tariffs, rare earths, and AI safety.

Political risk analyst Marcus Bischoff expects no major breakthrough but says the most realistic outcome is continuity in US-China relations as the most likely outcome. He sees cautious grounds for higher expectations following discussions between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.

Over the weekend, a Reuters report said that Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng were set to discuss advanced AI bots and the global adoption of the technology, as well as rare earths.

As Christian Keller, Barclays’ global head of economics research, recently described, China’s near-total control of more than 95% of critical material refining has been used as leverage against the US. Whether magnets, tungsten, germanium, gallium, or other critical materials, China has restricted their flows over the last year and a half, forcing the US into a mad sprint to secure conflict-free supplies.

Bloomberg reported the latest details on China’s resource nationalism and the weaponization of critical material supply chains overnight, citing customs data released Sunday that showed rare earth shipments from China to the US plunged sharply in August.

Shipments dropped 21% from July to 512 tons, according to the new trade data. The decline leaves US supplies of components used in cars, consumer goods, and weapons as a key talking point, whether in discussions between Bessent and his Chinese counterparts or between Trump and Xi.

Bloomberg Economics’ Chris Kennedy said, “Washington needs stability with Beijing to keep these critical inputs moving,” adding, “Yet periods of calm that restore access to lower-cost Chinese material weaken the urgency for the US to break its dependence on China.”

The latest trade data shows China’s quasi-monopolistic control of critical materials can be used as geopolitical leverage.

One major problem for the US is that Barclays’ Keller shows Beijing will control mineral mining and global refining of these materials through at least 2030.

Breaking Beijing’s quasi-monopolistic grip has been an emerging theme of ours that includes finding producing miners with conflict-free supply chains that can deliver to the West. Those miners will be the early winners because these critical materials are the building blocks of the West’s pursuit of reindustrialization, the AI data center buildout, power grid upgrades, and, of course, the incoming rearmament cycle.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 23:00

“Supply Shortage Problem Has Disappeared”: Acer CEO Says Memory Prices To Decline In 2027 As CXMT Starts Mass Production Of New Chip Platform

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“Supply Shortage Problem Has Disappeared”: Acer CEO Says Memory Prices To Decline In 2027 As CXMT Starts Mass Production Of New Chip Platform

At long last, the memory bubble may be finally bursting. 

According to Jason Chen, chairman and CEO of Taiwanese PC and IT hardware giant, Acer, prices for memory chips will start reversing in the latter half of next year, dismissing the memory cartel pardon Big 3 claim that chip prices will keep rising well beyond 2027, and bucking the popular narrative which expects no declines in chip prices for the foreseeable future. 

According to United Daily News, Chen said that only high-end DDR5 parts like LPDDR5X-9600 and niche CPUs like Nvidia’s N1 and N1X chips are in short supply. Since supplier pricing lags consumer pricing by about a few months, he added that PC prices will still rise between 5% and 20% towards the end of this year, plateau by the first half of 2027, before finally declining after years of AI-drive hikes.

The AI boom has driven shortages for various PC components, beginning with GPUs in late 2022, before expanding to memory chips by late 2025. This made memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, although the increases have finally cooled as consumers refuse to absorb further hikes.

Some memory companies like SK Hynix are saying that the shortage will be worse next year and that it won’t be until 2030 before pricing will start to normalize. The Adata chief even said that the DRAM shortage would last another 10 years. This is plausibly true, especially as HBM demand from AI hyperscalers remains strong, and the various memory chip fabs under construction aren’t expected to come online until the 2030s.

However, Chen disagreed with this take. He said that the major memory suppliers naturally want to keep their margins as high as possible for longer, and the reason memory makers keep coming out and saying “the price uptrend will continue into 2027” is that antitrust rules prevent them from coordinating prices directly, so they use public statements to send a kind of “signal” to one another “so they keep putting out the message: let me tell you, prices won’t come down until the year 20-whatever.”

The Acer chairperson argued that there’s already ample memory and SSD supplies, while the purported CPU shortage is now limited to specific models: “No. How could it stay short forever? Chinese capacity keeps coming onto the market. The supply shortage problem has already completely disappeared.”

Chen also expects the cost of the SSDs and memory Acer holds in 2027 to be lower than this year. If that gets reflected in end product prices, he sees a possibility that prices at least stop rising and stabilize in the second half of next year. The Acer CEO said prices could be raised further in Q1 27 as well. But since this is a period of pricing chaos, he expects the size of the increases to gradually shrink. He estimates component prices could peak around the middle of 2027, when the capacity that chipmakers have added is expected to start running in earnest.

After that, prices would stabilize, and whether they can actually come down in the second half remains to be seen. He admitted, though, that nobody can know the exact timing of the reversal. Chen said PC selling prices coming back down is strictly “a hope.”

He also added that Chinese memory makers churning out cheaper alternatives would disrupt the market – something that SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won feared. In fact, Acer, alongside HP and Asus, has started using CXMT chips in some of its products, while some Lenovo models sold in Germany were found to have YMTC SSDs.

Nevertheless, he said that price increases are becoming their own trend, saying that SSDs, PCBs, and fiberglass cloth used in motherboards are seeing their own hikes. “A lot of people come and tell us they want to raise prices, and we find it a bit baffling — this needs to go up, too?” Chen said to the reporters.

He wrapped up by saying this chain of price hikes creates inflation (according to Goldman, rising memory prices will push core PCE higher by 0.5%) which in turn pushes central banks to raise rates, and that “this is not a normal phenomenon.”

As Tom‘s Hardware summarizes, the overall tenor from Chen is good news for long-suffering PC enthusiasts if computer manufacturers could finally lower prices after years of shortages and expensive parts.

Certainly happy to take advantage of the soaring profit margins, China’s best IPO of the decade, DRAM chipmaker CXMT, said on ‌Sunday its fifth-generation technology platform had entered mass production, a claimed breakthrough that could help China build a stronger competitor to Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology in the global market for memory chips. 

The new platform is ​designed to make more powerful memory chips at lower cost and with less power ⁠use, Reuters reported. CXMT, which earlier this year listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market, said it would give electronics makers an additional ​source of supply for chips used in smartphones and other devices. The company is currently the 4th largest DRAM maker in the world – but rapidly growing – after the Big-3 cartel of Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.

CXMT, China’s leading producer of DRAM, said the ​new platform packs the tiny structures that store data closer together, allowing more memory to fit on each chip and more individual chips to be made from each silicon wafer.

The Hefei-based memory-chip maker said it had reduced the spacing of key features ​in the part of the chip that stores data to 11.95 nanometres, or about 12 billionths of a ​metre.

It achieved this using “quadruple patterning,” a process that repeats several manufacturing steps to produce finer circuit patterns.
“Our process capability is now ‌on ⁠par with the most advanced mass-produced nodes out there in the industry,” Luo Xiaodong, CXMT’s vice president and head of its marketing centre, said at the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei.

CXMT also unveiled two 24-gigabit LPDDR5X products made on the new platform. LPDDR5X is a power-saving type of DRAM used mainly ​in smartphones and other portable ​electronics. The products each hold ⁠50% more data than CXMT’s previous equivalent products and are already in mass production, the company said. They are offered in two package formats for different smartphone ​and portable-device designs.

CXMT said the platform can produce at least 50% more gross chip ​dies per ⁠wafer than its fourth-generation platform, using an 8-gigabit-chip baseline. That measures the potential number of chips made from a wafer before defective units are excluded, rather than the proportion that pass final testing.

CXMT said it developed the platform using computer ⁠simulations ​and joint work with Chinese chip-equipment makers on critical production steps.

The ​advance comes as Beijing seeks to reduce reliance on foreign semiconductor technology and US export controls since 2022 have restricted China’s access to ​certain advanced chipmaking equipment and related software.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 22:33

“Technically Not A Hurricane”: Rare Nor’easter Threatens Northeast This Weekend

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“Technically Not A Hurricane”: Rare Nor’easter Threatens Northeast This Weekend

Meteorologists on X are tracking a potential nor’easter that could form off the East Coast late this week. 

A late-September nor’easter is rare for this time of year, and it comes as El Niño has curbed hurricane development so far this season. 

“While not technically a hurricane, the coastal impacts from a powerful Nor’easter will bring “battering waves” and erosion plus very strong winds perhaps gusting to 70-80 mph,” meteorologist Ryan Maue wrote on X earlier Monday, adding, “Even without a storm name — news media should take this “climate-fueled cyclone” very seriously.” 

PIX11 senior meteorologist Mike Masco said, “Some model guidance has hinted at gusts of 60–70 mph from eastern New Jersey to eastern Long Island. That is NOT a forecast at this point, but I’m not dismissing the potential, particularly across eastern Long Island.” 

The good news is that peak hurricane season was on September 10 (11 days ago), without a named storm, because strong wind shear associated with El Niño was tearing apart developing systems in the Atlantic Basin. However, the season runs through November 30.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 22:10

Chinese County Orders Lawyers To Get Government Approval Before Defending Criminal Charges

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Chinese County Orders Lawyers To Get Government Approval Before Defending Criminal Charges

Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times,

A county justice bureau in southwestern China has ordered local law firms to report cases related to the government’s “anti-organized crime” campaign and obtain official approval before lawyers can argue that a defendant’s alleged offense should be classified differently.

The No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court in the Beijing suburb of Fangzhuang on Aug. 15, 2006. Goh Chai Hin/AFP via Getty Images

The notice, issued directly to law firms by the Justice Bureau of Pu’an County in Guizhou Province, requires lawyers handling cases covered by a recent anti-organized crime public notice to report them to the bureau’s public legal services department, according to a Sept. 18 blog post by a legal blogger on Chinese news portal NetEase.

The requirement has prompted concerns among Chinese lawyers that a government administrative agency is attempting to exercise control over how defense lawyers present their cases in court.

The notice states that law firms handling cases covered by the campaign “must promptly report [them] to the county justice bureau’s public legal services department.”

It adds: “If the defense argument is to change the legal characterization of the crime, it must be reported to the county justice bureau for study and approval before that defense theory can be expressed. All law firms are requested to strictly implement this.”

Under the arrangement, lawyers would therefore need to do more than simply notify the justice bureau that they are handling a particular case. Before presenting a defense argument that challenges the prosecution’s characterization of an alleged offense, they would have to obtain approval from the same government agency responsible for regulating the local legal profession.

Lawyers Question Restrictions

Two China-based attorneys spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, giving only their surnames out of fear of reprisal.

Zhang, a human rights lawyer from Hubei Province, said the local county requirement violates China’s Criminal Procedure Law and interferes with defendants’ rights to a defense, as well as lawyers’ independent practice.

“Lawyers [should act] independently in accordance with the law and not be subject to unlawful interference by any administrative agency,” Zhang said. “Establishing administrative approval or consent as a prerequisite for using a defense argument is tantamount to placing the review of judicial administrative agencies above the law.”

China’s Criminal Procedure Law provides that defense lawyers should, based on facts and law, present materials and opinions concerning innocence, lesser offenses, or the reduction or exemption of criminal responsibility.

However, the Pu’an County notice requires lawyers to wait for the justice bureau to “study and approve” one category of such defense arguments before presenting it.

Liu, a Beijing-based human rights lawyer, told The Epoch Times that the requirement is particularly significant in cases arising from government-led anti-organized crime campaigns, in which lawyers may need to challenge the evidence or the prosecution’s classification of an alleged offense.

“In mainland China, the more anti-organized crime is designated by the authorities as a task, the more lawyers need to question the evidence and the characterization of the crime,” Liu said.

If administrative agencies can screen out defense arguments they do not approve of, he said, a trial could effectively be left with only the prosecution’s account, reducing the defense to a mere formality.

“Special campaigns such as the ‘anti-organized crime’ campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party … carry clear political-task implications for local officials,” Liu said. “This precisely reflects that the [local] authorities concerned are moving toward abandoning judicial fairness, and doing so will lead to more wrongful and unjust cases.”

Similar Rule Previously Withdrawn

The requirement in Pu’an has a precedent elsewhere in Guizhou Province.

According to a 2015 report by Chinese state-owned media outlet The Paper, the Zunyi Municipal Justice Bureau introduced a rule in late 2014 requiring lawyers to report cases in which they intended to argue for a defendant’s acquittal or seek a change in the criminal charge.

Lawyers filed a government information disclosure request concerning the rule. The justice bureau responded that because the provision was controversial, it had decided to withdraw it.

The earlier rule required lawyers to report such cases. The Pu’an notice goes further by explicitly stating that a lawyer seeking to change the legal characterization of a crime must obtain the county justice bureau’s “study and approval” before expressing the defense argument in court.

Ye Zilong contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 21:45

Seattle Mayor Calls For New Gun Laws While Letting Repeat Offenders Roam Free

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Seattle Mayor Calls For New Gun Laws While Letting Repeat Offenders Roam Free

It’s the communist playbook in real time.  Allow crime to fester, then disarm law abiding citizens rather than punishing the people responsible.    

Democratic Socialist Mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, has been a disaster for the city and she’s only been in office nine months.  So far, multiple major corporate employers are leaving Seattle to avoid tax expansion, homeless camps are growing exponentially, she has triggered several public safety controversies, faced potential recall and plunging public approval. 

Anyone with sense could have predicted this, but Seattle is a nesting ground for woke cultism and Wilson said all the right things during her campaign.

As with any far-left administration, it was only a matter of time before Wilson went after firearms rights.  In a recent announcement on a “new approach to gun violence”, the Mayor calls for “preventing gun violence before it happens”.  Part of this plan includes Wilson pushing for added restrictions to firearms carry in Washington. 

Wilson wants to work with the state legislature to advance gun violence prevention legislation, including regulation of firearms “in sensitive spaces,” regulation of firearms at the city’s center, and an update to juvenile firearm possession and sentencing laws (she does not specify what these updates would entail).  

Washington already preempts most local gun regulation. Cities cannot ban carry on their own; any broader restrictions would require a change in state law. Current state rules limit guns in some city-run stadiums and convention centers, with exceptions for people who have a valid concealed pistol license.

Wilson’s proposal has not spelled out whether licensed concealed carry would be included in every “sensitive space.”  But her added restrictions, as presented, would only affect legal and law abiding gun owners.  

The problem with this model is that it ignores the source of the crime.  The vast majority of gun violence in Seattle is committed by 0.1% of all residents, and the majority of these criminals are repeat offenders.  Roughly 900 people in a city of 780,000 are connected to 52% of the violence.  Why not simply lock these 900 people up for good? 

On such case is Alrick Hollingsworth, who served only seven years for shooting five people are a Seattle bus stop and was released early.  Hollingsworth went back out on the streets this year only to commit another shooting.

Wilson and leftists like her will never lock up repeat offenders this because it would contradict their position on “social solutions” to crime response. Many criminals who commit violence are already on law enforcement radar because they have a long rap sheet of lesser offenses.  Wilson promotes a program called “LEAD Seattle” (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) which “diverts” offenders with “lesser crimes” away from prosecution and into social services projects. 

This problem is magnified in juvenile courts where offenders consistently get a slap on the wrist and sent to the revolving door.     

Whether or not the WA legislature agrees with Wilson on increased gun carry restriction is not yet clear, but the narrative is predictable.  Leftist candidates have consistently lost favor with the American public when it comes to gun control and they seem to have backed away from their more aggressive rhetoric on the issue.  However, that doesn’t mean they are abandoning their gun grabber roots.  

As we have seen in the past, gun control always starts with incrementalism – They start with less contentious restrictions, like a ban of concealed carry in public spaces, then move the ball forward from there.  Why should the rest of Seattle’s citizens pay the price for the actions of 900 dangerous thugs?  There’s no logical reason other than control.  The goal is not to solve crime, the goal is to exploit crime as a vehicle to add new laws.  

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 21:20

China Will Dominate Global Nuclear Energy Through 2035, Analyst Says

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China Will Dominate Global Nuclear Energy Through 2035, Analyst Says

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

The future of nuclear energy is in China’s hands. While the United States remains the world’s largest producer of nuclear energy, China’s sector is growing at such a rapid clip that it is expected to overtake France as well as the United States to become the world’s leading nuclear power producer within the next decade. In addition to this rapid expansion of traditional nuclear power capacity, Beijing has also quickly become the global leader in a broad and diverse range of advanced nuclear power technologies.

“By a wide margin, China will have the world’s most dynamic and significant nuclear industry through 2035,” Damien Ma, energy lead analyst for Gavekal Technologies, wrote in a recent report, as quoted by the South China Morning Post. “Construction efficiencies mean China can build a new plant in about six years, compared with more than a decade for the latest Vogtle reactors in the US,” Ma went on to say.

The United States has added just one nuclear plant in the last decade, Georgia’s long-delayed, over-budget, and controversial Plant Vogtle. Over the same time, China added a staggering 34 gigawatts of capacity. And, Beijing’s latest five year plan shows that China has no intentions of slowing down.

“With innovation and security as its leading themes, the latest FYP illuminates how nuclear energy underpins multiple strategic priorities for China in the context of not only energy security but also technological innovation and global engagement,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonprofit policy research organization and bipartisan think tank recently reported.

The Chinese government has been eager to build up the most advanced nuclear power sector in the world as a part of Beijing’s broader bid to establish lasting dominance in the global energy sector by becoming the world’s first electrostate. Building the world’s most advanced nuclear energy fleet is a part of this goal, and includes innovative approaches to how nuclear reactors are designed, deployed, and fueled.

“From the world’s first in-reactor thorium breeding confirmation to a dual PWR-HTGR plant and commercial supercritical CO2 generation, China is assembling a vertically integrated advanced nuclear ecosystem,” Power Magazine reported in March of this year. “The breadth of activity signals a coordinated push toward fuel independence and industrial deployment.”

The United States has also been bullish about building up and advancing its aging nuclear sector. The Trump administration has publicized its intentions to “produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market” and is likewise bullish on developing next-gen nuclear reactors and nuclear fusion technology on its own home turf. Similarly to China, the United States is also fighting to free itself from international nuclear fuel supply chains, and is attempting to do so by building up domestic uranium extraction and enrichment capacities. But the United States’ advanced nuclear sector is lagging far behind China when it comes to spending and technological knowhow.

But while China is historically quite secretive about its technological advancements and cutting-edge energy sector developments, this week Beijing made a surprising move to share its expertise with the rest of the world. This week, China signed a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to more freely share its knowledge on high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs) with other countries. HGTRs are a form of advanced fourth-generation reactor that is capable of producing nuclear energy at extremely high temperatures, opening avenues for use in a variety of industrial applications.

The new deal “covers cooperation in HTGR research and development, reactor design, construction, commissioning and operation,” as well as the exchange of “information on supply chains and personnel training,” according to a recent Interesting Engineering report. “The deal could give other countries greater access to China’s engineering experience with HTGRs as interest grows in nuclear systems that can provide both electricity and high-temperature industrial heat.”

This development is a promising starting point for a more cooperative approach to what is indeed a borderless problem – climate change and the growing problem of artificial intelligence’s energy demand growth. Advanced nuclear energy systems could provide a critical lifeline by offering clean energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 20:55

Massachusetts School District Investigated Over Alleged Secret ‘Gender Transition’

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Massachusetts School District Investigated Over Alleged Secret ‘Gender Transition’

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Education has announced that it is investigating a Massachusetts school district over allegedly enabling a minor girl student’s “gender transition” without the knowledge of parents or securing their consent.

The probe was launched by the department’s Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) against the Public Schools of Northborough and Southborough school district, the department said in a Sept. 17 statement.

The girl was enrolled at Algonquin Regional High School, where school personnel allegedly facilitated the student’s “social transition to a boy” while keeping her parents in the dark.

“The parents claim that their daughter participated in counseling sessions after school to support the transition while they were under the impression she was receiving academic assistance for her math class,” the department said.

The school personnel also allegedly began referring to the child by a male name and using male pronouns without the parents’ knowledge.

According to the Education Department, a school counselor is accused of reporting the parents to the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) for countering the school’s actions.

In December 2024, DCF removed the child from her family home. The parents are still engaged in custody litigation over their daughter.

The Education Department said the allegations raise serious questions about the school district’s compliance with federal laws protecting parental rights, specifically the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA).

FERPA grants parents the right to access their children’s education records for inspection and review. Parents also have certain control over the disclosure of personal information from these records.

Under PPRA, parents have rights regarding surveys, analyses, or evaluations of their children in certain areas, including sex behavior or attitudes and mental or psychological problems.

The law also covers the administration of physical examinations of minors. Parents have the right to review instructional materials used in the educational curriculum.

The Education Department said that under FERPA, parents can request changes to their child’s education records. If the school rejects the requested changes, parents can seek a hearing on the issue at the institution.

According to the department, it is currently unclear whether the school district and the school complied with FERPA and PPRA. The SPPO probe will determine whether these regulations were violated.

“Parents have a right to know what is happening with their children at school, particularly when it concerns deeply personal matters involving their health and well-being,” Frank Miller, director of SPPO, said in the statement.

“These egregious allegations are not an isolated problem. Families deserve answers, and SPPO will thoroughly investigate reports like this and hold any educational institution that violates federal law accountable.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the Public Schools of Northborough and Southborough and Algonquin Regional High School for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Another school district from Massachusetts was previously identified by the Education Department as violating parental rights. In that case, the district was found to have asked students to take part in a survey containing sexually explicit questions despite parents having expressly requested that their children be exempted.

The survey of students as young as seventh grade included questions regarding sexual encounters, alcohol and drug use, and gender identity, the department said, alleging the school district violated PPRA and parents’ rights to shape their children’s moral education.

Meanwhile, the department announced last month that it had sent letters to schools across the United States, reminding them of educators’ obligations under FERPA and PPRA and warning that noncompliance could result in the loss of federal funding.

The letters were sent while the 2026-2027 academic year was underway and were prompted by reports of educational institutions withholding crucial information from parents and issuing surveys containing sexually explicit material even after parents had opted their children out of such activities.

Miller said that in certain cases, state education departments had pressured school districts to violate FERPA.

“The department is committed to putting parents back in the driver’s seat. We will fully enforce FERPA and PPRA and ensure parents have the information and authority they need to make decisions for their children,” Miller said.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 19:15

Saudi Arabia Reroutes Oil Exports As Houthi Strikes Target Yanbu

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Saudi Arabia Reroutes Oil Exports As Houthi Strikes Target Yanbu

Satellite images gathered by Bloomberg show supertankers with capacity for 14 million barrels at Saudi Arabia’s Gulf export terminals over the weekend, the highest tanker count observed since at least June, according to data compiled from the European Union’s Sentinel-2 satellite.

Source: Javier Blas

However, as OilPrice notes, overall Hormuz traffic kept falling over the same weekend, nonetheless. Just a dozen commodity vessels crossed the strait, down from 35 a week earlier, and Thursday’s crossings totaled four tankers against a 10-day moving average of 16, Kpler data cited by Reuters showed.

Saudi Arabia moved crude through the strait at 2.9 million barrels a day over the past six days, JPMorgan said in a Friday note, calling the kingdom’s shift “the most notable pivot” among Gulf producers.

On September 11, drone strikes launched from Iraq shut down Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, also known as Petroline, which normally carries as much as 7 million barrels a day across 1,200 kilometers from Eastern Province fields to the Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea. The attack took 4-5 million barrels a day of that capacity offline, with total Saudi crude loadings falling from 7.5 million bpd in January and February to about 2.1 million barrels a day by mid-September, a decline of more than 70%.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said September 15 the pipeline would restart within days, but an industry analyst told Al-Monitor pump stations were destroyed in the strike and full restoration could take six weeks or more.

Yemen’s Houthi movement claimed cruise missile, ballistic missile and drone strikes on Riyadh and on Aramco facilities at Yanbu overnight September 18-19, and Saudi Arabia confirmed the Houthis targeted civilian infrastructure at the port where the East-West pipeline terminates. The Riyadh missile was intercepted and Saudi authorities reported no casualties or damage from either strike, but the attempt puts Yanbu, the kingdom’s primary outlet since the Hormuz freeze, under renewed threat.

Aramco pipes crude to its Ras Tanura terminal on the Persian Gulf, ships it on smaller vessels to the Gulf of Oman, and transfers it to larger tankers there, a routing it is using to move about 60 million barrels loaded at Ras Tanura for September and October delivery, mainly to Chinese and South Korean refiners. Gulf exports have rebounded to an average of 1 million to 1.5 million barrels a day, roughly in line with August levels.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 18:50

Nvidia CEO Says “Zero Percent” Chance Of AI Making Humans Extinct

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Nvidia CEO Says “Zero Percent” Chance Of AI Making Humans Extinct

Authored by Chris Summers via The Epoch Times,

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has rejected the claims of some artificial intelligence researchers that the technology could wipe out humanity, calling the arguments “doomsday narratives.”

Huang said in a Sept. 17 interview with CBS News that predictions made by former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon and Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, were not grounded in science.

Coxon said in a Sept. 9 post on X that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Hubinger said he agreed it could end humanity.

“Jacob is correct here – We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” he wrote.

Huang told CBS’s senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent on Thursday that 2030 won’t be the end of the world.

“There is zero percent chance that’s going to be the end of the world,” he said. “Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said in a Sept. 14 post on Truth Social that the United States needed no AI guardrails and that it already had significant criminal and regulatory power over Big Tech companies.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote.

Nvidia CEO Agrees With Trump

Huang said on Thursday that he agreed with the U.S. president’s view on legislation and regulation.

“Before we come up with new laws and new regulations, let’s apply the current laws and current regulations,” Huang said.

“There are all kinds of laws and regulations. … You have cybersecurity unauthorized entry, you have damage liabilities, all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity. All kinds of liabilities associated with products. … My point is apply those first, don’t let this doomsday narrative cause someone to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.”

Huang has been invited to a dinner at the White House on Sept. 24, when Trump will host Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Trump has said AI will be on the agenda during his meeting with Xi.

China

Huang told CBS that Xi wanted China to benefit from AI.

“They want China to prosper, just as we want America to prosper,” Huang said.

Nvidia manufactures specialized H200 chips that power large language models (LLMs) used by AI agents to synthesize information.

Trump said in a Dec. 8 post on Truth Social that he had told Xi the United States would allow exports of Nvidia H200 chips to approved customers in China “under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security.”

In July 2025, Nvidia restarted exports of H20 graphics processing units (GPUs) to China after U.S. regulators approved it.

Nvidia is now worth more than $5 trillion, making it the most valuable company on the planet. The company manufactures many of its chips in Taiwan, but last year, it opened a semiconductor fabrication plant in Phoenix, Ariz.

Last month, Taiwanese authorities indicted nine people, including a senior partner manager at Nvidia’s Taiwan unit, for allegedly taking part in a scheme to export servers with advanced Nvidia chips to China.

In June, Taiwan-born Huang told Nvidia shareholders that attempts to build artificial intelligence data centers with smuggled chips were a “dead end,” because the company provides no support or repairs for such products.

“National security is first and foremost,” Huang said. “Where commercial opportunities conflict with U.S. national security, national security comes first.”

Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/21/2026 – 18:25