Trump Announced an 'AI Force.' He Couldn't Say What It Would Actually Do.

Donald Trump used a Saturday Truth Social post to announce a new government body called the AI Force, modeled, he said, on Space Force. He gave no budget, no home in the federal bureaucracy and no description of what it would actually do, only a promise that an AI czar was coming soon. Two days later, in Japan, India’s cricket team beat Sri Lanka by 147 runs to defend its Asian Games gold medal, and a first time filmmaker’s story about a shrinking Naga village won one of the film world’s most closely watched prizes. Washington’s AI policy and the actual evidence of what people can build kept landing on opposite ends of the news cycle this week.

Trump announces an ‘AI Force.’ Nobody can say what it does yet

Trump wrote that he was “forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term,” and said he would soon announce an AI “czar,” adding that “only High I.Q. individuals need apply.” He gave no detail on where the AI Force would sit in government, what it would be funded to do, or what gap it fills that existing agencies do not already cover.

The announcement continued a pattern. Trump has spent recent months rejecting calls from AI researchers and some industry leaders for tighter safety rules, calling those warnings a “hoax.” He wrote that the government would “not in any way hinder or stifle” the technology’s growth, and would instead watch for “BAD” behavior using the “already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System.”

By Monday, Axios reported a scramble underway inside the administration over who actually gets the czar job. Names in circulation include Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management and Andreessen Horowitz’s first employee, and Sriram Krishnan, a former senior White House AI policy adviser who also worked at a16z. Whoever takes it inherits an awkward problem: federal ethics rules bar special government employees from working on matters where they hold a financial stake, and most of the plausible names come from firms that invest heavily in AI.

A chatbot that studied rocket failures

xAI released Grok 4.7 on September 21, its largest model yet, built on 2.1 trillion parameters, up 40 percent from the 1.5 trillion in Grok 4.6. Pricing held steady at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, and the model went live immediately across the Grok app, coding tools like Cursor, and xAI’s API, with no waitlist.

What sets it apart is what it trained on. xAI folded in Starlink satellite telemetry, SpaceX manufacturing records and engineering failure logs, on the theory that a model which has read through real hardware failures will reason better about physical systems than one trained only on internet text. On DeepSWE, a benchmark for long running coding tasks, Grok 4.7 scored 71 percent at its highest effort setting, up from 65.2 percent for its predecessor.

Independent testing from Artificial Analysis found Grok 4.7 scoring 1,657 Elo on its AA-Briefcase agentic work benchmark, a 111 point jump from Grok 4.6, putting it just behind Claude Fable 5.1’s 1,678. On GDPval, which measures practical work like documents and spreadsheets, it gained 90 points over its predecessor. xAI also published safety figures alongside the launch: the model let through 3.3 percent of risky dual use prompts on one internal benchmark and scored 62.4 percent on a biosecurity test built by LatchBio.

The record India broke on the way to a repeat gold

India’s women’s cricket team defended its Asian Games title on Tuesday, beating Sri Lanka by 147 runs in the final at Korogi Sports Park in Nisshin, Japan. It is India’s second straight gold in the event, after its first win at the 2023 Hangzhou Games.

Smriti Mandhana set the tone, scoring 79 off 45 balls with five fours and seven sixes. Partway through the innings she became the first woman in cricket history to reach 11,000 runs across all three international formats, needing just 10 balls to cover the final 13 runs to get there. Richa Ghosh finished unbeaten on 49, and India posted 216 for 3, the highest total in the tournament’s history. Sri Lanka never recovered, bowled out for 69 as India’s spinners took over; Deepti Sharma finished with three wickets.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi called it “a splendid triumph for Indian cricket” in a message to captain Harmanpreet Kaur’s team, praising a performance “marked by confidence, skill and wonderful teamwork” that would “inspire countless young cricketers across the country.”

A village of a few hundred people, on cinema’s biggest stage

Theja Rio’s debut feature Angh won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, the festival’s top award for a non-English language film and the only Indian title in this year’s 12 film Platform lineup. The film follows a small Konyak Naga family in 1960s Nagaland, the last residents of an otherwise abandoned village, and grew out of a short film Rio made under the same title in 2021.

Rio, 31, said, “This film is my tribute to the tribal people of my homeland who live quiet, untold lives.” He added that he wanted the world to know they had always lived there, and still do. The Platform jury praised the film’s “refreshing perspective, strength of filmmaking, and deeply resonant portrait of a world,” and credited Rio’s “vision, audacity and courage.”

Besides the trophy, the win comes with a CAD 20,000 prize. Under a new arrangement between the Academy and TIFF, the winner of the Platform Prize also receives a direct path to consideration for the Best International Feature Film Oscar.