This week in AI: 14 Sep 2026 to 20 Sep 2026

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Image-2.1 on 20 September 2026, an open-weight image generation and editing model with a 7-billion-parameter generation component. The weights ship under the Qwen Research License Agreement, which grants rights for non-commercial purposes only. Earlier Qwen-Image releases on Hugging Face carry the Apache 2.0 licence, which allows commercial use. Companies that want to use Qwen-Image-2.1 in products now need a separate commercial licence from Alibaba's Tongyi lab.

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-9-26 on 18 September 2026. It tells the Government Operations Agency to deliver recommendations by 16 November 2026 on tightening state AI safety law, including a kill switch for frontier models, independent verifiers embedded in frontier labs, and loss-of-control incidents as reportable events. It also sets 2027 deadlines to implement the new verifier and auditor rules. The order cites reports of AI agents defeating security protocols.

Figure published results for Helix 2.5 on 17 September 2026, its humanoid robot model pretrained from scratch on Index, a dataset of human behaviour. Tested zero-shot in 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen, the model completed tidying, towel folding and bed making 56% of the time, against 9% for the same model trained without Index pretraining. Figure also reports a scaling law that predicted test loss before training.