iPhone 18 Pro Goes on Sale in China as Pro Max Draws Premiums

OpenAI reopened its $200 ChatGPT Pro 20X tier to some eligible former subscribers after an eight-day pause on new subscriptions, according to AiFanr. The help center said the option is limited to accounts that still held the $200 subscription as of Sept. 10 local time or whose access ended within the previous 30 days. Eligible users must resubscribe within 30 days of losing access and get only one restoration chance during the suspension. New subscriptions and regular upgrades remain paused, while the $100 Pro 5x tier is still sold with the same benefits and quotas of five and 20 times Plus. OpenAI has not announced when full access will resume.

In AI models, users in anonymous battles on Arena AI spotted a model labeled Gemini 3.8 Flash with improved SVG, web, 3D scene and interactive tool generation, with some results described as close to GPT-6 Astra. Testers said a suspected Gemini 4 Pro was close to GPT-6 Astra Pro on tasks such as generating a pelican riding a bicycle, while some preferred Fable 5.1 for quality and creativity. Google has confirmed it started pretraining Gemini 4 and called it its largest foundation model training to date. AiFanr reported that the Gemini team has recently had management adjustments and core personnel changes, with product focus shifting toward code, AI agents, video multimodality and enterprise workflows. Zhipu introduced GLM-5.3-FlashX, with a maximum output speed of 200 tokens per second; Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, supporting 1 million-token multimodal input; MiniMax open-sourced Code CLI; ModelScope launched proof of open-source contributions; and DAMO Academy open-sourced DAMO RADAR, an abdominal CT model covering 146 imaging findings.

Seres Group director and vice president Kang Bo responded to Aito's shift to exclusive brand distribution. He said Seres will lead product definition, design, brand marketing, channel retail and service, while Huawei Terminal will continue to enable the brand. 21 Auto, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Aito will keep some stores in HarmonyOS Smart Cockpit shared showrooms, and some Huawei mall store authorizations will transfer to Seres, with channel separation to be completed by Dec. 31, 2026. Kang said the rights, OTA upgrades and after-sales service of Aito's 1.2 million existing users will not be affected. Seres holds a 10% stake in Yinwang, and Aito will still receive Huawei's technology, product and supply support. Aito plans to enter sedans and MPVs and will appear at the Paris auto show in October.

Xiaopeng and Volcano Engine said Xiaopeng built an AI middle platform on HiAgent, with 2,000 active users, 5,000 created agents and 50 digital employee scenarios being rolled out. The cooperation covers R&D, office, marketing, cockpit, intelligent driving and security. Xiaopeng's supply chain risk platform has 78 risk factors covering more than 800 suppliers. Volcano Engine said new-model capacity risk checks were shortened from two days to 10 minutes, monthly supplier risk reports from one week to one hour, and an AI outbound-call tool cut related labor costs by more than 50%. Xiaopeng's first AI open contest drew more than 21,000 participants, over half without coding backgrounds, and nearly 7,000 submissions.

Berkshire Hathaway said on Sept. 18 that Warren Buffett would become honorary chairman while remaining a director and adviser, and his eldest son, Howard Buffett, was elected chairman. Susan Decker remains lead independent director. Buffett said in a letter to shareholders that Greg Abel has fully assumed CEO duties and is responsible for important decisions. After the transition, Abel will continue to run the company, while Howard will guard Berkshire's culture and values. Howard has been a Berkshire director since 1993 and is chairman and CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Buffett said he will remain with the company as a shareholder.

BYD filed two proactive recall plans with the State Administration for Market Regulation, covering 183,211 domestically made vehicles, effective Sept. 18. The recall includes 142,895 Tang, new-generation Tang DM and new-generation Tang EV vehicles produced between March 2015 and January 2022, and 40,316 Qin series vehicles produced between June 2014 and June 2019. The regulator said some brake pedal limit pads have abnormal material batches and may crack or fall off after long use, causing brake lights to stay on when the pedal is not pressed and sending wrong signals to rear vehicles in extreme cases. BYD authorized dealers will replace the improved limit pads for free, and vehicles already replaced do not need repeat work.

Nvidia-backed Nscale submitted an S-1 filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Sept. 18 to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL. The London-based AI infrastructure company has not set the offering size, price or number of shares. Its revenue rose to $140.6 million in the first half from $10.4 million a year earlier, up 1,252%, while its net loss widened to $1.0201 billion from $368.9 million. Nscale attributed growth to more data centers and GPU deployments and said losses were affected by data center construction, GPU depreciation, personnel costs and financing expenses. As of Aug. 31, long-term contracts in operation were worth about $2.6 billion, and operational and signed contracts totaled about $103.4 billion, corresponding to about 461,000 operational or signed GPUs. Proceeds will fund data center projects, technology development, working capital and operations.

Anthropic has built a wet laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area to test Claude's practical abilities in biological experiments, Reuters reported. The lab has incubators, microscopes, liquid handling equipment and experimental robots. Christina Kim, the company's head of biology research, confirmed the lab's existence. Anthropic wants Claude to help design experiments, direct robots to perform operations such as pipetting and adjust the next round of experiments based on results. Kim said human supervision is still needed, and the lab is not dedicated to drug discovery; specific diseases and progress have not been disclosed. The company said the work also evaluates the model's biological capabilities and risks. The lab will not conduct clinical trials, and Claude's ability to stably complete consecutive experiments remains unverified.

Universal Music Group and Sony Music sued AI music platform Suno again on Sept. 18, alleging its newly released v6 model continues to use unauthorized copied recordings. Suno had said v6 was its first model trained entirely on licensed music. The labels argued that Suno trained v6 using outputs, user preference signals and interaction data from older models, which were the subject of their first lawsuit in 2024. They also said Suno used knowledge distillation and other model-transfer methods to let the new model inherit older behavior, so it cannot cut ties with the original training material. Suno has not responded to the new lawsuit. Warner Music has settled and established a partnership with Suno, while BMG and Believe have provided licensed content to v6; UMG and Sony continue to ask the court to rule that the new model still infringes their sound recording copyrights.

CATL Chief Manufacturing Officer Ni Jun said in an interview that all-solid-state battery industrialization is at least five years away. He said basic scientific problems such as the solid-solid interface remain, and technology, engineering, product, price and supply system issues must then be solved in turn. Ni said sodium-ion batteries and condensed matter batteries can be compatible with existing production lines and are closer to large-scale application. The main difficulty in power battery manufacturing is mass consistency: making a single sample in the lab is not the same as producing at scale.

Other developments reported by AiFanr included Lenovo Group's shares rising more than 7% intraday to HK$36.8, giving it a market capitalization of about HK$455.4 billion and briefly exceeding Meituan's HK$452.7 billion; Morgan Stanley maintaining an overweight rating and HK$46 target price on Lenovo. DingTalk founder Chen Hang was appointed a non-executive director of Baiwang with an annual salary of 100,000 yuan and no separate board meeting allowance. Disney appointed its first CTO, former Character.AI CEO Anand. Spirit AI founder Gao Yang said robot brains could reach a GPT-3 moment as early as 2027. Yiwu Mall began selling a manned flying saucer for 800,000 yuan with 15 minutes of endurance. 12306 responded that holiday floating high-speed rail fares do not equal an increase in the base fare, and Waterdrop raised its platform service fee from 6% to 8%, with a cap of 8,000 yuan per project.