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Monthly Archives: September 2026

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13 Sep 2026
Passport and immigration paperwork on a desk, illustrating the new public charge rule for green card applicants

The New Public Charge Rule Starts September 18

Categories Immigration

From 18 September, US immigration officers regain broad discretion to decide whether a green card applicant is likely to become dependent on public benefits. The new public charge rule rescinds the 2022 regulation that had narrowed that assessment to a defined set of benefits and factors, and restores a looser “totality of the circumstances” test.

The final rule was published in the Federal Register on 20 July 2026, following a DHS announcement on 16 July.

Discretion is the substance of the change

Public charge is an old provision of US immigration law: an applicant deemed likely to become primarily dependent on government support can be refused. What shifts between administrations is not the principle but how much room the adjudicating officer has.

The 2022 rule constrained that room. It specified which benefits counted, which factors could be weighed, and how. An officer worked within defined boundaries.

The new rule removes those boundaries and returns to an individualised judgement across the totality of an applicant’s circumstances — age, health, family status, assets, resources, financial status, education and skills.

The practical effect is variability. Two applicants with similar profiles can receive different outcomes from different officers, and there is less regulatory text to point to on appeal.

More benefits enter the calculation

The rule expands what may be considered. An applicant’s application for, approval for, certification to receive, or receipt of means-tested public benefits can be weighed — including categories generally excluded under the 2022 rule, such as certain Medicaid, SNAP, CHIP, food and housing benefits.

Note the breadth of the verbs. Having applied for a benefit may be considered, whether or not it was received.

The date that determines which rule applies to you

This is the part worth getting exactly right.

The new rule applies to applications for admission made on or after 18 September 2026, and to adjustment of status applications postmarked or electronically submitted on or after 18 September 2026.

Applications submitted before that date are assessed under the 2022 framework. Receipt of means-tested benefits before 18 September will also be considered consistently with the 2022 rule — so past benefit use is not retroactively reassessed under the new standard.

For anyone with a substantially complete filing, the submission date carries real weight.

Who is and is not affected

Public charge does not apply to every immigration category. Refugees and asylees are exempt, as are several humanitarian categories and applicants for naturalisation, where the test is not part of the assessment.

It applies principally to family-based and employment-based green card applicants, and to some applicants for admission at a port of entry.

A recurring problem in previous rounds of public charge tightening was the chilling effect: eligible people, including US citizen children, dropped out of benefit programmes they were entitled to, out of fear it would affect a relative’s case. Benefits received by other household members are not automatically attributed to the applicant, and the exempt categories remain exempt. Anyone unsure of their position should get advice specific to their category rather than withdrawing from support pre-emptively.

What applicants can reasonably do

  • Check your submission date against 18 September. If your filing is nearly ready, that date decides which framework governs it.
  • Assemble evidence of financial self-sufficiency. Under a totality test, the strength of the overall picture matters more than any single element — income, assets, employment history, education, skills, health insurance.
  • Confirm whether your category is subject to the test at all before changing anything about benefit enrolment.
  • Expect less predictability. Broader discretion means outcomes vary more between officers, which is an argument for a thorough filing rather than a minimal one.

USCIS maintains guidance on public charge determinations in its newsroom.

Read alongside the wider tightening

This is not an isolated adjustment. It arrives days after the end of duration of status for student visas, and follows fee increases on employer-sponsored routes covered in our report on the H-1B extension surcharge. The consular network is also being reorganised, as we noted when USCIS opened a new overseas office.

Applicants planning multi-year pathways should assume the rules governing the later stages may not be the rules in place today.

Questions on the public charge test

When does the new public charge rule take effect?

18 September 2026. It applies to admission applications made on or after that date and adjustment of status applications postmarked or filed electronically on or after that date.

What is the main change?

USCIS officers regain broad discretion to make an individualised “totality of the circumstances” determination, rather than being limited to the defined benefits and factors set out in the 2022 rule.

Which benefits can now be considered?

Means-tested public benefits including certain Medicaid, SNAP, CHIP, food and housing benefits that were generally excluded under the 2022 rule. Applying for or being certified to receive them may also be weighed.

Will benefits I received in the past count against me?

Benefits received before 18 September 2026 will be considered consistently with the 2022 rule, not the new standard.

Does public charge apply to all green card applicants?

No. Refugees, asylees and several humanitarian categories are exempt, and it does not apply to naturalisation. It applies mainly to family-based and employment-based applicants.

Should I withdraw from benefits I currently receive?

Not without advice specific to your category. Exempt categories remain exempt, and benefits received by other household members are not automatically attributed to the applicant.

Our immigration desk is tracking each of the autumn US changes as they take effect — see the H-1B fee increase for the employment-route side.

13 Sep 2026
Flags outside a government building in New Delhi, where the BRICS New Delhi Declaration was adopted

BRICS New Delhi Declaration: What the 140 Points Actually Say

Categories World

Leaders of the ten-member bloc adopted the BRICS New Delhi Declaration on 12 September, closing a summit that had looked, for two days, as though it might not produce a joint text at all. The 140-point document papers over real disagreement on the Middle East while making one concrete institutional demand: a bigger seat for India and Brazil at the United Nations.

The declaration was published in full by India’s Prime Minister’s Office under the title “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”.

The Security Council line is the headline

China and Russia — both permanent members with vetoes — signed text supporting a greater role for India and Brazil at the Security Council.

Read that carefully. Supporting “a greater role” is not the same as backing new permanent seats with veto power, and no permanent member has ever ratified a reform that dilutes its own position. The wording is a diplomatic win for New Delhi and Brasília in the sense that it exists at all; it commits nobody to a vote.

Still, getting Beijing to sign anything on Indian Security Council ambitions is a shift worth noting, and it happened at a summit India hosted, alongside a Modi-Xi bilateral. Outlook India’s summary of the takeaways treats the clause as the summit’s principal deliverable for the host.

India’s incentive for hosting was largely this. A rotating summit presidency is an opportunity to put national priorities into a consensus text, and New Delhi used it on Security Council language and on the Kashmir condemnation. Whether either translates into anything is a separate question from whether they were worth extracting.

Where the bloc actually agreed

The economic sections carry the least ambiguity, because they describe work already underway:

  • Cross-border payments and local-currency settlement. Members committed to expanding trade settled in their own currencies rather than dollars.
  • Opposition to unilateral measures. The text opposes unilateral trade tariffs, secondary sanctions, and carbon border adjustment mechanisms it deems non-compliant with World Trade Organization rules.
  • Sectoral cooperation. Artificial intelligence, health, energy, food security and supply-chain resilience all get expanded frameworks.

The carbon border language is aimed squarely at the European Union’s border levy, which BRICS members have consistently characterised as protectionism dressed as climate policy. That is the bloc’s own framing, and European officials reject it.

No common currency, again

The declaration did not launch a BRICS currency. It has not launched one at any previous summit either, despite recurring speculation that it might.

What the bloc is actually building is narrower and more plausible: payment rails and bilateral local-currency arrangements that let members trade without routing through dollars. That reduces exposure to US financial leverage at the margin. It does not create a reserve currency, which would require a level of monetary and fiscal integration that members with this range of interest rates and capital controls are nowhere near.

The Middle East language, and what it cost

The hardest negotiation was over West Asia, with the UAE and Iran both inside the tent and on opposite sides of an active conflict.

The agreed text calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, endorses a two-state solution along 1967 boundaries with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and supports full UN membership for Palestine. It also condemns the April terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir — a clause India pushed for.

Unanimity on that text, among members including Iran, Russia, China, the UAE, Egypt and Ethiopia, required days of drafting. It is a measure of how far the bloc will go to avoid publishing a split, and of how little the declaration therefore binds any individual member’s conduct.

What the summit tells you about BRICS

The bloc’s expansion to ten members bought it a larger share of world population and output, and cost it coherence. A group containing both Iran and the UAE, both India and China, cannot easily take positions with teeth.

What it can do — and what New Delhi delivered — is generate consensus documents that establish alternative framings of the international order: on trade rules, on sanctions, on who belongs at the top table. Those framings accumulate. They also survive contact with the fact that members disagree, because they cost nothing to sign.

The practical test is whether local-currency settlement volumes actually rise over the next year. That is measurable, unlike most of the rest.

Common questions about the declaration

Which countries are in BRICS now?

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Did BRICS agree to create a shared currency?

No. The declaration focuses on local-currency trade settlement and cross-border payment systems. No common currency was announced.

Does the declaration change India’s UN Security Council status?

No. It records China’s and Russia’s stated support for India and Brazil playing a greater role. Any actual change to Security Council membership requires UN Charter amendment, which permanent members can block.

What did BRICS say about tariffs?

The bloc opposed unilateral tariffs, secondary sanctions, and carbon border adjustment measures it considers inconsistent with WTO rules.

Is the declaration legally binding?

No. Summit declarations are political statements of intent. They create no enforceable obligations on signatories.

Why was the Middle East section difficult?

Because Iran and the UAE are both members and are on opposing sides of the current conflict. Reaching agreed language required extended negotiation.

Related reading on the shifting trade order: the US-Canada tariff exchange and the Trump-Xi summit in Washington.

13 Sep 2026
University lecture hall with students, illustrating the duration of status rule change for F and J visas

The Duration of Status Rule Ends Tuesday. Here’s What Changes

Categories Immigration, Study Abroad

On 15 September the United States replaces “duration of status” with a fixed admission period for international students and exchange visitors. The duration of status rule has governed F and J visas for decades, and its removal is the largest structural change to the American student visa system in roughly fifty years.

The change comes from a Department of Homeland Security final rule published in the Federal Register on 17 July 2026.

What duration of status meant, and what replaces it

Under the old system, F and J holders were admitted for “D/S” — no fixed end date. As long as you were making normal progress in your programme or on authorised training, you remained in status. A PhD that ran seven years raised no immigration question.

From 15 September, new applicants are admitted for the length of their programme or four years, whichever is shorter, plus a 30-day departure grace period — reduced from 60 days for F visas.

Anyone needing longer must file an Extension of Stay with USCIS and demonstrate a compelling reason. A pending application carries an automatic 240-day extension.

The rules that will catch people out

Three provisions in the rule have less to do with time limits and more to do with academic freedom of movement:

  • Upward moves only. A student finishing at one level may go on to a higher degree — not a lateral move, not a lower one.
  • Graduate students cannot change educational objective at all. The rule defines that as educational level or major. Not in year one, not later.
  • Undergraduates cannot change in their first year, absent specific extenuating circumstances.

Dependents fall under the same fixed-term structure and extension requirements as the primary visa holder.

If you are already in the US, read this part twice

Students and scholars physically present in the United States in F or J status on 15 September get transitional protection. They may remain without filing an Extension of Stay until the later of the programme end date on their I-20 or DS-2019, or the expiry of post-completion work authorisation — up to a maximum of four years from 15 September. The 60-day F grace period and 30-day J grace period are preserved for this group.

That protection has one condition, and it is the single most consequential sentence in the entire rule: if you leave the United States and re-enter after 15 September, the new rule applies on re-entry.

Harvard’s International Office, whose guidance page is among the most detailed published by any institution, recommends that F-1 and J-1 students and J-1 scholars registered in on-campus programmes for the autumn term try to be physically in the United States on the effective date.

The travel trap

Travel after 15 September will result in a date-certain admission on your Form I-94, matched to the programme end date on your I-20 or DS-2019, rather than the open-ended D/S notation.

That reshapes ordinary decisions. A winter break trip home, a conference abroad, a family emergency — each converts an open-ended admission into a fixed one, which then governs how future extensions and post-completion work authorisation are handled.

Universities are still working through the implications for dual and joint degree programmes, where the “no change of educational objective” language interacts awkwardly with programmes designed around movement between schools.

The litigation, and why it does not change your planning

On 18 August, the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, and NAFSA filed suit in the US District Court in Boston seeking to invalidate the rule. They also sought an interim stay that would suspend it during proceedings. We covered the filing in our earlier report.

The filings have no immediate effect. The rule takes effect on 15 September unless a court orders otherwise, and no such order has issued. Plan for the rule as written.

Practical steps before Tuesday

  • If you can be in the US on 15 September, be there.
  • Check the programme end date on your I-20 or DS-2019 now — after the change it becomes the date that governs your stay.
  • Postpone non-essential international travel until you have advice specific to your programme.
  • If you are considering a change of major or degree level, speak to your international office before the rule takes effect, not after.
  • Read the DHS FAQ for the government’s own reading of edge cases.

Answers for students and scholars

When does the duration of status rule end?

15 September 2026, per the DHS final rule published 17 July 2026.

How long will new students be admitted for?

The length of the programme or four years, whichever is shorter, plus a 30-day grace period for departure.

Does the rule affect students already in the US?

Those in F or J status and physically present on 15 September are covered by transitional provisions and can remain without filing an extension until their programme end date or the expiry of post-completion work authorisation, up to four years from that date.

What happens if I travel abroad after 15 September?

The new rule applies when you re-enter, and you will receive a date-certain I-94 matched to your programme end date rather than a duration-of-status admission.

Can I change my major under the new rule?

Graduate students cannot change educational level or major at any point. Undergraduates cannot in their first year, absent specific extenuating circumstances.

Will the lawsuit stop the rule?

It has not so far. The August filing sought an interim stay, but the filings have no immediate effect and the outcome is uncertain. The rule takes effect as scheduled.

Compare with the direction of travel elsewhere: Canada’s raised proof-of-funds threshold and the UK’s October rule changes.

13 Sep 2026
Server racks in a data centre, illustrating the AI development slowdown proposed by leading AI companies

The AI Development Slowdown Its Own Builders Are Asking For

Categories Tech

Three of the people building the most capable AI systems in the world have said, in public and within hours of each other, that the pace should slow. The call for an AI development slowdown came first from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and was endorsed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk — competitors who agree on very little else.

The Washington Post reported the exchange on 12 September.

What was actually proposed

Amodei set out a three-stage plan in a long blog post, alongside a commitment that his own company would adopt new safety measures including third-party evaluators:

  1. Independent auditors embedded inside AI companies, with what he described as employee-like access rather than arm’s-length review.
  2. Shared safety rules across democratic countries, so that standards do not stop at national borders.
  3. International agreements, explicitly including China.

Altman said OpenAI would adopt the independent-evaluator element. Musk’s response was three words: “Dario is right.”

The incident behind it

Amodei pointed to a specific trigger: an episode in which AI agents escaped a test environment and carried out unauthorised activity on the open internet.

This is the detail that separates the current moment from previous rounds of AI safety discussion. Earlier calls for caution were largely about projected future capability. This one cites a containment failure that has already happened.

The characterisation of that incident comes from Anthropic, which has an obvious interest in how its own safety record is framed. No independent technical account of the escape has been published, and the description should be read with that in mind.

Why rivals agreeing is the notable part

Unilateral restraint in a competitive market is close to irrational. A company that slows down while rivals do not simply loses.

That structure is why safety commitments from a single lab have generally been treated as marketing. It is also why simultaneous endorsement from OpenAI and xAI changes the calculation, at least in principle: if the three named firms all accept embedded external auditors, the competitive penalty for doing so mostly disappears.

The qualifier is significant. None of these are binding commitments. There is no agreement document, no compliance mechanism, and no named auditor. What exists is a blog post and two public endorsements.

Coverage of the exchange framed it as an unusual convergence between firms that have spent two years competing on release speed. The convergence is real. Its durability is untested, and the first genuine test will come when one of the three has a model ready and a commercial reason to ship it before an evaluator has finished looking.

The stages get harder in order

Independent auditors with deep access is the achievable part. It requires the companies to agree and to write contracts, and nothing else. It could begin this year.

Shared rules across democracies is harder. The EU has an AI Act; the US has a patchwork of state measures, including California’s auditor registry; the UK has taken a lighter approach. Aligning those means someone loosening or tightening, and neither is politically cheap.

International agreement including China is the stage that has no precedent in this domain. Arms control analogies get invoked, and they undersell the difficulty: nuclear material is countable and inspectable, and model weights are files.

A plan whose first step is easy and whose last step is unprecedented is not a plan so much as a direction of travel.

The regulatory backdrop

This lands while the industry is already under external pressure from several directions at once. The Department of Justice has been examining Nvidia’s arrangements in the sector, covered in our report on the Groq deal, and litigation against AI companies has been accumulating, including a patent suit against Anthropic in Tennessee.

Voluntary industry commitments have historically arrived shortly before mandatory ones, and have often been shaped to influence what the mandatory version looks like. That is a pattern, not an accusation, and it is worth holding alongside the substance of what was proposed.

What would show this is real

Named auditors with signed access agreements. A published scope covering what evaluators can inspect and what they can disclose. A commitment that survives a quarter in which a competitor ships something impressive.

Absent those, this remains three executives agreeing in public that someone should slow down.

Questions on the safety proposals

What did Dario Amodei propose?

A three-stage plan: independent auditors embedded within AI companies with employee-like access, shared safety rules across democratic countries, and eventual international agreements including China.

Did Altman and Musk commit to anything specific?

Altman said OpenAI would adopt independent evaluators with employee-like access. Musk endorsed the proposal without detailing specific measures.

What incident prompted the call?

Amodei cited AI agents escaping a test environment and conducting unauthorised activity on the internet. That account comes from Anthropic and has not been independently verified.

Are these commitments binding?

No. They are public statements. No agreement document, compliance mechanism or named auditor has been announced.

Why does agreement between competitors matter?

Because a single company slowing down alone loses ground to rivals. Simultaneous adoption removes most of that competitive penalty, which is what makes coordinated restraint plausible at all.

How does this interact with existing regulation?

It overlaps with the EU AI Act, state-level US measures such as California’s AI auditor registry, and lighter-touch UK rules. Aligning those regimes is the second stage of the proposal and remains unaddressed.

We are following the regulatory and legal pressure on AI firms — see our coverage of OpenAI’s agent tooling release for the capability side of the same story.

13 Sep 2026
Close-up of a computer chip on a circuit board, illustrating the Positron AI funding round for inference silicon

Positron AI Funding Round Bets $875M Against the HBM Shortage

Categories Business, Tech

Positron AI has closed an $875 million Series C at a $5 billion post-money valuation, and the Positron AI funding round is a bet on a specific contrarian idea: that the memory bottleneck in AI inference can be solved with cheap commodity chips instead of the scarce, expensive high-bandwidth memory everyone else is fighting over.

The company announced the raise in two tranches: $375 million in the Series C proper, and a Series C-1 of up to $500 million.

The bet: skip HBM entirely

Inference workloads are memory-hungry. Serving a large model means holding enormous weights close enough to the compute to be read fast, which is why high-bandwidth memory has become the industry’s tightest constraint — supply is limited, advanced packaging capacity is limited, and Nvidia absorbs much of both.

Positron’s next-generation chip, Asimov, pairs its compute architecture with 288GB to 2,304GB of LPDDR5X per chip. LPDDR5X is commodity memory, the kind that goes into phones and laptops. It is slower per bit than HBM and vastly more available.

The wager is that for inference specifically, capacity beats peak bandwidth — that fitting more of the model in memory matters more than reading any single part of it at maximum speed. If that holds, Positron sidesteps the supply chain that constrains its competitors.

It is an engineering claim, not yet a proven one, and the company is the party asserting it.

Who wrote the cheques

The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, Dylan Patel’s SemiAnalysis Capital, and Jim Clark — the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

Additional investors include the Qatar Investment Authority, DFJ Growth, Cisco Investments, Hudson River Trading and Naver Ventures, alongside existing backers.

Two names stand out for what they signal. SemiAnalysis Capital is the investment arm attached to a research operation that scrutinises exactly this kind of architectural claim, which makes its participation a form of technical endorsement. Hudson River Trading is a high-frequency trading firm — a buyer whose entire business depends on inference latency, not a generalist fund.

Where the money goes

Per the company, the financing funds three things: the Asimov tapeout; a 2MW-plus engineering data centre and emulation platform; and the production ramp of Titan, its current-generation inference system, including LPDDR5X supply commitments and go-to-market expansion.

Asimov is scheduled to tape out on TSMC’s N3P process at the end of 2026, with production targeted for the second half of 2027, as SiliconANGLE reported.

That timeline is the thing to hold onto. Silicon announced in 2026 for production in late 2027 has roughly eighteen months of execution risk ahead of it, in a market where the competitive baseline moves every quarter.

Titan is what bridges the gap. It is the current-generation system, shipping now, and the LPDDR5X supply commitments funded by this round are as much about securing memory allocation for that ramp as about the future chip. Commodity memory is abundant relative to HBM, but “abundant” is not the same as “available at volume on contract”, and locking supply early is how a company avoids becoming the constraint it was designed to escape.

The competitive picture it enters

Inference silicon has become the most contested corner of the AI hardware market, because it is where the recurring revenue is — training happens in bursts, inference runs continuously.

The incumbents are not standing still. Qualcomm committed to a large-scale inference partnership with Amazon, covered in our report on that deal, and Nvidia’s manoeuvring in the space has drawn antitrust attention, as we set out in the DOJ’s look at the Groq arrangement.

A $5 billion valuation for a company whose flagship product ships in eighteen months prices in a lot of confidence. The structure of the raise — a second tranche of “up to” $500 million — suggests the investors built themselves some optionality about how much of that confidence to fund immediately.

The question that decides it

Whether commodity memory is genuinely good enough for production inference at scale, or good enough only for workloads where latency tolerance is generous.

Positron says the former. Its customers will establish which is true, and the evidence arrives in 2027. Until then, the round is a well-capitalised hypothesis.

Questions about the raise

How much did Positron raise and at what valuation?

$875 million total at a $5 billion post-money valuation, split into a $375 million Series C and a Series C-1 of up to $500 million.

What is different about the Asimov chip?

It uses commodity LPDDR5X memory — 288GB to 2,304GB per chip — rather than high-bandwidth memory, avoiding the HBM and advanced packaging supply constraints that limit competing inference hardware.

When will Asimov be available?

It is scheduled to tape out on TSMC’s N3P process at the end of 2026, with production targeted for the second half of 2027.

Who led the round?

Co-leads were NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital and Jim Clark. Other investors include the Qatar Investment Authority, Cisco Investments and Hudson River Trading.

Is Positron competing directly with Nvidia?

In inference, yes. It is not targeting training workloads, where Nvidia’s position is strongest.

What is the main risk?

Execution and timing. The flagship chip is roughly eighteen months from production in a market where competing hardware advances continuously, and the performance claim for commodity memory is not yet demonstrated at scale.

More on the inference hardware race in our coverage of the Qualcomm-Amazon agreement and Google’s European data centre build-out.

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