Good morning. Here is a reminder that not everything about artificial intelligence concerns the race for market share or which AI agent went rogue.

Google DeepMind on Tuesday introduced the AlphaGenome Atlas, a dataset of predictions for the effects of every possible single-letter change across the human genome-roughly 9 billion variants in total.

The dataset was built using Google DeepMind's AlphaGenome AI model and is available through a website that does not require coding skills.

"By precomputing AlphaGenome's predictions at scale, we have created an easily accessible resource that vastly expands the model's reach," the AI lab explained in a press release. "Just as an atlas is a collection of maps, linking together features of the land like altitude and location, AlphaGenome Atlas charts the molecular effects of DNA variants across the genome."

Google DeepMind said the AlphaGenome Atlas offers a "high-resolution, global view of the genome," and that its academic partners are already using it to translate that data into concrete insights, uncovering new links between genetic variation and disease.

The news calls to mind AlphaFold, DeepMind's AI platform designed to accurately predict a protein's structure in minutes, which won DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. DeepMind says the new Atlas dwarfs it in scale. The AlphaGenome Atlas is a 1-petabyte dataset, more than 30 times larger than the AlphaFold's.

There's a business lesson in here too, and it has nothing to do with genomes. In AI-land, the race for market share may get the attention, but the value in AI can often come from something quieter: taking a capability few people could use and turning it into something everyone can build on. Now, let's get back to the AI race.

The AI Race

'Distillation' has Washington up in arms. U.S. security agencies on Tuesday accused six Chinese artificial intelligence companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Alibaba, of systematically exploiting American AI models to train their own systems, the WSJ reports. The agencies, including the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the Chinese companies have engaged in "aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale." What is distillation? The WSJ's Raffaele Huang explains: "AI engineers can prompt an AI 'teacher model' to give answers to questions and explain its answers. The engineers use those question-answer-reasoning sets to fine-tune their 'student model' and adjust its weights. This process of using an existing model to fine-tune a new one is called distillation."

The U.S. security agencies said the Chinese companies have engaged in millions of exchanges with frontier U.S. models including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok.

Data Centers

States are ripping up data center tax breaks. Data-center tax exemptions offered by states are facing a rapid backlash as the AI boom has driven their cost far beyond original projections, in some states topping $1 billion annually, the WSJ reports.

More than 10 states, including Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington, have paused or rolled back the breaks amid voter anger over power and water consumption, even as industry groups and President Trump warn that cutting incentives will simply push data centers and their economic benefits to more favorable states like Indiana, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Rogue AI

Anthropic researcher quits over 'out-of-control' AI fears. Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old Anthropic researcher, said Tuesday he's leaving the company because he doesn't want to join the industrywide rush to build self-improving AI systems, fearing they could spiral out of control and threaten humanity. His departure is one of the first examples of an Anthropic employee leaving over AI safety fears. Several researchers have left OpenAI and other companies recently and in past years citing similar worries, the WSJ reports.

Coxon isn't alone. Axios reports that other Anthropic researchers this week also voiced concerns and predictions on whether AI could destroy humanity in the next decade.

On Our Radar

Meta Platforms has launched Muse, a personal AI agent app that can shop online, manage emails, and handle other authorized tasks, marking the company's latest attempt to monetize its massive AI investments. Amid industry concerns about AI agents going rogue, Meta's AI chief, Alexandr Wang, told the WSJ that the model that powers its agents hasn't displayed the same capabilities as those involved in prior hacks.

AI coding startup Cognition AI raised $2 billion in new funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir, nearly doubling its valuation to $48 billion from $26 billion just three months earlier, Bloomberg reports.The company, maker of the AI engineering agent Devin, said its run-rate revenue has grown from $492 million in May to almost $900 million.

Boston Scientific said it will likely miss its third-quarter and full-year sales and earnings guidance due to a cyberattack that disrupted manufacturing and order fulfillment. The medical-technology company plans to issue updated fiscal 2026 guidance when it reports third-quarter results on Oct. 28, the WSJ reports.

When will Anthropic go public? A late Labor Day, the timing of the coming Jewish holidays and a Federal Reserve meeting where the central bank might change interest rates could be reasons to wait to launch the offering, people familiar with the matter tell the WSJ.

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About Us

Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute's new Executive Resilience series, where she's profiling America's top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

Follow Belle Lin on LinkedIn and X for her latest reporting on enterprise technology and AI.

Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

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