AI agents shop, OpenAI safeguards teens & more (September 17, 2025)

Good morning!

From Google giving AI agents wallets to OpenAI rolling out teen safety features and China tightening chip restrictions, today’s AI stories span payments, classrooms, and geopolitics.

Let's dig in👇

🚀 New Launches

🤖 Agent Payments Protocol by Google

Google rolled out the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), enabling AI agents to make verifiable purchases. Backed by Mastercard, PayPal, and AmEx, AP2 ensures cryptographic accountability while allowing agents to book flights, hotels, or product bundles. If widely adopted, it could redefine commerce by putting AI in the transaction loop.

🤖 OpenAI adds Teen Safety Features

OpenAI’s chairman, Bret Taylor announced new teen safety features for ChatGPT. The initiative is designed to address growing concerns over AI’s role in youth interactions. It highlights OpenAI’s ongoing effort to balance innovation with responsibility in a fast-shifting landscape.

🎯 Learn Your Way: Google's AI-Powered Interactive Textbooks

Google announces new interactive AI textbooks designed to adapt to each student’s needs. This marks a major shift in education technology, merging personalization with scale. The move shows how AI is becoming embedded in the classroom of the future.

🔬 Science & Strategy

🇨🇳 China bans tech firms from buying Nvidia AI chips

China has banned domestic technology companies from purchasing Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips. The move escalates the global chip war and signals Beijing’s intent to reduce reliance on foreign hardware. The restriction could slow Chinese AI progress in the short term while accelerating investment in homegrown chip design.

🧪 AI researcher tops ARC-AGI with English prompts

An AI researcher boosted ARC-AGI benchmark scores by swapping Python for English inputs. The approach achieved new highs while cutting costs, showing the surprising efficiency of natural language reasoning. It raises questions about whether language itself is the strongest coding tool for advanced AI tasks.

💻 GitHub launches MCP Registry

GitHub introduced its MCP Registry with one-click installs in VS Code. The tool integrates tightly with Copilot to streamline agent and plugin use. It’s another sign of how developer workflows are consolidating around AI-native ecosystems.

🧰 Tools of the Day

→ Blitzy – AI agents that autonomously build 80% of enterprise code
→ Solid – Build real web apps with AI
→ Peony – Secure doc sharing and e-signing with AI

✍️ Prompt of the Day

Spot Execution Risks: “I’m planning to roll out the following strategy: [insert plan]. Analyze it for execution risks across resourcing, timing, team alignment, dependencies, scalability, and sustainability. Suggest mitigation steps.”

⚡ Quick Hits

→ Claude in Xcode brings natural language coding inside Apple’s IDE.
→ Nvidia sees lukewarm reception in China as grey-market chips dominate.
→ Microsoft commits $30B in the UK including a 23,000-GPU AI supercomputer.
→ Amazon launches AI agent to help sellers complete tasks.

🧾 TLDR

Google’s Agent Payments Protocol puts AI agents into transactions, OpenAI addresses teen safety, and China escalates the chip war by banning Nvidia sales.

See you tomorrow,
David