AI Tools Weekly — September 29, 2026
Five things worth knowing this week if you're building content with AI tools: a US government push to rename "artificial intelligence," a faster and cheaper Claude model, the end of Gemini's Gems, a new character-consistency agent from Leonardo.Ai, and a striking number on how much of Anthropic's own code is now AI-written.
Trump Directs Federal Agencies to Say "Super Intelligence" Instead of "AI"
At the UN General Assembly on September 22, President Trump said the US government would refer to artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," or "SI," arguing the word "artificial" "makes it sound fake, and it is not fake." The State Department's international-organizations bureau had already told diplomats to use the new term before any formal order was signed. On September 29, after meeting with AI industry executives, Trump told reporters he would sign an executive order on the change. As of this digest's publication, we have not found a published, signed order text, so we can't confirm exactly what it covers, including whether it touches legislation or international agreements. We'll update this if that text becomes available.
Sources: The Washington Times, 22 September 2026; Breaking Defense, September 2026.
Why it matters for creators: this is a US government naming convention, not a change to how the tools you use are built or described. Nothing here requires AI companies or products to change their own terminology.
Anthropic Releases Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28. The company says it runs more than 30% faster and costs up to 30% less per task than Sonnet 5, through efficiency gains like fewer tokens and tool calls, at the same list price ($2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens).
Source: TechCrunch, 28 September 2026.
Why it matters for creators: if any of your writing or productivity tools run on Claude under the hood, expect a quiet speed and cost improvement in the coming weeks.
Google Is Retiring Gemini's "Gems" in Favor of "Skills"
Google announced it will retire Gemini's custom-assistant feature, Gems, with the migration to a new format called Skills starting November 17. Existing Gems are meant to carry over automatically. One detail worth flagging: Skills currently require a Google AI Pro or Ultra plan plus Gemini Spark access, while Gems have been available on the free tier, and Google hasn't yet clarified what happens to free-tier users' migrated Gems.
Source: TechCrunch, 28 September 2026.
Why it matters for creators: if you built any custom Gemini assistants for your workflow, check that the migration preserves what you set up, and confirm your plan will still have access afterward.
Leonardo.Ai Launches an Agent for Consistent Characters Across Scenes
Leonardo.Ai introduced the Leonardo Agent, now in beta, on its official social channels around September 23. The company describes it as taking one idea and building it into a character, a real-world scene, band photography, album art, and ads while keeping the identity consistent, demonstrated with a fictional band it built end to end. Leonardo.Ai says the agent is free to use for a limited time, drawing on your existing token balance. We have not found a dedicated blog post with a formal launch date, so the announcement date above is approximate, based on the company's own posts.
Source: Leonardo.Ai on X, September 2026.
Why it matters for creators: relevant if you've read our Leonardo AI review — this targets one of the most common frustrations with AI image generation, characters that look different from one image to the next. This is a product update, not a new review; we haven't tested the Agent ourselves.
Anthropic Says Over 80% of Its Own Code Is Now Claude-Written
Anthropic disclosed that the share of code merged into its own codebase that was written by AI rose from the low single digits before Claude Code's February 2025 research preview to more than 80% by May 2026. The figure comes directly from Anthropic's own published account of the shift, not a third-party report.
Source: Anthropic, 2026.
Why it matters for creators: a concrete sign of how fast AI-assisted development is scaling inside a frontier lab — even if your own tools feel incremental, the pace behind them isn't.