U.S. housing construction delivered a mixed report in August. On September 17, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that the seasonally adjusted annual start of new homes totaled 1.275 million units, a decrease of 2.6% from the revised figure for July and a year-over-year decline of 1.2%. However, the start of single-family homes rose to 918,000 units, an increase of 7.6% from the previous month. The simultaneous weakening of the overall figure and the rebound in single-family homes indicate that the decline was mainly due to multi-family residences, rather than a cooling across all types of housing.

On September 17th, Anthropic launched the Life Sciences Verification Program LSVP, which allows qualified professional teams to use the Claude model with fewer restrictions for tasks such as drug discovery, biological research, clinical development, and manufacturing. This program has already been integrated with dozens of institutions in its early stages and is now open for applications to a wider range of life science organizations in its beta version. It is not a one-time unlocking for all users, but rather a tiered access system based on identity, project, and continuous monitoring.

Microsoft has finally incorporated ChatGPT into the sidebar. On September 17th, they updated their product description to state that ChatGPT, for, and Word are now available to all ChatGPT packages, including the free version. Users can directly use these tools within the documentation to draft notes, summarize long texts, rewrite selected text, and adjust titles and formats as well. With this addition, Excel, PowerPoint, and Office join together, forming a set of three core tools that can all be accessed through the same Microsoft Store plugin.