Oktane is two weeks out, C1 Transform is less than a month away, and this week in AI had two major stories worth knowing. Here's the rundown.
This Week in AI
NVIDIA acquired Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The deal closed September 3. Hugging Face, the platform 18 million developers use to host, share, and deploy open-source AI models, will remain an open platform under Nvidia ownership. For the enterprise, the practical question is whether Nvidia operates it with the neutrality of how Microsoft ran GitHub in its early years, or whether the gravitational pull toward Nvidia hardware eventually narrows the ecosystem. Worth watching. (CNBC, CNN)
GLM 5.3 quietly changed how to think about model costs. Z.ai released GLM 5.3 on August 14 and the headline number is a 50% coding improvement over its predecessor, but the more useful story is token efficiency. At high reasoning effort, GLM 5.3 outperformed Claude Opus 4.8 on coding benchmarks while using roughly 50,000 output tokens per task versus 120,000 for Opus. The implication: raw token price is increasingly the wrong metric. A slightly more capable model that gets it right in two attempts costs less per completed task than a cheaper model that takes five. Task efficiency is the metric that matters going forward. (VentureBeat, Z.ai Docs)
C1 at Oktane 2026
Oktane is the world's largest identity conference and it starts September 22 at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. C1 is coming in with a full week of activations. Here is what to put on your calendar:
Tuesday, September 22 | C1 Elevated Access: Off-Road Before the expo hall opens, C1 co-founders Alex Bovee and Paul Querna are taking a dozen security executives to Adrenaline Mountain: flamethrowers, heavy machinery, and the option to smash a car. Back in time for the expo floor.
All week | Booth S3, Caesars Forum Stop by for a live look at the platform, or book a 1:1 with the team. Limited-edition custom totes while supplies last.
Tuesday, September 22 | C1 Elevated Access: After Dark End day one with drinks at the Vanderpump Cocktail Garden at Caesars Palace. The whole garden, just for us.
What happens when a stolen credential gets used? Usually, you find out weeks later when the breach surfaces. C1's decoy credentials flip that.
C1 mints real, working credentials that belong to no legitimate workload. Plant one in a .env file, a CI variable, or a secrets manager entry. Anyone who authenticates gets a standard OAuth error and moves on; you get a critical finding with timestamp, source IP, user agent, endpoint, and raw event. It fires only on successful cryptographic validation, so the finding proves access to the place you put it. And if a scanner finds your decoy on a paste site first, that file left your environment — treat every real secret beside it as compromised.
C1 Transform | October 6 | The Clancy, San Francisco
You're invited: C1 Transform is C1's inaugural conference for security, identity, and technology leaders navigating enterprise AI adoption. One day of peer-to-peer conversations and actionable blueprints for scaling AI securely.
Registration just hit 60 seats, up 70% in one week, with 50 remaining. If you've been meaning to register, now is the time.
Confirmed speakers include Karl McGuinness (Ex-Okta Chief Product Architect), Travis McPeak (Security Leader, SpaceXAI), Derek Chamorro (Head of Security, Together AI), Ayodele Abejide (Senior Staff Engineer, Brex), Justin Pagano (Vanta), Ivan Burazin (Daytona.io), and Sam Bisbee (DraftKings) and Chi Zhang (Kite AI).
Booth S3. Three days of identity conversations, two evening events, and a morning offroad experience before the expo hall even opens. If you're going to be in Las Vegas, come find us. All the details are above.
The AI Conference | Sept 29 – Oct 1 | Pier 48, Mission Rock, San Fran
Come find us at Booth 134 in Sheds A and B. It's one of the biggest AI gatherings of the year and it's happening in C1's backyard. Stop by and see what we've been building.
C1 Transform | October 6 | The Clancy, San Francisco
C1's inaugural conference for security and identity leaders is one week after The AI Conference, same city. Registration is open, 50 seats remain, and the speaker lineup is full. If it's been on your list, now is the time.
.png?upscale=true&width=1116&upscale=true&name=Blog-company%20(1).png)
