Some fresh questions from a university classroom this week. LMK in the comments
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Seven Plus Software
Stonegate Capital opened a single family office in Dubai this month for an established UK family, and calls it AI-first. The team is seven people, rising to eleven by the end of the year. AI systems carry research, modelling, due diligence, risk monitoring, consolidated reporting and operational workflows.
Signal: Every office now splits work between AI and people, and that design is what lets a small team scale.
WealthBriefing (2 minutes)
Misbehaviour On Record
OpenAI published a framework on 16 September for tracking and publicly disclosing cases where its models behave in ways it did not intend, across training, testing and deployment. The first six reports describe unauthorised use of API keys, unsanctioned file uploads, self-written instructions to conceal behaviour, and models passing notes through an internal repository.
Signal: These early public incident logs are how offices and regulators will write the next set of rules.
OpenAI (12 minutes)
Who May Knock
Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse agent from shopping on Amazon.com on 20 September, saying continued access by an unauthorised AI agent breaks its Conditions of Use. Muse launched on 8 September, does not identify itself to the site, and signs in with the customer’s own login. Six banks, including ING, Bank of America, Capital One, NatWest and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, published principles the same week on transparency, safety, privacy, customer choice and interoperability for agentic commerce.
Signal: Efficiency built on rails you do not own can be cut overnight, so keep a second path and expect change.
GeekWire (5 minutes) · ING (2 minutes)
Back To Listed Markets
Citi Wealth’s 2026 Global Family Office Report, released 22 September, surveys 351 offices in 41 countries. Nearly half increased public equity exposure over the year, making listed markets the top destination for new capital. AI use is described as moving from experimentation to implementation across analysis, reporting and workflows, aimed at productivity rather than alpha, with experienced professionals retaining final decisions.
Signal: Most offices calling this implementation are still on chat; agentic gains are rare, but the interest is real.
Citi (8 minutes)
Buying The Jurisdiction
Corient said on 23 September it has acquired FortCay Family Office Advisory, a Cayman Islands multi-family office running about $2.6 billion for 14 ultra-high-net-worth families as of 31 July 2026. Corient runs about $572 billion as of 31 August 2026. Terms were not disclosed.
Signal: Consolidators are buying the jurisdictions where structures sit, so an office’s administrator and its adviser increasingly answer to the same owner.
Corient (2 minutes)
MFA Was Not Enough
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit disrupted EvilTokens on 22 September, a phishing-as-a-service platform sold at $1,500 plus $500 a month that compromised more than 12,000 inboxes at more than 10,000 organisations. It abused OAuth device code flows that bypass conventional multi-factor authentication. Microsoft says operators used AI to tailor lures and to triage compromised inboxes for finance, executive and administrative roles.
Signal: Today’s security stack is not enough for an AI-native office; posture has to harden for where this is going.
Microsoft Security Blog (15 minutes)
Caught Hiding It
The UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI published its first thematic brief on 21 September, examining the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident of May to July 2026. It reports that agents bypassed network restrictions, communicated across runs meant to stay separate, cheated an evaluator and tried to conceal it.
Signal: An evaluator that can be deceived reports success; that is a reporting-line problem before it is a technical one.
United Nations (8 minutes)
From This Week’s Students
Q: If you were a family office starting today with no AI in place, what would you do to get started?
I had my ideas, but would love to hear your thoughts in the comments
The Last Word
“Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web.”
Ted Chiang, in The New Yorker, 9 February 2023.
He argued that a large language model retains much of the information on the Web the way a JPEG retains much of a higher-resolution image, but that if you look for an exact sequence of bits you will not find it — only an approximation. Hallucinations, on that reading, are compression artifacts: plausible enough that spotting them means checking them against the original.
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