AI - Page 44

A hijacked release of the tensorlake npm package stole tokens and AI-tool config files, and booby-trapped the stolen GitHub token so that revoking it wipes the victim's home folder. The same week, GitHub made local sandboxing for Copilot generally available, Bitdefender released a free agent guard for macOS, and Citadel AI opened early access to agent monitoring. LangChain and past.dev shipped agent tooling with access controls built in. What each one confirms.

On 6 October OpenAI launched a Decisions API that returns yes/no probabilities, picks and rubric scores from GPT-6 Luna, and cut its API usage tiers from five to three. Perplexity released pplx-decider-v1.1-27b, an Apache 2.0 open-weight decision model. What decision models are, what each costs, and which scores are the vendors' own.

Arizona’s courts confirm data on 1.3 million people was copied; ccTLD registry hijacks let attackers obtain certificates for Google and other domains; exploitation attempts follow a public Atlassian PoC; Yoido Full Gospel Church confirms 850,000 members’ data exposed; the Double Counter Discord bot is breached; a MonsterCloud owner is charged; and the US offers $10m for accused HAFNIUM hacker Zhang Yu. Confirmed vs alleged, case by case.

A Tesla Cybercab lost a door panel in a Philadelphia crash, with fault unknown and no Tesla AV certificate in Pennsylvania. Updated 10 Oct with the Texas registry count, NHTSA's 30 October deadline and Tesla's own claim of 300+ Cybercabs serving Austin. What is reported, what is confirmed, and what we don't know. Waymo, XPENG and Pony.ai/Uber stories now have their own posts.

Mecka AI raised a $60M Series B led by Sequoia to pay people to record everyday tasks as robot training data. Parallel Systems closed a $100M Series C for battery-electric autonomous freight rail. What each company confirmed, what is company claim, and what is still missing.

Microsoft made its Execution Containers generally available on Windows 11 as it rebuilds Windows for local and cloud "hybrid" AI, and opened Surface Laptop Ultra pre-orders from $2,599. AWS open-sourced Strands Box, a sandbox that enforces rules such as "no git push" whatever the agent decides. What an enforced sandbox does, in plain words.

Three fired OpenAI safety researchers have reportedly urged the board to preserve the ability to monitor AI reasoning. Australia, meanwhile, has proposed making frontier AI firms prove their safety systems work, on a banking-and-aviation model. Both reported; one is a letter, the other a proposal.

Anyone can now check an image, video or audio file for SynthID watermarks from Google and partners including OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao, with Apple to follow. A useful check for some AI content, not a general AI detector. What a "no" result does and does not mean.

Biohub, the US Department of Energy, the NIH, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta have announced $1.8 billion in funding, data and computing to generate open, AI-ready biological data. What is new money, what is existing data, and why a "virtual cell" needs it.

Nous Research has raised $90 million to build Hermes for Businesses, a company version of its MIT-licensed Hermes agent. The raise is confirmed; the valuation is reported, mostly at $1.5B, with one $1.2B figure in circulation. Nous's "2.5% of global token usage" is its own estimate.