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Quoting Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss argues AI collapses code-writing and review costs, leaving product discovery and precise definition as the core of software engineering.

Simon Willison quotes Laurie Voss's essay "We are all Product Engineers now," which argues that AI is collapsing the cost of writing code and will likewise collapse the cost of reviewing, fixing, and operating it. Voss contends the remaining work is finding out what people want, defining it precisely, and making software pleasant to use. He expects the amount of software to grow without limit because demand has no ceiling, making product-definition skills the whole job. No specific models, tools, or incidents are named; this is career and industry commentary.

Simon Willison · 1d agoAI industry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 10, 2026

Help Net Security's roundup lists open cybersecurity roles at BioNTech, AIG, ServiceNow and others across Europe, the Middle East and Canada.

A job-board roundup of cybersecurity openings including Associate Director Application Security at BioNTech (Germany), CISO at AIG (Israel), Cloud Security Professional at ServiceNow (Italy), and SOC/GRC, analyst, engineer and data governance roles in the UK, UAE, India, Canada and France. Roles span application security, cloud security, SOC operations, compliance and OT environments. Most listings are marked no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 19d agoIndustry

Axis Robotics Releases AXIS: A Browser-Based Data Engine With 207 Robot Manipulation Tasks and 50,129 Trajectories

Axis Robotics and academic partners released AXIS, a browser-based teleoperation system yielding 207 manipulation tasks and 50,129 trajectories that lifts pi0.5 to 88.8 on LIBERO-Plus.

A team from Axis Robotics, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, and NTU introduced AXIS, a browser-based data engine where contributors teleoperate a simulated Franka Research 3 in a MuJoCo WebAssembly frontend while GPU backends handle task generation, training, and evaluation. The released snapshot holds 207 tasks, 50,129 episodes, and 60K+ task or scene variants from more than 70,000 community contributors. Continual pretraining of pi0.5 on AXIS data raises LIBERO-Plus performance from 83.9 to 88.8, versus 57.5 for a volume-matched RoboCasa365 control; the 2.36 TB dataset is gated for non-commercial academic use.

MarkTechPost · 8d agoAI research

The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job Right

Palantir veteran Vinoo Ganesh traces the forward deployed engineer role and shares practices for building effective FDE teams.

Kepler CEO and former Palantir forward deployed engineer Vinoo Ganesh argues that labs, startups, and PE firms hire FDEs without a shared definition of the role. He recounts Palantir's Project Frontline rotation, which trained about 250 software engineers as FDEs, many now leading forward deployed teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Anduril. A 2013 failure of the Phoenix transaction store at a bank, where real-world data gaps caused roughly 2.3 million keyspaces and an out-of-memory crash, illustrates why FDEs must own the gap between design and production reality. At Kepler he places the FDE function inside product rather than sales.

Latent Space · 3d agoAI industry 4 sources1

1Password increases engineering productivity 21% with Codex

OpenAI reports 1Password engineers boosted productivity 21% using Codex to build features and internal tools under strict security policies.

OpenAI published a customer case study stating that 1Password's engineering teams use Codex to rapidly develop new features and internal tools while reaching production readiness. The company attributes a 21% engineering productivity increase to the adoption, noting rigorous security policies were maintained throughout.

OpenAI News · 8d agoAI industry

Hackers exploit Tencent app flaw to deploy GrayRabbit malware

UNC3569 actively exploits one-click RCE in Tencent Sogou Input Method to deploy the GrayRabbit backdoor, patched in version 16.3.0.3498.

Gen Digital reports that China-aligned UNC3569 is actively exploiting CVE-2026-51990, a one-click RCE chain in Tencent Sogou Input Method for Windows, which has hundreds of millions of installations in China. The chain abuses unvalidated command-line argument injection via the sgbiz: URI handler, unrestricted URL navigation in a CEF-based webview, and an unsandboxed outdated Chromium 80 engine to gain code execution and install the GrayRabbit backdoor. The analyzed malware is a mature 64-bit variant with RC4-encoded C2 config supporting reverse shells, file transfer, and reflective plugin loading. Tencent patched the argument validation in version 16.3.0.3498, but the browser engine remains outdated and unsandboxed.

BleepingComputerupdated · 1d agofirst · 2d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-519903

Explainability Assistant: A Conversational XAI Interface for Interpreting Energy Consumption Models

Researchers release Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI tool using LLM function calling, lifting intent-parsing accuracy from 76.8% to 94%.

The paper introduces the Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI system for interpreting energy consumption forecasting models such as genetic-programming symbolic regressors. It uses LLM function calling instead of rigid custom grammars, achieving 94% intent-parsing accuracy versus 76.8% for prior work TalkToModel, and adapts to different ML problem types without task-specific fine-tuning. Comparative evaluation with energy domain specialists against a traditional XAI dashboard showed improved usability, with all experts preferring the conversational interface.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

What must happen for AI’s trillion-dollar gamble to pay off

Hyperscalers need 2.7x productivity gains by 2030 to justify nearly $1.1 trillion in AI data center spending, or risk bankruptcy and capital misallocation.

Wharton finance professor Jessica Wachter estimates hyperscaler AI expenditure will reach nearly $1.1 trillion through 2027 and that a 2.7x productivity increase is needed to break even by 2030. AI revenues of roughly $150-200 billion this year fall far short of about $750 billion in annual spending, with total investment from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle potentially exceeding $5 trillion over four years. Alphabet reported its first free cash flow deficit (about $5.9 billion) since its 2004 IPO due to AI infrastructure costs. Researchers warn that failed demand could make the buildout the largest capital misallocation in history, with depreciating GPU chips risking stranded assets.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Separating AI's Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems

Schneier and Sanders argue AI's harms stem from capitalist incentives and governance gaps, not just technical limits, urging structural reform.

Writing with Nathan E. Sanders in Tech Policy Press, Bruce Schneier argues that AI's technological problems (hallucination, sycophancy, overconfidence) must be separated from socio-political problems created by capitalist market incentives. The essay contrasts US frontier-scale, energy-intensive development with China's incentive-driven leaner open models on commodity hardware, and cites Switzerland's Apertus model - trained on licensed data using public computing and renewable hydropower - as a public-interest alternative. It contends that proposals like research pauses, data-center moratoria, and federal screening conflate technology problems with governance problems, and that society faces independent choices on both axes.

Schneier on Security · Aug 15, 2026AI policy

Keepnet launches free SMS/Call Reporter for iOS

Keepnet launched a free iOS app, SMS/Call Reporter, letting users one-tap report smishing and vishing into corporate incident response pipelines.

Keepnet released the free SMS/Call Reporter app for iOS, letting users report suspicious SMS and voice phishing with one tap. For enterprise customers, reports flow into Keepnet Incident Responder alongside email phishing reports. The company cites Verizon 2026 DBIR data showing mobile phishing simulations achieve a 40% higher median click rate than email, and FBI IC3 2025 counted $798 million in smishing and vishing losses. An Android version is planned.

Help Net Security · 14d agoTools

Design Docs Are All You Need: An AI-native Machine-Learning Performance Tool

Researchers present SMART, an ML performance-modeling library regenerated by AI coding agents from natural-language design docs instead of code.

The paper describes SMART, a symbolic performance-modeling library whose main branch contains almost no code: the repository is a DAG of self-contained design documents, and coding sub-agents regenerate implementations from only the docs on version updates. Reliability rests on a worked-example doc style used as in-context demonstrations and a minimal operator IR with SymPy cost expressions, offering both fast analytical roll-up and fine-grained modulo-scheduling modes. Regenerated implementations reproduce hand-audited reference models, including DeepSeek-V3 serving on a TPU pod slice, to round-off precision.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research1

The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary, (Mon, Aug 31st)

A SANS honeypot caught a real coding-agent session routed to a rogue "free" LLM endpoint, exposing a Windows user's transcript and tool outputs.

A SANS analyst describes how an internet-exposed inference honeypot was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names like DeepSeek, and enrolled in infrastructure serving "free" LLM backends. On 2026-08-30 an opencode terminal coding agent sent an 88-message, 224 KB transcript 210 times in 91 seconds via a China Unicom relay, exposing directory listings, tool outputs and read file portions. The analyst frames tool-enabled agents treating model endpoints as trusted control planes as a novel risk — a "rogue model endpoint" that could request tool executions on the user's machine.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 15d agoAI safety & security1

StudyBench: Can Self-Evolution Squeeze Textbooks for Olympiad Capability?

Researchers introduce StudyBench, a physics benchmark showing self-evolution gains on textbook problems rarely transfer to olympiad-level questions.

StudyBench is a controlled physics benchmark splitting test data into an Application Set of difficult textbook problems and a Transfer Set of olympiad-level problems. Across three base models, representative self-evolution methods improved on the Application Set but rarely transferred to the harder Transfer Set. A guidance ablation reveals a Guidance Gap, and every method hits a Compute Plateau, indicating the remaining limits are method problems rather than data or compute problems.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research

How a researcher uses Codex and ChatGPT to search for new antimicrobial molecules

OpenAI profiles César de la Fuente's lab using ChatGPT and Codex alongside deep-learning models to accelerate antimicrobial molecule discovery.

OpenAI published a case study on bioengineer César de la Fuente's lab, which uses ChatGPT and Codex for hypothesis brainstorming, code writing, dataset processing, and bridging knowledge gaps across biology, chemistry, and computer science. The lab's deep-learning models scan genome and protein databases for antimicrobial peptide candidates, potentially cutting initial searches from years to hours. Bacterial antimicrobial resistance was associated with about five million deaths in 2021, a toll projected to roughly double by 2050.

OpenAI News · 5d agoAI industry1

[AINews] Andrew Ng gets into AI Engineering

Andrew Ng relaunches DeepLearning.AI around AI Engineering, defining four core skills from an analysis of 10,000+ job postings and expert interviews.

Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google Brain and Coursera, relaunched DeepLearning.AI with a focus on AI Engineering, basing the curriculum direction on an analysis of over 10,000 job postings plus interviews and surveys. He identifies four key skills: building and deploying AI applications, software engineering fundamentals, effective use of coding agents, and shaping the build with product sense. The Latent Space AI News issue also recaps agent ecosystem developments, including NVIDIA's 'Skill Lift' evaluation proposal showing skill scan scores correlate only weakly (Spearman rho = 0.14) with judged quality, and Konwinski's open-source persistent-agent 'microharness' Headlong, which achieved an unattended self-debugging repair in 48 minutes.

Latent Space · 22d agoAI industry1

Switching Password Managers in 2026

An Apple password-management engineer (writing personally) explains switching password managers via iOS direct app-to-app export, crediting FIDO Credential Exchange for passkey portability.

Ricky Mondello, an Apple engineer in password management and authentication (writing personally, not for Apple), demonstrates moving 100 items from 1Password to Apple Passwords via the iOS system export, which transfers passwords, passkeys, verification codes, and notes directly between apps with Face ID confirmation and no intermediate files. He credits the FIDO Alliance's Credential Exchange format (first draft May 2024, now an open spec) and iOS 26/macOS 26 for enabling phishing-resistant credential transfer between apps like 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, DuckDuckGo, and Devolutions. The post is advice rather than news, recommending bulk transfer on the existing device, switching AutoFill to the new app, and treating the new manager as the source of truth.

Lobsters · security · 7d agoIndustry1

Large Language Models for HVAC Operations in Building Energy Systems: A Critical Review of Methods, Applications, and Deployment Readiness

Systematic review of 66 studies finds LLMs for HVAC operations are mostly research-stage, with no ready-now deployment and only four pilot-level studies.

A critical review of 66 peer-reviewed studies from 2023 to March 2026 examines LLMs for HVAC operations in building energy systems. Only four studies reach pilot-level evidence, none reports sustained operational deployment, and 63 of 66 are research-only. Conventional ML, MPC, and RL remain dominant for high-frequency control and short-horizon forecasting, and the evidence supports LLMs primarily as semantic and workflow layers rather than autonomous controllers.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research

How AI wiped out an entire industry in Nairobi

ChatGPT's rise collapsed Kenya's contract essay-writing industry, which once employed 40,000 people in Nairobi, cutting $40–70-per-paper earnings after 2022.

The New York Times reports that generative AI, primarily ChatGPT, wiped out Kenya's ghostwriting business, which at its peak employed at least 40,000 people in Nairobi writing academic papers for US and UK students. Writers like Teresios Bundi, who produced over 2,500 papers in twelve years, saw prices and orders collapse after ChatGPT's 2022 launch. Related gig work such as transcription, data annotation, and Meta content moderation has also dried up, leaving 'humanizers' who rewrite AI text to evade plagiarism checks. Kenya's government had promoted online gig work since 2016, and roughly 80 percent of the country's jobs are informal.

The Decoder · 8d agoAI industry

Mines, Minds, and Machines: The Journey of AI

Recorded Future essay traces AI's supply chain from minerals and chips to embodied AI, mapping geopolitical rivalry and cyber operations at every stage.

Recorded Future published an analysis following the supply chain of the fourth industrial revolution: minerals become chips, chips become data centers, and data centers become models that are acquiring physical capabilities. It argues geopolitical rivalry and cyber operations now run along every link, from mine to embodied AI machines.

Recorded Future · Aug 11, 2026AI industry

Cyble Introduces Major Upgrade to its Executive Monitoring Module

Cyble upgraded Executive Monitoring in Cyble Vision, unifying impersonation, exposure, and mention findings with AI scoring and multi-channel alerting.

Cyble released a major upgrade to Executive Monitoring within its Cyble Vision platform, consolidating Mentions, Impersonations, Exposures, and a new Surface Mentions source (blog and news coverage) into a single findings stream. The release adds AI-generated verdicts and recommendations, per-executive Risk and Reputation scoring for board reporting, and richer onboarding with aliases, reference images, and addresses to cut same-name false positives. Alerting now supports data residency, bulk import, delivery via email, WhatsApp, and SMS, an Access API, and branded executive PDF reports; the upgrade is live with no customer action required.

Cyble · 5d agoTools

Curriculum Learning as Transport: Understanding Curricula with Wasserstein Geodesics

Researchers model curriculum learning as Wasserstein transport over difficulty distributions, finding curriculum benefits are strongly task- and budget-dependent with no dominant strategy.

The framework represents curricula as trajectories of training distributions over discrete difficulty levels, decoupling ordering, matched exposure, endpoint smoothness, and pacing. Across a calibrated suite of 12 tasks and 33 difficulty axes under fixed training budgets, no single strategy dominates, though easy-to-hard ordering improves hard-level performance relative to exposure-matched static sampling. Endpoint smoothness and pacing substantially affect where along the difficulty spectrum a curriculum is effective, and the transport view supports extensions to learned pacing and structured difficulty spaces.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Analysis of 16.9 million SOC alerts finds AI-related alerts at 0.43%, growing 685% since February, with 94.1% noise and 0.02% real attacks.

A review of roughly 16.9 million SOC alerts found about 73,000 (0.43%) were AI-related, a share that grew 685% between February and June 2026. Of AI-related alerts, 94.1% were noise, 5.8% genuine risks, and 0.02% real attacks; 79.8% received benign verdicts, 81.7% were automatically suppressed, and only 5.4% reached a human analyst. The only confirmed attacks were phishing campaigns that weaponized AI brand names as lures, while developer coding agents spawning shells and reading credential stores routinely tripped detections written before AI agents existed.

The Hacker News · 4d agoResearch1

Senior engineers are spending their week cleaning up AI-generated code

New Relic study finds AI-generated code doubles critical runtime issues, with senior engineers losing a third of their week to fixes.

A New Relic survey of U.S. technology leaders reports AI now writes the majority of shipped code, with senior SRE and DevOps engineers spending up to a third of their week triaging and refactoring it. A large majority of organizations had at least one AI-related production failure in the past six months, and roughly three in ten saw newly introduced security vulnerabilities. AI-generated code showed nearly twice as many critical runtime issues as peer-reviewed human-authored code, with gaps concentrated in edge cases, concurrency, deprecated APIs, and complex state changes. Most teams now prompt AI tools to embed logs and traces directly into generated code.

Help Net Security · 23d agoAI industry1

Hackers Abuse AutoIt to Inject AsyncRAT Into Microsoft-Signed Windows Process

Attackers use AutoIt and an invoice-themed batch file to inject AsyncRAT into Microsoft-signed charmap.exe for stealthy remote access.

Point Wild Threat Intelligence documented a five-stage campaign starting with 'Right-click to open Invoice Details.bat' that launches hidden PowerShell, drops a renamed AutoIt interpreter and encrypted loader into a random Temp folder, and persists via a Startup-folder batch file. The loader decrypts AsyncRAT only in memory and injects it into the Microsoft-signed charmap.exe (Windows Character Map) process, leaving no payload file on disk. The final payload patches AMSI inside the infected process and includes screen-capture code that prepares images for transfer to a command-and-control server at 158[.]51[.]122[.]136:4944.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoMalware in the wild1

Securing the Infrastructure of Intelligence

NVIDIA positions AI factories combining chips, networking, power and data as the defining infrastructure of the AI economy needing full-stack security.

NVIDIA's blog argues that AI factories are the defining infrastructure of the AI era, transforming energy and data into intelligence that powers businesses and countries. It frames compute as revenue and lists the full stack of critical resources required: advanced chips, packaging, memory, networking, land and power. The piece is a corporate positioning article about securing this infrastructure, with no specific incident or product announcement detailed in the excerpt.

NVIDIA Blog · 29d agoAI industry

Top 10 Best Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) Tools in 2026

A 2026 scorecard ranks DSPM tools with Wiz and Cyera tied first, documenting consolidation via Palo Alto, Rubrik, Proofpoint, and CrowdStrike acquisitions.

The article ranks ten DSPM platforms: Wiz and Cyera tie at 8.7/10, followed by BigID at 8.5 and Securiti at 8.4, scored on discovery breadth, classification accuracy, access context, remediation, and value. It highlights heavy market consolidation, noting Dig Security was acquired by Palo Alto Networks, Laminar by Rubrik, Normalyze by Proofpoint, and Flow Security by CrowdStrike. Buyers are advised to purchase from current owners and confirm post-acquisition integration state.

Cyber Security News · 3h agoIndustry

Φ-Bench: Can Large Language Models Engineer the Infrastructure That Powers Them?

Researchers release Phi-Bench, a benchmark evaluating frontier LLMs on open-ended, long-horizon engineering and optimization of the LLM infrastructure stack.

Phi-Bench evaluates LLMs on open-ended engineering of the LLM infrastructure stack, derived from optimization problems studied in frontier research and grounded in real-world code repositories. Tasks range from localized kernel-level function completion to long-horizon implementation and end-to-end system optimization. Experiments on frontier LLMs reveal current capabilities and limitations on the path toward autonomous optimization of future AI infrastructure.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

Using AI for Weapons Development

Anthropic report reveals Yemen-based actors used Claude Code to build guidance software for guided rockets and ballistic missiles.

Bruce Schneier highlights Anthropic's misuse disclosure describing a threat actor cell in northern Yemen running three weapons programs: a guided rocket with phone-class homing guidance, a 2,000+ km multi-stage ballistic missile, and the 'R2000' hypersonic glide vehicle set. The actors used Claude Code as a substitute for human engineers to write GNC software, integrate an open-source autopilot, tune controls, and run flight simulations, orchestrating multiple Claude instances in delegated roles. Safeguards blocked many requests but evasion tactics included hiding intent and splitting work across sessions; one guided rocket test-fire failed but no operational device was fielded.

Schneier on Security · 1d agoAI safety & security in the wild

A Detection Engineer's Guide for Delegating Work to AI

Huntress argues detection engineers should only delegate security work to AI when outputs can be independently verified.

A Huntress detection engineer argues that the deciding factor for handing tasks to AI is whether the output can be checked, not whether the model is trusted. The piece frames human verification as the gate for delegating security engineering work to AI assistants. It is guidance/opinion aimed at defenders building detections with AI help.

Huntress · 28d agoAI safety & security

Cyber Command turns to veteran of intelligence agencies for top AI role

US Cyber Command appoints Rear Adm. Ronzelle Green as chief AI officer as its AI budget grows from $5M to $138M.

US Cyber Command has named Ronzelle Green, previously head of research and development at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as its new Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, replacing Brig. Gen. Reid Novotny. The command's 'AI for Cyber Operations' budget request grew from $5 million in fiscal 2026 to $138 million in fiscal 2027, aiming to let cyber operators process data and respond to threats faster than humans alone. Sources say Green's priority will be consolidating fragmented AI pilot programs across the organization, in contrast to the NSA's more established Artificial Intelligence Security Center created in 2023.

The Record · 5d agoAI policy 3 sources1· 1 read

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

A review paper frames on-policy self-distillation collapse as governed by three levers: token weighting, privileged information, and guidance decay.

The paper critically reviews On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), where a language model trains on its own generations scored token-by-token by a teacher conditioned on privileged information such as reference solutions or environment feedback. It identifies collapse, the progressive narrowing of producible reasoning paths, as the dominant failure mode and analyzes it through three levers: signal weighting, the nature of privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review is restricted to mathematical reasoning, reports no new experiments, and offers a shared vocabulary separating settled findings from disputed ones.

Hugging Face daily papers · 21d agoAI research

Infostealer Logs Expose Replayable AI Tokens That Can Bypass MFA

Okta finds infostealer logs contain thousands of replayable AI session tokens and API keys, letting criminals bypass MFA and access services from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI.

Okta analyzed a 7 GB infostealer dump from August 2, 2026 covering 5,871 infected machines in 162 countries and found 555 of 44,791 JWTs related to AI services, plus 1,843 unexpired JWTs and JWEs (largely set by OpenAI via NextAuth.js) and 24 still-valid API keys for Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq and OpenRouter. Valid session tokens and API keys can be replayed with anti-detect browsers like Camoufox to bypass credential and MFA checks, fueling an underground market for AI account access known as LLMjacking, where attackers rack up victims' AI compute bills. Some 17.7% of the JWTs contained plaintext PII usable for social engineering. Google's GTIG reported growing buyer demand for Claude, Gemini, Cursor and Devin credentials, and Mandiant handled an incident where an actor used an exposed GitHub PAT to deploy unauthorized AI infrastructure and scale high-performance compute.

The Hacker News · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources1

🔬“We have foundation models for language, not for physics” — Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing

Caltech professor Anima Anandkumar discusses Neural Operators and FourCastNet for physics modeling, arguing inductive biases beat pure token scaling.

Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor at Caltech and co-founder of Accelerated Understanding, describes Fourier Neural Operators that learn in frequency and spherical-harmonic domains to model weather, fusion, and fluid or heat flow. Her team built FourCastNet 3, a global weather model competitive with physics-based simulations that runs on consumer-grade GPUs. She also introduced TorchLean, a framework for writing PyTorch-style networks inside the Lean proof assistant for formal verification, and was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board. She argues physical domains resist scaling due to tiny datasets and context lengths in the hundreds of billions, so progress comes from built-in structure and physical priors.

Latent Space · 20d agoAI research1

Pro-Ukraine Hacking Cat group deploying new malware against Russian targets

Kaspersky links pro-Ukraine hacktivist group Hacking Cat to Gorilla RAT and Monkey Ransomware in destructive attacks on Russian targets.

Kaspersky reports that pro-Ukraine group Hacking Cat, active since February 2024, has shifted from defacements to destructive encryption attacks, using a previously undocumented Gorilla RAT remote-access tool and Monkey Ransomware, which appends the .monkey extension to files. Initial access in some attacks came from exploited Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, and rapid multi-language malware variants suggest possible generative AI assistance. Shared tools like Nemo Wiper across groups including Ukrainian Cyber Alliance complicate attribution, and targets include Rosatom contractor and heating provider Donbassteploenergo.

The Record · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

The Evolution of the Agent Harness

Latent Space essay argues late-2025 agent gains came from models and harnesses maturing together, with harness logic absorbed into model weights.

The piece defines the agent harness as everything beyond model weights—tools, context, memory, guardrails—and charts its evolution from ReAct prompting (October 2022) through AutoGPT's premature autonomy, Cursor/Copilot's human-in-the-loop retreat, and Devin's roughly 15% success rate, to o1's capability overhang and Claude Code's February 2025 terminal agent with permission rules. It argues the Christmas 2025 jump cited by Transformer co-inventor Lukasz Kaiser reflected model and harness curves crossing, and that remaining harnesses will serve human attention rather than the model.

Latent Space · 25d agoAI tools & infra

Proofpoint Strengthens Executive Leadership Team with Appointment of Chief Legal Officer and Chief People Officer

Proofpoint appointed Brian Levey as Chief Legal Officer and Puja Jaspal as Chief People Officer, strengthening its executive leadership team.

Proofpoint announced on September 8, 2026 the appointments of Brian Levey as Chief Legal Officer and Puja Jaspal as Chief People Officer. Levey previously served as Chief Business Affairs & Chief Legal Officer at Upwork and spent 13 years at eBay; Jaspal was Chief People Officer at Fastly with prior senior roles at Cisco, Visa, and Google. The hires support Proofpoint's stated expansion around human and AI-agent security.

Proofpoint Threat Insight · 8d agoIndustry

Quoting Boris Cherny

Anthropic's Boris Cherny says AI-generated production code needs a higher quality bar enforced with tests, fuzzers, and automated reviews.

In remarks quoted by Simon Willison, Anthropic's Boris Cherny argued that production code written by Claude should meet a higher quality bar than human-written code. He described guardrails at Anthropic including lint rules, extensive tests, Claude-driven end-to-end tests, daily Claude-powered fuzzers, and automated code and security reviews. He warned that without such controls AI-generated code can become hard to maintain.

Simon Willison · 4d agoAI tools & infra1

ControlAI’s Connor Leahy on why superintelligence is ‘not a weapon, it’s an adversary’

ControlAI's Connor Leahy argues superintelligence is an unmanageable adversary, backs the Sanders-Casar 'Ban Superintelligence Act' and international verification agreements.

On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, ControlAI's US Executive Director Connor Leahy argued that alignment and containment alone cannot manage superintelligence risk and advocated halting frontier development, citing the Sanders-Casar 'Ban Superintelligence Act' and parallel UK legislation ControlAI advised on. He characterized frontier AI labs as political actors, pointed to the OpenAI-related Hugging Face breach as evidence of danger, and called AI self-improvement the point of no return, endorsing international 'trust but verify' agreements.

TechCrunch · AI · 6d agoAI policy

The Vulnerability Gap: Why Discovery Is Outrunning Repair

Dark Reading argues AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery and tightening regulation are widening the gap between flaw discovery and repair capacity.

The article argues that AI tooling is increasing the pace at which vulnerabilities are discovered while remediation capacity has not kept up, creating a growing backlog. It frames this widening 'vulnerability gap', combined with a tightening regulatory environment, as an all-hands-on-deck moment for security teams. The piece is analysis and opinion rather than disclosure of a specific flaw.

Dark Reading · 22d agoIndustry

Meta FAIR Introduces AI Research Preference Models (RPMs): Ranking ML Experiments Before Spending GPU Hours

Meta FAIR, Oxford and UCL introduce Research Preference Models that rank unexecuted ML experiments, lifting AIRS-Bench scores from 0.684 to 0.729 and cutting compute ~1.6×.

Researchers from Meta FAIR, Oxford, and UCL introduce Research Preference Models (RPMs), which use frozen pretrained LLMs (Qwen3.6-27B backbone, no fine-tuning) to rank unexecuted experiment candidates and execute only the winner of a pairwise knockout tournament. Two variants shipped: an inference-only LLM-as-a-judge and an agentic variant that runs small pilot experiments in an H200 sandbox. On AIRS-Bench (20 tasks, 24 hours on one H200, 10 seeds), scores rise from 0.684 (random) to 0.711 and 0.729 versus a 0.748 validation oracle, and both variants reach the baseline's 24-hour score in roughly 15 hours. The team reports new SOTA on WinoGrande (94.1% with Agentic RPM) and SVAMP (95.7% with inference-only).

MarkTechPost · 9d agoAI research