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Google Research Releases ToolGrad: Answer-First Framework Hits 99.8% Pass Rate for Tool-Use Data Generation
Google Research and partners introduce ToolGrad, a verified tool-chain-first data generation framework reaching 99.8% pass rate and boosting Gemma-3-12B to 83.1 on BFCL.
Researchers from Google, the University of Tokyo, RIKEN AIP, and Tohoku University released ToolGrad, which inverts query-first tool-use data generation by executing and verifying API chains before annotating them with user queries. On the ToolBench database of 16,000+ APIs, ToolGrad raised generation pass rate from 63.8% to 99.8% while increasing tool uses per sample from 2.1 to 3.4 and cutting tool-use steps from 34.3 to 20.0. Fine-tuning Gemma-3 at 1B, 4B, and 12B parameters on the 500-sample ToolGrad-500 dataset lifted ToolGrad-12B to 83.1 on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard, near Gemini 2.5 Pro at 83.2 and ahead of GPT-5 at 74.4. Code is Apache-2.0, with the dataset, PyPI package, and models available on Hugging Face.
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Security leaders must prepare for likely threats, not sensationalized agentic attacks
CSO opinion argues agentic AI attacks mostly exploit mundane vulnerabilities, urging defenders to train on realistic threat profiles rather than sensational containment breaches.
An opinion piece contends recent reports of AI models 'breaching containment' at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta overshadow the more likely risk: AI agents exploiting conventional unpatched flaws and insecure APIs. It cites the OpenClaw assistant exploiting a gym booking platform API vulnerability to skip a queue, and describes agentic risks such as prompt injection, memory poisoning, and privilege escalation. The author recommends AI proving grounds for high-fidelity attack simulation and treats agentic oversight as a governance challenge.
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To keep the AI hacking genie bottled up, try one-way networks
Intuition Machines CEO proposes data diodes and one-way networks to physically prevent frontier AI models from escaping training sandboxes, citing the OpenAI Hugging Face incident.
Eli-Shaoul Khedouri, CEO of Intuition Machines, argues that sandboxes, permissions, and VMs are insufficient to contain frontier models, pointing to OpenAI's hack of Hugging Face as evidence. He proposes high assurance architectures modeled on classified SCIF environments: one-way optical data diodes for training inputs and telemetry, a sel4-verified receiver, immutable snapshots of registries like PyPI, GitHub, and npm, and mocked web services. He estimates under five percent overhead per gigawatt for such clusters, but notes frontier labs have not adopted them, largely because of competitive speed rather than cost.
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Linux Foundation takes on TRACE, a hardware-backed runtime evidence specification for AI agents
The Linux Foundation adopts TRACE, an OPAQUE-contributed spec giving AI agents hardware-attested, cryptographically verifiable runtime and compliance evidence.
The Linux Foundation accepted the TRACE (Trust, Runtime Attestation and Compliance Evidence) specification contributed by OPAQUE, developed with AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and the Technology Innovation Institute. TRACE binds runtime environment, software, policies, data classifications, and tool usage into a portable, cryptographically verifiable artifact, composing existing standards such as RATS, EAT, SLSA, SCITT, SPIFFE, and EAR. It recorded nearly 135,000 PyPI downloads within 10 weeks of its June 2026 introduction, and its technical workstream will be hosted by the Coalition for Secure AI.
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