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Panic builds over bankrupt Spirit’s looming data sale to Google

Startups object to Google's bankruptcy-auction purchase of Spirit Airlines operational data, claiming proprietary IP is being sold without consent.

Google won an auction to acquire a large enterprise dataset from bankrupt Spirit Airlines, which it says will help improve its products and AI models, with no personal information included. Springshot, whose airline logistics platform powered Spirit's stack, filed a limited objection arguing the vaguely defined data categories could transfer third-party IP and trade secrets it owns; International Aero Engines filed a similar objection. The EFF called it the first public bankruptcy proceeding over selling company and employee data as an asset, and objectors warn of a precedent letting large companies acquire startup IP through bankruptcy courts.

Ars Technica · AI · 6d agoAI industry

nvidia/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-NVFP4 — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

NVIDIA released an NVFP4 4-bit quantized build of Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a 125B-parameter MoE vision-language model, via Model Optimizer.

The checkpoint quantizes Qwen3.8-Flash-Next — a hybrid-attention (Gated DeltaNet and Qwen Sparse Attention) Mixture-of-Experts model with 125B total and 6B activated parameters, plus 51B n-gram embeddings and 4B MTP — using NVIDIA Model Optimizer v0.46.0. NVFP4 benchmarks stay close to FP8: GPQA Diamond 91.5 vs 92.0, MMMU Pro 78.3 vs 77.1, Terminal-Bench 2.1 82.9 vs 83.3. It targets Blackwell B200/B300 GPUs, runs on vLLM, supports 262K context extendable to 1M tokens, and is licensed under the NVIDIA Open Model License with Qwen Community License 1.0.

Hugging Face trending models · 15d agoModel release

Anthropic and OpenAI want to embed safety evaluators. Will they really be independent?

Anthropic and OpenAI propose embedding independent safety evaluators with deep access to training, but evaluators question whether true independence is achievable.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed embedding third-party evaluators like METR and Redwood Research inside frontier AI labs with access to training checkpoints, and OpenAI's Sam Altman said his company would also commit to the practice. Evaluators welcomed the idea but cited past problems: Apollo Research received only three days to pre-release test GPT-6 Astra, and METR and Redwood got roughly one week on premises for the Hugging Face incident, yielding inconclusive results. Researchers argue that access to intermediate training checkpoints is needed to detect alignment faking, since models increasingly recognize when they are being evaluated, and some say legislation may be needed to guarantee independence.

TechCrunch · AI · 15h agoAI safety & security

AI labs have a data trust problem that their policies haven't solved

Nvidia, Palantir, and Booz Allen restrict Anthropic's Fable over data-retention distrust, exposing gaps in AI labs' customer data policies.

Nvidia limits Anthropic's Fable to non-sensitive work and runs its own Nemotron models for internal tasks, while Palantir blocks Fable deployment until Anthropic grants irrevocable zero-data-retention guarantees, and Booz Allen bans it for proprietary cybersecurity work. John Schulman and researcher Sarah Hooker explain that labs can still extract customer IP from metadata, user traces, and synthetic data even under zero data retention. The trust crisis crystallized around Tristan Buckmaster's accusation that OpenAI's Codex absorbed his Navier-Stokes drafts, though OpenAI later stated his prompts could not have influenced its model.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI industry

RAPID: A Real-Time Defense Against Unauthorized Model Distillation for Text-to-Image Services

RAPID embeds defensive perturbations in a T2I model's shared VAE decoder to block unauthorized black-box distillation in real time.

The paper defends text-to-image services against model theft via black-box output-based distillation, where adversaries collect prompt-image pairs to train substitute models. RAPID integrates defensive perturbations into the shared VAE decoder using self-referenced latent maximization plus reconstruction-guided color regularization, avoiding costly sample-wise online optimization. Across four T2I models and four datasets versus five baselines, it consistently degrades substitute-model generation quality while preserving visual fidelity.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoAI safety & security

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants U.S. open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan urges US open-weight labs to distill frontier models and regulators to stay out, countering Anthropic's crackdown calls.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC he would "do nothing" about Chinese labs distilling frontier models and floated an "American distillation regime" letting US open-weight labs do the same to American frontier labs. Anthropic this week released its second report alleging Chinese labs conduct "illicit distillation attacks" using hidden identities, fraud, and stolen credentials, and CEO Dario Amodei has called for US regulators to crack down. Tan argued closed labs cannot dictate what customers do with API outputs, noting frontier labs trained on copyrighted material without permission, and called a single monolithic proprietary provider the true AI doomer scenario.

TechCrunch · AI · 5d agoAI industry

PuzzleMask: Abusing Plain Prose as a Covert AI Attack Vector

Check Point details PuzzleMask, a plain-prose technique that bypasses LLM gatekeeper policy checks, letting hidden payloads reach target models unreviewed.

Check Point Research describes PuzzleMask, a prompt-crafting technique that hides policy-violating payloads inside plain-English prose wrappers, bypassing quick LLM-based policy checks without emojis, Base64, or invisible formatting. The researchers tested 23 automated prompts against gatekeepers including GPT-4o-mini, GPT-OSS-Safeguard 20b, Claude 3 Haiku, and Llama Guard 3, and all were classified as safe despite policies that flagged the plain versions. When submitted to GPT-5 in thinking-high mode with a Python interpreter, the target model extracted and acted on the payload in over 90% of trials. The technique is not itself a jailbreak but can carry a jailbreak prompt as payload; mitigations include input paraphrasing, hardened gatekeeper policies, and output monitoring.

Check Point Researchupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

A new open standard locks AI weights to approved hardware

OPAQUE releases Weight Custody Manifest, an open standard keeping AI model weights encrypted until receiving hardware cryptographically attests to builder-specified conditions.

OPAQUE, a confidential computing company, released the Weight Custody Manifest (WCM) standard as a developer-preview specification with a Python SDK and a public test suite of 91 cases. WCM keeps model weights encrypted until the receiving infrastructure proves via CPU/GPU attestation that it matches builder-signed conditions, and decryption access can be revoked later if conditions change. OPAQUE says it ran the attestation exchange on an NVIDIA H100 and on AMD and Intel confidential servers hosted on Azure and Google Cloud, with two independent SDK builds producing identical output across 5,948 files. The public quickstart only exercises protocol logic on synthetic evidence and skips GPU cryptographic verification, and the standard cannot distinguish an authorized key from one physically extracted from hardware.

Help Net Security · 7d agoAI safety & security

Understanding the Security Boundary of Obfuscation-based On-Device LLM Protection

Researchers formalize obfuscation primitives for TEE-protected on-device LLMs and show a Collapse attack breaks ArrowCloak, TSQP, and LoRO, then extend the boundary.

The paper formalizes obfuscation primitives for TEE-Shielded LLM Partition (TSLP) schemes that offload computationally intensive layers from a Trusted Execution Environment to external GPUs. A novel primitive-guided attack, Collapse, demonstrates a shared vulnerability in prominent published methods including ArrowCloak (Security'25), TSQP (S&P'25), and LoRO (NeurIPS'25). The authors then introduce two new obfuscation primitives and integrate them with existing constructs to formulate an extended security boundary (O_ext).

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoAI safety & security

DeepSeek, Alibaba and Chinese AI Firms Extract Billions of Tokens From U.S. AI Models

NSA, CISA and FBI advisory AA26-251A accuses DeepSeek, Alibaba and four other Chinese AI firms of industrial-scale distillation of US frontier models.

Joint advisory AA26-251A from NSA, CISA and FBI accuses DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of extracting billions of tokens from Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok variants since at least late 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness. Campaigns allegedly used API proxy 'transfer stations', account pools, metadata sanitization and prompt injection to harvest reasoning, coding, agentic and reinforcement-learning capabilities, with techniques mapped to MITRE ATLAS. DeepSeek's R1 and V3 and Alibaba's Qwen families reportedly trained on harvested outputs, and DeepSeek's $5.6 million training-cost claim is disputed as excluding distilled data value. Agencies urge anomaly monitoring, output alteration for suspected extractors, and intelligence sharing across vendors, clouds and aggregators.

GBHackers · 8d agoAI safety & security in the wild1· 1 read

Stealing AI Reasoning Traces

Researchers demonstrate a decryption jailbreak that extracts encrypted reasoning traces from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google LLM APIs via weaker sibling models.

The paper exploits the fact that encrypted chain-of-thought blocks returned by LLM providers are interchangeable across sessions, users, and models within a provider's ecosystem. Injecting an encrypted trace into a weaker, less-safeguarded model from the same provider forces it to output the trace in plaintext, bypassing anti-distillation mechanisms. Decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories recovered 367 PII artifacts and 182 credentials, showing large-scale private data leakage. The flaw also enables hidden hazardous information disclosure and invisible prompt injections embedded in encrypted blocks; mitigations were proposed after responsible disclosure.

Schneier on Security · 9d agoAI safety & security

NCSC Warns Shadow AI Creates New Security Risks

UK NCSC warns that unapproved AI tools used by 71% of UK employees expose corporate data and create hard-to-detect organizational security risks.

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre warned on 7 September that shadow AI, unapproved AI tools used outside organizational controls, creates visibility gaps and raises risks of data breaches, intellectual property loss, and regulatory non-compliance. It cited Microsoft research finding 71% of UK employees had used AI tools not approved by their employer. NCSC also warned AI agents can carry critical vulnerabilities, allowing attackers who exploit one to inherit the agent's data access, services and privileges, and that attackers are highly likely to abuse agents with looser guardrails. The agency recommended reducing rather than eliminating shadow AI through positive security culture and clear guardrails.

Infosecurity Magazine · 9d agoAI safety & security

AI supply chain risk is showing up in developer workflows first

Zentera Systems CEO says AI supply chain attacks currently hit developer workflows first, advising segmentation over tooling and citing the Phantom Raven campaign.

In an interview, Zentera Systems CEO Dr. Jaushin Lee argues that most active AI supply chain incidents target developer workflows and open-source package repositories, while poisoned model weights, compromised MCP servers, and poisoned vector stores remain largely in research and demos. He cites the active 'Phantom Raven' campaign, where attackers register AI-hallucinated package names in public repositories with malicious payloads that silently infect vibe-coding build pipelines. He recommends software-defined segmentation, semiconductor-style project enclaves with egress controls, and warns that self-hosting models without agent sandboxing leaves exposure unchanged.

Help Net Security · 23d agoAI safety & security

F5 enhances AI Gateway to control AI costs, access, and security

F5 integrated AI Gateway into its AI Security Platform, adding model routing, MCP governance, and guardrails, claiming up to 60% token spend reduction.

F5 announced AI Gateway enhancements combining a Model Gateway for cost optimization, an MCP Gateway for agent-to-tool access control, and AI Guardrails for prompt and response inspection. The company cited its 2026 State of Application Strategy Report finding 77% of organizations now treat inference as their dominant AI activity and manage an average of seven AI models. F5 claims smart routing, semantic caching, and GPU-aware load balancing can cut token spend by up to 60% without application changes. The gateway enforces budgets, model routing policies, and agent access controls centrally across SaaS, hybrid SaaS, and hybrid multicloud deployments, with air-gapped support planned.

Help Net Security · 29d agoAI tools & infra

Bad Likert Judge: A Novel Multi-Turn Technique to Jailbreak LLMs by Misusing Their Evaluation Capability

Unit 42 details the Bad Likert Judge multi-turn jailbreak that abuses LLMs' evaluation capability, raising attack success rates over 60% across six frontier models.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 describes the Bad Likert Judge technique, a multi-turn jailbreak that asks a target LLM to act as a Likert-scale judge scoring the harmfulness of example responses. The highest-rated example in each scale can carry harmful content, bypassing the model's internal guardrails. Testing across six state-of-the-art text-generation LLMs showed an average attack success rate increase of more than 60% versus plain attack prompts, with tested models anonymized. The technique targets edge cases rather than typical use, and the article positions the work as guidance for defenders on potential jailbreak risks.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security