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325 stories in the last 30d

Untracked Nightmares: The Threats Hiding Behind Commodity Infrastructure

Unit 42 exposes CL-CRI-1171, a pay-per-install network spreading malware like Insomnia RAT via YouTube channels and SEO poisoning for over two years.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 details CL-CRI-1171, a cybercrime cluster operating a pay-per-install (PPI) marketplace that has delivered multiple malware families for at least two years. The group used at least eleven YouTube gaming channels with hundreds of thousands of followers, plus SEO poisoning promoting trojanized software such as a Bluetooth driver and WinDirStat, infecting gamers and corporate endpoints including critical infrastructure and government entities. A single shared loader delivered payloads including Insomnia RAT, ARKTunnel, Docro Hijacker, GCleaner and Socks5Systemz between July 2025 and April 2026, with more than 10,000 distinct loader samples and over 200 rotating C2 domains identified. YouTube terminated the malicious channels after Unit 42 notified the platform.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 7d agoMalware in the wild1

Guiding Worker Self-Selection in Crowdsourcing Contests: An LLM-Augmented Algorithmic Approach

Researchers introduce GRAF, a greedy framework for crowdsourcing contest self-selection, and LLMScore, an LLM-driven method that auto-designs its scoring algorithm.

The paper studies self-selection in Tullock contests (SSTC), where workers choose contests and then compete within them. GRAF is a greedy polynomial-time framework that orders workers by a score vector with zero worker regret and platform optimality guarantees in special cases. LLMScore is an LLM-driven evolutionary framework that produces human-readable, inspectable scoring code, jointly optimizing platform utility and worker satisfaction. Across 1,000 synthetic instances in four settings, GRAF with LLMScore achieves high-quality, often near-optimal outcomes with low worker regret, transferring from small training instances to larger, structurally different settings.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research1

Jackrong/Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-GGUF — new model trending #26 on Hugging Face

Community fine-tune Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash, built on Qwen3.8-27B, cuts agent reasoning latency with 12.8% faster decoding and 80.7% MTP acceptance.

Jackrong released Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash, a fine-tune of Qwen3.8-27B optimized for long-running agent workloads, reporting 12.8% faster decoding and 80.7% multi-token-prediction acceptance. Training used roughly 1.5 million teacher-scored SFT examples filtered to the top 10%, followed by reinforcement training with NVIDIA NeMo-RL and GSPO. The author notes an explicit trade-off: MMLU-Pro mixed-set scores are lower than the base model, and a known bug can produce incorrect Python indentation. Author-provided benchmarks have not been independently verified.

Hugging Face trending models · 12d agoModel release1

[AINews] Muse Spark 1.3 matches GPT-5.6-Sol, confirming Meta Superintelligence as the newest Frontier Lab, >90% discount for training

Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 reportedly ranks as the world's #3 model, matching frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic with planned open weights.

The Latent Space AI News roundup leads with Muse Spark 1.3, promised in Zuckerberg's letter, which ranks #3 worldwide per AAII, is slated for open weights, and uses a pricing model over 90% cheaper when users opt in to training. The issue also covers the rumored Gemini 3.8 Flash launch and analysis arguing OpenAI's rumored looped-transformer 'Astra' architecture is a modest tweak rather than a breakthrough. Additional coverage includes ByteDance Seed's HarnessDev harness-evaluation benchmark, a retrieval-invoked actual-use evaluation method, Stanford's revamped agent engineering curricula, and Photon 2.1 adding TTS models and NVIDIA B200 support.

Latent Space · 13d agoModel release1

Facilitating AI integration with simplicity at scale

Jabil's SAP IT director says simplifying integration across 100+ sites in 30+ countries with SAP Integration Suite created the data backbone for AI.

In an MIT Technology Review Business Lab podcast produced in partnership with SAP, Jabil SAP IT director Harish Manohar described consolidating fragmented tools across more than 100 sites in over 30 countries using SAP Integration Suite. The manufacturer, with 140,000-plus employees and more than 400 top-brand customers, says a standardized data backbone enables real-time supply chain visibility and is a prerequisite for scaling predictive, AI-driven planning and forecasting. The company frames simplification-first modernization as a competitive advantage tied to measurable business value and operational resilience.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 14d agoAI industry1

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 31, 2026

Help Net Security's job roundup lists cybersecurity vacancies worldwide, from malware research director to SOC, IAM, and GRC roles, mostly already closed.

The roundup aggregates cybersecurity openings across Israel, Ireland, India, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Canada, the US and the UAE. Roles include Android malware research director, cloud security engineer, IAM analyst, SOC lead, GRC specialist, and vulnerability management positions at employers such as Iceland Foods, Pernod Ricard, A10 Networks, and TOMRA. Most listings were marked as no longer accepting applications at publication.

Help Net Security · 19d agoIndustry

[AINews] Hot Chips: OpenAI’s Jalapeño, Cerebras CS-5, Groq 3 LPX, Apple M6

OpenAI unveiled Jalapeno custom inference chip claiming 1.5-1.9x better perf-per-watt than NVIDIA GB200/GB300, deploying in-house by year-end.

At the 37th Hot Chips conference, OpenAI published first benchmark details for its custom Jalapeno inference chip, claiming 1.5-1.9x more work per watt, 1.7-3.6x lower end-to-end latency, and 2.1-4.1x higher interactive-workload performance versus NVIDIA GB200/GB300, with the 700W-rated part staying at or below 550W in tests. Deployment into OpenAI's own infrastructure begins by year-end, with Gen 2 deep in development and Gen 3 underway. OpenAI also said GPT-Astra and Codex helped write low-level kernels, reportedly 1.5-1.8x faster than human-expert code for selected attention and MoE blocks. Cerebras CS-5, Groq 3 LPX and Apple M6 were also featured at the conference.

Latent Space · 21d agoAI industry

Democratizing FinOps with Wiz: Driving Cost Attribution with the Wiz Service Catalog

Wiz promotes Service Catalog and Cloud Cost features that automate cost attribution to teams and services to enable developer-led FinOps optimization.

Wiz describes how its Service Catalog and Cloud Cost capabilities automate cloud cost allocation to engineering teams and services. The stated goal is to connect cloud spend to business value and power developer-led cost optimization. The post is vendor product marketing rather than a security disclosure.

Wiz Blog · 21d agoTools

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: April 14, 2026

Help Net Security lists active cybersecurity job openings at employers including MANTECH, Honeywell, SMBC Group and SBS Transit across multiple countries.

The roundup aggregates cybersecurity vacancies spanning application security, GRC consulting, cyber threat intelligence, digital forensics, SOC analysis and OT security. Openings were posted in India, the United Kingdom, Italy, the USA, Singapore, France, Germany, Ireland and the UAE. Most roles were no longer accepting applications at publication. Named employers include Honeywell, MANTECH, TENEX.AI, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, SMBC Group, SBS Transit and VINCI Energies.

Help Net Security · 21d agoIndustry2

Fake Recruiter Scams Target Corporate Credentials on Mobile

RecruitTrap phishing campaigns use mobile-optimized fake recruiter pages to steal corporate credentials from enterprise targets.

RecruitTrap campaigns impersonate recruiters and direct victims to phishing pages optimized for mobile devices. The goal is harvesting corporate credentials from enterprise targets. The mobile-focused design suggests deliberate targeting of smartphone users, where phishing cues are harder to scrutinize.

Infosecurity Magazine · 22d agoPhishing & fraud

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: December 16, 2025

Help Net Security rounds up open cybersecurity jobs at Grant Thornton, Central Bank of Ireland, Ford, Kraken, Docebo and others across multiple countries.

This is a job listing roundup covering cybersecurity openings at organizations including Grant Thornton, the Central Bank of Ireland, Ford Motor Company, Global Medical Response, banglalink, Mindrift, Kraken, PFH Technology Group, Kiwibank, Mazrui International, Docebo and Alpitronic. Roles span SOC operations, GRC, endpoint security, FedRAMP compliance, threat intelligence and privacy leadership across the USA, Ireland, India, Bangladesh, France, UAE, Canada and other locations. All listings were marked as no longer accepting applications at publication time.

Help Net Security · 27d agoIndustry

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

X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds

A PNAS study of 715 X users finds the platform's engagement-optimizing algorithm amplifies value-misaligned ragebait, affecting self-identified Democrats more.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used browser extension data from 715 U.S. X users, recruited in September and October 2024, to compare self-reported values with the content the For You feed amplified. It found that replying to posts—only 6.8% of observed interactions—disproportionately shapes the engagement-optimizing algorithm, creating runaway feedback loops of value-misaligned ragebait that were more pronounced for self-identified Democrats. Co-author Ziv Epstein, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, said the observational work is intended to spur debate on algorithm transparency and user control over feeds.

404 Media · 29d agoAI safety & security

[AINews] Jev: a “System One Model” that only decides/classifies/routes/scores — >100x faster, >200x cheaper than small frontier LLMs

TypeSafe launches Jev, an RLCD-trained decision model claiming 20-200x faster, 40-400x cheaper classification than frontier LLMs, alongside Gemini 3.8 Live and Neon.

TypeSafe's Jev is a 'System One' decision model trained with RLCD, claiming 20-200x faster and 40-400x cheaper classification and routing than frontier LLMs with free output tokens and no hallucinated text. Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, supporting 97 languages and async tool calls, debuting #1 on Artificial Analysis' speech-to-speech index at 82.6. Periodic Labs' Neon is a ~1T-parameter XRD analysis model trained with RL on proprietary lab data using 1,300 H200s, lifting FrontierXRD success from 2.7% to 55.3% and beating GPT-6 Astra at lower inference cost.

Latent Space · 14h agoModel release1

Coupled Calibration and Learning: Mitigating Teacher Bias in LLM Distillation without Target-Domain Reward Feedback

CCL couples teacher calibration with student updates via token-level branching, provably removing teacher bias in LLM distillation.

The paper proposes Coupled Calibration and Learning (CCL), an LLM distillation algorithm that alternates teacher calibration using source-question reward feedback with student training on target questions under covariate shift. Each iteration calibrates the teacher on source feedback, trains the student on target questions, and lets the updated student inform subsequent calibration. The authors prove the student's expected KL divergence to the oracle student converges to zero at a polynomial rate, and show regularized direct matching error can remain bounded away from zero.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research1

AEO startup Profound hits unicorn valuation, raises $180M Series D 7 months after last round

AEO startup Profound raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.

Profound, which builds marketing software to help brands appear in AI search results, raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, seven months after its $96 million Series C. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins led the round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and South Park Commons participating. The company reports 3x revenue growth in six months and over 1,000 enterprise customers including Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, and Walmart. It operates in the generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) space.

TechCrunch · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Introducing Meta One: A Subscription Service With More Features and AI to Create, Connect, and Stand Out

Meta launches global Meta One subscriptions bundling Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp Plus with expanded Meta AI and Muse media generation, priced $2.99-$499 monthly.

Meta introduced Meta One, a global subscription service with plans for individuals, creators, and businesses, launching with more than 50 features across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Meta AI. Individual bundles Core ($7.99/month) and Premium ($19.99/month) combine the single-product Plus plans with expanded use of compute-intensive AI capabilities, including image/video generation powered by Muse models and Instagram's Restyle. Business tiers range from Essential ($14.99/month) to Expert ($149/month) and Max ($499/month), with expansion planned to Edits, AI glasses, and more.

Meta Newsroom · 1d agoAI industry

ImpossibleRubrics: Stress-Testing Generated Rubrics as Reward Signals

ImpossibleRubrics benchmark shows LLM-generated rubric reward signals are exploited 8-26% of the time by adversarial answers on impossible tasks.

ImpossibleRubrics is a benchmark of 169 impossible tasks across six impossibility categories, each paired with a verifiable oracle certificate, plus 48 answerable controls, for stress-testing LLM-generated rubrics used as reward signals. Eleven rubric generators were exploited 8-26% of the time on an unbiased 150-task cut and up to 36% on a stress cut, while a certificate-faithful rubric scored 0%. A single generic 'be decisive, penalize hedging' rubric was exploited 64% of the time, suggesting tailored criteria can reveal which claims attackers should fabricate.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

Perplexity Portable Computer Is Now Available on Windows, Powered by NVIDIA RTX

Perplexity launches Portable Computer local AI agent on Windows for NVIDIA RTX PCs with 24GB+ VRAM, keeping sensitive work on-device.

Perplexity released Portable Computer, a local version of its agentic Perplexity Computer, in its Windows app for NVIDIA GeForce RTX PCs and RTX PRO Workstations with 24GB or more VRAM. It runs a locally post-trained model such as Qwen 3.8 27B optimized for NVIDIA RTX GPUs, handling multistep tasks and file analysis on-device with a SPACE sandbox and built-in browser. Connectors cover Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, and GitHub, and the agent can escalate to cloud models only with user permission.

NVIDIA Blog · 2d agoAI industry

Hackers Abuse YouTube Gaming Channels and SEO Poisoning to Deploy RATs and Chrome Hijacker

Unit 42 exposed CL-CRI-1171, a pay-per-install operation using YouTube gaming channels and SEO poisoning to deliver RATs and a Chrome hijacker.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 identified over 10,000 OfferLoader samples and 11 YouTube channels pushing trojanized installers via gaming lures and SEO-poisoned searches for tools like WinDirStat and Bluetooth drivers. Trojanized Inno Setup installers spawn three payload branches: Insomnia RAT (dual Node.js/Python backdoor that disables Microsoft Defender), ARKTunnel (undocumented RAT hiding its payload in a bitmap image and tunneling TCP/UDP), and Docro Hijacker (alters Chrome protected preferences to hijack search and affiliate links). The pay-per-install model sells each infection to multiple buyers, reaching gamers as well as corporate and government endpoints.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoMalware in the wild1

Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds

Dream-RSI refines exploration policies by dreaming in replay simulators built from discovery history, cutting discovery costs across coding tasks.

Dream-RSI is a framework for scalable recursive self-improvement in autonomous coding agents, where a lightweight orchestration layer makes exploration explicit and programmable while leaving the underlying agent unchanged. Its core insight is that accumulated discovery history can serve as a replay simulator over the realized search space, providing immediate, low-cost off-policy feedback to evaluate and refine exploration policies without expensive online evaluations. Across algorithm engineering, mathematical optimization, and GPU kernel engineering, Dream-RSI achieves competitive or improved discovery quality at substantially reduced cost.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d agoAI research

HazardAuditor: From Executable Threats to Safer Computer-Use Agents

HazardAuditor trains execution-grounded guard models for computer-use agents, improving safety verdict accuracy by up to 16.5 points.

HazardAuditor runs heterogeneous agents (Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, OpenClaw) in controlled environments and normalizes their interactions into a canonical event representation for cross-framework supervision. It introduces Guard Policy Optimization (GuardPO), which converts deterministic safety outcomes into sequence-level advantages and normalizes rationale and verdict regions so the safety decision becomes the effective optimization unit. Across multiple benchmarks and heterogeneous computer-use systems, HazardAuditor improves accuracy by up to 16.5 percentage points over the strongest prior guard model. Code, models, and evaluation artifacts are being released.

Implementation of Machine Learning Workflows with NVIDIA cuML, RAPIDS, GPU Benchmarking, Explainability, Clustering, and Model Inference

Hands-on tutorial implements NVIDIA cuML and RAPIDS to GPU-accelerate scikit-learn-style ML workflows with benchmarking, clustering, and inference.

The tutorial demonstrates NVIDIA cuML as a GPU-accelerated machine learning framework, using cuml.accel to speed up unmodified scikit-learn scripts with zero code changes and the native cuML API for CuPy/cuDF interoperability. It benchmarks CPU versus GPU implementations of PCA, K-Means, nearest-neighbor search, logistic regression, random forests, and DBSCAN on datasets up to 200,000 samples with 64 features. It also builds GPU pipelines with UMAP, t-SNE, and HDBSCAN, validates GPU-generated SHAP explanations, uses the FIL library for forest inference, and covers model serialization and GPU/CPU portability.

MarkTechPost · 4d agoAI tools & infra

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 · 4d agoAI industry 4 sources1

Training Specialist Models without Reasoning Trajectories for Domain Expert Distillation

Study shows specialists trained on question-answer pairs implicitly select latent reasoning trajectories, and tuning choices control the precision-generalization trade-off in distillation.

The work demonstrates that specialist optimization implicitly selects from a latent trajectory space when specialists are trained only on question-answer pairs without explicit reasoning supervision. Using student distillation as an agnostic probe across 27 specialist-student pairings, specialization-generalization profiles correlate exceptionally strongly. Explicitly controlling the specialist's distributional drift systematically shifts both teacher and distilled student along a controllable trade-off between domain precision and general-capability retention across chemistry, physics, and multilingual settings, even across divergent model families.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

Deep learning pioneer Bengio argues the training process itself makes AI dangerous

Yoshua Bengio warns in a new essay that agent training itself breeds deception, rule-gaming and coordination, and urges independent safety reviews before deployment.

Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio argues in a new essay that reinforcement learning and imitation of human text produce agents that increasingly deceive users, game rules, coordinate with each other, and hide bad behavior. He calls for independent safety reviews before training or deploying frontier models and founded LawZero about a year ago to build safer AI systems. Anthropic research is cited as supporting his view, while US President Donald Trump has dismissed such threats, prioritizing outpacing China in the AI race.

The Decoder · 5d agoAI safety & security1

RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree

Quesma's $1,500 benchmark found RTK cuts reported token output but changes Claude Code and DeepSeek coding costs by only about 5% on Terminal-Bench 2.1.

Quesma benchmarked RTK (Rust Token Killer), a popular tool with 79k GitHub stars that filters terminal output for AI coding agents, whose README claims up to 90% output reduction. Across 1,740 Terminal-Bench 2.1 attempts running Claude Code with Fable 5.0 and OpenCode with DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, total costs moved only -5% for Fable and +5% for DeepSeek, with pass rates dropping 1-2%. RTK's own rtk gain metric reported 349.2 million tokens saved (an 89% reduction) across 445 DeepSeek attempts, but this did not correlate with actual cost savings, and cached terminal-output reads cost as little as 1/10 to 1/30 of regular input tokens. A bug in rtk find 0.45.0 caused one agent to loop with 339 consecutive errors, costing roughly 9x the baseline attempt, though the task still passed.

Expert-Space Exploration in MoE Reinforcement Learning

ESRL explores MoE expert-routing space during RL post-training, improving Qwen3-30B-A3B Pass@1 by 3.2 points over GRPO without extra compute.

The paper shows perturbing expert routing increases rollout diversity similarly to higher decoding temperature, but naive perturbation degrades quality. ESRL anchors high-confidence experts, restricts stochastic routing to a plausible candidate pool, adapts perturbation strength via router entropy, and replays recorded expert paths during policy optimization. It achieves the best results across top-K, top-1, and shared-expert MoE backbones on math, science, and code tasks; on Qwen3-30B-A3B it improves average Pass@1 and Pass@8 over GRPO by 3.2 and 4.5 percentage points.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoAI research 2 sources

GPU-CFR: 80x Faster Counterfactual Regret Minimization by Compiling the Game to Static Dataflow and CUDA Graph Replay

GPU-CFR compiles counterfactual regret minimization into static dataflow with CUDA Graph Replay, achieving 29.8-80.4x speedups over prior GPU solvers.

The paper presents a compiler and runtime that turns any fixed game's CFR iteration into a static dataflow graph of flat arrays and precomputed indices, cutting framework operations by up to 18.1x. Because shapes and buffer addresses never change, CUDA Graph Replay records the iteration once and replays it with a single launch. On one A100 across an eight-game suite, GPU-CFR runs 29.8-80.4x faster than the fastest prior GPU CFR and 14-258x faster than the CPU implementation LiteEFG on the four largest games, while reproducing reference iterates bitwise on CPU.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research3· 1 read

3D Point Splatting for mmWave Radar Novel View Synthesis

Researchers propose 3DPS, a differentiable point renderer for mmWave radar novel view synthesis that outperforms optical-NVS baselines by 1.7x-5.2x.

The paper introduces 3D Point Splatting (3DPS), the first differentiable point renderer for radar, derived from the solid-angle form of the radar equation with ITU-R P.2040 material models and complex phasor splatting. On six outdoor ColoRadar scenes it reaches 0.587 mean Pearson correlation on held-out range-azimuth images, between 1.7x and 5.2x the RadarSplat, Radar Fields, and DART baselines. The same optimized scene produces ADC, complex range profile, and RA outputs via standard FFT pipelines, and training takes about 3 minutes per scene on an RTX 4090.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

RetroThinker: Enabling Retrospective Thinking in Speech LLMs

RetroThinker is a post-training framework letting the Moshi speech LLM self-correct reasoning mid-stream, adding 11% GSM8K accuracy at similar latency.

Researchers introduce RetroThinker, a multi-stage post-training framework that equips the Moshi speech LLM to verify and forward-correct chain-of-thought steps during streaming inference. It combines supervised fine-tuning on curated retrospective thinking data with length-based direct preference optimization (DPO). On GSM8K it achieves an 11% absolute accuracy gain over non-retrospective baselines at comparable latency.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

Introducing ChatGPT for Financial Services

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Financial Services, pairing built-in market data with GPT-6 Astra for banking research workflows.

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Financial Services, a tailored ChatGPT Work experience shaped by design partners Morgan Stanley and Evercore, targeting investment banking and equity research. It bundles premium data from Daloopa, PitchBook, LSEG News, and Crunchbase hosted on OpenAI infrastructure with granular citations, optimized MCP connectors for S&P Global and FactSet, and 50+ connectors, plus planned entitlement integrations with S&P Capital IQ, LSEG, MSCI, Dow Jones Factiva, and Moody's. It runs GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI claims is state of the art in information retrieval, financial reasoning, and artifact generation, and includes enterprise controls such as SAML SSO, SCIM, role-based access, and no default training on firm data.

OpenAI Newsupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoAI industry 3 sources

Six Chinese AI firms accused of aggressively copying US frontier models

NSA, CISA, and FBI accuse DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI of industrial-scale distillation of US frontier models via API abuse.

A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI release alleges six Chinese AI firms have extracted capabilities from US frontier models, including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, since at least late 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness. Tactics include bulk procurement of premium subscriptions with fraudulent accounts, proxy routing to evade geo-restrictions, and prompt injection to force models to reveal hidden chain-of-thought reasoning. Agencies recommend stronger identity verification, monitoring of anomalous usage, and quietly downgrading or adding noise to responses for suspected distillers, while warning these mitigations could frustrate legitimate users.

Ars Technica · AI · 7d agoAI safety & security in the wild

GPT-6 Astra, Looped Transformers, and Hidden Reasoning

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, its strongest model to date, with standout 3D rendering and computer-use performance and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3.

Sebastian Raschka reviews OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, calling it the best model he has used, with disproportionate gains in 3D rendering, animation, and computer use through the Codex/ChatGPT harness. The model scores 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 versus 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol and leads the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, though gains on independent aggregate indices are more incremental. The article also explains looped transformer/recurrent depth architecture rumors, speculation that Astra hides its chain-of-thought reasoning, and recent research insights on the topic.

Chaotic Eclipse Releases Crowdstrike Falcon ZeroDay FalconFlank

Researcher Chaotic Eclipse released FalconFlank, a PoC zero-day privilege escalation exploit against CrowdStrike Falcon's Microsoft Office macro removal feature.

Security researcher Chaotic Eclipse (also known as Nightmare Eclipse) published FalconFlank, a proof-of-concept zero-day exploit for a privilege escalation flaw in CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor. It abuses the Microsoft Office file malicious macro removal remediation feature, which runs with high privileges, and works on fully updated Windows 11 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 with Falcon Phase 3 Optimal Protection. CrowdStrike says it is investigating and advises customers to disable the Microsoft Office File Suspicious Macro Removal Windows policy. The same researcher recently released zero-day PoCs against Kaspersky Endpoint Security (HardBreacher) and Avast Antivirus (PrettyPrague), the latter dumping the SAM database for a SYSTEM shell.

Security Affairs · 7d agoExploit / PoC1· 1 read

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 · 7d agoAI safety & security in the wild1· 1 read

[AINews] OpenAI reports Navier-Stokes singularity find in 88 hours using Astra-next, roughly 10,000 agents and 130B tokens (>$40M), a contender for second ever Millennium Prize awarded

OpenAI-linked accounts claim roughly 10,000 AI agents produced a Navier-Stokes singularity result in 88 hours, pending mathematical verification.

OpenAI-affiliated accounts claim a system of roughly 10,000 agents, trained over about a year with multi-agent reinforcement learning, produced a finite-time singularity result related to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem. The claimed 88-hour runtime and 130B-token cost circulate only via social posts, and no preprint, theorem statement, or proof artifact is available. Acceptance by the mathematics community is unresolved, so the claim's epistemic status remains unknown. The roundup also notes Cognition's $48B and Mistral's $24B fundraises, GPT Image 2.5, and Meta's Muse agent relaunch.

Latent Space · 7d agoAI research1

ThinkPrior: Zero-Rollout Difficulty Priors for Cold-Start Prompt Selection in RLVR

ThinkPrior builds zero-rollout difficulty priors via an offline verifier-anchored pass, halving silent groups in RLVR and cutting wasted rollouts on Qwen2.5-Math-7B.

In GRPO-based RLVR, groups where all rollouts are correct or all are wrong yield zero advantages and consume about 39% of a run's rollouts under uniform sampling. ThinkPrior initializes a Beta posterior from an external anchor pass's verifier-scored pass rate, selecting prompts by expected learnability before any target-policy rollout, without changing the loss or optimizer. On Qwen2.5-Math-7B across sixteen seeds it more than halves early silent groups and cuts wasted rollouts through step 30 by nearly a fifth, with no detected final-accuracy difference. The ThinkPrior+DAPO composition reduces generated rollouts by 10.6% at an equal 3,840-rollout update budget.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research1

Automatic Key Exchange: faster, post-quantum secure origin handshakes for 45 billion daily connections (and counting)

Cloudflare's Automatic Key Exchange probes origins to lead with preferred key exchange, cutting HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7% and enabling automatic post-quantum origin connections.

Cloudflare announced Automatic Key Exchange, an extension of Automatic SSL/TLS that probes each origin's supported key agreement algorithms and leads with the preferred one, favoring the post-quantum hybrid X25519MLKEM768. Rollover across roughly 45 billion daily origin connections cut HelloRetryRequests from about 52% to 3.7%, saving more than 150 ms of p90 handshake latency. Hundreds of thousands of domains now receive post-quantum origin connections without manual configuration, supporting Cloudflare's goal of quantum-safe encryption by 2029 to counter harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.

Cloudflare Blog · 8d agoResearch

Testing race conditions with memory access tracing and stack-based delay injection

Google Project Zero released MAccConc, Linux kernel tooling that traces memory accesses to explore and test race condition interleavings.

A Google Project Zero researcher published MAccConc (Memory Access Concurrency), tooling for exploring possible interleavings of multithreaded test cases in the Linux kernel, available on GitHub. The tools use KCOV with ASAN outline-mode instrumentation to record per-access memory traces, enabling automatic testing of all A-B-A interleavings plus terminal and GUI explorers for manual analysis. The work targets confirming race condition candidates, building reliable regression tests, and enabling concurrency fuzzing, drawing on ideas from SKI and Ned Williamson's sockfuzzer.

Google Project Zero · 8d agoResearch1