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Russian State-Sponsored Hackers Use Claude to Rebuild Malware After Detection

Anthropic disrupted APT29-linked GTG-20006, which used Claude to autonomously rebuild malware, hijack hotel Wi-Fi DNS, and target 20-plus Ukrainian, European, and US-linked organizations.

Anthropic attributed the campaign to GTG-20006, aligned with Midnight Blizzard (APT29/Cozy Bear), which developed an AI-driven process that monitors its implants against security products and autonomously rebuilds and redeploys detected malware. Targets included military intelligence, diplomatic, and defense organizations in Ukraine and Europe, plus Middle East and Asian maritime agencies; the actor compromised at least three hotel Wi-Fi vendors via DNS hijacking and served ClickFix lures delivering Windows, Android, and iOS malware such as PowerChrome, GiftDrop, and DarkSword. Operations also included a North African breach exfiltrating over 300,000 national identity records and 500,000-plus company registry entries, an Embassy Kit device-code phishing campaign stealing Microsoft 365 tokens from at least eight organizations, and WhatsApp account takeover using headless browsers. The campaign overlaps with CaptiveCrunch reporting from ReliaQuest, Microsoft, Google, and Lumen Black Lotus Labs.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 4d agofirst · 4d agoThreat actor in the wild 15 sources2

[AINews] DeepSeek v4.1-Flash: 763B-P8B-D16B novel causal Encoder–Decoder architecture with vision marks the Return of the Whale

DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash, an open-weight 763B-parameter model with a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture, 1M context, vision input, and MIT license.

DeepSeek launched V4.1-Flash, an open-weight MIT-licensed model using a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture with 763B total parameters and asymmetric active parameters: 8B for prefill and 16B for decode. It supports 1M-token context and text+image input, priced at $0.30 per 1M input and $1.20 per 1M output tokens with a 50% off-peak discount. Artificial Analysis scored it 40 on its Intelligence Index, above DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, and Vals ranked it the #1 open-weight model ahead of Kimi K3. Baseten shipped day-0 support and Ollama began rolling it out to paid subscribers.

Latent Space · 4d agoModel release 6 sources1

Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye

METR analysis finds AI accelerating cyber vulnerability discovery, while SPADE self-play environment generation improves Qwen3 reasoning benchmark scores at 30B scale.

Import AI 470 discusses a METR research note reporting differential acceleration from AI: major acceleration in reported cyber vulnerabilities (cURL, OpenSSL, Firefox, Microsoft, NVD, OSV), minor acceleration in mathematics, and no measurable acceleration in AI-research optimization benchmarks. It also covers SPADE, a self-play framework from a multi-university team (University of Washington, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and others) that co-evolves executable training environments and agent capability using Environment Designer and Reasoning Agent roles with hint-based regret rewards. Trained on Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, Qwen3-8B, and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 via GRPO (400 rollouts of 25 environments), SPADE lifted the 30B-A3B game-environment suite average to 58.3, +8.1 over base, and improved tool-use results across backbones. The issue also references Hawkeye for building better GPU kernels.

Import AI · 22d agoAI research

[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 · 1h agoModel release

[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over

Latent Space argues AI training pipeline stages—rewards, data, teachers, curricula, environments—are flipping from human-made to model-made simulation.

Latent Space's AINews essay traces how each component of AI training has turned synthetic since 2022: reward models (InstructGPT, RLAIF), synthetic pretraining data (Microsoft Phi, NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B), model teachers (Alpaca, DeepSeek-R1 distillation), and self-generated curricula (Self-Rewarding Language Models, SPIN). In 2026 it highlights Karpathy's autoresearch loop—700 experiments yielding 20 kept improvements, cutting GPT-2 training time from 2.02 to 1.80 hours—and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 fully synthetic RL environment, judging, and verification stack. It frames these shifts as 'simulation': 10% worse but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster than human equivalents.

Latent Space · 25d agoAI industry

Building AI to accelerate science and improve lives

Google highlights AI-for-science advances: AlphaGenome Atlas mapping 9 billion genetic variants, WeatherNext 3 weather model, and global health AI tools.

Google detailed AI advances across science and health, including AlphaGenome Atlas, which mapped all 9 billion possible single-letter genetic changes in the human genome and was made openly available. WeatherNext 3 delivers 50% more accurate precipitation forecasts a day or more ahead and is already in products. AlphaFold is used by 4 million researchers in 190 countries, TB chest X-ray screening has processed 25,000+ scans across six nations, and the diabetic retinopathy model has supported 1.15 million screenings. Google also released its AI & Economy ATLAS global usage insights.

Google · AI · 20h agoAI industry

Anthropic Adds Plugin Evals to Claude Code: 6 Grader Types, a No-Plugin Baseline, and a CI Gate for Skills

Anthropic ships a plugin evals workflow for Claude Code with six grader types, a no-plugin baseline arm, and a CI gate via threshold and cost flags.

Anthropic published a plugin evals workflow for Claude Code, exposed via the "claude plugin eval" command on v2.1.269+. Six grader types exist: regex, tool_used, tool_order, and file_exists are free transcript checks, while llm and baseline invoke a billed judge model. Every case runs with and without the plugin, and the delta (Δ) isolates the plugin's contribution; a Δ near zero with a failing tool_used:Skill grader indicates the skill never triggers. CI gating uses --threshold 0.8, --max-cost-usd, --trust-plugin, and --no-publish flags, with results written to a report.html under evals/results/.

MarkTechPost · 4d agoAI tools & infra2

[AINews] Fal’s H3 Max Live breaks the infinite videogen barrier

Fal post-trained MiniMax H3 into a 'Max' variant with 35x-faster inference, enabling faster-than-realtime AI video generation and infinite streams.

Fal post-trained MiniMax's H3 model into a 'Max' variant and optimized it for its in-house inference engine, achieving roughly 35x the speed of the official endpoint. The optimization enables faster-than-realtime video generation, demonstrated by an infinite interactive AI-generated stream productized by levels.io. The roundup also notes Meta Muse Code's general availability with an SDK, open DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp weights, GLM-5.3-Flash's strong agentic cost/performance rankings, and Tencent's 770B-parameter Hy4 Preview MoE with 49B active parameters.

Latent Space · 15d agoAI industry

ENCP: Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction for Vision-and-Language Navigation

ENCP calibrates conformal prediction per navigation episode, giving step-level coverage guarantees for vision-language navigation agents despite within-episode dependence.

Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction (ENCP) rescales a nonconformity score by a VLN policy's residual confidence and calibrates one maximum score per episode, preserving step-level coverage of at least 1−α despite dependence among steps within an episode. Across four VLN policies and three nonconformity scores on R2R and REVERIE, ENCP meets all reported empirical step-coverage targets in seen-to-unseen evaluation. The model-agnostic uncertainty estimates can signal when an agent should defer to a stronger predictor or human assistance.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 19h agoAI research

HypoEvolve: Genetic Algorithms Enable Multi-Agent LLMs to Discover Scientific Hypotheses

HypoEvolve couples a generational genetic algorithm with specialized LLM agents to generate drug-repurposing hypotheses, beating six baselines on DepMap selectivity (0.171 vs 0.115).

HypoEvolve coordinates specialized LLM agents through a generational genetic algorithm in which scientific judgments and new proposals reshape a hypothesis population. Evaluation centers on drug repurposing, linking mechanistic explanations to target-level biological claims assessed via external measures adapted from DepMap and Open Targets. Across 34 cancer types, HypoEvolve scores highest against six baselines on both measures, with DepMap selectivity of 0.171 versus 0.115 for the strongest baseline, and gains generalize to held-out cancer types.

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

NCP-ArchPreview Technical Report: Moving towards Latent Space Language Models through Next Concept Prediction

An 8.9B-parameter latent-space language model using next-concept prediction matches OLMo-3-7B pretraining loss with only 51.3% of the training tokens.

NCP-ArchPreview augments next-token prediction with Next Concept Prediction over a product-quantized concept vocabulary built from hidden states, trained jointly end-to-end. The 8.9B model was trained on 5.73T tokens from the Dolma-3 dataset, the largest latent-space language model demonstration to date. It consumes 51.3% of the tokens to reach OLMo-3-7B's final pretraining loss and outperforms it by 2.45 points on the downstream macro-average, including a 5.99-point GSM8K gain. The learned latent space also enables lightweight domain adaptation via a 17M-parameter VQ module and improves speculative drafting accepted length by 4.17%.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

Speculative Decoding in vLLM on AMD GPUs

vLLM benchmarks speculative decoding on AMD Instinct MI300X and MI355X GPUs across five drafting methods including EAGLE-3 and native MTP.

The vLLM project documents draft-and-verify speculative decoding support for AMD GPUs via ROCm, comparing native MTP, Gemma 4 MTP, EAGLE-3, DFlash, and DSpark drafting approaches. Output-token throughput effects varied with drafting method, proposal length, model family, draft checkpoint, workload, and acceptance behavior. The post also covers how to enable each method plus practical tuning and observability considerations.

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp — new model trending #10 on Hugging Face

DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, its first experimental multimodal model, with large multimodal agent benchmark gains over V4-Flash-0731.

DeepSeek AI published DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, an experimental multimodal model built on the DeepSeek-V4-Flash architecture with added visual modules and continued training. It scores 83.9 on Terminal Bench 2.1 and 36.5 on ApexBench Pass@1 versus 26.2 for DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731, while remaining comparable to Opus-4.8 on several benchmarks. The MIT-licensed repository ships a tokenizer, OpenAI-style and TXT prompt encoding, and a minimal PyTorch inference implementation, with vLLM and SGLang deployment recipes.

Hugging Face trending models · 16d agoModel release1

MacSync Stealer: How a Google Search for Claude Led to a macOS Infostealer

Huntress dissects MacSync Stealer, a macOS infostealer delivered through fake Claude Code download pages in Google search results.

Huntress SOC analysts published a reverse-engineering analysis of MacSync Stealer, a macOS infostealer distributed through fraudulent Claude Code download pages surfaced via web searches. Users searching for Anthropic's Claude coding tool are redirected to fake download pages that install the stealer, abusing developer trust in popular AI tooling. The writeup covers the analysis of the sample and its delivery chain.

Huntress · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild

WarmBloodAban/Minimax-h3_Singularity — new model trending #22 on Hugging Face

Community fine-tune Minimax-h3_Singularity enhances MiniMax-H3 video generation with HDR quality, distant face restoration, and improved motion, trending #22 on Hugging Face.

Minimax-h3_Singularity is a community fusion fine-tune of the MiniMax-H3 multimodal video generation model, built from multiple checkpoints and refined with pruning and weight optimization. It supports Text-to-Video, Image-to-Video, Reference-to-Video, and Video-to-Video workflows in ComfyUI, and claims improvements in HDR clarity, distant face restoration, motion fluidity, and fantasy VFX. The authors recommend pairing it with the minimax_h3_ref2v_turbo_4step_v0.1 LoRA for four-step accelerated inference, and an online demo is available via RunningHub.

Hugging Face trending models · 10d agoModel release7· 1 read

Miles v0.1: Production-Level Post-Training

Radix Ark open-sources Miles v0.1, a full-stack RL post-training framework demonstrated with asynchronous agentic RL on GLM-5.2 744B-A40B across 64 GB300 GPUs.

Miles v0.1 is a full-stack, open-source system for frontier-scale reinforcement-learning post-training, built on slime with rollout engines on SGLang and trainers supporting NVIDIA Megatron-LM and PyTorch FSDP backends plus three weight-synchronization transports. It supports full-parameter RL, LoRA RL, on-policy distillation, supervised fine-tuning, true-on-policy rollout-training alignment, and extends to diffusion models. The end-to-end case study ran fully asynchronous agentic RL on GLM-5.2 744B-A40B for terminal-use coding tasks on 64 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs with a median step time of 263 seconds over the first 30 measured steps. The code is open-sourced on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI tools & infra

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 · 7d agoAI research1

AlphaGenome Atlas: A predictive map of every possible DNA letter change in the human genome

Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, a free 1-petabyte platform predicting the molecular effects of all ~9 billion possible single-letter DNA variants.

Google DeepMind introduced AlphaGenome Atlas, containing precomputed predictions for the effects of roughly 9 billion single-nucleotide variants across the human genome, spanning hundreds of human and mouse cell types. The 1-petabyte dataset is more than 30 times larger than the AlphaFold Database and includes an AlphaGenome Variant Impact (AVI) score combining AlphaGenome and AlphaMissense predictions for both coding and non-coding regions. External collaborators have already used it to identify and experimentally verify variants in unsolved rare disease research. It is available via a free web portal, the AlphaGenome API, and as a skill in Google Antigravity.

Google DeepMind · 7d agoAI research 2 sources

NOAH: Learning the Full Patient Journey. A Longitudinal Multimodal Time-Aware Model for Representation and Forecasting

Researchers introduce NOAH, a generative time-aware transformer trained on 559 million MIMIC clinical events to model and forecast patient trajectories.

NOAH is a task-agnostic, time-aware generative transformer designed to represent and forecast the full multimodal patient journey across medical images, time-series signals, categorical events, and clinical text. It was trained on over 559 million clinical events from 431,000 hospital visits covering 299,000 patients in the MIMIC dataset family. The architecture combines bidirectional time integration with a variational latent space to capture continuous patient state evolution and clinical stochasticity. NOAH supports autoregressive forecasting with time control, zero-shot classification, and counterfactual intervention simulation, with evaluations on 15 ICD chapters, 29 comorbidities, and time-to-event prediction.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research2

AuK Technical Report: An Open-Source Foundational Model for Speech Generation and Editing

Open-source speech foundation model AuK unifies generation and editing, trained on 1.95 million hours, with distilled AuK-Flash achieving 4.5x speedup.

AuK is an open-source foundational model that unifies speech generation and editing through natural-language instructions and audio context, trained on approximately 3.03 billion instruction-audio instances and 1.95 million hours of supervision across five task families including generation, content editing, and acoustic editing. It combines a multimodal LLM for semantic conditioning, a VAE jointly trained on speech, general audio, and music, and a hybrid rectified-flow Transformer using dual-stream MMDiT blocks followed by unified single-stream DiT blocks. Post-training applies human-feedback preference optimization for editing and reward-based reinforcement learning for generation, and the distilled AuK-Flash performs 4-step inference without classifier-free guidance at a 4.5x wall-clock speedup. Source code and model weights are released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoModel release1

How Threat Actors Are Turning Trusted AI Platforms Into an Attack Surface

Huntress details campaigns abusing Claude Artifacts, claude.ai/share links, and ChatGPT/Grok conversations to deliver SectopRAT, MacSync, and AMOS stealers.

Huntress SOC documented nine months of campaigns in which attackers weaponized trusted AI platform features—Claude Artifacts, public claude.ai/share links, and indexable ChatGPT/Grok conversations—to deliver malware. The July FakeAgent campaign hit more than 29 organizations via a malicious Claude Artifact posing as a Claude Desktop download page that redirected to SectopRAT. A claude.ai/share link disguised as an Apple Support guide tricked a victim into running a curl command that deployed the MacSync stealer, harvesting cookies, credentials, keychain secrets, Telegram sessions, and SSH/cloud keys, while SEO-poisoned ChatGPT and Grok conversations delivered the AMOS stealer via ClickFix-style instructions.

BleepingComputer · 4d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

EvoSafeHarness: Evolving Model- and Domain-Specific Harnesses for Securing Agents

EvoSafeHarness auto-synthesizes per-model, per-domain safety harnesses, cutting prompt-injection attack success on AgentDojo to 0.0% at 82.8% utility.

EvoSafeHarness is an optimization framework that synthesizes deployable safety harnesses for frozen LLM agents in a target domain, jointly searching natural-language policies and executable code logic guided by model behavior, domain specifications, and adversarial review. On DecodingTrust-Agent it reduces average attack success rate from 45.6% to 10.0% at a 3.3-point utility cost, and on AgentDojo reaches 82.8% utility at 0.0% ASR, twice CaMeL's utility at that operating point. It keeps mean ASR below 20% under adaptive PAIR attacks and transfers unchanged to unseen AgentDyn suites. The analysis finds domain semantics determine required safety relations while model and runtime behavior determine enforcement points.

Training a coding model to paint watercolours with TRL and OpenEnv

Hugging Face tutorial trains a coding model with TRL and OpenEnv to paint watercolours through generated code.

A Hugging Face blog walkthrough uses the TRL reinforcement learning library and the OpenEnv environment framework to train a coding model. The target task is generating code that produces watercolour-style drawings, serving as a hands-on reinforcement learning training example. No article body was available in the feed, so specifics are limited to the title.

Hugging Face Blog · 13d agoAI tools & infra1

DataFlex-RL: An Evaluation Platform for RLVR Data Policies

DataFlex-RL benchmark of 13 RLVR data policies on Qwen2.5-7B finds none reproducibly beats uniform sampling under matched GRPO training.

DataFlex-RL is an evaluation platform comparing rollout-selection, reweighting, and mixture data policies for RLVR under a common GRPO recipe. Across 13 configurations and 12 matched seeds with Qwen2.5-7B-Base on 12 math, logic, and science benchmarks, uniform GRPO improved domain-balanced accuracy by 7.76 points, but no alternative policy achieved a statistically significant improvement. A corrected 12-seed Llama-3.1-8B-Base extension found no consistent winner, and math-heavy evaluation summaries were negatively correlated (-0.33) with domain-balanced summaries.

Hugging Face daily papers · 11d agoAI research

Beyond Solver Verdicts: Generative Reward Models for Autoformalization

Researchers introduce Generative Verification (GenV), a generative reward model achieving 0.961 AUROC in detecting unfaithful autoformalization that preserves solver verdicts.

The paper formalizes Verdict-Preserving-Unfaithfulness (VPU), a failure mode in neurosymbolic autoformalization where an incorrect encoding executes successfully and matches the expected solver verdict, and proves verdict-only verification is bounded to chance-level detection. The proposed Generative Verification (GenV) distills an offline Z3-equivalence oracle into a reference-free, continuous reference-equivalence score within the language model's vocabulary space. The oracle-mined verifier (GenV+HN) achieves 0.961 AUROC, generalizes zero-shot across unseen translators and formal styles, and yields an 11.3-point downstream accuracy gain in agentic test-time compute allocation. Mechanistic analysis with decision-projected logit lenses and sparse autoencoders shows the generative readout extracts precise spatial error coordinates without explicit localization training.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research1

NOAH: Learning the Full Patient Journey. A Longitudinal Multimodal Time-Aware Model for Representation and Forecasting

Researchers introduce NOAH, a time-aware generative transformer trained on 559 million MIMIC clinical events to forecast multimodal patient trajectories.

NOAH is a task-agnostic, time-aware generative transformer trained on over 559 million clinical events from 431,000 hospital visits by 299,000 patients across the MIMIC dataset family. It uses bidirectional time integration and a variational latent space to model the stochastic evolution of patient states, natively processing medical images, time-series signals, categorical events, and structured or unstructured clinical records. The model supports autoregressive forecasting with optional time control, zero-shot classification, and counterfactual intervention simulation, with strong probing performance across clinical outcomes, 15 ICD chapters, and 29 comorbidities.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research1

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.

Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.

Simon Willison · 11d agoAI research

Atria Dawn: The Dawn of Agentic Superintelligence

Atria Dawn Preview, an agentic foundation model trained on verifiable experiences, tops five of 16 research and engineering benchmarks.

Atria Dawn Preview is a foundation agentic language model for scientific research and engineering workflows, trained via a Verifiable Experience Pipeline connecting tool-mediated interactions to executable environments and externally verified outcomes. Across 16 benchmarks spanning research, engineering, and digital work it is competitive with frontier agents and achieves the highest reported score on five of them. The release includes a human-AI collaboration case study analyzing 769 task records from 56 participants, where about one-third of completed AI-assisted tasks were rated infeasible without AI and agents frequently proposed methods and implemented revisions while humans retained final decisions.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoModel release