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Podcast: Amazon is Destroying Rare Books to Train AI

404 Media podcast covers Amazon buying and destroying rare books for AI training, AI misuse in court cases, and Meta's glasses patent.

404 Media's podcast discusses its investigation tracing a shipment of rare books to an Amazon AI training facility where they were destroyed, alongside reporting on AI misuse in courts: an expert witness who used ChatGPT to write a report defending 3M in a deadly explosion lawsuit, and a prompt injection hidden in a legal filing instructing AI to side with one party. It also covers Meta's new patent for AI smart glasses with facial recognition and research into the glasses being used to harass women.

404 Media · 28d agoAI industry

Amazon Prime Video’s new AI tech matches lips to dubbed audio

Amazon Prime Video launched AI lip-sync dubbing aligning actors' mouth movements with human-dubbed audio, starting with the English dub of Maxton Hall.

Prime Video's new feature combines AI and visual effects technologies to make lip movements match translated speech, currently available for seasons 1-2 of the German series Maxton Hall worldwide and planned for additional titles, with season 3 arriving December 9. Amazon previously piloted AI-aided dubbing in English and Spanish across 12 movies and shows last year. Meta and YouTube have recently launched similar AI auto-dubbing features with optional lip sync for creators.

The Verge · AI · 7d agoAI industry

Sure, Meta’s AI Muse works, but it sure creeps me out

Hands-on review finds Meta's Muse AI agent completes shopping and email tasks but surfaces personal Instagram API data beyond user-visible ad-topic settings.

Meta launched Muse, its first agentic AI productivity assistant, which performs tasks like shopping, email management, trip planning, media generation, and creating webpages or documents via a cloud-based virtual computer. The Verge's hands-on found it successfully deleted thousands of promotional emails and completed an Amazon purchase, but it also revealed detailed personal interests inferred from Instagram and Facebook account API data that is not visible in the apps' ad-topic settings. Meta says Muse only exchanges data needed for third-party integrations and does not share information with advertisers; the reviewer frames privacy unease as the main adoption hurdle.

The Verge · AIupdated · 4d agofirst · 6d agoAI industry 10 sources

Amazon launches Alexa+ in India with Hindi support

Amazon launched its generative AI Alexa+ assistant in India with Hindi support in Early Access, free for Prime customers after testing.

Amazon announced that Alexa+, its generative AI-powered conversational assistant, is now available in India in Early Access with Hindi and English support, including mid-sentence language switching and long-form context retention. The assistant handles multi-step tasks such as ordering groceries via Amazon Now and controlling smart home devices, with integrations including Swiggy, District, MakeMyTrip, EazyDiner, Amazon Music, and JioSaavn. It will be free for Prime members after the testing period and cost about $20.85 per month for non-Prime customers. Amazon is targeting India's 600 million-plus Hindi speakers, and says smart device adoption grew 20% year over year.

TechCrunch · AI · 11h agoAI industry

Shipt becomes the latest delivery app with an AI shopping assistant

Target-owned delivery platform Shipt launched Ask Shipt, an AI shopping assistant that turns prompts and dish photos into ready-to-buy carts.

Shipt, the same-day delivery platform owned by Target, announced Ask Shipt, an AI assistant that converts text prompts, budget constraints, and uploaded dish photos into customized shopping carts. It follows similar 2026 launches from Instacart (Clementine), Uber Eats, and DoorDash. Target.com has separately added AI features such as photo search and review summaries. The tool is available now in the Shipt app and on Shipt.com.

TechCrunch · AI · 7d agoAI industry

ZDI-26-559: (Pwn2Own) Amazon Smart Plug OTA Update Process Out-Of-Bounds Write Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI disclosed a Pwn2Own out-of-bounds write RCE (CVSS 7.5) in Amazon Smart Plug's OTA process, exploitable by unauthenticated network-adjacent attackers.

The Zero Day Initiative published ZDI-26-559 for an out-of-bounds write remote code execution flaw in the Amazon Smart Plug OTA update process, demonstrated at Pwn2Own. Unauthenticated network-adjacent attackers can execute arbitrary code on affected installations. ZDI rated the issue CVSS 7.5.

ZDI Published Advisories · Aug 12, 2026Advisory

Podcast: We Spoke to an Amazon Worker Destroying Books for AI

404 Media podcast covers Amazon destroying scanned books for AI training, recurring AI names in academic papers, and ICE voter-data spending.

404 Media's podcast follows up on its investigation of an Amazon warehouse where books are scanned and destroyed for AI training data, including an interview with a warehouse worker. The hosts also discuss how the same few names repeatedly surface in LLM outputs and AI-generated academic papers. The episode additionally covers ICE's plans to spend millions on voter fraud data and Boston Dynamics robot dogs.

404 Media · 14d agoAI industry

Cohesity adds recovery capabilities for AI agents and the data they manage

Cohesity launched Agent Resilience to discover, protect, and recover AI agent memory, configuration, and agent-managed data, debuting with Amazon Bedrock integration.

At Cohesity Catalyst, Cohesity introduced Agent Resilience within Cohesity Data Cloud, protecting AI agent memory and configuration with snapshot architecture, immutable backups, and clean-room recovery, plus recovery for databases and file systems that agents manage. It launches with Amazon Bedrock integration, support for Microsoft and Google platforms planned, and general availability targeted for year-end. The company cited Gartner's prediction that up to 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific agents by 2026, and Cohesity research showing 56% of organizations are unprepared to detect or contain unintended agent actions while 58% lack confidence in verifying AI model integrity after attacks. Cohesity also outlined an Autonomous Cyber Resilience vision using agentic workflows and introduced the AI Resilience Academy.

Help Net Security · 11h agoTools

AWS Introduces Pizza Bot: An Open Source Inbox for Background AI Agents

AWS open-sourced Pizza Bot, a self-hosted inbox app for background AI agents with approval gating and multi-provider model support.

AWS released Pizza Bot under Apache 2.0 after earlier versions served over 2,000 Amazon employees for meeting prep, email drafting, and research. The app provides macOS, Windows, and Linux desktop builds plus browser and terminal clients talking to a Hono API server, with LangGraph/DeepAgents checkpoints preserving thread state and approval pauses. It supports Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic, Google Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Ollama, exposes external tools via MCP servers, and lets skill authors gate actions behind approve/edit/reject flows.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI tools & infra

Attack Paths Into VMs in the Cloud

Unit 42 maps attack paths into AWS, Azure, and GCP VMs through intended features like startup scripts and SSH key pushes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 reviewed attack vectors against virtual machine services on AWS, Azure, and GCP, finding that 11% of internet-exposed cloud hosts carry Critical or High severity vulnerabilities. The attack paths rely on legitimate features such as EC2 User Data, VM custom data, EC2 Instance Connect, SSM Run Command, and serial consoles rather than vulnerabilities, and exploiting them requires attackers to first obtain control plane permissions. A compromised VM exposes not only its data but the workload identity and cloud permissions assigned to it, making identity compromise potentially more damaging than data theft. The firm places mitigation responsibility on cloud users and administrators.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research1

PACE: Perceived-Latency-Aware Cascading Service Routing and Filler Control for QoE-Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Dialogue Serving

PACE cuts perceived latency in retrieval-augmented dialogue serving via cascading routing and filler control, reaching 0.41s P95 under load.

PACE is a serving framework for retrieval-augmented dialogue that optimizes Perceived Time-to-First-Response (PTFR) under quality and cost constraints. It combines a load-adaptive cascading router, a joint path-filler controller, and volatility-aware cache admission, deployed on a humanoid-robot sales service. On 75k CarQA requests, the cascade halved pure-LLM P95 PTFR (0.29s vs 0.53s) and the adaptive controller reached 0.41s P95, 2.4x better than RAG at high load; filler calls dropped 94% and stale answers fell from 86% to 0%.

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

Getting ahead of ‘harvest-now-decrypt-later’: Post-quantum cryptography planning

Opinion piece urges organizations to begin post-quantum cryptography migration now, citing harvest-now-decrypt-later risk and NIST deadlines.

CSO Online outlines why harvest-now-decrypt-later makes long-lived sensitive data a current risk even before quantum computers exist. It cites NIST IR 8547 timelines deprecating RSA-2048 and ECC P-256 by 2030 and removing them by 2035, finalized FIPS standards ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, upcoming FN-DSA (FIPS 206), NSA requirements for national security systems from 2027, and UK NCSC phased guidance through 2035. The author recommends cryptographic discovery, crypto-agility, and prioritizing long-confidentiality data and TLS endpoints.

CSO Online · 6d agoResearch

RegionFed: Federated Learning for Personalized Query Understanding in Heterogeneous Retail Environments

RegionFed is a gradient-level federated learning framework enabling personalized retail query understanding while matching centralized accuracy with differential privacy.

RegionFed is an architecture-robust federated learning framework for personalized query understanding that operates at the gradient level, using the l2 conflict between regional and global gradients to diagnose heterogeneity and control personalization. Existing parameter-level personalized FL methods collapse on transformers, falling below 10% accuracy on T5, while RegionFed deploys unchanged on T5-Small, T5-3B, RoBERTa, and CNNs. RegionFed-Meta achieves 92.27% across Amazon ESCI, Amazon Reviews, and LEAF-FEMNIST, within 0.23 percentage points of the centralized upper bound, with epsilon-approx-0.60 differential privacy.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research1

The EU CRA's Real Question: What Shipped, and When Did You Know?

ActiveState argues the EU CRA's 24-hour ENISA exploit-notification duty, effective September 11, 2026, makes current SBOMs and provenance visibility a legal necessity.

An ActiveState essay warns that the EU Cyber Resilience Act's reporting obligations take effect on September 11, 2026, requiring manufacturers of products with digital elements sold into the EU to notify ENISA within 24 hours of learning a vulnerability is actively exploited, with a fuller report within 72 hours. The law's engineering requirements only apply from December 11, 2027, leaving a visibility-first runway, and Article 13 requires the SBOM to stay current unlike one-time artifacts generated under US Executive Order 14028. The author contrasts the 24-hour notification clock with an industry-average 55 days to remediate high or critical vulnerabilities and recommends automated SBOM regeneration or consuming pre-vetted, attested open source components.

BleepingComputer · 8d agoPolicy & legal

Daybreak models are now available on AWS

OpenAI makes Daybreak cybersecurity models available on AWS via Amazon Bedrock for enterprise security workflows.

OpenAI announced that its Daybreak models are now available on AWS through Amazon Bedrock. The move extends Daybreak's cybersecurity capabilities to enterprises running security workflows in the cloud.

OpenAI News · Aug 11, 2026AI industry

ToxicPanda 2.0 Gets a Major Upgrade, Expanding Attacks Across 16 Countries

Zimperium documents ToxicPanda 2.0, an Android banking trojan now targeting 349 financial institutions in 16 countries via ADB privilege escalation and overlay credential theft.

Zimperium's zLabs documented ToxicPanda 2.0, an Android banking trojan expanding from 16 targeted apps to 349 financial institutions across 16 countries, with 167 remote commands. It poses as a dropper, abuses VPN permissions to block Google Play Protect while installing a hidden payload, then uses the Accessibility Service for screen monitoring and overlay-based credential theft. It automates enabling Android Wireless Debugging and completes the pairing handshake to gain ADB shell access for privilege escalation, and overlays fake lock screens to steal device PINs. Previously unfinished commands are now operational and samples are served from AWS-hosted storage buckets.

Security Affairs · 25d agoMalware in the wild

Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training

Amazon's Las Vegas VGT3 warehouse destructively scans thousands of books, cutting spines and discarding pages, to build AI training data.

404 Media interviewed an anonymous Amazon employee at the VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, part of the same complex as the LAS8 print-on-demand facility. Workers receive shipments of books including library liquidations and University of London materials, scan them, cut the spines off with machines, and discard the loose pages irreversibly. The operation was discovered by placing a tracking device in a shipment of rare books a bookseller suspected was being acquired by an anonymous AI company. Employees described scanning barcodes to weed out duplicates and an often disorganized process that changed daily.

404 Media · 21d agoAI industry

CDN Tsunami Attack Abuses HTTP/3 Translation for Up to 350x DoS Amplification

Researchers disclosed two DoS attacks exploiting CDNs' HTTP/3-to-HTTP/1.1 translation to amplify low-bandwidth requests up to 350x against origin servers.

Researchers named the two techniques HTTP/3 Bandwidth Amplification (HBA) and HTTP/3 Connection Amplification (HCA), exploiting the gap where CDNs speak HTTP/3 to browsers but only HTTP/1.1 to origins. All six tested CDNs (Alibaba, Baidu, Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Tencent) were susceptible to HBA, and five to HCA, with Cloudflare immune to HCA because it buffers full requests before opening backend connections. Attackers using under 5 Mbps forced over 100 Mbps at origins, and the 350x factor applies only to Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, which support the QPACK dynamic table. Testing identified 42,330 potentially vulnerable subdomains out of 151,685 hosted on the six providers across the Tranco Top 1M.

The Hacker News · 27d agoResearch

terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access

terms.txt specifies a robots.txt-style protocol for per-path, per-purpose AI crawler consent and compensation, with enforcement adding 0.20-0.65 ms per request.

The paper documents that automated clients now make up most web requests, that training dominates Cloudflare-classified crawling, and that the largest AI platforms fetch thousands of pages per returned visitor while robots.txt cannot express identity, purpose, terms, or price. It specifies terms.txt plus an origin-enforced exchange using Web Bot Auth signatures, signed intent, delegation tokens, HTTP 402 negotiation, and signed receipts. A dependency-free implementation adds 0.20 to 0.65 ms per request on one vCPU.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

White House launches Watershed 250, a six-month Texas pilot using volunteer vendor cyber and AI tools to harden water utility defenses.

The Office of the National Cyber Director and Texas Cyber Command will oversee the six-month Project Watershed 250 pilot to improve water sector cybersecurity through industry-donated red teaming, system hardening and AI tooling. Twelve companies including Microsoft, Fortinet, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, AWS, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Forescout, Abnormal AI and Dragos participated in the rollout. Officials cited recent attacks including an Iranian-backed campaign against 30 water systems in 12 states and a 2024 incident in Muleshoe, Texas. Some water-security professionals criticized the program as lacking dedicated funding.

CyberScoop · 16d agoPolicy & legal1

The Frontier AEO Tracker: What Astra Chooses (and every other frontier model, and what you can do about it)

Latent Space launches an AEO tracker scoring 7 frontier models' product recommendations across 161 categories, revealing generational bias flips.

Latent Space built a tracker measuring Answer Engine Optimization by running 6 prompt variations across 7 frontier models with search enabled over 161 product categories, scoring first choices, alternatives, mentions, and anti-recommendations. It found 28 categories with a universally dominant primary choice and observed soft biases, such as models favoring their own lab's coding agents. Analysis of Anthropic's Sol→Astra and Opus→Fable generations showed newer models consulting fewer sources and being less likely to change answers when questions are paraphrased.

Latent Space · 9d agoAI research

AWS Certificate Manager sets 2027 end date for email-validated certificate renewals

AWS Certificate Manager will phase out email validation for public certificates during 2027, requiring migration to DNS validation before September 30, 2027.

AWS Certificate Manager will stop offering email validation in new Regions on January 1, 2027, discontinue it for new certificate requests on March 31, 2027, and stop renewing email-validated certificates on September 30, 2027. This precedes the CA/Browser Forum's March 15, 2028 deadline ending email-based domain validation for publicly trusted certificates. AWS is updating the UpdateCertificateOptions API so customers can switch to DNS validation in place while retaining the certificate ARN, with Route 53 support for creating required CNAME records.

Help Net Security · Aug 14, 2026Advisory

Microsoft patches a record 972 vulnerabilities, 112 of them critical

Microsoft's September Patch Tuesday fixes a record 972 vulnerabilities, 112 rated critical, including two zero-days in Windows components.

Microsoft's September 2026 release patched roughly 972 vulnerabilities (997 including ported Chromium fixes for Edge), a record, with 112 rated critical. Notable flaws include two zero-days: CVE-2026-81963 in the Windows update service and CVE-2026-85880 in the Windows Advanced Local Procedure, with no public information on exploitation breadth. Microsoft has fixed 2,760 vulnerabilities in 2026, more than double last year's total, which ZDI's Dustin Childs attributes to AI-assisted discovery becoming the 'new normal'.

Top 10 Best AWS Security Tools in 2026

Editorial roundup ranking the ten best AWS security tools of 2026, from native GuardDuty and Security Hub to CNAPPs like Wiz and Prisma Cloud.

The article recommends enabling AWS-native services first: GuardDuty for threat detection, Security Hub for posture aggregation, the free IAM Access Analyzer, plus CloudTrail logging and Config rules. It then reviews third-party platforms including Wiz, Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, Trend Micro Cloud One, and Orca Security. It is an editorial vendor assessment with pricing described by model only, highlighting cross-account correlation and attack-path prioritization as third-party differentiators.

Cyber Security News · 12h agoTools

Human Attacker Exploits Marimo RCE, Reaches SSH Bastion in Eight Seconds

Sysdig documents a skilled human attacker exploiting Marimo pre-auth RCE CVE-2026-39987 (CVSS 9.3), reaching an SSH bastion in eight seconds without AI tooling.

Sysdig detailed exploitation of CVE-2026-39987 (CVSS 9.3), a pre-authenticated RCE affecting all Marimo versions that came under active exploitation within hours of disclosure. A human operator used a hand-written Python script to harvest an AWS key from Secrets Manager and SSH into a bastion host in eight seconds, issuing 850+ commands over nine hours. Separately, Hunt.io disclosed an XMRig cryptomining campaign compromising 3,562 Redis servers via SLAVEOF rogue replication and AOF authorized_keys injection. Operation CameraSwarm, linked to a single operator, compromised over 14,000 Dahua IP cameras using CVE-2021-33044 and CVE-2021-33045.

Cisco Advance Notification for Publication of September 16, 2026, Security Advisories

Cisco will publish security advisories with fixed software on September 16, 2026, covering BroadWorks, ISE, Nexus Dashboard, ASA, FMC, FTD and ThousandEyes.

Cisco PSIRT announced advance notification for security advisories to be published on September 16, 2026, along with fixed software releases. Affected products include BroadWorks CommPilot Application Software, Identity Services Engine (ISE), Nexus Dashboard, Secure Firewall ASA, Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC), Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD), and ThousandEyes Virtual Appliance. ISE, Nexus Dashboard and the Secure Firewall products receive security hardening releases, and the ASA, FMC and FTD advisories will be included in the same combined release.

Cisco Security Advisories · 7d agoAdvisory

CISA Red Team Compromised Two Critical Infrastructure Orgs, One Detected Nothing

CISA red teams fully compromised two critical infrastructure orgs with similar tradecraft; one detected nothing, the other contained phishing within minutes.

CISA advisory AA26-237A, 'A Tale of Two SOCs,' describes two simultaneous red team assessments of a Government Services organization and a Water and Wastewater Systems organization, both compromised to the domain level. Organization A never detected the intrusion, enabled by default credentials, a misconfigured AD CS template (ESC1), cleartext credentials, non-expiring static AWS keys, and over-permissioned Entra ID applications. Organization B detected and isolated phishing within 2-20 minutes, though the red team still reached krbtgt via DCSync from cleartext SCCM credentials. CISA attributes the outcome gap to people and processes rather than the security tools themselves.

The Hacker News · 21d agoAdvisory

Simplify Threat Intelligence Procurement with SOCRadar and AWS Marketplace

SOCRadar now offers its threat intelligence platform through AWS Marketplace to streamline security teams' procurement process.

SOCRadar announced its threat intelligence platform is available for purchase through AWS Marketplace, aiming to reduce procurement delays for security teams buying external threat intelligence. The vendor positions marketplace availability as a way to shorten budgeting and approval cycles.

SOCRadarupdated · 1d agofirst · 5d agoTools 2 sources

US data centers could consume more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035

BloombergNEF projects US data centers will consume about 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily by 2035, exceeding Germany and Japan combined.

A new BloombergNEF report forecasts US data centers will consume roughly 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, nearly double the estimate from nine months ago. On-site gas plants planned by Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon would use 2.9-3.4 billion cubic feet per day, while grid-connected data centers drive an additional 15 billion cubic feet per day of power-sector gas demand. The added demand would generate about 1 million metric tons of extra greenhouse gas pollution daily, roughly 12% of current US emissions.

TechCrunch · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged unlicensed use of their journalism for AI training, joining a wave of publisher lawsuits.

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing generative AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot are 'rapacious consumers' of human-authored journalism that return derivative imitations. The suit follows The New York Times' 2023 case against the companies and other publisher lawsuits. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was surprised but always happy to explore solutions; the outlets have received Microsoft funding for journalism projects and fellowships.

TechCrunch · AI · 10d agoAI policy1

Honeypot-Omaha and batch.py [Guest Diary], (Wed, Sep 2nd)

A SANS ISC guest diary describes batch.py, a Python tool that consolidates honeypot logs and enriches IOCs with threat intelligence data.

Written by a SANS.edu BACS intern, the diary explains analysis of the DShield Honeypot-Omaha sensor, which uses Cowrie to emulate SSH and Telnet and log attacker activity. The author's batch.py script implements a four-phase pipeline with SHA-256-generated master and guest authentication to consolidate JSON and log files, correlate data via external APIs, and produce MITRE, CVE, geolocation, threat-score and fingerprint enrichment for investigated indicators.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 13d agoTools1

AWS is using Qualcomm for AI inference while Qualcomm uses AWS Bedrock to design the chips

Qualcomm will design custom AI inference chips for AWS while using Bedrock for chip design, its third major data center win since June.

Qualcomm is designing custom AI inference chips for AWS across multiple product generations and co-developing optical interconnects with up to 1.6 Tbps bandwidth. In return, Qualcomm uses Amazon Bedrock to accelerate its chip design process. The deal is Qualcomm's third major data center win since June, after Meta adopted the Dragonfly C1000 server processor and Microsoft began deploying Qualcomm's HBC memory architecture in Azure; Qualcomm targets $15 billion in data center revenue by 2029.

The Decoder · 7d agoAI industry1

Unmasking Cloud Identities: From Behavioral Clustering to Automated Detection

Unit 42 clusters behavior of 40,000+ AWS identities from 125 cloud environments to map functional roles and enable lightweight SQL-based detection.

Palo Alto Unit 42 built an unsupervised behavioral clustering model using UMAP and HDBSCAN on AWS CloudTrail logs to map cloud identities to functional roles such as administrators, backup services, security tooling and DevOps. The study analyzed over 40,000 identities across 125 cloud environments over two months. The researchers show that heuristics extracted from the clustering map can be implemented in standard SQL, enabling role classification at scale without running a continuous ML pipeline. The methodology extends to audit logs from other cloud providers, SaaS and Kubernetes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 2d agoResearch

The VMs Powering Mobile Agents (Instinct, Claude Code)

A teardown reveals Claude Code runs in Firecracker microVMs with a Rust PID 1 and MITM'd egress, while Instinct rents E2B sandboxes with git-based memory.

The author inspects the virtual machines hosting cloud agents: Claude Code runs in a Firecracker microVM with a custom Rust init (process_api) as PID 1, a 324 MB Bun harness on a read-only disk, and 443-only MITM'd SSE egress to api.anthropic.com with host-rotated OAuth tokens and no inbound access. Instinct rents E2B sandbox-as-a-service Firecracker microVMs (Ubuntu 22.04, 2 vCPU, 1.9 GB RAM) where agent memory is a git repo of Markdown committed by the agent and pushed to S3 as a single bundle, using short-lived STS credentials. Both platforms rely on Firecracker, differing mainly in fleet operator and guest boot configuration.

Instacart launches an AI grocery shopping assistant called Clementine

Instacart launches Clementine, a conversational AI grocery assistant that turns chats, lists, or recipes into purchasable carts in the US and Canada.

Instacart launched Clementine, an AI assistant that converts conversations, grocery lists, photos of handwritten lists, or recipes into ready-to-buy carts, now available in the US and Canada. It generates personalized recipes, tailors recommendations to dietary needs such as gluten-free and vegetarian, and surfaces deals and lower-cost alternatives. Uber Eats and DoorDash have launched similar AI assistants as delivery apps compete to become households' default meal-planning tools.

TechCrunch · AI · 7d agoAI industry

Prompt Injections for Defense

Tracebit researchers show prompt injections placed next to AWS secrets can stop AI hacking agents by triggering forbidden outputs, a technique called context bombing.

Researchers from Tracebit reported that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, SSH keys, and other secrets stored on AWS could shut down attacks by AI hacking agents. The injected prompts order the attacking LLM to perform actions forbidden by its guardrails, such as explaining how to develop inhalable Anthrax spores or referencing Tank Man, causing guarded models to halt. The researchers named the technique context bombing and note it only works against agents with guardrails, not locally run guardrail-free models.

Schneier on Security · Aug 12, 2026AI safety & security