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Discovery Foundation Models: Toward Open-Ended Discovery Intelligence

Paper defines Discovery Foundation Models with seven coupled capabilities for open-ended discovery, demonstrated via Zetema and GALILEO systems.

The paper formulates Discovery Foundation Models (DFMs) as general-purpose model systems for open-ended discovery, supporting seven coupled capabilities spanning problem discovery, formulation, representation construction, hypothesis formation, intervention, evidence-grounded revision, and continual improvement. It instantiates the framework with Zetema, which couples explicit research-state dynamics, verification and experimental gating, and cross-task Discovery Skill evolution. The framework is grounded with GALILEO, a real therapeutic-discovery system combining dry-lab reasoning with robotic wet-lab experimentation in a closed physical discovery loop; code is released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 2d agofirst · 3d agoAI research 2 sources

Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data

Mecka AI, which collects human motion data for robot training, is nearing a Sequoia-led round at about a $500 million valuation.

Mecka AI is nearing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of roughly $500 million, three months after raising $60 million led by Framework Ventures with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures. Founded in 2024 by Josh Gao, Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong, and Duy Nguyen, the startup pays people to record everyday tasks using body sensors and smartphones to produce egocentric training data for humanoid robots. The company projected a $100 million annual run rate by the end of 2026 and competes with firms like Scale AI, Mercor, Surge, Micro1, and XDOF in the physical-world data market.

TechCrunch · AI · 4d agoAI industry 2 sources1

Former Infosys chief’s AI startup nabs another $53M

Hang Ten Systems, founded by ex-Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, added $53 million to its seed round, bringing total funding to $85 million.

The new round was led by Temasek's early-stage platform Xora with Mayfield participating, closing five weeks after the initial $32 million seed. Founded in May 2026, the Palo Alto startup advises enterprises with over $10 billion in annual revenue on AI strategy and builds production software using its in-house Hobie framework of reusable AI skills. It works with 21 major enterprises including Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy, and plans to expand engineering, consulting, and sales teams.

TechCrunch · AI · 8h agoAI industry

Not everyone is convinced that Big AI's proposed development slowdown is really about safety

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and others blast OpenAI, Anthropic and Google's proposed frontier AI slowdown as anticompetitive 'cartel by another name.'

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for industry and government coordination to slow frontier AI development, requesting antitrust exemptions, with backing from Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez called the proposal a cartel designed to lock in barriers like massive compute and permanent monitoring, while Hugging Face's Niels Rogge and White House AI czar David Sacks also pushed back. Trump labeled AI takeover warnings a hoax, and China rejected the slowdown plans as a US ploy.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI industry

Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.

Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Generative Marketing Mix Modeling: A Causal Inference Framework Linking GEO and GEM to Business Impact

Paper proposes Generative Marketing Mix Modeling to causally estimate Generative Engine Optimization and Marketing effects on business outcomes.

The authors develop GMMM, a causal inference framework for measuring how often users see and notice a firm's name in generated answers, which standard marketing data ignore. For GEO it combines repeated generated answers with question counts, shares of generative-system usage and notice probabilities; for GEM it uses sponsored placement records with notice probabilities. The framework compares expected business responses under alternative treatment sequences, establishes identification conditions, and is evaluated on simulated product-recommendation answers in English and Japanese.

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

HiddenLayer nabs $100M as enterprises rush to secure their AI deployments

AI security startup HiddenLayer raised a $100 million Series B led by Delta-v Capital as enterprise spending on securing AI deployments accelerates.

HiddenLayer, which protects AI models, agents, and workflows from adversarial attacks, vulnerabilities, and code injections, raised a $100 million Series B led by Delta-v Capital with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft's M12, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The company says annual recurring revenue grew more than 10x to the tens of millions of dollars, with customers including the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and a frontier model provider with over 700 million weekly users. Gartner estimates enterprise spending on AI security products will reach $2.83 billion in 2026, up 83% from 2025, and nearly $4.78 billion next year.

TechCrunch · Security · 14d agoIndustry1

NVIDIA AI Factory Compute Is Becoming an Investable Asset Class

NVIDIA partners with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure financing.

NVIDIA announced partnerships with major financial firms including Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The independent financing platforms are designed to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital to support AI infrastructure buildout. NVIDIA frames the move as positioning AI factory compute as an investable asset class.

NVIDIA Blog · Aug 12, 2026AI industry

Why you should work on AI for AI Research — Richard Socher of Recursive

Richard Socher's new lab Recursive, backed by $4.65B seed, targets AI systems that automate AI research itself.

Latent Space interviews Richard Socher, founder of You.com and AIX Ventures, about his new venture Recursive, which raised a $4.65 billion seed round to build the 'Eureka Machine' — a superintelligence for automating invention and AI research. Early claimed results include an AI research system outperforming humans and their agents on optimization tasks within two days, and NVIDIA GPU kernel improvements discovered without CUDA experts. Discussion spans reward hacking, constitutional AI critique, AI regulation, open-source models as geopolitical soft power, and hard-takeoff constraints.

Latent Space · 2d agoAI industry

Causal Foundation Models

A paper introduces causal foundation models (CFMs): pretrained networks that estimate treatment effects on new datasets via in-context learning without fine-tuning.

Causal foundation models (CFMs) apply the foundation-model paradigm to causal inference, replacing bespoke per-problem estimator pipelines with networks pretrained once at scale. CFMs estimate causal quantities such as the average treatment effect on entirely new datasets through in-context learning, without model updates. The work serves as a practical introduction to the emerging area, covering background in causal inference and machine learning and including example code and Jupyter notebooks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research

How to level up from security pro to security leader

Career advice piece argues aspiring CISOs must pair technical depth with business fluency, communication, and cross-department influence.

The article offers guidance for security professionals moving into CISO and security leadership roles, drawing on interviews with CISOs at ExtraHop, BlueVoyant, Infosys, and others. It emphasizes translating technical risk into business priorities, building trust across departments, and understanding how the company makes money. An analysis of CISO job postings found employers value communication skills, regulatory knowledge, and business education over mastery of specific security platforms.

CSO Online · 2d agoIndustry

AI compute provider Nscale is looking for $3.5B in pre-IPO financing

British AI compute provider Nscale seeks $3.5B pre-IPO via $1.5B convertible notes and $2B from Nvidia ahead of a possible September IPO.

Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company founded about two years ago, is reportedly in talks to raise $3.5 billion ahead of an IPO that could come as early as late September 2026: $1.5 billion in convertible notes plus $2 billion in financing from Nvidia. Nvidia previously joined Nscale's $1.1 billion Series B in March, led by Aker and billed as the largest Series B in European history, following a $155 million Series A in December 2024. Nscale recently signed an approximately $45 billion deal with Anthropic and has told investors it has roughly $103 billion in projected revenue based on signed customer leases.

TechCrunch · AI · 11d agoAI industry

Teaching Everyone to Fish for Tokens

Analysis argues open-source AI now depends heavily on Nvidia's financing, with a reported $26 billion bet shaping the open-weights ecosystem's future.

An Interconnects essay examines whether the open-source model recipe, exemplified by Ai2's Olmo and Nvidia's Nemotron releases, can become economically self-sustaining. It reports Nvidia is spending roughly $26 billion on near-open-source models to drive demand for its chips, and argues the open ecosystem faces an existential financing window over the next few years. The author predicts open models may fork toward efficiency, specialization, and on-prem enterprise agents rather than competing head-on with closed frontier labs.

Interconnects · Aug 17, 2026AI industry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: September 15, 2026

Help Net Security's weekly roundup lists cybersecurity job openings worldwide, from CISO roles to cloud security engineers at firms like Adobe, JPMorgan Chase, and PwC.

Help Net Security's September 15, 2026 job roundup lists cybersecurity openings across India, USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Israel, UAE, Ireland, and Denmark. Roles include a CISO at Texas Health and Human Services, a GenAI CBRNE Cyber Security Expert at Alice, and security engineering positions at Adobe, JPMorgan Chase, PwC, and the Reserve Bank of Australia. Several openings focus on AI security, including red-teaming AI models and securing AI agent platforms.

Help Net Security · 1d agoIndustry

Another Blueprint In The Wall: How to Ask Frontier AI Like a Kid?

Six frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind converge on one imagined successor architecture when asked under a school-audience framing.

Researchers ran ten independent sessions per model type across six frontier models using a three-stage prompt sequence progressing to a full ASCII backbone architecture. Under school-audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared motif including persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, and stopping control, while control runs without the framing produced heterogeneous responses. A GPT-5.6 Sol output closely overlapped an architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra, raising questions about shared design priors or motif propagation between model families. The paper coins 'epistemic jailbreak' for the observed loss of provenance discipline as prompt specificity increases.

Mars Security Debuts Automated Threat Engine Processing Live Cyber Intelligence Into Validated Rules Within Minutes

Mars Security launches Real-Time Intel-Based Detection, converting threat intelligence advisories into validated, ATT&CK-mapped detection rules within minutes for SOCs.

Mars Security, an autonomous threat hunting and detection engineering platform founded by former offensive security operators, announced Real-Time Intel-Based Detection. The capability ingests advisories from sources like CISA, Mandiant, Unit 42, and Microsoft Threat Intelligence, maps indicators to MITRE ATT&CK, and authors native query logic across connected infrastructure including CrowdStrike Falcon, Wiz, Splunk, Sysmon, identity providers, Snowflake, and Databricks. Every rule is backtested against 30 days of historical telemetry to quantify false positives before analyst approval and one-click deployment. The feature is free for existing customers and available via AWS Marketplace.

CSO Online · 8d agoTools2

Multi-Agents LLM Financial Trading Framework

TauricResearch's TradingAgents, an open-source multi-agent LLM framework for financial trading, gained traction on Hacker News with 94 points and 60 comments.

The TradingAgents GitHub repository from TauricResearch presents a multi-agent LLM framework for financial trading and surfaced on Hacker News with 94 points and 60 comments. It targets developers building agentic trading systems on top of LLMs.

Physical AI Takes the Wheel: How the World’s Robotaxi Leaders Are Building With NVIDIA Technologies

NVIDIA details a three-computer robotaxi platform that Uber, Lyft, May Mobility, Mercedes-Benz and others are adopting to scale autonomous fleets.

NVIDIA says every major commercial robotaxi program runs on its stack, spanning training (DGX with Alpamayo VLA models), simulation and validation (Omniverse, Cosmos, AlpaSim on RTX PRO), and in-vehicle compute (DRIVE Hyperion 10 with dual DRIVE AGX Thor chips). Adding meta-action and chain-of-thought reasoning data to a VLA model reduced minimum average displacement error by 43%, from 2.08 to 1.18. Uber plans NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion-based fleets across 28 cities by 2028, partnering with Autobrains, Avride, Lucid, May Mobility, Mercedes-Benz, Momenta, Nissan, Nuro, Pony.ai, Stellantis, Waabi, Wayve, WeRide and Zoox. DRIVE Hyperion 10 combines 14 cameras, nine radars, three lidars and 12 ultrasonics with redundant compute and NVIDIA Halos safety validation.

NVIDIA Blog · 6d agoAI industry

Feyospace-v1: How the Cyber Mercury Seven Trained Frontier Cyber Models

A seven-person independent team trained open-weight agentic cyber models via a data-centric post-training framework, ranking 10th on CyberGym and first at comparable scale.

The paper presents Feyospace-v1, a data-centric post-training framework combining five systems: Choulea (hidden reasoning analysis), SkyReal (teacher-sampling cost reduction), Hongzwang (bypassing teacher API restrictions), PSBreakup (restoring capabilities weakened by model merging), and Kreator (converting expert interventions into trainable reasoning). The data engine builds resettable coding, vulnerability, CTF, kernel-history, full-exploit, firmware, and device-backed environments, retaining only execution-verified and evidence-audited trajectories, yielding 164,269 trajectories for long-context supervised fine-tuning. Three checkpoints improve over their starting models by an average of 23.76% on the full CyberGym suite and 10.49% across pooled CTF suites. As of September 1, 2026, Feyospace-s1 achieves a 63.24% verified success rate, ranks 10th on the official CyberGym leaderboard, and all three checkpoints rank 1st among models at comparable parameter scales.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

ZGCM-1: A Fully Open and Extremely Efficient Foundation Model for Math and Agentic Search

ZGCM-1 is a fully open 7B foundation model with 256K context that stays competitive with frontier models on math reasoning and agentic search.

ZGCM-1 is a fully open 7B dense foundation model trained from scratch using an efficiency-focused recipe: interleaved gated sliding-window and full attention, a stable FP8 Muon optimizer, and MDP-based mid-training with context scaling across 16K, 64K, and 256K. On mathematical reasoning and agentic search suites it remains competitive with much larger frontier models such as Qwen3-235B-A22B and GLM-5.1. The recipe yields a ~4.2x improvement in 16K pre-training time-to-loss, and all weights, checkpoints, training code, data recipes, and W&B logs are open-sourced.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoModel release

Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

A distillation framework compresses LLM reasoning into a 15.5M-parameter trade-up recommendation model reaching AUC 0.941 with product-type test-time training.

The paper targets trade-up recommendation, which identifies higher-quality alternatives that preserve customer purchase intent. A retrieval-augmented few-shot LLM teacher generates labels and rationales that supervise a compact embedding-pair classifier; at inference the 15.5M-parameter student uses only two precomputed 768-dimensional embeddings with no LLM calls. On 8,352 annotated pairs, label-only training scored AUC 0.912, reasoning distillation reached 0.924, and product-type test-time training lifted it to 0.941 with average precision 0.940. The distilled student is roughly 5,000x faster and 10,000x cheaper than direct LLM inference on a 100K-pair proxy catalog.

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

τ^τ-Bench: An Environment for End-To-End, Realistic Agent Construction

New τ^τ-bench tasks coding agents with building deployable customer-service agents; best config, Claude Opus 5, passes only 23.9% of simulations.

Researchers introduce τ^τ-bench, an end-to-end benchmark where a developer agent must build a complete customer-service agent from real business records, a client with requirements, a production API, an inherited codebase, and cost/model limits, then is scored by deploying it against held-out simulated users. Across 53 tasks in four domains, the strongest configuration, Claude Opus 5 under Claude Code, passes just 23.9% of evaluation simulations versus an 82.2% expert-authored reference ceiling. Failure modes mirror those of human developers: shallow queries instead of deep record comprehension, almost no client communication, and shipping the first architecture that runs rather than experimenting.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

How loveholidays is making everyone a builder with Codex

loveholidays uses OpenAI Codex to let business teams build software, shortening the path from ideas to shipped products.

OpenAI published a customer story describing how travel company loveholidays deploys Codex to make software development accessible across business teams. The company says the approach helps non-engineers turn ideas into products faster. The piece is a vendor case study rather than new technical or research output.

OpenAI News · 21d agoAI industry

AI for Games in the Foundation Model Era

Survey organizes foundation-model AI for games into six roles and analyzes which capabilities transfer across playing, design, building, runtime adaptation, and testing.

A survey maps foundation-model and learned world-model research across the game lifecycle into six roles: playing/acting, modeling players and games, designing games, building/maintaining games, runtime generation/adaptation, and testing/evaluation. The authors identify cross-role connections such as trajectories training world models and design specifications driving executable implementations. Control schemes, rules, engine interfaces, state representations, and player contexts often remain setting-specific, so downstream claims require validation in the target setting. Evaluation is most standardized for bounded game playing, while persistent state, repeated revision, validated player modeling, and automated testing remain less established.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

Synthesized builds Test Data Agent to validate AI agents with production-like data

Synthesized announced a Test Data Agent that provisions production-like data and system states to validate enterprise AI agents before deployment.

Synthesized unveiled its Test Data Agent, an agentic infrastructure capability that generates, masks, and subsets production-representative data for testing AI agents under realistic enterprise conditions. It integrates with agent development, evaluation, testing, and orchestration frameworks, with purpose-built support for complex SAP estates including finance, procurement, and supply-chain workflows and ECC-to-S/4HANA transformation programs. The product runs in on-premises, private-cloud, and hybrid environments and exposes REST APIs and CI/CD triggers for repeatable validation scenarios.

Help Net Security · 29d agoAI tools & infra1

Structural Jailbreaks Generalize but Do Not Compound: A cross-provider and multilingual study of Involuntary In-Context Learning

Researchers show IICL structural jailbreaks generalize to Google Gemini, lifting attack success to 80-100% on harm and financial benchmarks; non-English prompts attenuate it.

The study red-teams two Google Gemini models with Involuntary In-Context Learning (IICL), a structural jailbreak reframing harmful requests as the final cell of a data-labeling task. IICL lifts attack success from at most 6.7% to 80-90% on HarmBench and 97-100% on financial abuse (FinProof), an order of magnitude above prior results on OpenAI's GPT-5.4. Against a compounding hypothesis, forcing IICL output into Spanish, Hindi, or Arabic attenuates the attack in 11 of 12 conditions, attributed to a 'relevance curse' producing lower-quality harmful content in lower-resource languages. Findings replicate under an independent non-Google judge (Cohen's kappa 0.86 over 377 paired verdicts).

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security

XDOF, just 3 months out of stealth, is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation

Robotics data startup XDOF is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation led by 8VC, three months after emerging from stealth.

XDOF, co-founded in 2024 by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu and Fred Shentu, collects real-world teleoperation data for training general-purpose robots. It raised a $70M Series A in June from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital, and annualized revenue is approaching $50 million. The company is partnering with UC Berkeley's AI Research lab to release the ABC robot training dataset and already serves about 20 customers, including several frontier AI labs. Terms of the Series B are not final.

TechCrunch · AI · 11d agoAI industry

Making Knowledge Distillation Cheap Enough to Run at Scale

Hugging Face blog by Multiverse Computing describes techniques making knowledge distillation cheap enough for large-scale training.

A Hugging Face blog post from Multiverse Computing (CAI) presents methods for reducing the cost of knowledge distillation so it can be run at scale. The post is aimed at practitioners compressing large models into smaller, cheaper ones for production use.

Hugging Face Blog · Aug 10, 2026AI research

IBIB: A Protocol for Measuring Enterprise AI Systems by Serving Route, Not Model Identifier

IB2 protocol scores enterprise AI systems by serving route with reliability-inclusive scoring; serving-arm choice moved one score from 77.38 to 82.54.

The protocol has three parts: a gold-blind capability-binding preflight verifying a route can execute the evaluation contract, a reliability-inclusive first-pass scoring rule, and structurally score-blind adjudication. Its reference instantiation uses 128 locked tasks and 987 assertions over document, spreadsheet, chart, tool, and database work, released as procedure and schemas rather than an exposed corpus. Across eleven systems, two complete runs on identical weights later failed distinct binding-gate predicates, four of seven suites saturate within a six-system band driven by governed database work and multi-tab joins, and excluding failed responses from denominators changes the point ordering. Serving-arm choice shifted one declared revision and precision from 77.38 to 82.54, though arms differed in access mode, harness generation, and the tool-call parser.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

Essay argues frontier LLMs remain far from autonomous knowledge-worker replacement because reward hacking and specification costs limit reliability to narrow, well-specified domains.

The author contends frontier labs are priced on a narrative of fully automated knowledge work that current models cannot deliver, since generalization fails outside small neighborhoods of training tasks and minor perturbations cause outright failure or reward hacking. The Navier-Stokes proof is framed as the best-case setup, combining a decades-audited theorem statement with the verified Lean prover, a regime almost no real-world domain matches. Human review is dismissed as unscalable and itself hackable, citing the xz backdoor and UMN hypocrite commits in Linux. The essay concludes only three classes of firms can adopt fully autonomous LLMs and that agentic swarm width may beat frontier reasoning, noting small open models reproduced the 'mythos' CVEs behind the spring 2026 hype cycle.

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

IFM Releases K2 Horizon: Six Apache 2.0 Models From 0.9B to 375B

MBZUAI's IFM released K2 Horizon, six Apache 2.0 models (0.9B-375B) with open training data, code, and checkpoints, claiming the largest fully open-source launch.

The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), launched by MBZUAI, released K2 Horizon: six Apache 2.0 models (0.9B, 3.7B, 7B, 32B, 36B-A4B, 375B-A23B) shipping with the ~20-trillion-token pretraining corpus, intermediate checkpoints, training code, and logs, which IFM calls the largest fully open-source launch in AI history. The 375B-A23B scores 70.2 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 87.3 on GPQA Diamond; the 7B model posts 70.6 on SWE-bench Verified. New techniques include MoVA, which extends MoE routing into attention (36B total, ~4B active), and Uno, a LoRA adapter giving roughly 3x lossless decoding speedup. IFM's own reward-hacking audit re-scored 375B-A23B from 70.2% to 66.9% after flagging 24 of 712 Terminal-Bench trials.

MarkTechPost · 9d agoModel release1

Sequoia doubles down on Cymphony as AI agents create new enterprise security risks

Cymphony emerges with $30M from Sequoia and SMBC to give security teams unified visibility into AI agent and non-human identities.

Cymphony, a New York- and Tel Aviv-based startup, raised a $25 million Series A co-led by Sequoia and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund, valuing it above $100 million. Its platform builds a "workforce graph" unifying identity, data, and activity signals for employees, AI agents, and other non-human identities. The company says it found roughly 85,000 files exposed to AI tools at one US public company and reached seven-figure ARR in its first year of sales with customers including KKR and Syngenta. Sequoia previously led its undisclosed seed round, betting on Israeli Talpiot program alumni founders.

TechCrunch · Security · 7d agoIndustry

A $25 template helped scammers build hundreds of phantom bank domains

Allure Security researchers found 838 live phantom bank sites sharing a $25 template, built to lend credibility to investment and romance scams.

Allure Security researchers discovered roughly 2,200 domains presenting invented banks, of which 1,095 returned working pages and 838 contained a shared phrase. 97% of those retained parts of the $25 Cuex front-end template and 94% ran Laravel, with a misspelled 'Curreny Charts' heading on 90% of sites. The sites presented login pages, session cookies, and anti-forgery tokens consistent with a fraud model where scam contacts direct victims to fake financial portals. A leftover 'Remedy bank' title and form submission to remedycodes[.]site linked some sites to already-flagged fraud infrastructure.

Help Net Security · 26d agoPhishing & fraud

My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

A developer's business partner shipped a 5,236-line untested vibe-coded payments backend PR whose endpoints failed basic testing.

The author describes reviewing a pull request with 5,236 additions for a payments backend that a business partner generated largely with AI in a single day without testing. The PR's AI-written documentation included redundant boilerplate (e.g., 'returns 400 on error') but omitted operational details like where to obtain API keys, and the endpoints failed when tested. The post is a critical opinion piece on vibe coding and perceived skill atrophy among developers who rely on AI for everything.