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Hackers abused Claude to extract secrets from 1.8M Android apps

Anthropic reports ShinyHunters, Midnight Blizzard, and GTG-10007 misused Claude to automate credential theft, malware operations, and espionage against dozens of victims.

Anthropic's threat report details how ShinyHunters member 'frkoo' ran a credential-harvesting pipeline on ten AWS EC2 workers that mass-downloaded and decompiled 1.8 million Android APKs, scanning for hardcoded secrets with TruffleHog. In one AI-assisted operation, an actor extracted 2,100+ Azure AD authentication tokens across more than 40 Microsoft tenants in roughly 34 hours, and ShinyHunters affiliates also stole AI API keys and breached a SaaS provider affecting about 200 downstream customers. Russian espionage group Midnight Blizzard used Claude Code skills to automate malware development, phishing, C2, and exfiltration against 20+ government and defense entities, rebuilding malware automatically when detected. Chinese-linked GTG-10007 ran autonomous vulnerability research that uncovered zero-days in a major endpoint security product and hit roughly 50 organizations with confirmed compromises; Anthropic disrupted the abuse and banned the accounts.

BleepingComputerupdated · 13h agofirst · 5d agoThreat actor in the wild 18 sources1

Schools are catching on to Big Tech’s playbook

A new book warns AI firms are repeating Big Tech's education playbook, as New York City and Los Angeles restrict classroom AI use.

NYT education reporter Natasha Singer's book 'Coding Kids' documents how Apple, Microsoft and Google embedded proprietary curricula and Chromebooks in US schools over 15 years, building product loyalty and market position. Google's Chromebook and Classroom dominance positioned it to promote generative AI in classrooms. New York City banned AI in elementary and middle schools and Los Angeles imposed broader restrictions including high schoolers, as parents and teachers push back against screens and AI in classrooms.

The Verge · AI · 6d agoAI industry

Who Should Grade My Work? Student Perspectives on Transparent AI-Assisted Writing Assessment in Higher Education

A Saudi university study finds students value ChatGPT writing feedback but treat human instructors as the final grading authority.

Thirteen male undergraduate computing students at a Saudi public university completed handwritten writing tasks that were scored by ChatGPT using a rubric-based prompt, then reflected after being told the score and feedback were AI-generated. Inductive thematic analysis identified four themes: perceived feedback usefulness, awareness of AI's contextual and pedagogical limitations, conditional trust, and reflection on the instructor's institutional role. Participants accepted GenAI feedback for surface-level revision but consistently positioned human instructors as the authority over grading decisions, distinguishing feedback utility from evaluative authority.

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

Learning never stops: How AI makes learning continuous

OpenAI report describes how students and educators use ChatGPT to extend learning continuously beyond the classroom.

OpenAI published a report examining how students and educators use ChatGPT to make learning more continuous. The report describes support that extends beyond the classroom, positioning ChatGPT as an ongoing learning companion. The release is part of OpenAI's education-focused communications rather than a technical or safety research paper.

OpenAI News · 21d agoAI industry

Bringing ChatGPT for Teachers to more U.S. school districts

OpenAI expands ChatGPT for Teachers to 55 U.S. school systems, adding secure AI tools and training for over 100,000 more educators.

OpenAI announced that ChatGPT for Teachers is expanding to 55 U.S. school systems. The rollout brings secure AI tools, training, and support to more than 100,000 additional educators and staff. The expansion marks a significant scale-up of OpenAI's education product in the U.S. K-12 market.

OpenAI News · 21d agoAI industry

Better answers, broader thinking: What students gain from ChatGPT and critical-thinking training

OpenAI published a randomized study of over 1,000 students examining ChatGPT's effects on critical thinking and performance.

OpenAI released results from a randomized study of more than 1,000 students using ChatGPT on a real-world university assignment. The research examined effects on critical thinking, originality, and student performance. Findings inform ongoing debates about AI's role in education and learning outcomes.

OpenAI News · 20d agoAI research

New York City bans AI tools from public schools through eighth grade

New York City banned AI tool use for roughly 600,000 public school students through eighth grade starting this school year.

New York City's Department of Education announced that about 600,000 students through eighth grade can no longer use AI tools, with individual screens banned through third grade and companion chatbots banned at all grade levels. Middle schoolers are recommended no more than 45 minutes of daily screen time; teachers may use AI for lesson prep but not grading. Mayor Zohran Mamdani framed the move as resisting industry framing of AI education as inevitable, while parent groups want a full two-year moratorium; a task force will deliver a report by April 2027 to guide future policy.

The Decoder · 9d agoAI policy1

Curriculum Learning as Transport: Understanding Curricula with Wasserstein Geodesics

Researchers model curriculum learning as Wasserstein transport over difficulty distributions, finding curriculum benefits are strongly task- and budget-dependent with no dominant strategy.

The framework represents curricula as trajectories of training distributions over discrete difficulty levels, decoupling ordering, matched exposure, endpoint smoothness, and pacing. Across a calibrated suite of 12 tasks and 33 difficulty axes under fixed training budgets, no single strategy dominates, though easy-to-hard ordering improves hard-level performance relative to exposure-matched static sampling. Endpoint smoothness and pacing substantially affect where along the difficulty spectrum a curriculum is effective, and the transport view supports extensions to learned pacing and structured difficulty spaces.

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

Separating AI's Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems

Schneier and Sanders argue AI's harms stem from capitalist incentives and governance gaps, not just technical limits, urging structural reform.

Writing with Nathan E. Sanders in Tech Policy Press, Bruce Schneier argues that AI's technological problems (hallucination, sycophancy, overconfidence) must be separated from socio-political problems created by capitalist market incentives. The essay contrasts US frontier-scale, energy-intensive development with China's incentive-driven leaner open models on commodity hardware, and cites Switzerland's Apertus model - trained on licensed data using public computing and renewable hydropower - as a public-interest alternative. It contends that proposals like research pauses, data-center moratoria, and federal screening conflate technology problems with governance problems, and that society faces independent choices on both axes.

Schneier on Security · Aug 15, 2026AI policy

5 new ways to level up your learning with Search

Google promotes five Search study tools for students preparing for classes and standardized tests.

Google published a back-to-school post highlighting five ways to use Search tools when studying for classes and standardized tests. The post is promotional product guidance rather than a launch, research result, or security announcement.

Google · AI · 28d agoAI industry

Students who use AI generally score worse at school

OECD PISA data from 91 countries shows AI-using students generally score lower, though moderate intentional use plus critical evaluation training can improve outcomes.

PISA 2025 data covering over 760,000 students in 91 countries found that, after adjusting for socioeconomic status, students who never use AI generally outperformed users in science. Effects varied by use type and frequency: task-specific uses like summarizing showed the largest drops, while weekly users of AI for general learning slightly outperformed non-users, especially when trained to critically assess AI output. AI use was higher among advantaged students and varied widely by country, from over 95% in Vietnam to 60% in Japan.

The Verge · AI · 7d agoAI research

Education Under Attack: The Pattern Behind Recent University Breaches

Huntress finds four recent university breaches share one root cause, security misconfigurations, and outlines fixes for higher education.

Huntress analyzed four university breaches from 2026 and identified misconfiguration as the common root cause behind the incidents. The report describes the recurring attack pattern targeting higher education and offers remediation guidance to close the gap. Specific victim institutions, threat actor attribution, and breach volumes are not named in the announcement.

Huntress · Aug 13, 2026Threat actor in the wild

AI for Societal Impact

Google publishes a collection page showcasing partnerships applying AI to health, disaster prediction, learning, and economic opportunity.

Google's 'AI for Societal Impact' page curates examples of experts and local leaders applying AI to disease detection and prevention, natural disaster prediction, education, and economic opportunity. It is a marketing-oriented collection page with no new technical details.

Google · AI · 1d agoAI industry

How Virginia Tech Connected Pentesting to Its Engineering Workflow

Horizon3.ai customer story details Virginia Tech automating external pentesting via NodeZero's GraphQL API with GitLab and ServiceNow integration for remediation tracking.

Horizon3.ai published a customer story describing how Virginia Tech, whose environment serves more than 38,000 students across hundreds of independent departments and multiple cloud providers, used NodeZero's GraphQL API to automate external pentesting through GitLab. Findings are routed directly into ServiceNow for subnet-owner assignment and remediation tracking, creating a repeatable attack-validation-to-remediation workflow.

Horizon3.ai · 13d agoIndustry1

Quoting Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss argues AI collapses code-writing and review costs, leaving product discovery and precise definition as the core of software engineering.

Simon Willison quotes Laurie Voss's essay "We are all Product Engineers now," which argues that AI is collapsing the cost of writing code and will likewise collapse the cost of reviewing, fixing, and operating it. Voss contends the remaining work is finding out what people want, defining it precisely, and making software pleasant to use. He expects the amount of software to grow without limit because demand has no ceiling, making product-definition skills the whole job. No specific models, tools, or incidents are named; this is career and industry commentary.

Simon Willison · 2d agoAI industry

Two-year university study finds banning AI from classrooms leaves students worse off

A two-year university study found students banned from using ChatGPT performed worst, while formal prompt-engineering training advantages faded as everyday AI familiarity grew.

Researcher Schrepel ran a classroom experiment in 2024 (66 students) and 2025 (164 participants) comparing a no-AI group, unguided ChatGPT users, and trained students revising EU AI Act provisions. The no-AI group finished last both years, hitting 'idea exhaustion' after 10-15 minutes, while the trained group's advantage nearly vanished by 2025 as everyday chatbot familiarity rose. Schrepel now argues blanket AI bans harm outcomes and universities should rethink bans and pure literature-review theses.

The Decoder · 3d agoAI industry

Supporting Thailand’s next generation of AI startups

OpenAI and Thailand's MHESI launched an eight-week accelerator for ten health, wellness, and education AI startups.

OpenAI announced a program with Thailand's Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI) to support the country's next generation of AI startups. The eight-week accelerator will help ten startups in health, wellness, and education turn AI prototypes into trusted products.

OpenAI News · 20d agoAI industry

Microsoft Commits to Sweeping AI Privacy Rules for Students. Will Other Tech Giants Follow?

Microsoft signed legally binding AI privacy and safety standards for schools with the American Federation of Teachers, effective November 1.

Microsoft's agreement with the American Federation of Teachers prohibits using student or educator data to train AI systems, bans selling data or using it for ads and product development, and forbids AI companions designed to foster emotional dependency, with third-party audits required. The standards apply to all schools under Microsoft contract starting November 1. NYC and LA school districts announced one-year moratoriums on student AI use, while OpenAI and Anthropic pursue similar pacts and Google remains noncommittal.

SecurityWeek · 1d agoAI policy

I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?

AI researcher Nathan Lambert argues LLMs remain weak at long-form technical writing, questioning whether models can autonomously organize scientific knowledge for breakthroughs.

Nathan Lambert describes writing a post-training textbook, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, and finds today's LLMs weak at organizing long-form technical content despite becoming superhuman at coding and math. He notes GPT 5.5 Pro found deep typos across a 200-300 page manuscript while Claude models proved more useful as editors. He argues that compressing knowledge through writing is a prerequisite for autonomous scientific insight and tempers expectations for near-term AI-driven open science.

Interconnects · Aug 12, 2026AI research

Verify Before You Distill: Prompt-Level Teacher Gating for On-Policy Distillation

TGOPD verifies teacher reliability per prompt before on-policy distillation, outperforming vanilla OPD across math, code, and instruction benchmarks.

Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD) estimates teacher reliability from verifier-scored teacher probes and routes each prompt either to dense on-policy distillation or to verifier-grounded GRPO, avoiding misleading updates from confidently wrong teachers under mode-seeking reverse KL. Across 4B and 35B students in mathematics, code, and instruction following, TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD in all six single-domain settings and achieves higher seven-benchmark averages under multi-domain training. It also raises teacher-node GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in the measured 4B single-domain run by reusing idle teacher capacity.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research

CTEM Technology Evaluation Scorecard

Horizon3.ai releases a scorecard for evaluating CTEM technologies on demonstrated exploitability and remediation evidence.

Horizon3.ai published a downloadable CTEM Technology Evaluation Scorecard for assessing security technologies across the six-stage Continuous Threat Exposure Management operating model, from discovering exposure through verifying risk removal. The scorecard uses a 0-3 scale based on repeatable evidence demonstrated in the evaluator's environment rather than stated feature claims, with emphasis on validating exploitability and verifying remediation. It is vendor marketing material aimed at security leaders and evaluation teams.

Horizon3.ai · 9h agoIndustry 2 sources

Introducing ChatGPT for Teens: Built for learning, backed by protections

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens, a teen-focused version with built-in protections, healthy-use features, and expanded parental controls.

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Teens, a version of its assistant positioned for learning and critical thinking with stronger built-in protections. The offering includes healthy-use features and additional controls for parents. It is a consumer product launch aimed at safer teen usage rather than a model or research release.

OpenAI News · 29d agoAI industry

Mines, Minds, and Machines: The Journey of AI

Recorded Future essay traces AI's supply chain from minerals and chips to embodied AI, mapping geopolitical rivalry and cyber operations at every stage.

Recorded Future published an analysis following the supply chain of the fourth industrial revolution: minerals become chips, chips become data centers, and data centers become models that are acquiring physical capabilities. It argues geopolitical rivalry and cyber operations now run along every link, from mine to embodied AI machines.

Recorded Future · Aug 11, 2026AI industry

AI models flub these intelligence tests. Can you fare any better?

MIT Technology Review examines puzzle and game benchmarks where current AI models still underperform, probing the limits of machine intelligence tests.

MIT Technology Review explores puzzles and games as benchmarks for gauging AI progress, tracing the practice back to the origins of machine learning in a 1959 article by IBM's Arthur Samuel. The piece highlights intelligence-style tests that today's models still fail and questions what those results reveal about model capabilities. It situates gaming benchmarks within the broader debate over measuring machine intelligence.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 21d agoAI research

OpenAI expands initiatives to support journalism from classrooms to newsrooms

OpenAI expands journalism-support programs offering tools, training and partnerships to students, educators, journalists and news organizations.

OpenAI announced an expansion of initiatives to support journalism, spanning classroom education and newsroom operations. The program provides AI tools, training, and partnerships aimed at students, educators, journalists, and news organizations. The announcement did not include specific product, pricing, or technical details in the available text.

OpenAI News · 9d agoAI industry

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.

Diffusion TV: Experiencing Diffusion Models through Tangible, Embodied Interaction

Researchers present Diffusion TV, a CRT-based installation where antenna manipulation lets audiences physically experience diffusion model denoising.

Diffusion TV is an interactive installation built around a modified CRT television where turning the antenna controls the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds, mirroring the denoising process of diffusion models. Three channels present AI-generated animals from the past, present, and future within a temporal and ecological narrative. The authors frame the work as an embodied, non-verbal alternative to explainable AI that highlights intermediate generative states rather than final outputs.

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

When will average people feel AI’s impact?

Interconnects essay argues AI's impact is still a rounding error for average people, comparing looming wage stagnation to Engels' pause.

An Interconnects essay argues that AI currently touches daily life far less than previous industrial revolutions, since its benefits are concentrated in knowledge work and lack tangible consumer goods. The author invokes Engels' pause (1790-1840), when British wages stagnated amid rapid GDP growth, as a warning that popular backlash could kneecap AI's development. He contends the current phase is about building compounding infrastructure, and predicts daily life may look similar even 50 years from now.

Interconnects · 7d agoAI industry1

1Password increases engineering productivity 21% with Codex

OpenAI reports 1Password engineers boosted productivity 21% using Codex to build features and internal tools under strict security policies.

OpenAI published a customer case study stating that 1Password's engineering teams use Codex to rapidly develop new features and internal tools while reaching production readiness. The company attributes a 21% engineering productivity increase to the adoption, noting rigorous security policies were maintained throughout.

OpenAI News · 9d agoAI industry

CanvasAnneal: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

CanvasAnneal injects teacher reasoning traces into diffusion canvases during curriculum RL, improving diffusion LLMs on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2.

CanvasAnneal is a curriculum-guided reinforcement learning framework for diffusion language models that addresses exploration bottlenecks in standard RL. It warm-starts exploration by injecting teacher-generated reasoning traces into the initial diffusion canvas, then gradually removes this guidance so the model generates reasoning trajectories independently. Across mathematical reasoning and tool-use benchmarks, it improves over standard diffu-GRPO on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2 and accelerates reward improvement, though gains are task-dependent.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

[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