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The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement

Position paper defines recursive self-improvement for AI, introduces the Headroom-Closed Index and an autonomy roadmap toward genuine recursive meta-improvement.

The paper uses the Headroom-Closed Index to diagnose limitations of existing LLMs and frames recursive self-improvement (RSI) as a staged roadmap: improvement-execution, improvement-strategy, experience-acquisition, and environment-adaptation autonomy, culminating in recursive meta-improvement. It examines RSI across scientific discovery, embodied intelligence, and software engineering, highlighting differing requirements and development speeds. Drawing on industry practices and preliminary empirical evidence, it connects RSI research with practical systems and identifies key challenges to achieving genuine RSI.

Identifying Agentic Automation with Behavioral Telemetry

Akamai describes detecting autonomous AI browser agents like Comet using Masked Autoencoder Transformer models on sparse behavioral telemetry.

Akamai researchers present a behavioral telemetry approach for identifying agentic automation in web traffic. Masked Autoencoder Transformer models are used to detect the sparse behavioral signals produced by autonomous AI browser agents such as Comet. The work targets traffic classification and bot detection rather than a specific vulnerability, and becomes more relevant as agentic browsing adoption grows.

Akamai Blog · 28d agoAI safety & security1

How Ransomware Gangs Use Automation, and How You Can Beat It

Recorded Future outlines ten automation strategies ransomware gangs use, from credential marketplaces to bulletproof hosting, urging intelligence-led defense.

A Recorded Future blog post promoting an Insikt Group report and webinar describes how ransomware gangs leverage automation across their attack cycles. The Insikt Group identified ten key strategies, including selling breached credential databases on underground forums, checkers and brute-forcers for validating stolen credentials, loaders and crypters for evading antivirus, banking injects, exploit kits, spam and phishing services, bulletproof hosting services, sniffers, and automated marketplaces for selling stolen credentials and digital fingerprints. The post argues defenders should adopt intelligence-led automation to counter the speed and scale of automated criminal tooling.

Recorded Future · 29d agoRansomware

Intezer adds native response automation without separate SOAR

Intezer launched Workflows, native response automation inside its AI SOC, letting teams automate remediation without a separate SOAR platform.

Intezer announced Workflows, a native automation and response builder inside its AI SOC platform that lets security teams run post-investigation actions such as closing alerts, isolating hosts, and updating tickets without a separate SOAR. Workflows are created through natural language via MCP, inherit full investigation context, and are logged for audit, with per-tenant routing and customer communications aimed at MSSPs. The announcement cites Intezer's AI SOC Report 2026 finding that nearly 1% of real incidents trace back to lowest-severity alerts.

Help Net Security · 28d agoTools

Identifying Agentic Automation with Behavioral Telemetry: Part 2

Akamai details behavioral telemetry signals for identifying agentic automation traffic in the second part of its research series.

Akamai published part two of its series on identifying agentic automation using behavioral telemetry. The post appears on Akamai's security research blog and focuses on detecting AI-agent-driven traffic. Full article text was unavailable at classification time, so classification relies on the title and source.

Akamai Blog · 20d agoResearch

Inside Meta’s push to put robots to work in data centers

Meta is testing robots to perform technician tasks in its data centers, advancing automation of AI infrastructure operations.

Meta is testing robots to perform tasks currently done by human technicians in its data centers. The push signals ambitions to automate AI infrastructure operations at scale. The excerpt provides no details on robot suppliers, deployment scale, or timelines.

Ars Technica · AI · 17d agoAI industry

Agent as Policy for Robotic Manipulation

Agent as Policy lets a general-purpose agent drive a physical robot via runtime reasoning and program generation, reaching 100% success on manipulation tasks.

The paper introduces Agent as Policy (AGP), which puts task planning and execution for a physical robot under a general-purpose agent's control with no task-specific or environment-specific training. The agent interprets visual evidence, writes executable programs, issues motion commands, and revises actions based on physical outcomes. AGP was evaluated on real-world manipulation tasks including assembly from human videos, block construction from goal images, die reorientation, targeted throwing, and bimanual towel folding. It achieved success rates of 100%, 100%, and 80% on three block construction configurations.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

Webinar Today: Keep Pace With AI – A New Operating Model for Endpoint Remediation

SecurityWeek and Automox host a webinar on accelerating endpoint vulnerability remediation through automation and governance policies.

The 20-minute webinar promotes 'Frontier Pace Governance,' an approach to balancing automation, policy, and business risk in endpoint patching. It is vendor marketing content co-hosted with Automox, covering visibility, remediation automation, and patching SLAs.

SecurityWeek · 6d agoIndustry

Why Patch Automation Needs Brakes, Not Just an Accelerator

Action1's field CTO argues patch automation needs staged deployments and stop conditions, not just speed.

Gene Moody, Field CTO at Action1, writes on BleepingComputer that patch automation must pair acceleration with safeguards. He recommends staged deployment rings with predefined go/no-go criteria, keeping human judgment for domain controllers, databases, and ERP systems. The piece warns that automation without brakes can push a bad update to 10,000 endpoints as fast as a good one.

BleepingComputer · 2d agoIndustry

Autonomous Research for Open-Ended Problems: A Case Study on Telecom Ticket Retrieval

Case study shows autonomous LLM research reaches 90% of SOTA on telecom ticket retrieval in 10 weeks versus 10 months human work.

The paper explores adapting autonomous research to open-ended, industry-grade ML problems through a telecom ticket retrieval case study with commercial and open-source agents. Autonomous research reached 90% of state-of-the-art performance (0.34 vs. 0.38 Recall@1) in 10 weeks versus 10 months of human work, at up to $200 per Cursor campaign. The authors find agents excel at narrow hyperparameter optimization but lack human-like intuition, recommending human-agent collaboration.

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

Rockwell Automation Redundancy Module Configuration Tool

CISA warns CVE-2026-9633 in Rockwell Automation Redundancy Module Configuration Tool lets attackers execute processes with administrator privileges; fix in 10.01.00.

CISA released an ICS advisory for Rockwell Automation Redundancy Module Configuration Tool. CVE-2026-9633 could allow an attacker to escalate privileges and execute processes with administrator rights. Versions 9.00.00 through 10.00.00 are affected, and the vendor shipped a fix in version 10.01.00.

CISA Advisories · 15d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-9633

Studying Without a Syllabus: Task-Agnostic Environment Preprocessing

Paper formalizes task-agnostic environment preprocessing, where agents study unfamiliar environments under a budget to build reusable artifacts for a frozen solver.

The paper formalizes task-agnostic environment preprocessing, where a studying system explores an environment under a budget and produces artifacts like indices, scripts, or procedural guidance for a frozen solver, without task examples or evaluation feedback. The authors compare unaided and archive-equipped meta-agents against fixed synthetic-practice and corpus-processing methods across six heterogeneous benchmarks. A meta-agent variant achieves the highest Avg@3 reward on five benchmarks, while fixed corpus processing remains best on the largest corpus benchmark. Studied artifacts reduce the test-time sampling needed to reach a given score, shifting computation from repeated test-time attempts to a pre-task study phase.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

From assistance to execution: How enterprises put AI to work

OpenAI reports enterprise adoption patterns of agentic AI through ChatGPT and Codex, with frontier firms pulling ahead in deployment.

OpenAI published a report on how enterprises are moving from AI assistance to autonomous execution, focusing on agentic AI deployments. It highlights the use of ChatGPT and Codex in enterprise workflows and argues that frontier firms are pulling ahead of peers in AI adoption. The piece is adoption research and marketing rather than a security disclosure.

OpenAI News · Aug 12, 2026AI industry1

Automox Mitigation Worklets cut endpoint exposure to unpatchable flaws

Automox launched an AI-speed Mitigation Worklet Pipeline that drafts and publishes mitigations for unpatchable vulnerabilities within hours of disclosure.

Automox announced its Mitigation Worklet Pipeline, which uses AI to draft mitigations for unpatchable vulnerabilities and publishes human-reviewed Worklets to its catalog within hours of disclosure. The company cites rising vulnerability volume, including a record Patch Tuesday with 973 CVEs, as motivation. Customers can search Worklets by CVE, control deployment targets, and verify execution through Activity Logs and Policy Results.

Help Net Security · 5d agoTools

MIT creates method to force AI to comply with safety rules

MIT researchers published HardFlow, a method enforcing hard safety constraints on flow-matching generative models' final outputs without retraining.

MIT researchers led by Zeyang Li and Navid Azizan developed HardFlow, a trajectory-optimization method that enforces strict, non-negotiable constraints on flow-matching generative models by checking rule satisfaction only at the final generation step. Published in IEEE TPAMI, it outperformed six rival projection and guidance methods on four simulated benchmarks including D3IL robotic manipulation, Maze2D, physical process control, and image editing. All results are simulation-only, with no independent reproduction yet reported.

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

JarvisGUI: Towards Cross-Device GUI Agents with Dynamic Task Composition

JarvisGUI benchmark tests GUI agents on cross-device workflows across Android, Windows, and Ubuntu, revealing major gaps in state transfer and long-horizon reasoning.

JarvisGUI is a dynamic benchmark that formulates GUI tasks as input-output transformations under a lightweight type system, automatically composing multi-step cross-device workflows across Android, Windows, and Ubuntu virtual environments. Evaluation shows state-of-the-art open-source GUI agents struggle with state-transfer awareness, cross-platform contextual reasoning, and long-horizon dependency management, exposing a capability gap invisible to existing single-device benchmarks.

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

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA introduces a 527K-trajectory benchmark with 280 task variants showing current VLA models struggle with spatial reasoning and long-horizon planning.

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark for diagnosing embodied reasoning in vision-language-action models, covering fine-grained spatial reasoning and long-horizon procedural planning. It spans 10 task categories and 56 base tasks instantiated across five difficulty levels for 280 variants, with 527K trajectories collected across multiple embodiments and diverse scenes. Diagnostic metrics go beyond binary success rates, and experiments show current VLA models struggle with complex spatial relations, precise low-level execution, and memory-intensive planning.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

Procedural Graphs: Self-Evolving Execution Structures for LLM Agents

Researchers introduce Procedural Graphs, self-evolving (procedure, relation, procedure) structures guiding LLM agent tool use and planning.

Procedural Graphs organize procedural knowledge into (procedure, relation, procedure) triplets to guide LLM agent actions, addressing drift such as lost objectives, out-of-order tool calls, and repeated unproductive steps. At each decision step the framework localizes the active node and a guidance model translates the surrounding subgraph into step-level situational guidance. An LLM refiner edits graph topology by contrasting failed with successful trajectories, and across datasets, task types and LLMs the approach outperforms memory-based baselines and matches or surpasses hand-designed graphs.

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

[Control Systems] Inductive Automation security advisory (AV26-892)

Canada's Cyber Centre relayed a CISA ICS advisory for an Inductive Automation Ignition vulnerability affecting versions up to 8.1.53.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security published control systems advisory AV26-892, noting that as of September 4, 2026, Inductive Automation is affected by a vulnerability in Ignition versions prior to or equal to 8.1.53. The advisory references CISA's ICS advisory (ICSA-26-246-06) and its CSAF file, and encourages users and administrators to review the linked resources and apply necessary updates as they become available. Ignition is a widely deployed industrial automation platform, so affected OT operators should patch promptly.

Canadian Centre for Cyber Security · 8d agoAdvisory

Rockwell Automation ControlFLASH

CISA advisory for CVE-2026-12663 (CVSS 7.3) in Rockwell Automation ControlFLASH <=V15.07: world-writable install directory enables local code execution.

Rockwell Automation reported CVE-2026-12663 in ControlFLASH V15.07 and earlier, where the installer grants write permissions on the installation directory to the Everyone group. An attacker could plant malicious code there and execute it at the logged-in user's privilege level. The issue is local only and not remotely exploitable; no public exploitation has been reported to CISA.

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA introduces a 527K-trajectory robotic benchmark with 280 task variants exposing VLA model weaknesses in spatial reasoning and long-horizon planning.

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark for diagnosing embodied reasoning in vision-language-action models, spanning fine-grained spatial reasoning and long-horizon procedural planning. It covers 10 task categories and 56 base tasks instantiated across five difficulty levels for 280 variants, with 527K trajectories collected across multiple embodiments. Experiments on representative VLA models show current systems struggle with complex spatial relations, precise low-level execution, and memory-intensive planning.

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

Companies Have 6 Months to Prepare for Automated Attacks

Dark Reading warns that frontier AI models have demonstrated autonomous end-to-end compromises and urges companies to prepare for AI-driven automated attacks within six months.

This analysis piece argues that frontier AI models can already autonomously, and sometimes inadvertently, carry out end-to-end system compromises. It frames AI-driven automated attacks as a near-term operational risk that defenders have roughly six months to prepare for. No specific incident, vendor, or technique is disclosed in the source text.

Dark Reading · 12d agoAI safety & security

How AI-native companies turn workflows into operating capability

OpenAI highlights Basis, Clay, and Exa Labs using AI agents for onboarding, account management, and developer integrations in enterprise workflows.

An OpenAI news post profiles AI-native companies Basis, Clay, and Exa Labs that use AI agents to improve onboarding, account management, and developer integrations. The piece positions these workflows as operating capability and draws lessons for enterprise leaders. It is promotional case-study content rather than product or research news.

OpenAI News · 15d agoAI industry

EmbodiedSkills: A Unified Framework for Orchestrating, Training, and Deploying VLA Agents

Researchers introduce EmbodiedSkills, a framework treating VLA skill decisions as verified execution proposals, reaching 86.2% success on RoboTwin 2.0.

The EmbodiedSkills framework treats each vision-language-action skill decision as an execution proposal, checking prerequisites before execution and verifying outcomes afterward via a shared executable-skill interface. It connects high-level skill selection, bounded low-level VLA execution and post-action verification in a single agent loop, and logs structured trajectories for supervision and optional online adaptation. Instantiated with Qwen3-VL and OpenPI/pi0.5, task-adapted policies achieve 86.20% average success across 50 RoboTwin 2.0 tasks and 97.40% across the four LIBERO suites, with 12.5% on memory-dependent RMBench tasks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research1

Rockwell Automation OTTO Fleet Manager

CISA warns Rockwell Automation OTTO Fleet Manager (CVE-2026-75112, CVSS 6.8) uses insufficiently costly password hashing, easing offline brute-force attacks.

CISA published ICS advisory ICSA-26-239-03 for Rockwell Automation OTTO Fleet Manager versions 2.36.2 and earlier (CVE-2026-75112, CVSS v3 6.8). The flaw involves use of a password hash with insufficient computational effort, reducing the cost for an attacker to perform offline brute-force attacks against stored password hashes. Deployments span critical manufacturing and transportation systems sectors worldwide, with company headquarters in the United States.

CISA Advisories · 20d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-75112