Search: “writing”

The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary, (Mon, Aug 31st)

A SANS honeypot caught a real coding-agent session routed to a rogue "free" LLM endpoint, exposing a Windows user's transcript and tool outputs.

A SANS analyst describes how an internet-exposed inference honeypot was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names like DeepSeek, and enrolled in infrastructure serving "free" LLM backends. On 2026-08-30 an opencode terminal coding agent sent an 88-message, 224 KB transcript 210 times in 91 seconds via a China Unicom relay, exposing directory listings, tool outputs and read file portions. The analyst frames tool-enabled agents treating model endpoints as trusted control planes as a novel risk — a "rogue model endpoint" that could request tool executions on the user's machine.

SANS Internet Storm Center·Aug 31, 20:00 UTC · 16d agoAI safety & security1

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·Sep 4, 16:49 UTC · 12d agoAI research

ZDI-26-674: Adobe Acrobat Reader DC Annotation Out-Of-Bounds Write Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI disclosed CVE-2026-81981, an out-of-bounds write in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC annotation handling that permits remote code execution.

Zero Day Initiative advisory ZDI-26-674 details an out-of-bounds write in the annotation handling of Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. Successful exploitation allows arbitrary code execution after the victim opens a malicious file or visits a malicious page. The advisory carries a CVSS score of 7.8. No exploitation is reported.

ZDI Published Advisories·Sep 10, 05:00 UTC · 6d agoVulnerability 19 sourcesCVE-2026-81981

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, 13:01 UTC · Aug 12, 2026AI research

ZDI-26-543: Microsoft Windows ICC File Parsing Out-Of-Bounds Write Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI discloses an out-of-bounds write in Windows ICC file parsing via Mscms.dll enabling remote code execution (CVE-2026-54984, CVSS 7.8).

ZDI advisory ZDI-26-543 describes an out-of-bounds write in Microsoft Windows ICC file parsing that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code. Exploitation requires interaction with the Mscms.dll color management library, though attack vectors may vary by implementation. The flaw has a CVSS rating of 7.8 and is assigned CVE-2026-54984.

ZDI Published Advisories·Aug 11, 05:00 UTC · Aug 11, 2026VulnerabilityCVE-2026-549841

A Chosen Future Can Still Be Rewritten: Causal Writability in Video Models

Study shows video models often learn correct physics but fail to use it; low-dimensional 'causal writability' edits can restore correct motion.

The paper demonstrates 'causal writability' in video generation models: physically correct motion remains available inside the model even when the model outputs incorrect motion. In a red/blue mass oscillation setup, a low-dimensional edit predicted from simple physical variables restores correct fast motion, with a sharp depth boundary marking commitment. Early causal writability predicts which training errors later get corrected, and both writability and closure reproduce in a pretrained 1.3B video model.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:58 UTC · 2d agoAI research

AI Is Learning to Write Genetic Code

AI models generated viable bacteriophage genomes, with 16 designs successfully replicating and some outperforming the original virus at attacking E. coli.

Two AI models generated complete genome designs for bacteriophages modeled on ΦX174, a virus known to infect E. coli. Researchers produced about 700,000 candidate designs, selected 285 promising ones, and synthesized DNA inserted into E. coli, yielding 16 viable viruses. Some of the newly generated viruses proved more effective at attacking E. coli than the original bacteriophage.

Schneier on Security·Aug 21, 16:52 UTC · 26d agoAI research

ChatGPT can now connect to your personal apps to mimic writing style

OpenAI is testing ChatGPT Writing Style, which mimics a user's voice using writing samples from connected Gmail, Slack, and Drive accounts.

OpenAI confirmed it is testing a Writing Style feature for ChatGPT that learns a user's voice from writing samples in connected apps. The onboarding flow references Messaging (Slack), Documents (Google Drive and Notion), and Email (Gmail) as example sources. It resembles Anthropic's Styles personalization feature but draws on existing writing inside connected services rather than uploaded samples. The feature is available to a small group of users with no announced general rollout date.

BleepingComputer·Sep 7, 10:36 UTC · 9d agoAI industry

Muse can shop, write emails, and negotiate prices for users, all through WhatsApp

Meta launched Muse, a WhatsApp-controlled agent running on an isolated VM with a Sentinel gatekeeper, able to shop, email, book travel, and negotiate.

Meta introduced Muse, an autonomous agent controlled through WhatsApp that runs on its own cloud virtual machine, plans multi-step tasks, browses, fills forms, and negotiates on users' behalf. Payments run through Stripe's Link using one-time cards, which Meta calls the first AI agent covered by Link's purchase protection, with Shop Pay and 1Password integration planned. A second agent, Sentinel, gates all Muse network access and holds credentials, and a Muse Confidential VM with user-held encryption keys is planned later this year. Muse's model reportedly scored 44-48 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3, up from 31 for Muse Spark in April, near GPT-5.6 Sol's 47; it launches first in the US on iOS and Android.

The Decoder·updated Sep 12, 20:00 UTC · 4d ago·first Sep 10, 12:27 UTC · 6d agoAI industry 10 sources1

Quoting Paul Ford

Simon Willimon quotes Paul Ford arguing AI can write good software but cutting-edge work still demands human collaboration, craft, and judgment.

Simon Willimon highlights a passage from Paul Ford's essay 'A.I. Was Supposed to Give Us New Killer Apps. What Happened?'. Ford argues that while AI can write very good software, it also makes it easy to do someone else's job badly, which partly explains why many AI-driven projects fail. The quote reflects a broader industry reassessment of AI coding tools after initial fears that developer roles were obsolete.

Simon Willison·Sep 12, 18:00 UTC · 4d agoAI industry1

NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA Warn of Active AI

Five US agencies warn of active AI-assisted attacks on internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs across critical infrastructure, using disguised snap7 scripts for pre-positioning reconnaissance.

NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA issued joint advisory CISA AA26-231A warning of an active hacking campaign against Siemens S7-series PLCs, from S7-200 through S7-1500 F-series, across US critical infrastructure. Threat actors use internet scanning services such as Censys and ZoomEye to locate exposed controllers, then perform read operations over S7comm on TCP port 102 using the legitimate snap7.dll and python-snap7 libraries, disguising AI-generated exploitation scripts as monitoring tools. The agencies assess the activity as pre-positioning ahead of possible process disruption, equipment damage, or safety incidents in Energy, Water, Critical Manufacturing, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities sectors.

Security Affairs·Aug 20, 17:36 UTC · 27d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

The Semantic Bottleneck: Leveraging Semantic Representations for Non-Invasive Speech Decoding

Researchers introduced Brain2Semantics2Text, decoding sentence meaning from non-invasive MEG brain recordings via a semantic bottleneck, improving on prior Brain2Text methods.

The paper proposes Brain2Semantics2Text, a non-invasive speech decoding method that maps sentence-level magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses into a semantic embedding space and inverts those embeddings into natural language. Motivated by evidence that high-level semantic representations are distributed across cortex and evolve on slower timescales, the approach targets meaning rather than phonemes or words, avoiding the need for word-level alignment. The authors report improved sentence-level results compared to prior non-invasive Brain2Text methods despite the low signal-to-noise ratio of neural recordings.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research2

UBoatRAT Navigates East Asia

Unit 42 discovers UBoatRAT, a new custom RAT targeting South Korean and video-game industry personnel, delivered via Google Drive with GitHub-based C2 and BITS persistence.

Unit 42 identified UBoatRAT, a new custom remote access trojan first found in May 2017, whose initial version used a public Hong Kong blog service and a compromised Japanese web server for command and control. The latest variants target personnel or organizations related to South Korea or the video games industry, are delivered through Google Drive, and masquerade as Microsoft Word, Excel, or folder icons. The RAT checks for virtualization software and domain join, retrieves its C2 address from a Base64-encoded string in a GitHub-hosted file, uses a custom XOR-encrypted C2 protocol, and maintains persistence via Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) jobs that survive reboots.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 12:55 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild1

Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models

An open methodology toolkit measures whether transformer language models contextualize fixed word forms across domains using bridge forms and layer-wise silhouette analysis.

The manual documents an open toolkit built around 'bridge forms' - identical written words recurring across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each - to test whether transformer language models individuate word occurrences by context beyond the embedding layer. It covers declarative specification of bridge forms, Wikipedia corpus acquisition, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, domain-pairwise silhouette measurement, and visualization, justifying each choice against failure modes such as sense contamination and subword-tokenization misalignment. It is a methodological and implementation reference and reports no empirical results.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:38 UTC · 12d agoAI research

How AI wiped out an entire industry in Nairobi

ChatGPT's rise collapsed Kenya's contract essay-writing industry, which once employed 40,000 people in Nairobi, cutting $40–70-per-paper earnings after 2022.

The New York Times reports that generative AI, primarily ChatGPT, wiped out Kenya's ghostwriting business, which at its peak employed at least 40,000 people in Nairobi writing academic papers for US and UK students. Writers like Teresios Bundi, who produced over 2,500 papers in twelve years, saw prices and orders collapse after ChatGPT's 2022 launch. Related gig work such as transcription, data annotation, and Meta content moderation has also dried up, leaving 'humanizers' who rewrite AI text to evade plagiarism checks. Kenya's government had promoted online gig work since 2016, and roughly 80 percent of the country's jobs are informal.

The Decoder·Sep 7, 13:18 UTC · 9d agoAI industry

Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model

Study shows visually grounded token embeddings in a small masked LM persist through training and improve object-property knowledge, but escape standard BabyLM benchmarks.

The paper implements ostensive definition for a small DeBERTa masked language model trained on 10M words, seeding visually grounded tokens with embeddings derived from labeled image regions before training. Visual initialization leaves a persistent, seed-replicated advantage on object-property knowledge (COMPS) and a corpus-tailored Visual-Property Swap benchmark covering color, material, size, and shape, but has no effect on most BabyLM grammar benchmarks. Synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words causally transfers the advantage to exactly those words.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:43 UTC · 6d agoAI research

A Deep Dive Into Attempted Exploitation of CVE-2023

Mirai-like botnet scans exploit TP-Link EOL router flaw CVE-2023-33538 after CISA KEV addition, though observed exploit code is flawed.

Unit 42 observed large-scale automated scans attempting to exploit CVE-2023-33538 in end-of-life TP-Link TL-WR940N, TL-WR740N and TL-WR841N routers after CISA added the flaw to its KEV catalog in June 2025. HTTP GET requests inject commands via the ssid1 parameter at the /userRpm/WlanNetworkRpm endpoint to download and execute an arm7 ELF binary, a Mirai variant related to the Condi IoT botnet. Firmware emulation and reverse engineering showed the observed exploits are flawed and would fail, but the underlying vulnerability is real and successful exploitation requires authentication to the router's web interface. TP-Link confirmed the devices are end-of-life with no patches available and recommends replacing units and eliminating default credentials.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 19, 12:03 UTC · 28d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2023-335381

Verifiable by Construction: Claim-Level Evaluation of Verbatim Citation in Clinical Question Answering

Evaluation of twelve LLMs on 222 clinical questions shows verbatim quotes rarely substantiate claims; claude-opus-5 fully substantiates only 37.1%.

The authors build a standardized harness over four clinical practice guidelines and evaluate twelve LLMs on 222 synthetic clinical questions, measuring citation attachment, verbatim quote production, and claim substantiation. Most models attach verbatim quotes to over 90% of claims from prompting alone, though lightweight models like claude-haiku-4.5 struggle. Quotes frequently fail to substantiate claims: claude-opus-5 quotes 98.0% of claims but fully substantiates only 37.1%, exposing a capability gap for verifiable clinical QA.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:53 UTC · 2d agoAI research

Critical Gitea vulnerability now exploited in the wild (CVE-2026-60004)

Attackers are actively exploiting critical Gitea RCE CVE-2026-60004 via the diffpatch endpoint, prompting CISA KEV addition and at least one cryptomining compromise.

CISA added CVE-2026-60004, a critical code injection flaw in Gitea's diffpatch endpoint, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after in-the-wild attacks. An attacker with repository write access, or an unauthenticated visitor on instances with open registration, can execute arbitrary shell commands as the Gitea OS user. A disclosed incident saw an automated scanner register an account and deploy a loader and cryptominer inside a Docker container within about 11 seconds, with no persistence mechanism found. Gitea patched the flaw in v1.27.1, and CISA ordered US federal civilian agencies to update by August 28, 2026.

Help Net Security·Aug 26, 00:00 UTC · 21d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-60004

Claude Fable 5.1's language is less "load-bearing" than its predecessor's

Arena.ai found Claude Fable 5.1 writes 30% longer answers with fewer em dashes, hedges, and validation phrases than Fable 5.

Arena.ai compared tens of thousands of high-reasoning Text Arena outputs from Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Fable 5.1. Fable 5.1's median answer length rose 30% to 414 words (from 319), remaining 21% shorter than Opus 5's 525. Em-dash usage fell from 16.2 to 11.0 per 1,000 words while semicolons rose to 6.09, hedges like 'perhaps' and 'arguably' dropped 36%, and praise appeared in 1.98% of responses versus 3.17%. Long content words fell from 42.6% to 38.6% and abstract nouns declined 25%, suggesting the successor's language is less 'load-bearing'.

The Decoder·Sep 10, 15:26 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

Switching Password Managers in 2026

An Apple password-management engineer (writing personally) explains switching password managers via iOS direct app-to-app export, crediting FIDO Credential Exchange for passkey portability.

Ricky Mondello, an Apple engineer in password management and authentication (writing personally, not for Apple), demonstrates moving 100 items from 1Password to Apple Passwords via the iOS system export, which transfers passwords, passkeys, verification codes, and notes directly between apps with Face ID confirmation and no intermediate files. He credits the FIDO Alliance's Credential Exchange format (first draft May 2024, now an open spec) and iOS 26/macOS 26 for enabling phishing-resistant credential transfer between apps like 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, DuckDuckGo, and Devolutions. The post is advice rather than news, recommending bulk transfer on the existing device, switching AutoFill to the new app, and treating the new manager as the source of truth.

Lobsters · security·Sep 8, 13:55 UTC · 8d agoIndustry1

Inoculation Midtraining with Learned Neologisms

Inoculation Midtraining confines unsafe LLM behavior to a neologism-marked context, reducing misalignment after unsafe post-training but leaking under nearby contextual cues.

The paper introduces Inoculation Midtraining, which teaches a base model during midtraining that unsafe behavior belongs to a context marked by a learned neologism token, then post-trains on unsafe data within that context. Across supervised fine-tuning and RL post-training regimes, the technique reduces misalignment while preserving transfer of benign properties like German or Shakespearean prose. However, it does not outperform standard Inoculation Prompting, is sensitive to training configuration, and produces a leaky boundary that nearby contextual cues can reactivate. The authors conclude it is not yet a load-bearing component of a developer safety framework.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:12 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security

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·Sep 9, 11:01 UTC · 7d agoAI industry1

Does Your Agent's Memory Survive a Model Upgrade? A Controlled Study of Memory Portability

A controlled study finds agent memory portability varies sharply: fixed-schema knowledge graphs survive model swaps while compressed notes degrade.

The study compares preserving an agent's history as raw long context, RAG chunks, compressed natural-language notes, or fixed-schema knowledge graphs across model upgrades, using 48 synthetic histories and two open-weight sub-10B-parameter models. Fixed-schema KG accuracy changed by only +0.0004 ± 0.0020 after a writer swap, while compressed NOTES shifted asymmetrically by +9.91 or -13.28 percentage points depending on migration direction. Mixed 50/50 embedding migrations captured only 4.96 of an 11.90-point RAG re-embedding gain; 80% of the NOTES deficit came from information lost at construction, and 81% of the RAG deficit from retrieval failures. Store-only repair of NOTES failed to reach 90% recovery in all 48 cases, while retaining raw histories enabled recovery in 34 of 48 for one direction.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:44 UTC · 12d agoAI research1

CVE-2026-82427: Apache Storm Nimbus: Path Traversal as the Supervisor User via Unsanitised Blobstore Map Local Name

Unsanitised topology.blobstore.map local names in Apache Storm enable path traversal writes on supervisors as the supervisor user.

CVE-2026-82427 affects Apache Storm Nimbus (org.apache.storm:storm-server) versions 3.0.0 before 3.1.0, rated important. Topology submitters can choose a local name for each blob in topology.blobstore.map, which AsyncLocalizer and Container.createBlobstoreLinks used to build paths under the topology's working directory without normalisation. Crafted names allow path traversal, letting a submitter create or overwrite files outside the intended directory on supervisors, with symlink handling also affected. Fixed in version 3.1.0.

oss-security·Sep 13, 14:21 UTC · 3d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-82427

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

A review paper frames on-policy self-distillation collapse as governed by three levers: token weighting, privileged information, and guidance decay.

The paper critically reviews On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), where a language model trains on its own generations scored token-by-token by a teacher conditioned on privileged information such as reference solutions or environment feedback. It identifies collapse, the progressive narrowing of producible reasoning paths, as the dominant failure mode and analyzes it through three levers: signal weighting, the nature of privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review is restricted to mathematical reasoning, reports no new experiments, and offers a shared vocabulary separating settled findings from disputed ones.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 25, 20:00 UTC · 22d agoAI research

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Analysis of 16.9 million SOC alerts finds AI-related alerts at 0.43%, growing 685% since February, with 94.1% noise and 0.02% real attacks.

A review of roughly 16.9 million SOC alerts found about 73,000 (0.43%) were AI-related, a share that grew 685% between February and June 2026. Of AI-related alerts, 94.1% were noise, 5.8% genuine risks, and 0.02% real attacks; 79.8% received benign verdicts, 81.7% were automatically suppressed, and only 5.4% reached a human analyst. The only confirmed attacks were phishing campaigns that weaponized AI brand names as lures, while developer coding agents spawning shells and reading credential stores routinely tripped detections written before AI agents existed.

The Hacker News·Sep 12, 10:24 UTC · 4d agoResearch1

What the AI Warning Letter Completely Missed

Opinion piece argues the recent AI warning letter identifies a risk window but omits which actors pose risks and who can mitigate.

This Dark Reading commentary critiques a recent AI warning letter for correctly identifying an approaching risk window while failing to name who is coming through it or who will close it. The piece is brief opinion commentary on AI risk discourse rather than a technical report.

Dark Reading·Sep 3, 17:23 UTC · 13d agoAI safety & security

Hackers Abuse AutoIt to Inject AsyncRAT Into Microsoft-Signed Windows Process

Attackers use AutoIt and an invoice-themed batch file to inject AsyncRAT into Microsoft-signed charmap.exe for stealthy remote access.

Point Wild Threat Intelligence documented a five-stage campaign starting with 'Right-click to open Invoice Details.bat' that launches hidden PowerShell, drops a renamed AutoIt interpreter and encrypted loader into a random Temp folder, and persists via a Startup-folder batch file. The loader decrypts AsyncRAT only in memory and injects it into the Microsoft-signed charmap.exe (Windows Character Map) process, leaving no payload file on disk. The final payload patches AMSI inside the infected process and includes screen-capture code that prepares images for transfer to a command-and-control server at 158[.]51[.]122[.]136:4944.

Cyber Security News·Sep 14, 07:07 UTC · 2d agoMalware in the wild1

ECHO: A Matched-Contrast Benchmark for Context-Sensitive Turn-Taking in Full-Duplex Dialogue

ECHO benchmark pairs identical-overlap Chinese dialogue examples with contrasting contexts, revealing most full-duplex systems bias toward yielding the floor.

ECHO is a paired diagnostic benchmark for Chinese full-duplex turn-taking that matches examples with identical overlap transcripts but contrasting preceding multi-turn contexts, one requiring Yield and the other Keep. It also includes off-talk examples for diagnosing unnecessary yielding and introduces pair accuracy, which grants no credit to constant-action policies. Experiments across multiple full-duplex systems show most exhibit a pronounced Yield bias, performing substantially better on interruptions than backchannels. The benchmark and metadata will be publicly released.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 15:58 UTC · 1d agoAI research

CISA: WatchGuard RCE flaw now exploited in ransomware attacks

CISA confirms ransomware gangs are exploiting critical unauthenticated RCE CVE-2025-14733 in WatchGuard Firebox firewalls, with roughly 9,000 devices still unpatched.

CVE-2025-14733 is an out-of-bounds write in WatchGuard Fireware OS allowing unauthenticated remote code execution, exploitable on firewalls configured for IKEv2 VPN and potentially even after the configuration was deleted if a static branch-office VPN peer remains. WatchGuard released patches in December and confirmed in-the-wild exploitation; Shadowserver found over 115,000 exposed Fireboxes at the time, with nearly 9,000 still unpatched after nine months. CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog in December under BOD 22-01 and on Thursday confirmed ransomware gangs are now exploiting it, without providing campaign details. WatchGuard serves more than 250,000 small and mid-sized companies through 17,000+ security resellers and service providers.

BleepingComputer·Sep 10, 09:10 UTC · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2025-14733CVE-2022-23176CVE-2025-9242

LexFlip: A Dissociation Diagnostic for Legal Meaning Preservation Metrics

LexFlip releases 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving tokens, exposing weaknesses in embedding-based meaning preservation metrics.

LexFlip provides 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving 0.93 of tokens, creating dissociation items that break monotone token-overlap metric validation. The seven embedding and BERTScore metrics tested register only 0.022-0.039 of their identical-to-unrelated range on these edits, versus 0.670 for bidirectional NLI. Against FrJudge, with a measured human ceiling of r=0.597, a bare length feature outscores every semantic metric tested.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 15:49 UTC · 12d agoAI research

The SCREEN Act is a Christian Nationalist Nightmare

404 Media·Aug 4, 17:41 UTC · Aug 4, 2026Policy & legal

Does Syntax Matter? A Graph-Augmented Variational Topic Model for Computational Social Sciences

SCPTM graph-augmented variational topic model shows syntax aids topic diversity and descriptor quality but gains stem mainly from the variational encoder.

The Structural Contextual Probabilistic Topic Model represents corpora as heterogeneous document-word graphs with lexical and syntactic edges processed by a Graph Attention Network inside a VAE for mixed-membership topic distributions. Across four corpora, neural gains in document-topic alignment are attributable to the variational encoder rather than syntax, while graph-augmented variants improve topic diversity everywhere. Dependency paths add value on argumentative deliberative texts but are redundant in technical and institutional registers.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:39 UTC · 9d agoAI research1

How a researcher uses Codex and ChatGPT to search for new antimicrobial molecules

OpenAI profiles César de la Fuente's lab using ChatGPT and Codex alongside deep-learning models to accelerate antimicrobial molecule discovery.

OpenAI published a case study on bioengineer César de la Fuente's lab, which uses ChatGPT and Codex for hypothesis brainstorming, code writing, dataset processing, and bridging knowledge gaps across biology, chemistry, and computer science. The lab's deep-learning models scan genome and protein databases for antimicrobial peptide candidates, potentially cutting initial searches from years to hours. Bacterial antimicrobial resistance was associated with about five million deaths in 2021, a toll projected to roughly double by 2050.

OpenAI News·Sep 10, 16:00 UTC · 6d agoAI industry1

LLMs and Contextual Integrity

Bruce Schneier highlights two papers: the CIMemories benchmark shows frontier LLMs leak memory attributes up to 69%, and an RL method reduces inappropriate disclosures.

Bruce Schneier discusses contextual integrity in LLMs, referencing the CIMemories benchmark, which uses synthetic profiles with 100+ attributes per user to test whether models with persistent memory disclose sensitive information appropriately. Evaluation showed frontier models exhibit up to 69% attribute-level violations, with GPT-5's violation rate rising from 0.1% to 9.6% across 40 tasks and reaching 25.1% with repeated prompting, showing unstable leakage behavior. A second paper introduces a reinforcement learning framework trained on a synthetic 700-example dataset that substantially reduces inappropriate disclosure while maintaining task performance, with improvements transferring to the human-annotated PrivacyLens benchmark.

Schneier on Security·Aug 18, 10:40 UTC · 29d agoAI safety & security

Cisco Patches 12 SD-WAN and IOS XE Flaws, Including Three 9.9 CVSS Score Bugs

The Hacker News·Aug 7, 06:12 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Vulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-20303CVE-2026-20304CVE-2026-20310+12 CVEs1

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·Sep 14, 14:34 UTC · 2d agoAI industry

Introducing ChatGPT for Financial Services

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Financial Services, pairing built-in market data with GPT-6 Astra for banking research workflows.

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Financial Services, a tailored ChatGPT Work experience shaped by design partners Morgan Stanley and Evercore, targeting investment banking and equity research. It bundles premium data from Daloopa, PitchBook, LSEG News, and Crunchbase hosted on OpenAI infrastructure with granular citations, optimized MCP connectors for S&P Global and FactSet, and 50+ connectors, plus planned entitlement integrations with S&P Capital IQ, LSEG, MSCI, Dow Jones Factiva, and Moody's. It runs GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI claims is state of the art in information retrieval, financial reasoning, and artifact generation, and includes enterprise controls such as SAML SSO, SCIM, role-based access, and no default training on firm data.

OpenAI News·updated Sep 10, 18:25 UTC · 6d ago·first Sep 10, 07:00 UTC · 6d agoAI industry 2 sources

Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics

Anthropic published updated Claude consumer system prompts, including changes steering the model away from reproducing song lyrics, likely over copyright concerns.

Anthropic publishes system prompts for Claude.ai and Claude mobile apps, including historic revisions, and has reorganized them into an index with per-model pages such as the Haiku 4.5 page showing the original October 15, 2025 prompt and an updated January 18, 2026 version. The latest consumer prompt strongly discourages reproducing song lyrics, a behavioral constraint likely tied to copyright considerations. Prompts for Claude Cowork and Claude Code are not included in the published set.

Simon Willison·Sep 2, 14:16 UTC · 14d agoAI safety & security