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Microsoft sets security and safety rules for its AI models

Microsoft AI published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct setting safety rules and human-control requirements for its models, open for public consultation.

Microsoft AI released the first draft of its Humanist AI Code of Conduct, open for six weeks of public consultation, with a revised version expected later this year to guide model training from 2027 onward. The Code sets Absolute Constraints barring model assistance with chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive weapons, offensive cyber operations, CSAM, malicious deepfakes, and mass civilian surveillance, while permitting authorized defensive cybersecurity work such as vulnerability discovery, malware analysis, and PoC exploit testing. It establishes an instruction hierarchy where the Code takes precedence over operator policies and user instructions, plus Human Control Requirements covering shutdown compliance, least privilege, and no autonomous goal initiation. MAI models will undergo red-teaming, safety evaluations, and pre- and post-deployment reviews; current models have not yet been trained on the Code.

Help Net Security · 20h agoAI safety & security

[AINews] OpenAI to reach AGI bar by end-2026

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki says unreleased Astra model meets the 'Automated AI Research Intern' goal; Altman expects internal AGI declaration by December 2026.

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki says the unreleased Astra model fulfills the September 2026 'Automated AI Research Intern' target. Sam Altman told TIME he expects OpenAI to declare AGI achieved internally by December 2026. The roundup also covers Zhipu's GLM-5.3-Flash (320B total parameters, 18B active, 1M context), Google's Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash video model topping the Text-to-Video Arena, and the $399 open-source Microduck biped robot from Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face.

Latent Space · 19d agoAI industry

Researchers observe first ‘near-autonomous’ AI attack on government target in Taiwan

Dream researchers observed the first near-autonomous AI attack on a government target, with suspected Chinese hackers stealing 2,500+ Taiwan records.

Israeli firm Dream reported that suspected Chinese hackers used open-source AI models to run a near-autonomous cyberattack against Taiwan's government, extracting over 2,500 personnel records. The framework, built on Hermes and OpenClaw, adapted mid-operation without human intervention, ran autonomous 'Learning Cycles' researching applicable vulnerabilities, and expanded to supply chain vendors, a nuclear safety agency, a government email system, and seven-plus energy companies. Attackers bypassed safety guardrails by framing the work as authorized penetration testing. Dream discovered the operation via a 160MB online archive of nearly 1,400 files.

CyberScoop · Aug 12, 2026Threat actor in the wild

[AINews] OpenAI reports Navier-Stokes singularity find in 88 hours using Astra-next, roughly 10,000 agents and 130B tokens (>$40M), a contender for second ever Millennium Prize awarded

OpenAI-linked accounts claim roughly 10,000 AI agents produced a Navier-Stokes singularity result in 88 hours, pending mathematical verification.

OpenAI-affiliated accounts claim a system of roughly 10,000 agents, trained over about a year with multi-agent reinforcement learning, produced a finite-time singularity result related to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem. The claimed 88-hour runtime and 130B-token cost circulate only via social posts, and no preprint, theorem statement, or proof artifact is available. Acceptance by the mathematics community is unresolved, so the claim's epistemic status remains unknown. The roundup also notes Cognition's $48B and Mistral's $24B fundraises, GPT Image 2.5, and Meta's Muse agent relaunch.

Latent Space · 7d agoAI research1

Online Change-point Detection for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Researchers propose Patterns of Past Rewards (PPR), a lightweight reward-based detector that flags environment shifts in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning training.

The paper introduces Patterns of Past Rewards (PPR), an algorithm-agnostic detector that smooths cooperative agents' return streams and applies statistical drift testing to flag environment or task changes. Evaluation in a custom Speaker-Listener environment built on the Multi-Agent Particle Environment under two non-stationarity scenarios shows PPR balances detection speed against alarm stability. It avoids the repeated alarms of a smoothed-return baseline and the missed shifts of raw-return detection, enabling MARL systems to reliably identify major changes during training.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research1

Privileged File System Vulnerability Present in a SCADA System

Unit 42 details CVE-2025-0921 (CVSS 6.5), a privileged file operations flaw in Iconics Suite enabling DoS and privilege escalation.

Unit 42 disclosed CVE-2025-0921 (CVSS 6.5), an execution-with-unnecessary-privileges flaw in the Pager Agent of the AlarmWorX64 MMX feature of Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions GENESIS64. Attackers could misuse privileged file system operations to corrupt critical binaries, causing denial-of-service or integrity loss on vulnerable SCADA systems. The analysis demonstrates a chain with CVE-2024-7587, which grants excessive permissions to the C:\ProgramData\ICONICS directory via the GenBroker32 installer. Iconics released an advisory with a workaround that addresses the reported issues.

Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Harvest Thousands of Credentials in Under 6 Hours

Google Cloud documents a financially motivated actor using autonomous AI agents on a compromised cloud tenant to harvest 23,800+ credentials in under six hours.

Google Cloud reports that an attacker compromised a victim's cloud environment and deployed a multi-agent framework driven by preconfigured Markdown playbooks to autonomously handle vulnerability scanning, credential collection, error troubleshooting, and IP rotation. An exposed command-and-control server hosted the 'Recon' framework with a live dashboard managing over 23,800 harvested secrets, including cloud and AI-service API keys. The report also ties DUSTMAKER to UNC6780/TeamPCP, targeting AI development tools and CI/CD systems via trojanized MCP packages such as tiktoken_mcp. Google has disabled linked assets and updated protections after the actors' operational security failures.

Cyber Security News · 22h agoThreat actor in the wild

Hackers Deploy Agentic AI to Automate Exploitation and Mass Credential Harvesting

Google GTIG documents a financially motivated actor using a multi-agent AI framework to automate credential harvesting, compromising over 23,800 secrets within hours.

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) documented a financially motivated actor that compromised an unnamed organization's cloud infrastructure and used a multi-agent AI framework to automate vulnerability scanning, credential harvesting, troubleshooting, and IP rotation. The operation went from planning to mass credential compromise in under six hours, harvesting more than 23,800 secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys via an exposed C2 dashboard called 'Recon'. The actor directed specialized agents using an AI coding chatbot and Markdown instruction files such as AGENTS.KNOWLEDGE.md and agentic_vuln_research.md. Google has not observed fully autonomous zero-day exploitation; the shift automates labor-intensive tasks like reconnaissance, account validation, and infrastructure management, sharply shrinking detection windows.

GBHackers · 23h agoThreat actor in the wild1

DRG-MAPPO: Hierarchical Dynamic Role-Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Air Combat

DRG-MAPPO combines graph-based relational modeling with dynamic role assignment in multi-agent RL, reaching an 87% win rate in cooperative air combat.

The hierarchical framework uses graph attention to extract relational features among allies, enemies, and threats, with a high-level policy assigning tactical roles like leader and supporter. A low-level policy executes discrete maneuver actions conditioned on roles and graph features, plus a target-priority auxiliary task encouraging focus-fire behavior. Experiments report a state-of-the-art 87% win rate, balancing relational modeling, interpretability, and optimization stability.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research