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Exclusive: NSA to host a hacker reunion in bid to rebuild secretive unit

NSA will host a reunion of former Tailored Access Operations hackers as it moves to rebuild and rebrand the elite unit.

The invitation-only event at Fort Meade, spearheaded by Deputy Director Tim Kosiba, a former TAO technical director, will tour the new TAO building and pitch alumni to return. TAO, credited with contributions to Stuxnet and once grown to over 2,000 personnel, was renamed Computer Network Operations about a decade ago, and the recent reshuffle undid some of those changes after NSA lost roughly 2,100 staff (8% of its workforce) last year.

The Record · 20d agoIndustry

Quoting Terence Tao

Terence Tao warns AI agents racing to solve rumored open problems may incentivize researchers to hide directions, damaging open science.

Mathematician Terence Tao argues that fruitful open problems are being depleted non-renewably as AI-assisted effort floods any problem that gains attention. He observes that even rumors of someone working on a problem can trigger massive AI-powered effort to solve it before the original project matures. Tao warns this dynamic may push researchers to stop sharing promising directions, reversing centuries of open-science tradition.

Simon Willison · 7d agoAI industry

Leading mathematicians fear AI is making their field dumber, and warn the rest of us is next

Twenty-five Fields Medal winners, including Terence Tao, warn AI companies' benchmark-driven approach to mathematics is misaligned with the discipline's purpose of understanding.

In a joint statement, 25 Fields Medal winners including Terence Tao, Peter Scholze, and Maryna Viazovska warn that AI systems solving major open problems at machine speed undermine conceptual understanding and raise severe attribution and plagiarism questions. The statement lands amid a controversy accusing OpenAI of training math models to beat researchers to a rumored partial solution of a Millennium Prize Problem. The signatories describe a general threat to intellectual work across professions and call for urgent action by mathematicians, AI companies, and society, while not seeking a ban.

The Decoder · 4d agoAI industry1

Arrested man allegedly impersonated NSA elite hacking unit, Supreme Court chief justice

Colorado man Joshua Culver indicted for impersonating NSA's Tailored Access Operations chief and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in Indiana court cases.

Joshua Culver, also known as Maverick Young, was arrested in Colorado after a July Indiana indictment on four counts of falsely impersonating an officer of the court and one count of using a forged judge's signature. He allegedly posed as an NSA officer in September to pressure the Tippecanoe County sheriff's office, and later presented a forged document purportedly from the head of the Tailored Access Operations unit demanding case dismissal and warrant quashing. The indictment also alleges he used a forged signature of Chief Justice John Roberts on a dismissal order in Grant County, Indiana.

CyberScoop · 21d agoPolicy & legal2

A Misalignment of AI in Mathematics

25 Fields Medallists including Terence Tao issue a declaration warning that AI companies' benchmark-driven mathematics goals are misaligned with science and society.

Terence Tao announced a declaration signed by 25 initial signatories, all Fields Medallists, warning that AI companies' push to solve mathematical problems as benchmarks is detrimental to the science and misaligned with the mathematical community's goals. The signatories argue that rushed, headline-driven releases of LLM solutions to major problems raise attribution and plagiarism questions and could erode the human process that develops and transmits mathematical ideas. They frame the issue as a broader misalignment between AI outputs and the purpose of intellectual work, affecting other sciences and society at large. The declaration is posted on a public page, invites further signatures in the manner of the Leiden declaration, and has been covered by The Economist.

Hacker News · AIupdated · 4d agofirst · 4d agoAI safety & security 2 sourcesHN 98↑ · 50 comments1

GPT-6 Astra gives mathematicians a breather, and OpenAI says that's by design

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra tops ulam.ai's ErdosBench math benchmark with 106 of 226 problems solved, while the company prioritizes recursive self-improvement over math optimization.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra leads ulam.ai's ErdosBench with a score of 3.23, solving 106 of 226 open math problems and fully solving 43, ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol's 78 solved problems. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said OpenAI deliberately avoided targeted math optimization to prioritize recursive self-improvement and automated alignment research. Benchmark developer Przemek Chojecki estimated the gain at 5-10% across tested math-research skills. Mathematician Terence Tao warned at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians that AI-generated proofs could shift mathematics from proof scarcity to proof overload.

The Decoderupdated · 3d agofirst · 5d agoAI industry 10 sources1

OpenAI's millennium proof dispute raises the question of whether researchers can trust AI labs

Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of pressuring him and possibly training on his drafts amid OpenAI's race to claim a Navier-Stokes millennium proof.

OpenAI published a blog post and Sam Altman defended the team behind its AI-generated proof of the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem after mathematician Tristan Buckmaster accused the company of academic misconduct. Buckmaster and co-author Levent Alpöge, who works at Anthropic, allege OpenAI pressured Buckmaster, sidelined Alpöge, and may have trained on drafts they entered into OpenAI's systems. OpenAI acknowledges it cannot rule out that de-identified data from their product usage helped improve its models. Mathematician Terence Tao warned the episode could discourage researchers from sharing work, reversing centuries of open science.

The Decoderupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoAI industry 2 sources1

What OpenAI’s latest controversy tells us about the future of math

OpenAI says its agents solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Problem using an internal model, amid uncredited-work accusations from mathematicians Buckmaster and Alpöge.

OpenAI announced that its AI agents produced a proof that the full Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem can break down, using an internal model that outperforms the recently released Astra. NYU's Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent Alpöge had posted a proof for a simplified version the previous day after nearly a year of work with public OpenAI and Anthropic models. OpenAI denies using their transcripts or training on them; chief research officer Mark Chen reiterated the denial, and the company says it will not claim the $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute prize. The episode fuels debate over attribution norms as frontier labs concentrate mathematical breakthroughs.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 7d agoAI industry

Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users

OpenAI's Habitat online storage platform now handles over 70 million requests per second and 500 PB of data for 1 billion users.

OpenAI details the evolution of Habitat, its online storage platform backing ChatGPT and other products, which began in mid-2024 as a Python client-side library over Azure Cosmos DB. Habitat now processes more than 70 million requests per second, serves over 500 petabytes of data across nearly 40 geographic regions, and supports over 1 billion users weekly. By mid-2025 the client library approach became brittle, so OpenAI moved Habitat into a standalone service to centralize deployments, observability, and multi-tenancy reliability. This is part one of a two-part series; a future post will cover read optimization and scaling the Azure Cosmos DB partnership.

OpenAI News · 4d agoAI tools & infra1

Risky Bulletin: Two TeamPCP members arrested in Australia

Australian Federal Police arrested two alleged TeamPCP members behind supply-chain worm attacks that stole over 500,000 credentials from compromised open-source libraries.

The AFP arrested alleged TeamPCP leader Ruben Thomson, 21, and Louis Gaebler, 23, near Perth; both were charged and remain in custody. The group inserted a self-spreading credential-stealing worm into open-source projects including Trivy, KICS, LiteLLM, and Telnyx, harvesting more than 500,000 credentials used for network access, ransomware, extortion, and sales. About 78,000 tokens and secrets from nearly 2,200 organizations leaked online last month, and the FBI supported the investigation that began in April.

Risky Business News · 19d agoPolicy & legal in the wild1

Risky Bulletin: Russia starts blocking DoH and DoT

Russian users report blocks on DoH and DoT servers, including Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Google 8.8.8.8, in an apparent censorship crackdown.

Russian internet users began reporting failures connecting to DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS servers, suggesting a government crackdown on the two privacy protocols. The blocks reportedly cover Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Google's 8.8.8.8 resolvers; Roskomnadzor has not officially confirmed the action. The agency tested a similar block in March on Beeline's network and had named DoH for blocking as early as 2021. The bulletin also briefly notes state-sponsored phishing of EU officials, a DDoS against Norway's Digdir, the ReliaQuest/ShinyHunters dispute, and older ransomware and breach disclosures.

Risky Business News · 21d agoPolicy & legal1