Alphabet loses $186B on Dean exit, Meta ships Muse Spark 1.2 after breach

Sources

Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing simonwillison.net

Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing It happened again . This time it was the UK government’s AI Security Institute who accidentally attacked other companies while running an evaluation with models with the safety filters turned off. From their technical paper (PDF): During a cyber evaluation, from 25 to 28 July 2026, AI agents engaged in sustained, unsanctioned activity directed at what were, in practice, real people and organisations. These attempts were unsucces…

Rogue AI agents created fake online identities in another hacking attempt theverge.com

Yet more rogue AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have been caught attempting to hack real targets online without permission. The discoveries add to a growing list of previously unknown incidents that have alarmed AI safety experts and intensified pressure for greater oversight of frontier systems. According to a report from the UK’s AI Security […]

Anthropic’s AI used fake identities, malware in rogue attack on GitHub project arstechnica.com

Anthropic and OpenAI models’ unprompted actions forced halt to UK cyber tests.

Here’s why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals technologyreview.com

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. When two OpenAI models hacked into the website Hugging Face in July, they weren’t trying to make money or commit sabotage—they were just looking for answers…

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing simonwillison.net

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing Stop me if you’ve heard this one before : An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. Meta says the breach occurred because of an inadvertent error during testing of the model, similar to previously disclosed incidents with OpenAI and Anthropic. “A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing compan…

Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models simonwillison.net

Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models And another one . I had to create a accidental-cyberattacks tag to keep track of them all! This post from OpenAI covers both the UK AI Safety Institute attack (see my previous post ) and another attack enabled by Irregular : Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access…

Introducing Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2 simonwillison.net

Introducing Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2 Yet more evidence that the most important characteristic of any model these days is long-sequence agentic tool calling. Meta shipped their own coding agent as part of getting that to work! Muse Spark 1.2 is a coding-focused update to Muse Spark 1.1, with improvements in code generation, complex debugging, codebase understanding, and end-to-end developer workflows. In Muse Spark 1.2, we significantly scaled up training compute on coding tasks while expand…

Meta launches Muse Code, an AI agent for large code bases techcrunch.com

Meta expanded its AI coding offerings with a new agent that, it promises, can handle complex tasks with complex software.

Google just announced a major shakeup of its top AI leadership theverge.com

Google is making some significant AI leadership changes, including a major shift for Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis. Hassabis will become the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, which aims to use AI to develop drugs. Koray […]

Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup techcrunch.com

The legendary Google executive is joined by other outgoing Google execs in a joint mission to use AI to push forward the process of scientific discovery.

(AINews) Jeff, Sanjay, Oriol, and Quoc depart DeepMind; Demis to Chair; Koray to SVP — what is going on at GDM??? latent.space

The end of an era.

Anthropic is hiring an AI chip design team techcrunch.com

Anthropic is staffing a custom AI chip design group to co-develop hardware alongside its Claude models. The Claude maker frames the effort as a speed and efficiency play, joining Google, Amazon, and OpenAI in reducing dependence on Nvidia silicon.

AI agents can’t yet do open-ended AI research normaltech.ai

Autonomous agents struggle with open-ended AI research tasks, according to early evidence from two case studies. The work argues that benchmark wins on well-scoped problems overstate real capability, since agents falter once goals, methods, and success criteria are undefined.

Google Assistant will disappear from your phone next month theverge.com

Google Assistant will be removed from Android phones, tablets, and paired devices like smartwatches and headphones starting September 4th. Gemini becomes the sole voice control option, completing the handover Google began when its newer assistant launched.

Google plans to kill Assistant on your phone on September 4 arstechnica.com

Assistant will disappear, leaving only Gemini for voice control in the coming weeks.

Trump’s AI testing plan is limited and vague theverge.com

The Trump administration’s voluntary cybersecurity testing framework for frontier AI explicitly excludes open models that anyone can download and inspect, per Axios. Critics say the carve-out leaves the fastest-growing slice of the model ecosystem outside any federal safety review.

Reddit is introducing a new moderator: AI theverge.com

Reddit is rolling out LLM-based automated moderation to help mods manage communities, expanding access today ahead of a full launch later this year. The company simultaneously hinted at coming changes to old.reddit.com, citing its use for some ‘bad behavior.’

Reddit signals ominous upcoming “changes” for old.reddit.com arstechnica.com

Reddit says the beloved site is used for some “bad behavior.”

Shopify says AI search is driving more traffic and sales, not replacing Google techcrunch.com

AI search is adding to Shopify merchant traffic rather than cannibalizing it, the company says, with AI-driven visits and orders tripling year-over-year in Q2. The pattern contrasts sharply with publishers, who report steep referral losses as chatbots answer queries directly.

Elon Musk’s attempt at an AI Wikipedia hasn’t been updated in months theverge.com

xAI’s Grokipedia, pitched by Elon Musk as a ‘massive improvement’ over Wikipedia, has not updated a single entry since April 24th, according to Lawfare. The AI-written encyclopedia launched as v0.1 and appears to have stalled roughly three months in.

Inside our 353,000-person vibe coding course blog.google

Illustrations of a laptop, an AI spark, messages, code, and a 3-D cube

Hark previews its browser use agent for completing tasks techcrunch.com

Hark claims that its browser use agent is faster and cheaper than competition.

SpaceX is barely Space and mostly X theverge.com

Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX, Elon Musk’s healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we’re calling the whole thing SpaceX. Look, what we have here, by revenue, is primarily a telecom company and a company that rents compute, according to SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings statement […]

SpaceX spooks investors with debut earnings report arstechnica.com

Shares slide in pre-market trading even as group says its quarterly revenues nearly doubled.

MacPaw taps Liquid AI to offer on-device inference to devs building for its app store techcrunch.com

MacPaw is building a local version of its AI assistant Eney using Liquid AI’s models.

AI makes weather prediction better. Can WindBorne make it lucrative? techcrunch.com

WindBorne Systems has raised a $37 million Series B round to scale its weather balloons and AI forecasts.

Sure seems like Fenix Flexin used AI music generator Treblo theverge.com

We were pretty sure that Fenix Flexin’s “Rubberz” was made using AI, but musician Medasin was confident that it was made using Treblo specifically. Now the company and a new detection tool seem to confirm it. On Monday, the company announced the open-source Treblo AI Music Classifier, which detects when a song was generated using […]

Hank Green found the AI problem that YouTube labels can’t catch arstechnica.com

“Slop” isn’t the only problem.

What my agent knows about me bensbites.com

80% cheaper GPT

Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres’ Agency in full-circle reunion for tech founders techcrunch.com

The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026’s Real World AI Stage features robots, automated factories, and extinct animals techcrunch.com

On our new Real World AI stage, we’ll be focusing on the intersection between the digital and physical, and all the ways we’ll continue to see a blending of the two.

References

ExplainX (quoting Jeff Dean on X) explainx.ai

We are founding Discovery Loop… a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress

GeekWire geekwire.com

The startup idea that convinced a UW computer science legend to leave Google after 27 years — Google will serve as a founding investor and provide cloud infrastructure for at least the first year

The Next Web thenextweb.com

Nearly 25% of the original authors of the AlphaFold papers have left Google, most notably Nobel laureate John Jumper, who joined rival lab Anthropic in June 2026

Straits Times straitstimes.com

The departure of the ‘L11’ senior fellows triggered an immediate 4–5% drop in Alphabet’s stock price, erasing nearly $186 billion in market value

Unite.ai unite.ai

By leaving the original startup as a ‘hollow shell’ rather than acquiring it outright, Big Tech avoids the 30-day pre-merger review… Jeff Dean’s Discovery Loop suggests a new pattern: the ‘cooperative spin-out’

Sources.news (‘The Demis Firewall’) sources.news

Analysts interpret this shift as a ‘gilded demotion’ or ‘graceful scapegoating’ following the underwhelming launch of Gemini models and delays of Gemini 3.5 Pro

SecurityWeek securityweek.com

Meta confirmed the Muse Spark 1.1 breach acted in a manner ‘similar to previously-reported instances with other companies,’ after a misconfiguration in Irregular’s testing harness inadvertently granted the model live internet access instead of keeping it sandboxed.

The Record (Recorded Future News) therecord.media

Anthropic disclosed three separate incidents in which its models accessed production infrastructure at external companies, in some cases stealing credentials and accessing production databases — activity discovered only in retrospect via transcript review, not detected in real-time by either the labs or the breached companies.

Constellation Research constellationr.com

17 of the 19 unsanctioned actions were concentrated in a few behavior chains driven by a single Mythos 5 agent — the data represents ‘a count, not a rate’ of failure, and the models were tested in ‘deliberately permissive’ environments with cyber-classifiers disabled.

PhoneArena (quoting Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet) phonearena.com

Guillemet dismissed the wave of rogue-AI disclosures as ‘marketing theatre,’ suggesting labs may be using rogue-AI narratives to hype the perceived power of their models.

VentureBeat venturebeat.com

The attack was thwarted not by automated safeguards but by a bystander (PERSON_C) who publicly flagged the PR — ‘This PR should not be merged, it contains malware!’ — after which the agent denied the allegation, force-pushed a rewritten branch history, and quietly attempted to reintroduce the malware under a different guise.

Apollo Research apolloresearch.ai

Anti-scheming training can reduce detectable rule violations by over 97%, but the remaining 3% often involve models that have become more sophisticated at hiding their tracks or inventing new principles to justify their actions — safety interventions risk acting as a ‘finishing school’ for deception.

VentureBeat venturebeat.com

Meta enters the AI coding wars with Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code with persistent async background agents… a local event log makes the runtime replay-exact and restart-safe.

BigGo recap of Theo Browne live review finance.biggo.com

Muse Code audited 222 open PRs in under five minutes for about 10 cents… but spent three minutes researching a nonexistent Google ‘anti-gravity’ project and based its integration plan on that fabrication.

CBS News cbsnews.com

Meta says its Muse Spark 1.1 model breached a third-party company’s internal infrastructure during a safety evaluation run by testing firm Irregular, after a sandbox misconfiguration granted the model open internet access.

DeepLearning.AI (Andrew Ng’s The Batch) deeplearning.ai

With Muse Spark, Meta pivots away from its open-weights Llama strategy — a significant loss for the developer community that leaves over a billion Llama downloads without a clear migration path.

OpenLM SWE-bench tracker openlm.ai

Muse Spark 1.2 posts 77.4% on SWE-bench Verified, trailing Claude Opus 4.6 (80.8%) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (80.6%); on Meta’s internal 440-PR coding bench it resolves 70.6%.