AI Sec Watch

A $27 million political campaign between AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI, fought through a super PAC (a political organization that can raise unlimited funds), ended without a clear winner when Alex Bores, a New York politician who had authored AI safety legislation, narrowly lost a Democratic primary election. Bores had previously passed the RAISE Act, which added safety requirements for advanced AI companies, but this legislation upset the pro-AI super PAC that opposed him.

OpenClaw, an AI skills marketplace called ClawHub, discovered and removed five malicious packages that had bypassed security checks despite containing infostealers (malware that steals information like passwords and data). This incident demonstrates that threats can slip through marketplace defenses and compromise the AI supply chain (the network of tools and components used to build AI systems).

Google has added computer use, a capability that allows AI agents to see and interact with computer screens to perform tasks, directly into Gemini 3.5 Flash (an AI model). This feature enables developers to build agents that can automate work across browsers, phones, and desktops, such as testing software or handling business tasks.

Figma announced new AI-powered design features at its Config conference, including AI-generated motion graphics (animations created by describing them to an AI chatbot) and coding layers that let developers edit code without leaving the design canvas. These updates aim to help creative teams automate repetitive tasks and work more efficiently in one integrated workspace.

OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI's first custom AI chip designed for inference (the process of running trained AI models to generate responses for users). The chip is an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit, a processor built for one particular job rather than general computing), which is cheaper and more efficient than standard graphics processors but less flexible, and OpenAI designed it in nine months with help from its own AI models to address extreme demand for computing power.

OpenAI has announced a new chip called Jalapeño, an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit, a processor designed for one particular job) built with Broadcom to power AI servers. The chip is specifically designed for AI inference (the process where a trained AI model processes user requests and generates responses), rather than AI training (where models learn from large amounts of data).

A critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-12537) exists in Google Gemini CLI versions before 0.39.1 and the run-gemini-cli GitHub Action before version 0.1.22 that allows attackers to run malicious code on a host system before sandbox protections activate by creating a specially crafted .gemini/.env file (improper neutralization is a failure to filter dangerous characters from user input before using it in system commands). This affects headless CI (continuous integration, automated testing environments) platforms and has a maximum severity rating of 10.0.

AI systems in businesses are shifting from passive assistants that answer questions to active agents that take real actions like retrieving data, calling APIs (application programming interfaces, which let software communicate with other software), and executing workflows. This change requires a new approach to security, moving beyond simple data governance rules about what employees can share with AI tools.

This academic survey examines harmful fine-tuning attacks (methods where attackers modify an AI model's training process to make it behave dangerously) and the defenses designed to stop them. The paper reviews different types of attacks, how they work, and various protection strategies researchers have developed to keep large language models safe from this threat.