AI Sec Watch

Elon Musk, who cofounded OpenAI but left after not becoming CEO, is suing the company and Sam Altman in a trial starting April 27th in Oakland, California. The lawsuit centers on claims that OpenAI committed fraud, though it also involves broader allegations of breach of contract and unfair business practices. This legal case is primarily about the conflict between Musk and Altman over control of the AI company.

AI agents create a security challenge called the 'Authority Gap' because they inherit permissions from the humans and systems that activate them, rather than having their own independent authority. The article argues that enterprises cannot safely govern AI agents unless they first reduce 'identity dark matter' (hidden credentials and unmanaged permissions scattered across systems) in their traditional users and software, and then use continuous observability (real-time monitoring of who is doing what) to dynamically control what authority agents receive based on who is delegating to them and the context of their actions.

Microsoft has released a new policy setting called RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp that allows IT administrators to uninstall Copilot (an AI-powered digital assistant) from enterprise Windows devices, available after the April 2026 Patch Tuesday security update. The policy can be deployed through Group Policy or Policy CSP (configuration service provider, a system for managing Windows settings remotely) on devices managed by Microsoft Intune or SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager, enterprise management tools), and applies only to Windows 11 version 25H2 where users haven't launched Copilot in the last 28 days. Users can still reinstall Copilot if they choose to after it is uninstalled by the policy.

The Trump administration is announcing plans to prevent foreign companies, especially those in China, from using 'model extraction attacks' (techniques that steal capabilities from U.S.-made AI systems by training weaker AI models on the outputs of stronger ones) to copy American AI innovations. The administration says it will work with U.S. AI companies to identify these extraction activities, build defenses, and punish offenders, while Congress is also proposing legislation to identify and sanction foreign actors who extract features from closed-source U.S. AI models.

Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a preview of its new V4 model, which is open-source (publicly available code that anyone can use and modify) and claims to match the performance of closed-source (proprietary, not publicly available) AI systems from US companies like OpenAI and Google. The V4 model shows major improvements in coding tasks, which are important for AI agents (AI systems that can take actions independently), and works well with Chinese chip technology from Huawei.

Cohere, a Canadian AI company, announced plans to acquire German AI company Aleph Alpha to expand in Europe, with Aleph Alpha's backer Schwarz Group investing $600 million in Cohere's upcoming funding round. The acquisition aims to combine both companies' strengths to offer sovereign AI (customized AI systems that keep data and control within a specific country or region) to regulated sectors like government, finance, and defense, while giving European organizations alternatives to relying on single AI providers. The deal is expected to close in 2026, pending regulatory approval.

Copperhelm, an Israel-based startup, raised $7 million to develop an agentic cloud security platform, which uses AI agents (autonomous software programs that can make decisions and take actions independently) to monitor cloud environments, investigate threats, and automatically fix security problems in real time. The platform uses a proprietary component called Context Lake to help AI agents understand cloud data and make accurate security decisions, while keeping human security teams in control of the process. This approach is positioned as an alternative to manual cloud security work that typically requires large engineering teams.

A serious flaw in LMDeploy (an open-source toolkit for deploying language models) called CVE-2026-33626 was exploited by attackers within 13 hours of being made public. The vulnerability is a server-side request forgery (SSRF, a weakness where a server is tricked into making requests to internal systems it shouldn't access) in the image-loading function that fails to block requests to private IP addresses, potentially letting attackers steal cloud credentials and access internal networks.

DeepSeek released two new preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, which use a Mixture of Experts architecture (a design where only some parts of the model activate for each task) and support 1 million token context (the amount of text the model can consider at once). These models are significantly cheaper than competitors like GPT and Claude, with DeepSeek-V4-Flash costing $0.14 per million input tokens compared to $0.20 for GPT-5.4 Nano, because DeepSeek focused on efficiency improvements that reduced computational requirements.