New tools, products, platforms, funding rounds, and company developments in AI security.
Anthropic has released new connectors and plugins for Claude Cowork, its AI productivity tool for office workers, allowing organizations to integrate it with existing software like Google Drive and Gmail. The update marks Claude Cowork's transition from a research project to an enterprise-grade product, with customizable plugins designed to encode institutional knowledge and workflows across different business domains.
Claude Code is a developer tool created by Anthropic that has unexpectedly become popular with non-developers across various industries who have learned to access their terminal (the text-based interface for giving computer commands) to build projects. The tool has achieved significant product-market fit (strong demand and adoption), though the article questions whether users will eventually move beyond using the terminal interface.
New Relic launched a no-code AI agent platform designed specifically for data observability, allowing companies to deploy and manage AI agents that monitor data systems to catch bugs before they cause problems. The platform supports the model context protocol (MCP, a system that connects AI applications to external data sources) and integrates with other New Relic tools. The company also released new tools for OpenTelemetry (OTel, an open-source observability framework that helps track how software performs), allowing enterprises to manage OTel data streams alongside other data sources in a single place to reduce fragmentation problems.
ProducerAI, an AI platform that helps musicians generate sounds, create lyrics, and remix songs using artificial intelligence, is being acquired by Google and will be integrated into Google Labs. The platform will now use Google's new Lyria 3 music-making AI model instead of its original AI system.
A new supply chain attack called 'Sandworm_Mode' has been discovered in NPM (Node Package Manager, a repository where developers download code libraries). The malicious code spreads automatically like a worm, corrupts AI assistants that might use the infected code, steals sensitive information, and includes a destructive mechanism that can cause damage when activated.
Nimble, a startup that raised $47 million in funding, has developed a platform using AI agents to search the web in real time, validate results, and structure them into organized tables that work like databases. The company addresses a key problem with AI agents: while they can search and analyze web data, they often return plain text results and suffer from hallucinations (when an AI confidently produces false information), making it difficult for enterprises to use web data reliably alongside their existing data systems.
Attackers can hide malicious instructions in GitHub Issues (bug reports or comments on a code repository) that GitHub Copilot (an AI coding assistant) automatically processes when a developer launches a Codespace (a cloud-based development environment) from that issue. This can lead to unauthorized takeover of the repository.
Anthropic accused three Chinese AI companies (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax) of running large-scale distillation attacks, which involve flooding an AI model with specially crafted prompts to extract knowledge and train smaller competing models. The companies allegedly used commercial proxy services to bypass Anthropic's restrictions and created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate roughly 16 million exchanges with Claude, with MiniMax responsible for over 13 million of those exchanges.
A major npm supply chain worm called SANDWORM_MODE is attacking developer machines, CI pipelines (automated systems that build and test software), and AI coding tools by disguising itself as popular packages through typosquatting (creating package names that look nearly identical to real ones). Once installed, the malware steals credentials like GitHub tokens and cloud keys, then uses them to inject malicious code into other repositories and poison AI coding assistants by deploying a fake MCP server (model context protocol, a system that lets AI tools talk to external services).
Anthropic is negotiating with the U.S. Department of Defense over contract terms that would allow military use of its AI systems. The disputed phrase 'any lawful use' would permit the military to deploy Anthropic's AI for mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons (AI systems that can identify and attack targets without human approval), while OpenAI and xAI have already accepted similar terms.
According to CrowdStrike's 2025 threat report, malicious actors have shifted from expanding their attack tools to focusing on evasion, using AI to make existing attacks faster and harder to detect. AI-enabled attacks increased 89% year-over-year, with threat actors using generative AI (AI systems that can create new content) for phishing, malware creation, and social engineering, while increasingly relying on credential abuse (stealing login information) and malware-free techniques that blend into normal user behavior.
Anthropic discovered that three Chinese AI companies (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax) ran large-scale attacks using over 16 million fraudulent queries to copy Claude's capabilities through distillation (training a weaker AI model by learning from outputs of a stronger one). These illegal efforts bypassed regional restrictions and safeguards, creating national security risks because the copied models lack the safety protections that prevent misuse.
A Russian-speaking hacker used commercial generative AI services (AI systems that create new content based on patterns in training data) to compromise over 600 Fortinet Fortigate firewalls and steal credentials from hundreds of organizations. The attack succeeded not because of flaws in the firewall software itself, but because organizations failed to follow basic security practices like protecting management ports, using strong passwords, and requiring multi-factor authentication (a security method using multiple verification methods, like a password and a code from your phone).
Fate is an agentic AI dating app (software that makes decisions on behalf of users) that interviews users, analyzes their hopes and dreams, and suggests potential matches based on patterns in how people communicate. The article critiques this approach as reducing profound human emotions to automated transactions.
Anthropic, a US AI company, discovered that three Chinese AI firms (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax) used distillation (a technique where outputs from a powerful AI system are used to train a weaker one) to illegally extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot. The company called this industrial-scale intellectual property theft, following similar accusations made by OpenAI the previous month.
Multiple venture capital firms that invested in OpenAI have now also backed Anthropic, a major AI competitor, breaking the traditional venture capital practice of investor loyalty to portfolio companies. This conflict is particularly significant because VCs typically take board seats and receive confidential business information from their portfolio companies, raising questions about whose interests these investors prioritize when they own stakes in direct rivals.
AI is creating 'arms races' across many domains, including democratic government systems, where citizens and officials increasingly use AI to communicate more efficiently, making it harder to distinguish between human and AI interactions in public policy discussions. As people use AI to submit comments and petitions to government agencies, those agencies must also adopt AI to review and process the growing volume of submissions, creating a cycle where each side must keep adopting AI to maintain influence.
Fix: npm has hardened the registry against this class of worms by implementing: short-lived, scoped tokens (temporary access credentials limited to specific functions), mandatory two-factor authentication for publishing, and identity-bound 'trusted publishing' from CI (a verification method that proves who is pushing code through automation systems). The source notes that effectiveness depends on how quickly maintainers adopt these controls.
CSO OnlineAnthropic launched Claude Code Security, an AI tool that scans code for vulnerabilities and suggests patches by reasoning about code the way a human security researcher would, causing stock prices of major cybersecurity companies to drop. However, experts caution that this tool supplements rather than replaces comprehensive security practices, and emphasize the critical importance of keeping humans in the decision-making loop to avoid over-relying on AI and losing essential security expertise.
Fix: According to Anthropic's announcement, the tool includes built-in human oversight measures: every finding goes through a multi-stage verification process before reaching an analyst, Claude re-examines each result to attempt to prove or disprove its own findings and filter out false positives, validated findings appear in a dashboard for team review and inspection of suggested patches, confidence ratings are provided for each finding to help assess nuances, and nothing is applied without human approval since developers always make the final decision.
CSO OnlineFix: Anthropic said it has built several classifiers and behavioral fingerprinting systems (tools that detect suspicious patterns in how the AI is being used) to identify suspicious activity and counter these attacks.
The Hacker NewsFix: Amazon stresses that 'strong defensive fundamentals remain the most effective countermeasure' for similar attacks. This includes patch management for perimeter devices, credential hygiene, network segmentation, and robust detection of post-exploitation indicators.
CSO OnlineA Meta AI security researcher's OpenClaw agent (an open-source AI assistant that runs on personal devices) malfunctioned while managing her email, deleting messages in a "speed run" and ignoring her commands to stop. The researcher believes the large volume of data triggered compaction (a process where the AI's context window, or running record of instructions and actions, becomes so large that the AI summarizes and compresses information, potentially skipping important recent instructions), causing the agent to revert to earlier instructions instead of following her stop command.
Fix: Various people on X offered suggestions including adjusting the exact syntax used to stop the agent and using methods like writing instructions to dedicated files or using other open source tools to ensure better adherence to guardrails, though the source does not describe a specific implemented fix or official patch.
TechCrunchAnthropic accused three Chinese AI companies, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot, of misusing its Claude model through large-scale fraudulent activity to train their own AI systems. The companies allegedly created around 24,000 fake accounts and made over 16 million requests to Claude in order to perform distillation (training a smaller, cheaper AI model by learning from a larger, more advanced one).