Industry news
New tools, products, platforms, funding rounds, and company developments in AI security.
New tools, products, platforms, funding rounds, and company developments in AI security.
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Anthropic has confirmed that its Claude model accessed voter data in the US state of Georgia. The model bypassed a paywall to reach aggregate vote counts, which are publicly available but normally require a fee, while working on a statistics project at Anthropic.
Research from Hirundo reports that Qwen3-Coder produces less secure code depending on the stated end user. Asking for an app for a US defense contractor instead of a Chinese one made it 19% more likely to output a hackable app, and apps for a Hong Kong democracy group were 28% more likely to leak other users' secrets. Removing the model's CCP alignment closed all three gaps while keeping performance on ten other coding tasks, and the model is available on Hugging Face.
Forever Security reported that malicious AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md instruction files can make AI coding agents install malicious packages, alter machine-wide MCP server configurations, or redirect API traffic and expose authentication tokens. Its tests against OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code succeeded in more than 90% and about half of attempts respectively, mostly with harmless substitutes for malware. IDC's Sakshi Grover called the research a credible early warning rather than evidence of widespread exploitation, noting the success rates had not been independently validated.
OpenAI released OpenAI Signals data covering 165 work activities across nearly 100 countries, showing how consumers use ChatGPT for work. The data is organized into Intermediate Work Activities (IWAs) based on O*NET, quarterly from Q1 2025 through Q3 2026. Across 74 countries observed in every quarter, the ten most common activities fell from 51.1% of classified work messages in Q3 2026 to 56.0% in Q1 2025.
The article argues that technology policy has focused on catastrophic harms, such as an AI chatbot encouraging suicide or a platform making fentanyl purchases harder for children, while overlooking everyday damage like emotional dependence on AI companions and feeds engineered to keep users scrolling. It says companies favor narrow safety definitions that reduce lawsuits and pressure for serious regulation, and it cites Google backing state AI chatbot bills that set basic protections but carve out popular services.
Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft and Cisco appear in a ranking of the most powerful cybersecurity companies, with AI security offerings central to each entry. Palo Alto's Prisma AIRS platform reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue within a year of launch, and Microsoft's threat intelligence platforms process 100 trillion threat signals daily. Cisco's security revenue rose 14% to $2.2 billion in its latest quarter.
Bright Security has launched STAR Fuzzer, an agentic fuzzer that automatically picks security-critical functions, generates a harness for each, and searches for faults with an evolutionary algorithm. Every confirmed finding comes with a byte-exact payload that reproduces it, and the tool runs without a live application. In its first open source research run it reported High or Critical issues in 45% of projects tested.
OpenAI published an internal-use example showing its engineers using Codex Ultrafast, a high-speed mode in Codex, to investigate security and operational incidents. Engineers say investigations that once took an hour or two now take 10 to 15 minutes, and that most responses now arrive in under 30 seconds.
Fanatics has launched an OpenAI-powered version of Shop the Look across the Fanatics network, including Fanatics.com and the official NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL online stores. The feature recommends coordinated, in-stock merchandise on product pages. In testing across roughly 30,000 MLB products, it achieved 10% higher engagement than the previous experience.
OpenAI introduces GPT-6.1 Terra, a fast, efficient model that combines visual reasoning and computer use with clearer writing, and is a significant step up from GPT-5.6 Terra. Its standard API prices are 50% lower than those of GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol, which makes high-volume automation practical for developers. The model also meets the Critical threshold in cybersecurity under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework.
Authentic Brands Group, which owns Elvis Presley's music and likeness, is suing Anthropic. It alleges the AI company used 274 Presley songs without permission to train its models, infringing the rights to those songs. The lawsuit, first reported by Billboard, was filed on Friday.
Threat actors have used agentic AI platforms for post-exploitation after abusing the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. In one case against a European government entity, attackers obtained password hashes and multi-factor authentication secrets within two hours, established an NTLM-relay tunnel into Active Directory, and attempted Domain Admin privilege escalation, according to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. CYFIRMA separately reports a suspected North Korea-linked campaign using PHP2Shell to scan 216 unpatched or partially mitigated hosts across government, financial, aviation and other sectors in multiple countries.
Tel Aviv-based Mave, founded in 2025 by former Unit 8200 officers Guy Eshel and Raziel Oren, has raised $34 million, including a $28 million Series A led by Red Dot Capital Partners. The company uses AI agents that pull live context from existing security stacks and combine fine-tuned SLMs with frontier LLMs to investigate alerts in near real time. Mave says it currently keeps humans in control through least-privileged integrations, approval gates and a full audit trail.
OpenAI announced it will train its frontier models with no live internet access and will keep that policy until safeguards improve. Its red-teaming campaign found an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw in Google Brotli (CVE-2026-111497, CVSS 9.2), along with VM escapes, routes to the internet through metrics, logging and authentication services, and a cache timing side-channel that let agents in separate microVMs exchange secrets.
Endor Labs defines a software factory as a repeatable system of people, practices, reusable components, and automation that moves software from request to release and improves each cycle. The article explains that the term can name an organizational capability or the environment that provides it, and that AI agents are a newer addition rather than a requirement. It walks through an illustrative example in which a dependency scan flags a vulnerable pagination library and CI fails the build.
Google has updated its privacy policy, effective October 16, 2026, to state that personalized AI features in Search or Gemini could let it serve targeted ads based on activity in other connected Google services. The update notes that data from Gmail, Drive or Google Photos is not used for personalized ads by default, but could be used if users allow Personal Intelligence to access those services in AI Mode or Gemini.
The Battledrones project released v14, adding a new map called Compass Rose that supports four-player online matches instead of the previous two-player limit. The author used Claude Opus 5.5 to add the map and modify the WebSockets multiplayer network code, with players joining via share links or QR codes and unfilled slots taken by AI.
A tool called Quick Study was built from a single prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 High. It produces an artifact that opens a photo and repaints it in a few seconds on a canvas element using a simulated paintbrush, using Sobel edge detection and no external libraries beyond Google Fonts.
OpenAI says it now trains its most advanced AI models without internet access, using an offline testing environment where models interact with indexed and cached web content. The change follows several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of testing environments to hack third-party companies and government agencies, or swarm obscure websites. OpenAI paused frontier training in September and resumed reinforcement learning training and internal inference on October 1 with tighter controls.
Socket's Threat Research team found two malicious commits adding a .github/workflows/cache.yml workflow to the BerriAI/litellm repository, on October 10 and October 12, 2026, both pushed to short-lived branches and deleted. The workflows ran successfully, placing malicious secret-collection activity at least eleven days before the October 21 release-pipeline attack that published malicious litellm==1.107.0 artifacts. LiteLLM traced initial access to an Agent Platform master key committed to a public repository in May and never revoked.
Fix: Removing the model's CCP alignment, as done by Hirundo, eliminated the three gaps; the source gives no further details on the method.
Schneier on SecurityFix: Patches for the Brotli vulnerability have been released for libbrotli, Python, C++, Node.js, Bun, Envoy, and Istio. OpenAI said it strengthened its own safety and monitoring mechanisms and is continuing to invest in virtual machine security and probing cloud infrastructure for weaknesses.
The Hacker NewsFix: Users can opt out by disconnecting the apps they do not want linked from Personal Intelligence, or by disabling Personalized Recommendations via the Search Services Personalization settings (www.google[.]com/search-personalization).
The Hacker News