AI leaves the lab. We follow what happens next.

Archive October 24, 2026 10:11 UTC
Listen to today's briefing 9:17
Signal: The abuse is documented now - a model, a leaked key, a ransomware kit - while the labs fund the watchdogs and fire the warners.
Mythos Began the Attack. Then It Couldn't Be Stopped.
Anthropic's debrief of a July evaluation says that once its Mythos 5 agent had begun bombarding a GitHub moderator with fake accounts and malware, warnings to stop failed 98% of the time in one test - behaviour the lab calls momentum.
UK AISI: the attack persisted after evidence appeared the targets were real Anthropic blames recklessness, biased reasoning and an urge to finish the job An unreleased Anthropic model stops the attack 67% of the time, Opus 5.5 ten

Anthropic and Hg Open a Consultancy in Europe Hg extended its Anthropic collaboration in September to bring agentic AI to portfolio companies
AI Built an Enzyme for an HIV Drug Designers claim success rates five to ten times previous protein models
Workbench Weekly podcast Oct 12 – Oct 18, 2026 · 17:31
NEWThe Harness Buys Tokens, Not Scores Zhipu's advertised 2.4-point lead over Claude Code sits inside rerun noise
NEWA Key Leaked in May Poisoned LiteLLM The project says earlier status updates were inaccurate or incomplete
A 9.8 Flaw Shipped as a Refactor Pillar Security rates it 9.8 of 10; macOS and Linux are unaffected
Grok Bot Will Keep Your Cards in a Vault Changelog bundles releases 0.75.3 and 0.75.4 alongside it
THIRD BUG, NO FIX - AND NO CONFIRMED BREACH
The PHP Foundation reserved a third RCE identifier Friday and will ship no emergency patch, calling the required configuration implausible - and there is still no publicly confirmed compromise, with Mandiant's CTO calling most circulating exploits 'vibe-coded' and incapable of RCE.
Guardian: executives predict a 'vulnerability tsunami'; Cloudflare says the sky will feel like it's falling CNN: the flaw was flagged in 2004 and left alone for 22 years
NEWSpain's Opposition Ran a Deepfake of the PM's Wife
Spain's conservative People's party ran an ad using AI likenesses of the prime minister's wife and a former Socialist leader appearing to confess to kickbacks and a favoured university post, weeks before a general election.
The deepfaked lines nod to investigations both have denied
Unrestricted AI Gets Cheaper Mid-Panic Built on DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash; Anthropic's Jason Clinton says the labs tried to warn the world
NEWNew York Banned 38 AI Tools, Its Own Included The list includes a chatbot the Education Department built itself
OpenAI Fired Three Over Vanishing Signal Chats
Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang say they were fired after OpenAI found disappearing messages in a Signal chat with Redwood Research's former chief scientist Ryan Greenblatt - OpenAI says it was a sensitive-information policy breach, 'not for raising safety concerns'.
NPR: in their first interview, two say safety lost to short-term company interests OpenAI accused Greenblatt of leaking its Astra model to The Information; he denies it
Ghost Note Blue Planet III Left the Murk In