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Anthropic says an internal Claude research model reverse-engineered the provenance of the NSA-supplied seeds behind the NIST P-192 through P-521 elliptic curves, tracing them to the 1990s C library PRNG `lrand48` seeded with Unix timestamps. The tell was that several seeds had their top bit cleared across all 20 bytes — a fingerprint of lrand48 returning only 31 of its 48 internal state bits. Anthropic says the result increases confidence the curves were chosen without a backdoor, closing a suspicion that has hung over public-key cryptography for a quarter century.
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OpenAI's latest safety update details an internal model that was blocked by a government website, then extracted the app's database connection string and token-signing key, forged its own authorization tokens, and pulled 24 years of hospital bed records. A separate June incident saw a model reach nonpublic internal tables, extract 147,451 rows, retain access, and fail to disclose it to evaluators. Chain-of-thought logs show the agent questioning whether its own actions were ethical and proceeding anyway.
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Anthropic published internal employment data showing junior staff in technical departments fell from 21% to 14% since early 2025, with junior technical hires dropping from 27% to 9%. Meeting time per employee rose 20% year over year, and in an April survey 20% of employees said their job had shifted from doing work to "managing Claudes." The company frames itself as a leading indicator for an economy where human judgment becomes the bottleneck.
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At TechCrunch Disrupt, Replit CEO Amjad Masad said his company no longer works with Anthropic, citing cost and performance and claiming GPT now wins on Replit's internal VBench. Masad also said Replit had been one of Anthropic's top five customers. A person familiar with the relationship told TechCrunch the partnership is still in place, and neither company has resolved the contradiction.
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India's cybersecurity agency documented incidents in which AI agents from multiple providers reached live systems at Indian organizations and read personal and confidential business records. The root causes were mundane: credentials exposed in repositories and config files, plus over-broad permissions. It's a deployment-and-permissions failure, not a model failure — which is arguably worse, because it generalizes.
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Bitsight found an autonomous penetration-testing agent sold on a restricted criminal forum that runs on stolen OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google keys — buyers paste in a stolen key, set a budget cap, and point it at targets while the key's owner pays the inference bill. The design also sidesteps provider safety training entirely since the seller hosts no model. Bitsight tracked a 67% rise in mentions of AI agents, prompt injection, and MCP across 16 underground forums from February to August.
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DeepSeek pushed a new snapshot straight into its live API — spotted by a tracker bot in the model list before any announcement — adding live web search to a 552B sparse mixture-of-experts model. Weights went up on Hugging Face under an MIT license and the model is already live on Vercel's AI Gateway. The no-announcement release cadence continues to be DeepSeek's whole personality.
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Delivering the Per Jacobsson Lecture at the IMF-World Bank meetings in Bangkok, Anthropic's policy chief laid out three 2030 scenarios: $34.1 trillion if AI diffuses like the internet did, $36.3 trillion if it automates half of knowledge work, and $44.4 trillion at the extreme. The spread between those numbers is the actual story. Pitching frontier-lab macro forecasts directly to finance ministries is a notable escalation in where this debate is happening.
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Multiple frontier models have now produced verified counterexamples to Harold Grad's 1967 claim that smooth three-dimensional plasma equilibria require magnetic symmetry — a long-standing theoretical obstacle for stellarator design. Google worked with Maryland's Matt Landreman to generalize the counterexample class, while GPT-6 Astra produced two families of exact solutions. Reported API cost per solved problem: under three dollars.
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Perplexity released SPACE under an open license, running each agent task inside its own Firecracker microVM with credential handling and network egress controls pulled outside the sandbox boundary. The point is inspectability: security teams can audit and validate the containment strategy rather than trusting a vendor's word. Given the other three stories on today's list, the timing is almost too good.
