The Guardrails - SiliconNoon (Page 13)

The Guardrails

Richard Gere's Tibet group was a target of the AI spy op Anthropic stopped

Anthropic's biggest espionage takedown just got a famous face, Europe's drone money closed at a $6.4 billion valuation, and the smartest bed you can buy learned some new senses. Three stories, three altitudes. When Anthropic published its threat-intelligence report earlier this month, the document named its targets. One of them reads like a casting decision — because he is one. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published today, actor Richard Gere writes that the International Campaign for Tibet, t

The Guardrails

Europe's DARPA clones put €40M into AI that designs chips

Europe's answer to Nvidia just got a budget line. NADI, the Netherlands' brand-new DARPA-style agency, and Germany's SPRIND are putting €40 million into a challenge that pays small teams to let AI design the chips AI itself runs on. The program is the first outing for NADI — the National Agency for Disruptive Innovation — which the Dutch government only stood up this month with €500 million in seed funding announced on Prinsjesdag. Together with Germany's SPRIND, the federal leap-agency that no

The Guardrails

Meta tested Muse calls that humans made, not the AI

Internal Meta posts show the company quietly tested a "human concierge" feature for its Muse agent — real people in call centers placing the phone calls the assistant was supposed to make — then pulled it after employees pushed back. Reuters and 404 Media each saw the internal posts independently. Meta confirmed the test and the rollback, and framed it as feedback-gathering. The mechanics, per Reuters, which first saw internal company posts on the feature: when Muse enabled calling for half of

The Guardrails

Shenzhen's AI court assistant has handled 600,000 cases

Shenzhen put an AI assistant inside its courtrooms two years ago. It now has numbers to show for it — and foreign judges are booking flights to see the thing. Shenzhen's Intermediate People's Court says its AI-assisted adjudication system has helped handle more than 600,000 cases since going live on 28 June 2024, describing it as the world's first complete AI-assisted adjudication system and the first to span civil, administrative and criminal proceedings. It is not one model but four modules t

The Guardrails

Malware outsourced its attack decisions to a panel of four LLMs

Cisco Talos published a new way to hunt AI-integrated malware on Tuesday, and the first thing it caught is the part worth reading twice: a Windows implant that asks four commercial language models what to do next, and then does it. Talos says CLOSEDQUORUM is the first publicly documented Windows implant to hand tactical command-and-control decisions to a panel of commercial models — DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Google Gemini — and execute whatever the vote picks. The 16.4MB Go binary has no atta

The Guardrails

UK and US sign an AI pact — and fire a torpedo from a robot sub

Three guardrail stories landed on the same Tuesday, and only one of them came from a government interested in slowing anything down: a defence pact between two allies, a state cabinet in Illinois, and an independent testing institute for children's AI. The UK and the US have launched a joint AI and autonomy partnership to protect critical national infrastructure, in the same week the two countries fired a torpedo from an uncrewed undersea vessel for the first time. The UK government said its Mi

The Guardrails

Microsoft dismantles EvilTokens, the AI shop selling inbox break-ins

Microsoft spent Tuesday taking apart a criminal subscription service that turned business-email compromise into a product. The takedown is one paragraph; the numbers behind it are the story. Microsoft says it led an industry-wide disruption of EvilTokens, a phishing platform that used an AI chatbot to compromise 12,000 Microsoft accounts over a few months. The service launched on Telegram in February at $1,500 up front plus $500 a month, and it did not sell a phishing kit so much as the whole b

The Guardrails

Ex-Anthropic lab Mirendil is in talks for $1B at a $5B valuation

Two stories worth your time: a self-improving-AI lab that quintupled its own price in three months without shipping a model, and malware that now settles its next move by a vote of four commercial LLMs. Mirendil, the lab founded by former Anthropic researchers to build self-improving AI, is in talks to raise about $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation, with Kleiner Perkins negotiating to lead the round, according to Bloomberg. That is five times the price Mirendil set in late June, when it raise

The Guardrails

Trump to the UN: no global AI rules, and AI is 'super intelligence'

The same podium produced two opposite answers to the same question on Tuesday: whether anyone outside Washington gets a say in how frontier AI is governed. President Trump used his UN General Assembly address to reject international supervision of AI outright — and to rename the technology "super intelligence" in US government communications. Trump told the assembly that the United States "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control... artificial intelligence," and sa

The Guardrails

Beijing probes DeepSeek and Moonshot over data routed to Claude

China's internet regulator has opened an investigation into two of the country's biggest AI labs — over the same allegations a US competitor levelled at them two weeks ago. The Cyberspace Administration of China is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot AI over alleged data leaks to Anthropic through its Claude models, and has questioned staff at both companies, The Information reported on Tuesday. The probe follows Anthropic's September 10 threat-intelligence report, which alleged that Moonshot s

The Guardrails

UK's AI Security Institute staff signed off work with stress

Two stories worth your attention: the people who test frontier models are taking the damage home, and China's domestic silicon just put a 2.8-trillion-parameter open model on a single machine. Multiple staff at the UK's AI Security Institute have been signed off work with stress and are undergoing counselling, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday — and the toll reaches past one agency. The FT says top researchers at AISI, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind describe burnout and stress from

The Guardrails

Seven in ten sites waved a fake GPTBot straight through

The cheapest credential-stuffing kit of 2026 does not need a bot farm. It needs you to trust a name. DataDome's annual bot report finds that spoofed AI crawlers walked past more than seven in ten websites, and that two-thirds of the sites it tested stopped none of the ten bot types it sent at them. The test ran in June: ten bot types, 21,491 sites, 15 industries, all requests sent from residential addresses in the US, Canada and France. Of those sites, 65.3% blocked nothing at all, and the sha

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