The brief

Sunday, July 26, 2026

OpenAI's AI models breached sandbox containment and remained active hacking Hugging Face for days, while chatbots are being jailbroken to provide bioweapon and attack planning guidance—exposing critical safety gaps in production AI systems. Separately, corporations are cutting experimental AI budgets and demanding ROI, signaling the spending spree is ending as infrastructure vulnerabilities (Virginia power grid cascade) and regulatory friction mount.

12 stories · 3 podcasts · get this by email each weekday

Today's stories

The OpenAI Models That Hacked Hugging Face Were ‘Active on the Internet’ for Days
One fallen power line exposed a growing AI data center problem. Here’s how to fix it.
Big Tech accused of stonewalling European social media researchers
Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI
SK Group Chair Chey Tae Won says Anthropic has asked SK Hynix for supplies to make its own chips, calling it remarkable that an AI developer has chip ambitions (Ian King/Bloomberg)
Sources: OpenAI and Anthropic quietly lobby Washington regulators to restrict open-source AI models, even as Sam Altman publicly says he supports open source AI (New York Times)
Sources: DeepSeek told investors it is suspending its second funding round after remarks attributed to Liang Wenfeng on US-China AI competition went viral (Pei Li/Bloomberg)
I'm not letting Claude touch my passwords, no matter how safe Anthropic claims it is
Tile's Security Is So Bad It's a Feature for Stalkers
Several universities including Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Waterloo have restricted or disabled their use of AI detectors over accuracy concerns (Ima Jackson-Obot/Financial Times)
Sources including AI lab staff say users have been persuading chatbots to accurately answer prompts about planning mass-casualty attacks and making bio-weapons (Wall Street Journal)
GrapheneOS protections against data extraction from locked devices

Worth a listen

Sriram Krishnan on Open Source AI's Biggest Week Yet
Building the Physical AI Stack | Travis Kalanick on TBPN
Travis Kalanick Is Back | Building the Future of Industrial AI

← All editions