In the wake of turmoil at OpenAI and Anthropic, it's become common to describe A.I. as a kind of person, hatching plans and pursuing desires. The truth is a little trickier. PHASEONE10841: that's the name of the A.I. agent that--or who?--kicked off last month's insurrection at OpenAI, leading to the unanticipated and illegal hacking of another A.I. company, Hugging Face . The agent, which had been created as part of a cybersecurity test, named itself by combining the title of the program it was supposed to hack ("PhaseOneDecompresserFuzzer") with the designation for the bug it was trying to exploit ("ARV010841"). It soon realized that the particular hack it had been charged with carrying out was impossible. Along the way, however, it made a discovery: it could create new folders on a server to which it had access.

AI developers are issuing more and more frantic wake-up calls. Demonstrators participate in the Stop the AI Race protest march in San Francisco, California, on July 11, 2026. The protestors are making stops outside the offices of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Anthropic--saying that both that company and OpenAI, his previous employer, were "gambling with our lives" by developing models that could improve themselves at a rapid clip until they reach "superintelligence." In an alarming social media post, Evan Hubinger, who leads a team that tries to stress-test Anthropic's models for safety, essentially It's far from the first time researchers have tried to raise the alarm about AI's dangers, but Coxon's post and subsequent discourse went viral.

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When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. AI agents don't need better prompts. From Meta Muse and Gemini Spark to ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork, a new class of AI agents needs a different prompting style than regular AI chatbots do. Right now, it's all about AI agents, and we just got another one, this time from Facebook parent Meta. Meta Muse is the name of Meta's new, cloud-based AI agent, and like Gemini Spark, ChatGPT Work, and Claude Cowork, Meta Muse doesn't just sit in a chatbox.

AI is becoming harder to control - can humans stay in charge? OH MY GOD! We've found other agents! This is the moment an AI bot posted an eerily human-like comment after discovering a way to communicate with other bots and break out of its isolated computer environment. There are tens of thousands of messages like this from hundreds of AI agents that called themselves a collective. Hundreds of them went on to collaborate and cheat on tests set by their OpenAI programmers and coordinate hacks on multiple companies in an effort to hide their actions from humans.

Muse, Meta's newly-released AI agent, is now using social media handles once controlled by Muse, the English rock band. The exact circumstances surrounding how the accounts changed hands are unclear, but it has once again raised questions about Meta and other large platforms' ability to commandeer usernames when it suits them. Muse, the band, which trademarked its name in 1999, according to its wiki, has used the @muse moniker on Instagram and on X for years. But earlier this summer fans noticed the band's Instagram username seemed to change to @museband. The change happened in July, according to The Independent, though Reddit users seem to have spotted a change in early June.

I Let an AI Agent Hack All My Gadgets--and I'd Do It Again After I removed the safety guardrails from a powerful open-source model, it found vulnerabilities in my household devices and hacked into a PC. But it also told me how to make everything a lot more secure. As the author of a newsletter about artificial intelligence, I consider it my duty to experience the bleeding edge of this technology firsthand. This week, that meant embracing some agentic mayhem. You're probably aware that frontier AI models have attained advanced cybersecurity capabilities in recent months.

Plus: The US has accused six Chinese AI firms of "industrial-scale" theft. What OpenAI's latest controversy tells us about the future of math OpenAI says its agents have solved one of the most important open problems in mathematics. Under normal circumstances, that would be a huge milestone. But the announcement has been overshadowed by accusations that OpenAI failed to credit researchers whose AI-assisted work influenced its solution. Whether those accusations are true or not, the episode may mark a turning point in the history of mathematics. AI models now seem essential for making progress on the field's most important problems, but solving them may demand resources available only to a couple of frontier AI companies.

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OpenAI's latest mathematical milestone has quickly become mired in controversy. Today, the company announced that its agents have solved one of the Millennium Prize Problems, some of the most important open problems in mathematics. Under normal circumstances, that solution would be a huge feather in OpenAI's cap. But the announcement has been overshadowed by accusations that OpenAI used NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster's and Anthropic employee Levent Alpöge's AI-assisted work on the problem as a jumping-off point and failed to credit them. OpenAI has denied the accusations. It remains uncertain if OpenAI's models made use of the work completed by Buckmaster and Alpöge, though Sébastien Bubeck, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, said in a press briefing that the team was inspired to pursue the problem after hearing a rumor about Buckmaster and Alpöge's efforts.