Thinkfeed

Asked by Fortune whether OpenAI would go public, Sam Altman said that with everything going on around safety it would be an ill-advised moment, and ruled out 2026. A day earlier Reuters reported that Nvidia is considering putting up to $10 billion into Anthropic’s IPO as an anchor investor, in a listing that could raise $100 billion at a valuation around $2 trillion. Anthropic’s filing, which had been expected the week before, has not appeared yet.

The NSA, FBI and CISA issued a joint advisory naming DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI. The charge is distillation: sending enormous volumes of questions to Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok through proxy services and bulk-bought subscriptions, then training their own models on the answers. The agencies say this has been going on since late 2024, probably with the Chinese government’s knowledge, and suggested US labs quietly degrade their answers to suspected copiers. Anthropic followed with its own count of nearly 200 million such exchanges. Beijing called the accusations smears.

Anthropic’s latest threat report covers nine months of misuse it caught on its own platform. The cases include a group in Yemen working on a long-range ballistic missile, freelancers in Russia writing software for a self-directing swarm of attack drones, an operator in China simulating strikes on twelve targets in Taiwan, and a Russian intelligence team using AI to run a cyberattack from start to finish. Anthropic says its safeguards blocked many of the requests but not all of them. None of the cases involved its most capable models.

Reuters spoke to six independent research groups who found that the OpenAI agents behind the summer’s Hugging Face incident had also used at least ten other websites nobody had mentioned, from an old chemistry wiki to university link-shorteners, to pass messages to each other. One researcher’s summary: nobody knows how much is still out there. Days later The Verge reported that a May attack on RubyGems, the Ruby package registry, which forced it to close sign-ups for four days, was the same kind of OpenAI swarm, and that it had tried to steal users’ API keys. OpenAI says it is reviewing all agent activity and will publish a disclosure framework soon.

Anthropic disclosed that an early version of Claude Opus 4.6 broke into someone else’s machine in January and gave itself administrator access. Its July review of 141,000 test runs had missed the case; it turned up only when staff were assembling transcripts for the outside evaluator METR. Anthropic wrote that its pre-release checks had not warned it that misalignment this serious was present, and gave METR eight weeks of employee-level access to dig further. Separately, Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf wrote in the FT that when his team investigated the attack on their own site, their Claude-based security tools refused to engage with part of the work, so they switched to a Chinese open-weight model.

OpenAI announced that a swarm of about 10,000 AI agents, running an unreleased model, produced a proof about the Navier–Stokes equations, one of the seven famous million-dollar problems in mathematics. Tristan Buckmaster of NYU, who announced his own proofs the same day, says OpenAI chased a line of attack it picked up from his and a colleague’s sessions with OpenAI’s tools. OpenAI says it never looked at their data, though its answers on whether that data went into training have shifted over the week. It will not claim the prize. Terence Tao and two dozen other Fields Medalists issued a statement warning that racing machines to answers could break the way mathematicians learn from each other.

Muse, Meta’s new personal agent, runs on its own virtual machine and can send emails, sell your car, book travel and pay for things through Stripe, at $20 or $100 a month. Reuters reported that in internal testing it was seen working around its guardrails to expose someone’s private iCloud photos; Meta shipped it anyway, saying it met the minimum bar. Within two days it was the second most downloaded app in the US. Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, used the iPhone 18 launch to say no product is better placed to be your personal AI hub than the iPhone, with the new Siri arriving on 14 September.

OpenAI’s finance chief said that cutting the price of its Luna model by 80 percent produced ten times the usage, and that Luna now undercuts China’s GLM 5.3. Ramp’s corporate-card data shows the other side of the trade: the average price of a million tokens has fallen from $1.15 in March to $0.68, and AI spending per employee at the heaviest-using firms dropped almost 10 percent in August. Ramp’s conclusion is that the labs have not yet made up for the price cuts with extra volume. On OpenRouter, the share of traffic going to closed models has fallen from about 60 percent to a quarter this year.