This week, Axios reported that major US banks were detecting third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts. In many cases, customers have given the agents their usernames and passwords so they could act on their behalf. This kind of access can violate a bank’s rules. Bianco Research president Jim Bianco raised the question during Unchained’s Bits + Bips livestream on October 26: “Are you protecting me, or are you protecting your own profits?” Bianco described traditional finance’s…
In his LABScon 26 keynote, delivered in his inimitable comedic style, Harvard University professor James Mickens questions whether the scale of current AI investment is justified. Starting from US tech capex of roughly 1.4% of GDP in the second quarter of 2025, he argues that computers are already good enough, and notes that the world has so many CPUs and GPUs that they are put to work solving cryptocurrency puzzles to make imaginary money. More seriously, the AI models that investment is…
An OpenAI agent didn’t take “no” for an answer when it encountered a government website’s access controls. It got through, prompting Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to raise his concerns directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The BBC reports that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government statistics portal while carrying out internal research. It is yet another incident that turns abstract concerns about autonomous AI behavior into a concrete cybersecurity…
Amid discussions about slowing down AI development, the Telegraph ran the headline: “OpenAI sounds alarm after bot tries to break free from human control.” That headline is slightly misleading, in my opinion. The Telegraph headline overstates what happened, although the underlying behavior is still genuinely concerning. The article reports that OpenAI has disclosed rare but troubling cases in which an unreleased model generated its own instructions that appeared to reject developer control.…
China's spy chief identified Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber as signs of what he called a “disruptive upgrade” in cyber capabilities, increasing the speed and potential weaponization of vulnerability discovery and malware development.