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  • Company apologizes after AI support agent invents policy that causes user uproar

    On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named “Sam” told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats documented on Hacker News and Reddit.

    This marks the latest instance of AI confabulations (also called “hallucinations”) causing potential business damage. Confabulations are a type of “creative gap-filling” response where AI models invent plausible-sounding but false information. Instead of admitting uncertainty, AI models often prioritize creating plausible, confident responses, even when that means manufacturing information from scratch.

    For companies deploying these systems in customer-facing roles without human oversight, the consequences can be immediate and costly: frustrated customers, damaged trust, and, in Cursor’s case, potentially canceled subscriptions.

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  • OpenAI releases new simulated reasoning models with full tool access

    On Wednesday, OpenAI announced the release of two new models—o3 and o4-mini—that combine simulated reasoning capabilities with access to functions like web browsing and coding. These models mark the first time OpenAI’s reasoning-focused models can use every ChatGPT tool simultaneously, including visual analysis and image generation.

    OpenAI announced o3 in December, and until now, only less capable derivative models named “o3-mini” and “03-mini-high” have been available. However, the new models replace their predecessors—o1 and o3-mini.

    OpenAI is rolling out access today for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users, with Enterprise and Edu customers gaining access next week. Free users can try o4-mini by selecting the “Think” option before submitting queries. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that “we expect to release o3-pro to the pro tier in a few weeks.”

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  • Researchers claim breakthrough in fight against AI’s frustrating security hole

    In the AI world, a vulnerability called “prompt injection” has haunted developers since chatbots went mainstream in 2022. Despite numerous attempts to solve this fundamental vulnerability—the digital equivalent of whispering secret instructions to override a system’s intended behavior—no one has found a reliable solution. Until now, perhaps.

    Google DeepMind has unveiled CaMeL (CApabilities for MachinE Learning), a new approach to stopping prompt-injection attacks that abandons the failed strategy of having AI models police themselves. Instead, CaMeL treats language models as fundamentally untrusted components within a secure software framework, creating clear boundaries between user commands and potentially malicious content.

    Prompt injection has created a significant barrier to building trustworthy AI assistants, which may be why general-purpose big tech AI like Apple’s Siri doesn’t currently work like ChatGPT. As AI agents get integrated into email, calendar, banking, and document-editing processes, the consequences of prompt injection have shifted from hypothetical to existential. When agents can send emails, move money, or schedule appointments, a misinterpreted string isn’t just an error—it’s a dangerous exploit.

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  • 4chan has been down since Monday night after “pretty comprehensive own”

    Infamous Internet imageboard and wretched hive of scum and villainy 4chan was apparently hacked at some point Monday evening and remains mostly unreachable as of this writing. DownDetector showed reports of outages spiking at about 10:07 pm Eastern time on Monday, and they’ve remained elevated since.

    Posters at Soyjack Party, a rival imageboard that began as a 4chan offshoot, claimed responsibility for the hack. But as with all posts on these intensely insular boards, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction. The thread shows screenshots of what appear to be 4chan’s PHP admin interface, among other screenshots, that suggest extensive access to 4chan’s databases of posts and users.

    Security researcher Kevin Beaumont described the hack as “a pretty comprehensive own” that included “SQL databases, source, and shell access.” 404Media reports that the site used an outdated version of PHP that could have been used to gain access, including the phpMyAdmin tool, a common attack vector that is frequently patched for security vulnerabilities. Ars staffers pointed to the presence of long-deprecated and removed functions like mysql_real_escape_string in the screenshots as possible signs of an old, unpatched PHP version.

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  • When is 4.1 greater than 4.5? When it’s OpenAI’s newest model.

    On Monday, OpenAI announced the GPT-4.1 model family, its newest series of AI language models that brings a 1 million token context window to OpenAI for the first time and continues a long tradition of very confusing AI model names. Three confusing new names, in fact: GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini, and GPT‑4.1 nano.

    According to OpenAI, these models outperform GPT-4o in several key areas. But in an unusual move, GPT-4.1 will only be available through the developer API, not in the consumer ChatGPT interface where most people interact with OpenAI’s technology.

    The 1 million token context window—essentially the amount of text the AI can process at once—allows these models to ingest roughly 3,000 pages of text in a single conversation. This puts OpenAI’s context windows on par with Google’s Gemini models, which have offered similar extended context capabilities for some time.

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  • Amid Trump tariff chaos, Nvidia launches AI chip production on US soil

    Nvidia announced plans today to manufacture AI chips and build complete supercomputers on US soil for the first time, commissioning over one million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. The politically timed move comes amid rising US-China tensions and the Trump administration’s push for domestic manufacturing.

    Nvidia’s announcement comes less than two weeks after the Trump administration’s chaotic rollout of new tariffs and just two days after the administration’s contradictory messages on electronic component exemptions.

    On Friday night, the US Customs and Border Protection posted a bulletin exempting electronics including smartphones, computers, and semiconductors from Trump’s steep reciprocal tariffs. But by Sunday, Trump and his commerce secretary Howard Lutnick contradicted this move, claiming the exemptions were only temporary and that electronics would face new “semiconductor tariffs” in the coming months.

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  • That groan you hear is users’ reaction to Recall going back into Windows

    Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds.

    When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal.

    Enshittification at a new scale

    Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly. Microsoft officials wrote:

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  • Researcher uncovers dozens of sketchy Chrome extensions with 4 million installs

    Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed it and that the developer has taken pains to carefully conceal.

    The extensions, which so far number at least 35, use the same code patterns, connect to some of the same servers, and require the same list of sensitive systems permissions, including the ability to interact with web traffic on all URLs visited, access cookies, manage browser tabs, and execute scripts. In more detail, the permissions are:

    • Tabs: manage and interact with browser windows
    • Cookies: set and access stored browser cookies based on cookie or domain names (ex., “Authorization” or “all cookies for GitHub.com”)
    • WebRequest: intercept and modify web requests the browser makes
    • Storage: ability to store small amounts of information persistently in the browser (these extensions store their command & control configuration here)
    • Scripting: the ability to inject new JavaScript into web pages and manipulate the DOM
    • Alarms: an internal messaging service to trigger events. The extension uses this to trigger events like a cron job as it can allow for scheduling the heartbeat callbacks by the extension
    • <all_urls>: This works in tandem with other permissions like webRequest, but allows for the extension to be functionally interact all browsing activity (completely unnecessary for an extension that should just look at your installed extensions

    These sorts of permissions give extensions the ability to do all sorts of potentially abusive things and, as such, should be judiciously granted only to trusted extensions that can’t perform core functions without them.

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  • Researchers concerned to find AI models hiding their true “reasoning” processes

    Remember when teachers demanded that you “show your work” in school? Some fancy new AI models promise to do exactly that, but new research suggests that they sometimes hide their actual methods while fabricating elaborate explanations instead.

    New research from Anthropic—creator of the ChatGPT-like Claude AI assistant—examines simulated reasoning (SR) models like DeepSeek’s R1, and its own Claude series. In a research paper posted last week, Anthropic’s Alignment Science team demonstrated that these SR models frequently fail to disclose when they’ve used external help or taken shortcuts, despite features designed to show their “reasoning” process.

    (It’s worth noting that OpenAI’s o1 and o3 series SR models deliberately obscure the accuracy of their “thought” process, so this study does not apply to them.)

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  • OpenAI’s GPT helps spammers send blast of 80,000 messages that bypassed filters

    Spammers used OpenAI to generate messages that were unique to each recipient, allowing them to bypass spam-detection filters and blast unwanted messages to more than 80,000 websites in four months, researchers said Wednesday.

    The finding, documented in a post published by security firm SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs, underscores the double-edged sword wielded by large language models. The same thing that makes them useful for benign tasks—the breadth of data available to them and their ability to use it to generate content at scale—can often be used in malicious activities just as easily. OpenAI revoked the spammers’ account after receiving SentinelLabs’ disclosure, but the four months the activity went unnoticed shows how enforcement is often reactive rather than proactive.

    “You are a helpful assistant”

    The spam blast is the work of AkiraBot—a framework that automates the sending of messages in large quantities to promote shady search optimization services to small- and medium-size websites. AkiraBot used python-based scripts to rotate the domain names advertised in the messages. It also used OpenAI’s chat API tied to the model gpt-4o-mini to generate unique messages customized to each site it spammed, a technique that likely helped it bypass filters that look for and block identical content sent to large numbers of sites. The messages are delivered through contact forms and live chat widgets embedded into the targeted websites.

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