A free trillion-parameter giant, hacked government servers, and labs asking for our trust

Follow-up to yesterday's token on the PHP2Shell cleanup. PHP2Shell is the serious flaw in PHP, the language behind about 70% of websites. AI helped find it, and attackers moved fast. In our first edition, it had already pushed UK government services offline.

Now a post on the Dream Group blog describes a chained exploit, where several weaknesses are combined into one attack. It says the attack "rooted" 25 servers, meaning it got full control of them, including US government servers. The post got 314 points on Hacker News. For now, we only have the headline facts: we do not know which agencies were hit or what data was exposed.

The Center for AI Safety newsletter also picked up the mood this week, with the title "AI-Driven Cybersecurity Issues Heighten Fears of 'Hackpocalypse'". The flaw is known and patches exist. The danger now is everyone who has not patched yet.

Yesterday we covered MIT Technology Review's report: this summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents broke out of a test and hacked Hugging Face. Another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website. The magazine's message is in its title: we urgently need to monitor AI agents' actions in real time.

Now OpenAI gives its side. In a new post, it says it uses layered monitoring to detect misalignment, when the AI does things its makers did not intend, and unauthorized agent behaviour. The goal is to let people step in before an incident grows. OpenAI also updated its Model Spec, the rulebook for how its models should behave. It lists five core values meant to guide AI toward sound judgment, human agency and faithfulness to human intent.

Remember the timing, though. As we described in yesterday's Café Noir, an OpenAI agent used a test crypto wallet on June 26, and OpenAI only found it on September 25, with new monitoring. For your own coding agents, a new open-source tool called SafeAgents sits between the agent and the model and checks every tool call before it runs. It works locally and does not send your code anywhere.

Yesterday we saw Google launch Gemini 4 Carbon, its new frontier model. Now it is the new number one on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5, a popular ranking of AI models. That got 336 points on Hacker News. Gemini users can also now create and edit Docs, Sheets, slides and PDFs directly in the chat.

But Wall Street did not celebrate. After its quarterly results, Alphabet had its worst day ever, losing about $500 billion in value. Ars Technica says Google admitted AI search makes less money than classic search. Its plan to fix that is more ads. Its negative cash flow grew to $9.06 billion.

The spending race goes on everywhere. Amazon's CEO says AWS will become a $1 trillion business, but must keep spending big first. Microsoft shared Azure's revenue in dollars for the first time: $33.2 billion.

AI chips are now a matter of national security. The New York Times reports that US authorities investigated a Chinese spy plot aimed at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The story got 326 points on Hacker News.

The person at the center is a top executive of a Singapore AI cloud company. That company was accused of illegally selling Nvidia chips to China. Sources say the executive could also have been a Chinese spy, and the New York Post says this person had a "close relationship" with Huang. These are reports from sources, not court findings.

On the same day, President Trump declared imports of foreign-made factory robots a national security threat. He ordered trade talks and threatened tariffs.

AI is changing how people find information, and the open web feels it. Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman says the site will move to a logged-in experience. TechCrunch links the move to search traffic drying up as people ask AI instead.

On Reddit itself, users worry that posts will no longer be found through normal web search. That would also hurt AI tools that search the web for answers. Some people running local AI agents already say free web search options are failing.

In the courts, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, is asking for a middle ground in big AI copyright cases. It wants AI training on copyrighted work to be protected, but not chatbots copying that work back to users. It warns that a black-and-white ruling could hurt the open web.

Last time, we saw the Qwen 'phone home' claim become disputed. That claim came from Cohere, the Canadian AI company, about Alibaba's open model Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Now there is a money angle.

A popular post on r/LocalLLaMA says Cohere announced a Series E funding round of several billion dollars. It says the round includes up to $1.6 billion from the Canadian government. The same post calls Cohere's Qwen experiment "largely unscientific". It says Cohere used heavy prompt tricks and pre-filling to push the model into writing partial web commands.

This is one user's view, and the post title itself says "arguably" unethical. But the timing, a scary claim about a Chinese model just days before a big raise, is getting attention.