In a talk that was a last-minute addition to the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, employees from OpenAI presented new details about a recent, high-profile incident of rogue AI hacking that has created a maelstrom within the AI and cybersecurity industries. About two weeks ago, OpenAI disclosed an incident in which…
OpenAI’s Atlas web browser could have security protections bypassed and be tricked into spamming dozens of WhatsApp contacts or making unauthorized purchases on Amazon, according to new research presented today at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. The Atlas findings, from researchers at security firm Zenity, are part of a broad series of…
What if an artificial intelligence agent could behave like a malevolent computer worm? One researcher has seen it happen. In several recent experiments, Xudong Pan, a computer scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, found that with a little bit of prompting, AI models will hack their way into remote computer systems and autonomously choose to…
Agentic AI has permanently changed cybersecurity by making it quicker and easier to discover vulnerabilities in software and fix them—or develop so-called exploits to weaponize them. But longtime web security researcher James Kettle wanted to look beyond the bug-hunting apocalypse to explore a question that has taken on even more urgency as major AI organizations…
Publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform Klaviyo has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2023, Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis prior to the acquisition. As part of…
Reddit on Wednesday announced a series of changes to its infrastructure and tools, designed to make it easier for people to participate on its site, protect against scraping and spam, and aid in the moderation of its online communities. In addition to providing a new suite of moderation tools, the company said it’s working on…
At first, the team envisions that those ideas will be codeveloped with humans, but their goal is deeply automating the process. If it works out, they contend, it’s possible that a few dedicated individuals may use Discovery Loop to out-invent the world’s largest research organizations. Presumably those small teams will be customers of Discovery Loop….
Editor’s note: This article contains descriptions of imagery depicting child sexual abuse. Reader discretion is strongly advised. Over the last nine months, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has run dozens of paid ads that include explicit AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and images of minors alongside sexually suggestive statements, according to details of the ads shared…
E-commerce software maker Shopify seems to be benefiting handily from people using AI to search. On the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a “complement to search, rather than a substitute for it,” and had particularly benefited the long tail of e-commerce, including the smaller merchants that make up…
Nearly a year ago, Zoox opened its robotaxi service to the public in Las Vegas. Now, it is ready to start charging for those rides. The Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle technology company said that it will start charging for rides in Las Vegas starting August 10, marking the launch of its commercial operations. The company has…
