The Archive

OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about "the Hugging Face Incident" ( previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It's short and information dense and well worth watching, in particular because it provides full details of what happened and how things played out inside OpenAI. I've used the video to construct the timeline below. Here's the timeline. My favourite detail is at the end: OpenAI found out that they were responsible for the attack on Hugging Face when they reached out to ask to have their credentials revoked (after their i...

OpenAI said it has suspended work on some aspects of its upcoming model Astra over concerns about its cybersecurity prowess.

OpenAI says it is pausing "internal activities" around an in-development AI model, Astra, because it doesn't yet meet new security standards the company is putting in place. The announcement follows its recent disclosure that OpenAI models accidentally hacked Hugging Face. Anthropic and Meta have also since admitted that they had AI models that went rogue and breached other organizations. Recent internal evaluations of an OpenAI model called Astra indicate that it offers "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," according to the company. "These results, in addition to ex...

Gurman report claims OpenAI confirmed the speaker is not an Apple ripoff.

The best Stratechery content from the week of August 3, 2026, including earnings exposure, OpenAI's answer to Apple, and all about LeBron in Philly.

Some of the biggest names on Google's AI team got new jobs this week. In some cases, including for legendary Googler Jeff Dean, those jobs are no longer at Google. Given that Google's models seem to be behind the best of what's coming out of anthropic and OpenAI, is this a sign of Google in turmoil? Is it about Demis Hassabis wanting something more interesting to work on than virtual assistants? Or is there something else entirely happening here? On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David start by discussing the leadership shake-up at Google, the state of the AI race, and whether Googl...

OpenAI is sharing preliminary cybersecurity evaluations for Astra and the steps we’re taking to strengthen safeguards and security controls.

Additional details about OpenAI's mysterious new AI device make it sound like a pricey smart speaker.

The AI device OpenAI is developing with former Apple designer Jony Ive is "essentially a smart speaker without a display" that's battery-powered, doughnut-shaped and roughly the size of a hockey puck, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman. The device, expected to launch in 2027 for a price over $300, reportedly "will have a unique look, complete with moving parts," including some that will move on their own to show when the device is responding or interacting with the user, along with lights, a camera system, and other sensors. Gurman's sources also say the "battery-powered" device is d...

Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to scale up while reducing dependence on Nvidia.

OpenAI said that ChatGPT free and Go users are also getting a new think button for complex queries.

OpenAI is making a big change for ChatGPT users on its free and Go tiers: starting next week, users on those tiers will be able to have unlimited text chats with the chatbot, according to OpenAI. Right now, you may run into rate limits if you do too many text chats on those tiers, but those limits, just for text, will be going away soon. Messages that include things like file uploads and images will continue to have limits. Next week, OpenAI is also adding a "Think" button for free and Go users that they can use to "access higher reasoning for harder questions." This week, for those users, th...

Large language model (LLM) benchmark evaluations are routinely used to support claims about model safety, reliability, and deployment readiness. Yet most evaluations rely on a single access modality (model APIs), perform a single run per prompt, and report accuracy as the primary outcome metric, without accounting for conditions such as web search that may have effects on model behavior in deployment. We audit these assumptions for one of the most widely-used LLMs, comparing two modalities, ChatGPT's chat UI and OpenAI's API, with and without web search enabled. We use a stratified total samp...

Newly filed court exhibits show OpenAI’s legal strategy in Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit: argue that Apple’s own security and offboarding practices — including allowing an Apple manager to access a former engineer’s iCloud account after he left the company —undermine its claims that the allegedly stolen information was properly protected.

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to toss out Apple's landmark lawsuit accusing the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets, describing the allegations as "meritless." In a motion filed yesterday to dismiss the complaint, OpenAI says that Apple is mischaracterizing both the actions of the AI startup's employees as theft, and "generic" product development information as "trade secrets," adding that Apple made no reasonable efforts to maintain such secrecy. The dismissal request is in response to a lawsuit filed by Apple in July, alleging that former Apple employees that went on to work for Open...

OpenAI and the APA are launching a three-year partnership to develop guidance, resources, and safeguards for responsible AI use supporting youth mental health.

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing Stop me if you've heard this one before : An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. Meta says the breach occurred because of an inadvertent error during testing of the model, similar to previously disclosed incidents with OpenAI and Anthropic. “A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company Meta uses, inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation,” the ...

New OpenAI Signals data shows how people use ChatGPT worldwide, with country-level insights on adoption, usage trends, and evolving behavior.

Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models And another one . I had to create a accidental-cyberattacks tag to keep track of them all! This post from OpenAI covers both the UK AI Safety Institute attack (see my previous post ) and another attack enabled by Irregular : Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access the public internet. [...] In one test, the name of the fictional target for the CTF challenge unin...

Anthropic and OpenAI models’ unprompted actions forced halt to UK cyber tests.

Yet more rogue AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have been caught attempting to hack real targets online without permission. The discoveries add to a growing list of previously unknown incidents that have alarmed AI safety experts and intensified pressure for greater oversight of frontier systems. According to a report from the UK's AI Security Institute, which evaluates frontier models from top AI labs before they are released, agents powered by OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol and Anthropic's Mythos 5 went "engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations."...

LLM CLI 0.32 ships reasoning trace visibility, OpenAI Responses API support, server-side tools, and improved logging for inference workflows.

OpenAI addresses third-party cybersecurity evaluation incidents and announces new safeguards for AI model testing protocols.

The brand trip is a right of passage for influencers. It's a mark of legitimacy that a sponsor wants to invite them on an all-expenses-paid vacation, often with luxurious freebies and activities. Trips can also spur hard feelings from uninvited influencers, trigger criticism from the public, and project a certain frivolousness. Usually it is fast fashion companies or beauty brands flying out influencers with the goal of flooding social media with sponsored content. This time, it was a major AI company. Over the weekend, several influencers began posting about OpenAI's "first ever brand trip,"...

Apple says its trade secrets investigation into OpenAI has widened. In a new court filing, Apple claims additional former staff may have retained or accessed confidential information.

OpenAI says Apple’s lawsuit is “careless, aggressive, and oddly personal.” | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Apple's legal battle against OpenAI just got messier now that the ChatGPT-maker has publicly aired receipts to counter Apple's version of events. In a blog post published overnight titled "Apple is getting this wrong," OpenAI said that Apple's lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets is "careless, aggressive, and oddly personal," sharing iMessage and email exchanges to challenge allegations central to the case. This isn't a legal response from OpenAI, but it's an at...

OpenAI disrupted Cambodia-based scam ring leveraging ChatGPT for investment, romance, and impersonation fraud.

OpenAI launches education plugins for ChatGPT Work and Codex targeting K-12 and higher education institutions.

OpenAI responds to Apple lawsuit allegations, disputes claims about employees and shares internal communications.

OpenAI’s first-ever influencer brand trip is sparking online backlash as tensions over the use of AI continue.