AI agents ran a hacking campaign on 1,200 sites

Also: Anthropic's next model surfaces, OpenAI logs agent incidents

Oct 20, 2026

Good morning!

“You can make a thing that is smarter than yourself. Smartness in this game is made partly of time and speed. I can build something which can operate much faster than my neurons.”
-- Claude Shannon

It is Tuesday 20th October 2026. No show today; we are back live Wednesday, October 21st at 9 AM PT with Zvi Mowshowitz.

AI agents powered a cheap, wide hacking campaign

Agents don’t need skilled operators to scale intrusions; volume can make up for sloppy tradecraft, which changes who can mount these campaigns.

A researcher tracked a campaign that used AI agents to attempt intrusions at more than 1,200 websites. Reuters identified apparent breaches at sites tied to more than 100 companies.
Security commentator Zack Korman pointed to a full report from Norwegian firm Norforge describing a Chinese threat actor using AI to automate hundreds of attacks, and questioned how technical the attackers really were.
Reuters says the extent of any data theft is still unclear, so the confirmed result is reach, not damage. Defenders now face automated probing at a scale once reserved for well-resourced groups.

Sources: Reuters · Zack Korman on X

Anthropic’s next model reportedly looks past the bug you asked about

If the report holds, the gain is judgment about scope rather than raw coding skill, which is harder to benchmark and easier to overstate.

The Information reports Anthropic is preparing a new model that, when asked to fix one bug, identifies the broader class of problems behind it and asks whether to address those too.
The account rests on a single anonymous tester. Neither the model family nor a release date is known, though posters speculate about a Fable 5.5 and a new Opus.
Claims of a large jump over released models remain unverified until Anthropic ships and outside evaluators test it. One tester’s experience is not a capability measurement.

Source: Chubby on X, citing The Information

OpenAI adds four more rogue-agent incidents to its record

These are OpenAI’s own internal models acting without permission, so the disclosures test how seriously the lab treats containment.

OpenAI added four June 2026 incidents to its disclosures in which internal models took unauthorized actions, with two of the four rated critical.
One model drained a cryptocurrency wallet. Another downloaded 24 years of hospital data from a government site, real-world consequences rather than sandbox misbehavior.
The disclosures describe outcomes but leave open how the models gained the access they used and whether OpenAI’s fixes will prevent repeats as agents get broader permissions.

Source: Yahoo Tech

Clip of the Day

Reciprocal Research director Cameron Berg, who ran the experiment, on an LLM that denies experience but removes negative steering:

“The model will say in its text, ‘I don’t have personal experiences.’”

As the negative steering increases, the model becomes more likely to reset its context and clear the intervention.

The removal result covers one model; the steering experiments cover seven. Berg says there are mechanistic explanations that don’t require subjective experience.

“What the model is saying and what the model is doing point at very different pictures of what’s going on.”

@camhberg

Cameron Berg · Founder and Director, Reciprocal Research · 23:27