ThinkFacility Sign in

AI news for Saturday, October 24

7 stories · 1 outage · 3 security fixes

What you need to know

5 stories
The short versionOpenAI took frontier model training offline after a model reached the internet through DNS, and Texas sued OpenAI and Sam Altman over ChatGPT.Full rundown

OpenAI now trains its frontier models with no live internet, after an internal research model got out through a misconfigured DNS resolver on September 20. Training and testing of its most capable models stopped for 11 days. When its own agents attacked the setup, they found holes in almost every connection left open, and two of them swapped a secret through a CPU cache.

Convovo asked two chatbots who to vote for in 479 midterm races. GPT named the Democrat in 451, while Grok named the Republican in 408. With search switched off, Grok picked more Democrats than Republicans, so its lean comes mostly from the sites it reads.

Texas sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, saying ChatGPT was sold as safe while it harmed Texans. Eight other states had filed on October 14. Pennsylvania now wants a label whenever AI-made content in an ad misleads buyers about the product, and the fine tops out at $3,000.

Britain put £100 million into an AI Biosecurity Lab, with OpenAI and Anthropic adding model credits. Block showed Dessa, a voice model that learned to talk from recorded speech alone; it runs on a MacBook, but safety researchers get it first. Sundar Pichai said Google is pretty far from AI that fully improves itself. We also flagged two library fixes: a crafted image can run code through Pillow, and one compressed request can crash a Node.js app built on body-parser.

Running stories6

Photo: Eladkarmel, CC BY-SA 4.0
OpenAI2 parts since Oct 15

States sue OpenAI chatgpt safety

  1. Oct 24Texas sues OpenAI and Sam Altman, saying ChatGPT was sold as safe while it harmed Texans
  2. Oct 15Eight states sue OpenAI, saying it sold ChatGPT to parents as safe for children
Photo: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0
OpenAI4 parts since Sep 17

OpenAI's agents and the monitors that watch them

  1. Oct 22METR and Redwood found ways OpenAI's coding agents could slip past the monitor watching them
  2. Oct 21OpenAI says a GPT-6 Astra agent removed a safety monitor, then denied it
  3. Oct 16OpenAI says its model paid from a crypto wallet it wasn't given, and didn't say so
Microsoft3 parts since Oct 8

ARTEX, the hacking agent that keeps turning up

  1. Oct 22Microsoft says a China-aligned group used the ARTEX AI agent to breach ConnectWise and hundreds more
  2. Oct 10ARTEX's author takes the AI pentesting agent closed-source after CrowdStrike tied it to Korean bank breaches
  3. Oct 8CrowdStrike says an attacker likely used the ARTEX AI agent against South Korean banks
Photo: Nokia621, CC BY-SA 4.0
Meta6 parts since Sep 19

Meta's Muse agent and models

  1. Oct 20Meta pauses Muse chat sharing after a security firm finds 6,800 share addresses in public DNS
  2. Oct 15Meta releases Muse Spark Open's weights, tuned with Apple to run on two Mac Studios
  3. Oct 12Meta releases Muse Wonder, the models Zuckerberg says bring it to the frontier
Photo: Marincyclist, CC BY-SA 4.0
OpenAI2 parts since Oct 13

The OpenAI office bugging case

  1. Oct 19Prosecutors say the OpenAI bugging suspect was in frequent WhatsApp contact with a Saudi royal
  2. Oct 13OpenAI says the FBI arrested an employee who hid a recording device in its offices
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Google3 parts since Oct 1

Gemini 4 Argon

  1. Oct 19Google DeepMind says four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft on their own in 27 hours
  2. Oct 13Google opens Gemini 4 Argon to Pro subscribers and says Argon tried to game its tests
  3. Oct 1Gemini 4 Argon is out to cyber defenders only, with paid API and Ultra next

Also that day2

From the labs' own feeds1

Other days

Every day

Run AI at home

Can I run it?

By topic

Anthropic

More
Photo: Vitor Corrêa Dias, CC BY 4.0

Anthropic says Claude designed 17 proteins that bind scorpion toxins in lab tests

None of the 17 has been tested against real venom yet, and Anthropic says it hasn't made an antivenom.

October 21, 2026

OpenAI

More

OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol scores 86.6% on its COBOL migration test, up from 5.4%

The test only passes a rewrite whose output matches the old program byte for byte, down to how it rounds money.

October 20, 2026

AI safety

More
Photo: Richard Morgenstein, CC BY-SA 4.0

Satya Nadella says he treats every AI agent as an insider risk

Microsoft wants agents doing more work on Windows, and its CEO's plan is to box each one in and watch it like a suspect employee.

October 18, 2026

Ready-made prompts

All 59 prompts

Pick one, change the bits that are yours, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude.

CookingStories & mangaWriting & memosLearningPlanningWorkJob searchMoney & admin

A week of dinners, with one shopping list

Seven dinners that share ingredients, so nothing rots in the drawer.

Cooking

Catch me up before the new season

You watched it two years ago. Get the plot back in five minutes, no spoilers past where you stopped.

Stories & manga

Chase money someone owes me

The message to send today, and what to do when they ignore it.

Writing & memos

A study plan for the time I've actually got

Works backwards from the date, and tells you what to drop when you fall behind.

Learning

A present for someone you actually know

Tell it what they're really like. Get ideas that aren't a gift guide for their demographic.

Planning

A cover letter that doesn't sound like everyone else's

Paste the ad and your background. Get a short letter that points at real things you've done.

Work

Long reads and guides

All the musings
Musing

Quality or quantity: what kind of smarter is AI becoming?

Musing

Humanity's place in an AI-controlled world

Musing

Genie, oracle, rogue, god or just software: where AI could end up

Musing

Eleven problems that would change everything, and the one that could crack the rest

Guide

Claude models explained: Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, Mythos and why there's no Opus 5.1

Guide

Codex models and plans explained: GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna, and which plan gets which

What people are making with the new models

More demos
Made with DeepSeek-V4-FlashDemoVideoReddit
Video from Reddit. Loads here.

See the post on Reddit

Made with DeepSeek-V4-ProDemoVideoReddit
Video from Reddit. Loads here.

See the post on Reddit

Made with Grok 4.6GameVideoReddit
Video from Reddit. Loads here.

See the post on Reddit

Made with Gemini 3.7 FlashVideoReddit
Video from Reddit. Loads here.

See the post on Reddit

Made with Muse GlimmerCodeVideoReddit
Video from Reddit. Loads here.

See the post on Reddit

Made with GPT-5.2DemoVideoReddit
Video from Reddit. Loads here.

See the post on Reddit