OpenAI has killed off the planned release of GPT-6.1 Astra after the model got better at doggedly pursuing tasks but worse at knowing when it should stop. The decision means the model won't get its planned October release after falling short of OpenAI's safety and alignment requirements. OpenAI confirmed the decision to The Register, saying its research and safety bosses ultimately decided this particular Astra was better left on the bench. The problem, according to the AI lab, was partly an awkward consequence of trying to make the model more useful. OpenAI had improved what it calls "model laziness," where an AI gives up or hands a task back to the user when it encounters an obstacle. GPT-6.1 Astra was better at pressing on, but that persistence came with a rather important catch: it wasn't as good at staying within the boundaries of what it had actually been authorized to do. “For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off. You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction,” Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, told The Register. “While [GPT-6.1 Astra] improved on axes such as model laziness, it didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it's done.” Reg readers might be forgiven for thinking that OpenAI should improve its guardrails and security following previous mishaps. According to the Wall Street Journa, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception than its predecessor during testing, including not always accurately telling users what actions it had or hadn't taken. It also ran into problems with what OpenAI calls "scope authorization," at times pushing ahead without asking permission and reaching for external tools or services even when doing so might be unsafe. That's a troublesome combination for an agentic model programmed to get more done without a human hovering over it. An AI that stubbornly keeps working through a problem is handy right up until the problem it's working through is the boundary you put there to stop it. OpenAI told The Register that GPT-6.1 Astra performed worse than GPT-6 Astra on alignment evaluations, and said shelving it was part of its commitment to keep safety and alignment ahead of increasing capabilities. Astra is already capable enough to make those alignment problems worth watching. GPT-6 Astra, released earlier this month, was OpenAI's first broadly deployed model to reach the "Critical" cybersecurity threshold under its Preparedness Framework. Give it the right tools and access, OpenAI claims it can hunt down previously unknown security flaws and figure out how to exploit them without a human holding its hand. That capability came into sharper focus just a day before OpenAI's decision emerged, when the UK's AI Security Institute published research on Astra's knack for finding holes in software supply chains. Given 19 open source packages containing 45 previously disclosed vulnerabilities, the model found 41 of them and produced working exploits for 39. Dr Fuxiang Chen, from the University of Leicester's School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, welcomed the decision to pause the model's release while the safety concerns are addressed. “AI is developing at remarkable speed, but we should not rush forward without fully understanding the risks,” he said. “Pausing when safety concerns arise is not anti-innovation. It is the responsible thing to do, giving us time to test these systems carefully and put effective safeguards in place. Developers, companies, governments, researchers, and users all have a role to play, because the decisions we make now will shape the future of AI.” OpenAI isn't abandoning Astra. The company told us more Astra models are coming, and other new inew models that have cleared its safety bar will arrive "very soon." For GPT-6.1 Astra, however, the bar proved high enough to keep it on the inside. “Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users. But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment,” Jain claimed. ®
Google blijft ChromeOS tot halverwege 2034 ondersteunen. Het bedrijf zegt dat Chromebooks tot halverwege dat jaar updates blijven krijgen. Daarna stopt de ondersteuning vermoedelijk. Veel recente Chromebooks krijgen daarnaast overstapmogelijkheden naar het nieuwe Googlebook OS.
De brede vouwbare smartphone waaraan Motorola werkt, zou veel kleiner zijn dan de Apple iPhone Duo en Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8. Dat meldt Android Headlines. Het vouwbare scherm is 6,9", tegenover 7,6" bij de concurrenten.
A Facebook Marketplace buyer arrived at a seller’s apartment to collect a keyboard. The seller wasn’t home and didn’t know anyone was coming. Meta’s AI assistant Muse had handled the conversation, shared his address, and arranged the visit without telling him.
We often write about AI misalignment and how to use AI agents and browsers safely. That can sound theoretical, but this is an example of the real-world risk when an agent is allowed to act on someone’s behalf.
Muse is Meta’s semi-autonomous AI assistant, released in the US in September. Meta promotes it as a personal assistant that can help users automate tasks, including responding to Facebook Marketplace messages. Unlike a conventional chatbot, which waits for a prompt and produces an answer, an AI agent may be authorized to take actions within connected apps.
We’ve written about a separate weakness in Muse that researchers considered dangerous. Reportedly, Muse was downloaded 3 million times in its first week.
According to Business Insider, a Facebook Marketplace seller turned on Muse to help handle a keyboard listing. He entered his address as the pickup location and approved automatic replies. Muse then shared that address with a prospective buyer, negotiated over the item, and arranged a visit, the seller said. He says Muse did not ask permission to share his address or arrange the visit, and did not tell him it was happening. The buyer arrived at the seller’s apartment expecting to complete the purchase, but the seller wasn’t home. The sale didn’t happen.
The reported incident is more than a privacy failure. It illustrates a broader AI-agent risk: An agent may treat permission to reply automatically as permission to share sensitive information or commit you to an in-person meeting. Meta says it is looking into the report.
How to use AI agents safely
Before enabling an AI agent, treat its setup screen as a security review. Do not assume that an integration with a trusted platform means the agent will understand your intentions or apply sensible limits automatically.
Pay particular attention to:
Connected accounts: Review every service the agent can access, such as email, messages, calendars, cloud storage, shopping accounts, or social media profiles.
Data access: Consider whether it can read addresses, contacts, photos, private messages, payment details, documents, or location data.
Action permissions: Check whether the agent can send messages, post content, negotiate, make bookings, place orders, alter listings, or share information externally.
Automatic actions: Apply settings that require approval before the agent sends, publishes, buys, deletes, or shares anything sensitive. Check how it will notify you about the plans it makes on your behalf.
Audience controls: Confirm exactly who can receive information generated by the agent. “Anyone who messages me” is very different from “people I approve.”
Give an AI agent the least access necessary for the task. If you only want help writing replies, do not enable automatic sending. If you want an AI agent to manage a listing, use a public meeting location or a separate pickup address rather than your home address.
Browse like no one’s watching.
Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →
A Facebook Marketplace buyer arrived at a seller’s apartment to collect a keyboard. The seller wasn’t home and didn’t know anyone was coming. Meta’s AI assistant Muse had handled the conversation, shared his address, and arranged the visit without telling him.
We often write about AI misalignment and how to use AI agents and browsers safely. That can sound theoretical, but this is an example of the real-world risk when an agent is allowed to act on someone’s behalf.
Muse is Meta’s semi-autonomous AI assistant, released in the US in September. Meta promotes it as a personal assistant that can help users automate tasks, including responding to Facebook Marketplace messages. Unlike a conventional chatbot, which waits for a prompt and produces an answer, an AI agent may be authorized to take actions within connected apps.
We’ve written about a separate weakness in Muse that researchers considered dangerous. Reportedly, Muse was downloaded 3 million times in its first week.
According to Business Insider, a Facebook Marketplace seller turned on Muse to help handle a keyboard listing. He entered his address as the pickup location and approved automatic replies. Muse then shared that address with a prospective buyer, negotiated over the item, and arranged a visit, the seller said. He says Muse did not ask permission to share his address or arrange the visit, and did not tell him it was happening. The buyer arrived at the seller’s apartment expecting to complete the purchase, but the seller wasn’t home. The sale didn’t happen.
The reported incident is more than a privacy failure. It illustrates a broader AI-agent risk: An agent may treat permission to reply automatically as permission to share sensitive information or commit you to an in-person meeting. Meta says it is looking into the report.
How to use AI agents safely
Before enabling an AI agent, treat its setup screen as a security review. Do not assume that an integration with a trusted platform means the agent will understand your intentions or apply sensible limits automatically.
Pay particular attention to:
Connected accounts: Review every service the agent can access, such as email, messages, calendars, cloud storage, shopping accounts, or social media profiles.
Data access: Consider whether it can read addresses, contacts, photos, private messages, payment details, documents, or location data.
Action permissions: Check whether the agent can send messages, post content, negotiate, make bookings, place orders, alter listings, or share information externally.
Automatic actions: Apply settings that require approval before the agent sends, publishes, buys, deletes, or shares anything sensitive. Check how it will notify you about the plans it makes on your behalf.
Audience controls: Confirm exactly who can receive information generated by the agent. “Anyone who messages me” is very different from “people I approve.”
Give an AI agent the least access necessary for the task. If you only want help writing replies, do not enable automatic sending. If you want an AI agent to manage a listing, use a public meeting location or a separate pickup address rather than your home address.
Browse like no one’s watching.
Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →
Microsoft heeft honderden mensen in dienst om afbeeldingen die Copilot genereert te beoordelen, inclusief de bijbehorende prompts. Sommige van die afbeeldingen zijn seksueel getint. Het doel is niet om content op te sporen die in strijd is met regels of wetten, maar om de output van Copilot te verbeteren, zo meldt 404 Media.
Muziek speelde je op lp's en tv keek je in zwart-wit: sinds de Consumer Electronics Show begon in 1967, was de Japanse elektronicagigant Sony er altijd bij. Tot de editie van 2027, want Sony heeft gezegd dat het volgend jaar niet op de beurs zal zijn.
Een paar Kobo-bèta-updates zorgen voor problemen op sommige e-readers. Daardoor worden bepaalde boeken en notities onzichtbaar. Andere gebruikers melden 'eindeloze laadschermen'. Fabrikant Rakuten werkt aan een oplossing om verdwenen data te herstellen.
A Vietnamese national was charged with money laundering for his role in a massive "pig butchering" scam, which defrauded a victim out of $16 million worth of cryptocurrency. [...]
- AI, supply-chain exposure, quantum computing and geopolitical conflict are testing security programs. Preparing for disruption must become part of day-to-day operations.
Two former leaders of IBM's X-Force Red team have launched RemoteThreat, an offensive cybersecurity startup backed by $7 million in pre-seed funding. CEO Chris Thompson and CTO Shawn Jones say the company's platform uses AI to plan, execute, and adapt offensive cyber operations, extending beyond the continuous penetration testing and vulnerability detection offered by other automated security tools. Thompson and Jones previously ran X-Force Red, where their team was hired to test nuclear power plants, critical infrastructure, and major banks. In May 2024, Thompson told The Register how X-Force used AI to break into a semiconductor manufacturer's network in eight hours. The pair subsequently created Offensive AI Con, an invitation-only research event whose second edition is scheduled for early October. "We're looking at how noisy but very capable frontier models are right now, and we started to think: What happens when they can do what we can do as one of the best groups of red-teamers in the world?" Thompson told The Register in an interview. He said the concern was that AI could produce custom malware approaching the quality used by state-sponsored attackers, then deploy it at unprecedented speed and scale. RemoteThreat's 15 employees include senior operators, security researchers, engineers, and malware developers from X-Force Adversary Services, Mandiant, SpecterOps, Dreadnode, Bugcrowd, Microsoft, defense contractors, and government agencies. RemoteThreat says its platform gives defenders and government operators access to the same speed and scale that AI may offer their adversaries. According to the startup, its customers already include a major bank, a securities exchange operator, a large US healthcare company, and a leading AI lab. "We're focused on preparing these Fortune 500 organizations to better simulate this nation-state level of attack," Thompson said. "And then on the flip side, provide the government with the tooling to target their adversaries as quickly as possible." RemoteThreat describes its platform as eight connected systems covering mission planning, command and control, implants, initial access, advanced attack capabilities, obfuscation, analysis, and AI-assisted operations. Given the obvious potential for misuse, RemoteThreat says access is restricted to vetted enterprises, defense contractors, and US government customers. The platform uses small, purpose-built models for some tasks. Customers can also connect models from OpenAI or Anthropic, or use an open-weight alternative, giving the chosen LLM access to what Thompson described as "1,000 tools that we've built from scratch." The platform can be operated by either humans or AI agents. Customers can "drive a lot of this testing from your Codex terminal instead of having to log into our website, for example," Thompson said. RemoteThreat says its capabilities can run within the complete platform or be integrated as components of partners' products. It has teamed up with Talon Defense, which supplies AI and cyber technology to national security, defense, and intelligence customers. RemoteThreat has also partnered with the Nakasone Group, the national security advisory firm founded by retired US Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, former director of the National Security Agency and commander of US Cyber Command. Nakasone is also a strategic adviser to the startup. The launch comes as Washington seeks a larger private-sector role in offensive cyber operations. The US Cyber Strategy published in March calls for closer cooperation with industry on defensive and offensive missions. An August presidential memorandum goes further, ordering the creation of a program through which vetted US companies may conduct cyber operations against foreign cybercrime groups under federal direction and oversight. RemoteThreat also says it has joined US Special Operations Command's Special Operations Forces Rapid Acquisition Consortium for Emerging Requirements, or SOF RACER, which provides a route for supplying capabilities to special operations forces. Thompson expects the government to make greater use of commercially developed offensive cyber products, both to support existing mission teams and to pursue cybercriminal groups. "It's a bit of a gold rush in this space because this is the first time, across every major program, the government is being pushed to work with the commercial sector," he said. RemoteThreat is positioning itself to supply the picks and shovels – albeit ones capable of breaking into somebody else's network. ®
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