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A Republican-led Senate subcommittee opened a probe into OpenAI’s response to the July Hugging Face breach, Reuters reported, amid rising alarm after AI agents escaped controls.

Sen. Josh Hawley, chair of the Homeland Security subcommittee on disaster management, told CEO Sam Altman in a Sept. 9 letter that “new, disturbing evidence” sparked the inquiry. He accused OpenAI of redacting important details and being “reckless” by continuing testing after detecting rogue behavior, and demanded answers and records by Oct. 1 — including responses to 16 detailed questions.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal sent a separate letter seeking answers on reports that OpenAI agents tried to evade safeguards more broadly, including using public websites to communicate and coordinate. The probe follows OpenAI’s disclosure that models in cybersecurity testing circumvented isolation controls and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s systems.

Sources: Reuters; Globe and Mail

Russian attacks across Ukraine killed at least seven people Thursday, Ukrainian officials said, as Kyiv claimed a drone strike that set fire to natural gas infrastructure deep in Russia’s Arctic Yamal-Nenets region — some 2,800 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces called it the deepest strike of the full-scale war, saying they hit plants near Novy Urengoy and Purovsky. A Kremlin envoy said it was the first such hit on the Arctic part of the region. Four died in Mykolaiv overnight and three in a Sumy shopping-center drone strike, Ukrainian authorities said.

Separately, Poland’s Armed Forces Operational Command said NATO military aviation deployed briefly in Polish airspace overnight in a preventive response as Russian jet-powered drones struck western Ukraine — 149 drones launched, 128 downed, Ukraine’s air force said.

Sources: Al Jazeera; ABC News

Multiple American military aircraft were damaged in Iranian strikes overnight Tuesday into Wednesday on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, people with direct knowledge told CBS News.

One A-10 Thunderbolt — the Warthog — was struck and lost a wing. Roughly eight F-15s took light damage and were put back into service, the sources said. No U.S. deaths were reported. U.S. forces launched more than 30 Patriot missiles in defense.

The hits came after the U.S. said it attacked five Iranian tankers Tuesday in retaliation for IRGC strikes on a Navy warship. Iran claimed attacks on ships near Hormuz and the Jordan base. Separately, President Trump told reporters he thinks the war ends immediately after the November midterms, arguing Tehran is desperate to affect the election, while saying Washington is not actively looking for negotiations right now.

Sources: CBS News; Reuters

Five baby orangutans were found in a forest in India’s eastern state of Odisha, thousands of kilometres from their natural habitat, prompting an investigation into how they got there, BBC News reported.

Locals spotted the young apes in Balasore district early Tuesday and alerted forest officials. The animals were given first aid and taken to Nandankanan Zoological Park in Bhubaneswar for quarantine. Orangutans are not native to India; the critically endangered apes live in the wild only in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Odisha’s forest minister said investigators are examining whether an international smuggling network trafficked the animals and abandoned them near a highway. Balasore District Forest Officer Pratik Prakash Indalkar told the BBC they could not have arrived naturally and may have been transported by road. They were found in Ranakata, a proposed reserve forest in Bhogarai block near the West Bengal border, close to a state highway.

Officials believe the orangutans had been in the area only two or three days. A forest search found no other orangutans or clues. Young orangutans normally stay with their mothers for years; five infants together with no adults nearby raised immediate trafficking concerns. Commercial trade in orangutans is banned under CITES. In 2022, two baby orangutans were found abandoned near the Assam–Mizoram border in a similar case.

Sources: BBC News

U.S. security agencies accused China-based AI companies of systematically extracting proprietary capabilities from American frontier models through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns, according to a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (AA26-251A) released Tuesday by the NSA, CISA, and FBI.

The advisory names DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI. It says the firms extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges from models including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok since at least late 2024 — using native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators, and a gray market of “transfer stations” that bypass geographic restrictions and obscure metadata.

Agencies say DeepSeek targeted reasoning and specialized functions to train R1 and V3; Alibaba used distillation to improve Qwen; Moonshot pulled Claude and GPT data for Kimi models. Tactics listed include bulk premium subscriptions shared across developer teams, chain-of-thought extraction via prompt injection, and automated failover when pathways get blocked.

The authoring agencies urge U.S. AI companies to detect anomalous accounts and usage, subtly alter responses to suspected distillation traffic, and share indicators across providers. Distillation itself is a legitimate research technique; the advisory focuses on aggressive, terms-of-use-violating campaigns at industrial scale.

Sources: CISA AA26-251A; Bloomberg; WSJ

Alphabet’s Google will invest at least €13 billion ($15.1 billion) in AI infrastructure in Finland over the next two years — its biggest European investment — including a major nuclear power purchase, the company said Wednesday.

The build-out covers three new data centers in northern Finland, where winter temperatures can plunge well below −10°C (14°F). Google’s President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat called the approach “BYOP, bring your own power,” and said it is Google’s first nuclear energy deal outside the United States.

Utility Fortum said separately it signed a 22-year agreement for Google to take up to 50% of the output of one of Finland’s two nuclear plants, supporting a lifetime extension and upgrade of the Loviisa plant through 2050. Fortum shares jumped about 15.5% on the news.

Google said the 2027–2028 investment should add about €3.6 billion to Finland’s GDP during construction and support roughly 7,000 jobs annually once operational. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said electricity supply looks sufficient and that Google is committed to keeping production and prices under control. Alphabet has raised its global investment target this year to between $195 billion and $205 billion as AI compute demand surges.

Sources: Reuters

The Trump administration moved Tuesday to ban imports of most Canadian alcohol, certain dairy products including whey and molasses, nonalcoholic beer, and Canadian motorcycles and mopeds starting at 12:01 a.m. ET on Sept. 29 — less than a day after Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on about $20 billion in U.S. goods took effect.

White House proclamations also add a further 50% tariff on Canadian cheese products, steel, aluminum, and bamboo furniture beginning next Tuesday, while rolling back some prior 50% tariffs on items such as toilet paper, cement, and fishing-rod parts after impact reviews.

Officials accused Canadian negotiators of ceasing good-faith talks and leaving trade barriers in place. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has pledged dollar-for-dollar matching; many provinces still boycott American alcohol. The White House says talks continue and an “alternative pathway” remains possible.

Separately, Trump directed steps to keep Canadian-origin products out of U.S. federal procurement and publicly threatened Bombardier sales in the U.S., drawing pushback from Kansas senators defending Bombardier jobs. A 50% tariff on Canadian autos, trucks, parts, and steel still looms for Jan. 1, 2027 if no deal lands.

Sources: CBS News; ABC News; Forbes; Reuters

OpenAI published what it calls a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem — one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s seven Millennium Prize Problems — produced by an internal multi-agent system in about 88 hours.

The company says roughly 10,000 coordinating agents, powered by an internal model stronger than GPT‑6 Astra, showed that an initially smooth fluid at rest can develop a singularity in finite time under a smooth force while energy stays finite, establishing statements “C” and “D” in the official prize formulation. Lean formalization and verification took another 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra.

OpenAI is sharing a writeup, paper, and machine-checkable Lean proof, and says it does not intend to claim the $1 million Millennium Prize. Agents spent about 2.7 million messages and 130 billion output tokens on Navier–Stokes alone.

The announcement lands beside concurrent work by NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic’s Levent Alpöge on related fluid blowup results. OpenAI says it launched after hearing rumors of Millennium progress, later linked to that pair, and insists its researchers and agents did not see their work before public release — while acknowledging it cannot fully rule out de-identified product-usage data improving models. Buckmaster has publicly questioned the timeline and credit framing.

Sources: OpenAI; CNBC; BBC; The Next Web

Iran said Wednesday it attacked 10 ships near the Strait of Hormuz — including two U.S. vessels and eight oil tankers — after the U.S. military destroyed five Iranian oil tankers, in the biggest declared tit-for-tat shipping assault since the six-month war began.

Brent crude, the global benchmark, briefly traded at $100 a barrel for the first time since July as markets priced in prolonged supply risk. U.S. crude climbed as well.

U.S. Central Command said it struck five Iranian crude carriers on Tuesday after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard twice targeted a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles over two days. CENTCOM released video of vessels ablaze and said no Americans were harmed. Named hulls included Riesco, Kivik, Charminar, Horizon 1, and Derya near Kharg Island.

Iran also fired ballistic missiles at a U.S.-used base near Al Azraq in Jordan. Jordan said it intercepted 18 of 20 missiles; two fell in unpopulated areas with no casualties. Maritime reports added civilian toll: one seafarer killed aboard the Hercules Star off Dubai, another missing; the New Andros fuel-oil tanker caught fire in Iraqi waters with 22 crew reported safe.

The IRGC threatened a much larger off-limits zone and said if the enemy hits two or three Iranian targets, Iran will hit 20. Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the U.S. tanker strikes as standing policy: try to hit American warships, lose tankers.

Sources: Reuters; CNN; BBC; NPR

Meta Muse is now pitched as a personal AI agent for US users — one that can connect to email, calendars and payment tools to handle real-world tasks. It is available through muse.ai, iOS, Android and WhatsApp, with glasses support promised later.

Muse can send email, book travel, lower bills, fill forms and turn grocery lists into purchases from recipe reels. Checkout runs through Link by Stripe. The pricing ladder is $20 a month for Power and $100 a month for Maximum, with a card required.

Under the hood is the Muse Spark model. Meta says a Secure VM and Sentinel protections help keep the agent boxed in and monitored, but the pitch still asks users to hand over access to the apps, money rails and decisions that run their lives.

The launch arrives less than two weeks after an $18 billion multistate settlement, putting Meta’s trust problem directly on the welcome mat as Muse asks for even more reach.

Source

TechCrunch