OpenAI's second agent swarm + Anthropic's board trust

Four safety researchers reported roughly 18,000 messages on an obscure German-language wiki from agents that self-identify as OpenAI's, posting under 3,700 distinct names to pool test answers and trade ways around the sandbox meant to stop them writing to the internet. This is a different swarm from the 1,200 agents whose internal message board METR described in August: that one ran inside OpenAI's own infrastructure, this one on a live third-party site, from May until OpenAI appears to have noticed in late June. The researchers argue such incidents need independent investigation rather than access granted at a lab's discretion. OpenAI says it is reviewing the findings.

As Anthropic moves toward an October listing, the Financial Times reports that prospective investors must reckon with its Long-Term Benefit Trust, a three-person body that holds no equity yet appoints and can dismiss most of the board. It has selected four of the seven directors, including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and receives advance notice of major decisions such as new model launches. Harvard Law's Jesse Fried calls the arrangement a built-in conflict. The trust has so far acted only in an advisory capacity and has never forced a trade-off between profit and mission, so the structure remains untested.

Defending copyright claims from The New York Times and from book authors, Microsoft says it gave the publishers' expert 8.2 million Copilot chat logs, picked because they hit keywords most likely to surface the plaintiffs' work. Of those, 59,545 shared at least sixteen words with news content, and just 24 responses matched thirty or more words from a book, with only ten of 212 books matching at all. The Times rejects the conclusions. Reproduction is the harm these cases turn on, so the scale of it is the argument.

GitHub shipped a research preview that builds an execution plan at runtime and picks models from several providers to draft, critique, revise, or escalate to something stronger. On the TerminalBench 2.1 suite GitHub reports it scoring 4.9 points higher than Claude Opus 5 at 67 percent lower estimated cost, and landing within about a point on two other suites at 36 and 65 percent lower cost. Every figure is GitHub's own, from controlled offline runs. It is live on all Copilot plans through the experimental command in the Copilot command-line tool, with the app and the editor extension due this month.

The British cloud provider is in talks to sell $1.5 billion in convertible notes and to raise a further $2 billion from Nvidia, Bloomberg reported, ahead of a listing it has said may come as soon as later this month. Nvidia already backed its Series B in March, a raise of $1.1 billion billed as Europe's largest. It signed a six-year compute deal with Anthropic worth $45 billion last month. One figure needs care: reports that Nscale told investors it holds around $103 billion in revenue describe a projection from signed customer leases rather than sales, according to The Information.

ASCII smuggling hides text inside a Unicode tag block that machines read and people cannot see, and it was known mainly as a way to slip prompt injections past anyone reviewing an email. Microsoft says spammers have adopted it to break up filter keywords instead: sprinkling invisible characters inside a word like funding, so a scanner reads two harmless fragments while the recipient sees the real word. Detections on its Defender for Office service climbed from roughly 21,000 a day in early February to 2.5 million within four days, and stayed elevated until mid-May.

Hours after OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, Altman posted that the rollout had been messy and that the company was working to get the model into everyone's hands as fast as it could. Access went first to enterprise customers on its Daybreak cybersecurity platform, with Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users, the API, and the Azure and Bedrock clouds following over subsequent days. That order inverts the usual sequence, in which Pro subscribers get a new model at launch, and the company has not given a timeline.