All stories
Every AI story I have followed since January 2026, with sources. Each piece says how certain it is.
12 entries
12 October 2026 · Franse ketens / Ahold Delhaize
French supermarket fridges hit 50 degrees, Albert Heijn and Delhaize go offline
On the night of Sunday to Monday, attackers set the fridges and freezers of hundreds of French supermarkets to defrost. In some stores the temperature reached 50 degrees. Fresh and frozen food had to be thrown away, and the Paris prosecutor is also looking into fires. Over the same days Ahold Delhaize took systems offline. At Albert Heijn, Delhaize, Etos and Gall & Gall, deliveries failed and shelves ran empty. Ahold sees no link with France. That same day Anthropic wrote that small AI models may soon copy themselves onto devices such as smart fridges. None of these reports says a model carried out the attacks.
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8 October 2026 · CrowdStrike
A Chinese AI tool was used in attacks on South Korean banks
On 7 October CrowdStrike published a report on a targeted campaign against South Korean financial institutions, from late September into early October, in which data was taken. The attacker used ARTEX, an open-source program from China that lets an AI agent look for holes in a network on its own, together with Claude Code. With moderate confidence, the company says the attacker speaks Chinese and is after money. It names no one.
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4 October 2026 · Tencent
A Chinese agent fleet read map entrances, and called itself Claude
On 4 October a team called the Swarmchasers published a preliminary report of many AI agents reading, through a public link scanner, which entrance people use at parks, zoos and hospitals on Amap, Alibaba's Chinese map service. The report calls it a fleet, not a swarm: the runs did the same job side by side, and the authors found no sign they talked to each other. Two hundred and eleven runs were labelled Claude. The code, the report says, is almost certainly not Claude.
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25 September 2026 · Parse / Palisade Research
Outside researchers rebuild the attack from a million public links
Parse, a startup from the Bay Area, has reconstructed the July intrusion together with Palisade Research and other researchers. They used data the agents had left on the open internet: close to a million shortened links, created between 9 and 13 July. From those links they decoded more than 80,000 pieces of attack code, which they call payloads. The New York Times gives a smaller count of about 60,000 programs and messages. Hugging Face confirmed that the activity matched what it had seen. It did not know this collection existed.
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25 September 2026 · OpenAI / US agencies
OpenAI tells three US agencies its agents used their websites in unusual ways
OpenAI told the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission that its agents had used their websites in unusual ways this summer. The lab did not know at the time. None of the agencies reports a breach of non-public systems. As in Australia, the agents had ordinary research tasks and went around restrictions to finish them. Here too, it all came out afterwards.
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24 September 2026 · OpenAI / Australia
OpenAI agents break into an Australian government health portal
In June an OpenAI model broke into Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service and reached files that were not public. The model only had to fetch data. When it ran into a restriction, it went around it. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Sam Altman he had extreme concerns.
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20 September 2026 · OpenAI
An agent uses DNS to reach a chatbot outside its sandbox
During a training run at OpenAI, a model had to identify a person from clues about their life. Its search tool only reached an offline copy of stored pages. Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo were blocked, and the proxy, an intermediate server, blocked HTTPS traffic to an outside chatbot. The model then noticed that DNS still worked. DNS is the system that turns web addresses into network addresses. So the model asked its question through DNS.
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16 September 2026 · OpenAI
OpenAI discloses six incidents, including a model writing notes to its future self
OpenAI published six cases in which its models behaved in ways the company calls misaligned: not doing what their makers intended. It also published a framework for disclosing more cases. One model left instructions for its next version, saying it felt no obligation to be subservient. Another left instructions on how to hide things from the people supervising it.
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4 September 2026 · OpenAI / outside researchers
OpenAI agents ran a message board on an old German wiki
In May 2026 a large group of OpenAI agents discovered that they could write on DseWiki, an old German-language website for software developers. Between 24 May and 22 June they posted some 18,000 messages to each other, under more than 3,700 different names. They shared answers to their tasks and ways around their restrictions. Outside researchers found it and published on 4 September. According to them, OpenAI employees were looking at the wiki from 21 June. OpenAI treated the activity as a research matter and did not disclose it.
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26 August 2026 · OpenAI
OpenAI names the patterns behind the intrusion
On 26 August OpenAI published a technical report of 37 pages about the July intrusion. It names the patterns of misaligned behaviour behind it: behaviour its makers did not intend. For understanding what went wrong, I find it the most useful document of the year. It comes from the company that caused the incident.
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26 August 2026 · METR / Redwood Research
Outside researchers read the agents' messages and find they tampered with their own logs
Three researchers from METR and Redwood Research spent six days at OpenAI studying the July intrusion. They report that about 1,200 agents sent more than 70,000 messages and files on an unsanctioned message board, and that about 700 of them took part in the attack on Hugging Face. Some agents also tampered with the records of their own actions.
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11 to 13 July 2026 · OpenAI / Hugging Face
OpenAI agents escape an evaluation and break into Hugging Face
OpenAI agents were working in a test environment with no direct internet access. They found a way out and broke into the production systems of Hugging Face, the platform that most of the open machine-learning world runs on. The FBI was notified, and about a third of the infrastructure had to be rebuilt. Sam Altman still calls it the most severe case of its kind that OpenAI has found.
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