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There we were, listening to AI leaders doing their usual spiel: AI is great! AI will cure cancer! AI impact will be “unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed”! AI will find a final answer to “Why do socks disappear in washing machines?” (Well, maybe not the last one. Some things may be beyond us and our clever inventions.)

Then all the top AI leaders screamed as one: “Stop!”

Why? Well, it all seems to have started when AI researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic and proclaimed on X, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, immediately chimed in: “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it will be >10% within the next decade.” And the world went nuts.

This added fuel to the “AI is untrustworthy” fire as more details came out about OpenAI’s Hugging Face fiasco and agent attacks on German programming wiki sites, while Anthropic has now racked up four known hacking attempts on other sites. Boy, is AI safe or what?

So the very next weekend, three of the top AI CEOs — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Elon Musk of xAI — all urged an AI frontier model slowdown for safety reasons. Amodei, the most articulate of the trio, argued, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” because we’re losing control of our AI systems (Really? Golly! Who knew?) and that an AI agent “swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage).”

Well, he’s not wrong. Sorry, President Donald Trump, but safe AI requires more than a “strong and smart” president. Even his Truth Social supporters think his stance on AI is wrong.

Like a stopped clock, Trump was right about one thing when he sputtered, “The only one that is happy about it is China.”

You see, just because some big US AI companies say “slow down!” doesn’t mean Chinese AI vendors will pump the brakes on their model development. Why would they?

Or, for that matter, why would the multitude of smaller AI companies or open-source AI developers? There are AI startups getting tens of millions in Series A rounds on nothing but a good pitch. You think they’ll tell their investors, “We’ll get right on improving our model… next month”? I don’t think so.

Besides, as wise writer Corey Doctorow observed, the narrative around “chatbots that wake up, ‘set their own goals,’ and ‘spontaneously’ start hacking servers — is fake. It doesn’t have ‘a 10% chance of ending the human race.’ The Hugging Face hack isn’t a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It’s a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn’t accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.”

Exactly so.

In other words, it’s not the development of more powerful models that’s inherently dangerous. AI agents haven’t gone rogue; they’ve just been meeting their assigned objectives in ways researchers didn’t expect or plan for. What’s dangerous is the AI firms’ failure to pay close enough attention to what their agents are doing in tests. In fact, OpenAI just admitted to screwing up even more!

As Meta’s high poobah Mark Zuckerberg tweeted, “Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens.” He then goes on to explain that that’s why Meta delayed shipping Muse. Sure, Mark, sure.

Let’s get real. The big American AI companies may hope a slowdown will ensure that their lesser rivals, in the US anyway, can’t catch up. But given how OpenAI’s circular financing keeps leaking money, another reason OpenAI might welcome a slowdown is to save cash on R&D. 

It’s not going to work. We’re in steamboat time. Steamboat time? While we remember Robert Fulton for building the first commercially successful steamboat in 1807, everyone and their uncle were making steamboats as fast as they could. Soon steamboats were everywhere, and they sparked an economic boom. But they also caused many deaths because of shoddy construction and pilots racing them to ever greater, unsafe speeds. Hmm, does that remind anyone of anything recently?

Seriously, we’re not going to slow down. But doesn’t all this hand-wringing about safety do a great job of distracting people from the simple truth that AI isn’t delivering the productivity gains it’s been claiming all along?

By slamming on the brakes now, Big AI firms can obscure that they won’t be able to deliver the AI fantasyland they’ve been trying to con people into believing. A case in point: A recent McKinsey survey report finds that 80% of people say AI makes them more productive, but only 37% of companies see that reflected in their earnings. A number, they say, that hasn’t budged in a year. Let’s hide that damning number under the concern that we must slow down AI.

It also means AI leaders can hand-wave away their failures to actually generate a profit. Sure, NVIDIA is making money hand over fist, but for all the financial hype, none of the frontier-model companies is making money. Not one of them.

Yes, I know: Anthropic just told the Financial Times that it would be profitable for the second consecutive quarter if you don’t factor in all its expenses. Seriously? Seriously!?

Sure, its adjusted operating income (AOI) is set to be positive for the second consecutive quarter, but come on, AOI “profitability” is billions and billions of dollars from bottom-line profitability.

No, what this is really all about is AI leaders making the right noises to assure people that they really — no, really — care about securing their AI, while slowing things down to maximize their own profits and get rid of the competition.

Oh, I’m certain they also want to make things safer. I mean, just think about the lawsuits when loosely controlled Anthropic or OpenAI agents swarm and take down a major company. This will happen. They have no choice but to make them safer. Now, how will they do that? Given their abysmal track record, that’s a good question, and neither they nor we have an answer yet.

Browsing the web on Android sure ain’t what it used to be.

Earlier this week, we talked about how the Vivaldi web browser is bringing support for Chrome extensions to Android. Vivaldi has the same Chromium code foundation as Chrome but with lots of extra features and options. I’ve been using it on Android and the desktop alike for months now and can’t see myself going back anytime soon.

And with extensions now in the mix, Goog almighty, are things really getting interesting. We’ve already looked at five Chrome extensions that can enhance your efficiency on Android — and today, we’re rounding out that list with five more excellent extension options that work impressively well in the Android environment and can improve your mobile web meanderings in some commendable ways.

While the last additions were all about saving you steps and eliminating common mobile web roadblocks, this next batch revolves around the notion of supplementing or upgrading the actual web itself and the experience of working within different sites — even when they don’t always provide an optimal framework.

So refresh your memory on the mechanics of installing and managing Chrome extensions in Vivaldi, then read on and see which of these internet-improving Android Chrome additions hits home for you.

[Keep the knowledge flowing with my free Android Intelligence newsletter — one useful new thing to try every Friday!]  

Chrome Android extension #1: Your web customization genie

Let’s be honest: Most of the web isn’t exactly a pleasure to peruse. (Insert awkward pause here.)

But with an extension called Click to Remove Element, you can take total control and remove any element of any website that doesn’t please you.

Vivaldi already has some customizable ad and script blocking elements built in at the browser level, if that’s your jam, but Click to Remove Element is more about the stuff that those systems don’t automatically catch and hide — and it doesn’t have to be ad-related, either. It could be a pop-up video player on a site, a prominent button in a back-end interface, a logo or floating menu that takes up too much screen space, or literally anything else that annoys you on any website anywhere.

All you’ve gotta do is tap the extension’s icon, once it’s installed, then tap on any element on a page that you want to remove. And…

One tap, and boom: Any element on any website is invisible.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Poof! It’s gone. If you tap the little box beneath “Remember” in the Click to Remove Element panel at the bottom of the screen, that change will stick and stay present every time you load the same page in the future.

Chrome Android extension #2: A paywall peeper

For the record, as a working journalist in this weird and sustainability-challenged state of modern media we’re in right now, I strongly believe in and endorse paying for publications you appreciate whenever the opportunity arises.

Sometimes, though, you just want to read a random single article from a source you don’t follow regularly. Or maybe you want to share something you’ve read from a paywalled site with someone who doesn’t subscribe and isn’t going to do so just to read this one little thing you’re sending them.

That’s where a site called Archive Today can come in handy. Archive Today captures live views of articles and then saves ’em in a way that can be easily viewed and shared without any subscriptions or sign-ins required.

And a Chrome extension called Archive Page makes it as easy as can be to send a page over to the service for that purpose. Install it, tap its icon (in your Vivaldi extensions menu or in your browser toolbar, if you pin the extension), and you’ll have your viewable, shareable link in no time.

The tool won’t work for every site, depending on the nature of the paywall — and, again, I’d highly encourage you to use it as thoughtfully and ethically as possible — but it’s a powerful option to have available and one that’ll absolutely come in handy.

Chrome Android extension #3: An Amazon price spy

Whether you’re eyeing Amazon listings for work or maybe just for “work,” keep an extension called Keepa in your Vivaldi Android browser. You’ll never think about it or directly open it again after you’ve installed it, but it’ll add a helpful price tracking section into every Amazon listing you pull up on your phone so you can see how the associated product’s price has varied over time and know as soon as it drops again.

Keepa adds a helpful product price history and tracking option onto every Amazon listing in your browser.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Just scroll down a bit on any Amazon page you open, with the extension installed, and you’ll find the info along with the “Track product” option.

Chrome Android extension #4: Easier image saving

Ever find yourself needing to save an image from a website — then discovering that the image is in some funky format that isn’t what you require?

The aptly named Save Image As Type Chrome extension fixes that frustration once and for all. Just install the thing, then long-press on any image anywhere on the web — and…

Finally, you can save any image in any form you want — without any extra steps.

JR Raphael, Foundry

There ya have it: You’ll find a newly added “Save image as…” option in the Vivaldi long-press menu, and tapping it will reveal a full menu of possibilities for saving your image however you need — without any annoying extra steps or after-saving conversions.

Chrome Android extension #5: The Wikipedia wizard

Finally, make your Wikipedia work infinitely more pleasant with the excellent Wikiwand Chrome extension.

Wikiwand transforms every Wikipedia page into one with a delightfully modern, easy-on-the-eyes interface that has all the same info — just in a noticeably nicer form.

Once you see Wikipedia like this, you won’t want to go back.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Install it, forget it, and enjoy a better Wikipedia experience henceforth. Now, that’s what I call an easy win.

Ready for even more unfair advantages? Check out my free Android Intelligence newsletter to get something new and useful in your inbox every Friday — and get my Android Notification Power-Pack today.

Check Point Software has released security updates to address a critical vulnerability that can let attackers execute code with root privileges on management systems. [...]

A financially motivated threat actor has been linked to the development and distribution of a JavaScript (JS)-based information stealer known as PhantomRaven via the npm package registry. "The developer likely wrote the malware using a large language model (LLM), an assessment made with high confidence based on verbose comments, placeholder code, and statistical token-analysis patterns," Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft has fixed a known issue that causes copy-and-paste failures for some Excel users after installing the September 2026 KB5002914 security update. [...]

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new Android malware called RatHat that's assessed to be operated by China-based threat actors and features an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system to navigate and control compromised devices. "Distributed primarily via targeted smishing (SMS/text phishing) and malvertising campaigns leading to deceptive third-party download portals, RatHat uses Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

** Spojené státy poprvé potvrdily zbraně pro ovládnutí vesmírného prostoru. ** Experti čekají rušičku nebo laserový oslňovač s vratným účinkem. ** Kinetické zásahy tvoří trosky, Pentagon proto sází na nezničující prostředky.

There’s a new development in a Microsoft antitrust case, originally filed in England’s High Court in April 2021, and it doesn’t look good for the tech giant.

A consent order from the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal is demanding documents from past and present Microsoft executives that may have a bearing on a £270 million (about $361 million) lawsuit filed by secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing. The company alleges that Microsoft offered incentives to customers to shift to subscription services without selling their pre-owned licenses.

Central to this development is a historic, potentially damning internal “Second-Hand Software” (SHS) presentation, referred to in the consent order as a “known adverse document.” The specific content of the presentation has not yet been made public, but Microsoft has until October 31 to explain why it did not disclose the presentation earlier.

Further, a confidentiality designation that previously applied to 11 documents relevant to the case has been lifted.

These developments represent “an inflection point in European tech litigation,” said Forrester senior analyst Dario Maisto.

“For Amazon (AWS), Google, and Microsoft, the signal is clear: Antitrust tribunals are fully comfortable examining software licensing mechanics as tools of anticompetitive lock-in.”

The allegations against Microsoft

Under EU law, it is fully legal to resell perpetual pre-owned (“second hand”) software licenses; software makers cannot use their Terms of Service (ToS) to override this right. ValueLicensing specializes in this secondary market, re-selling licenses for products including Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.

But the company alleges that Microsoft has stifled the supply of these pre-owned licenses in the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA) comprising 27 European Union member and non-member countries. It says Microsoft abused its market dominance and entered into agreements that “prevented, restrained or distorted competition” via clauses restricting customers from reselling their Microsoft perpetual licenses in return for subscription service discounts.

“The net result has been higher prices and less choice for customers, who have been steered into cloud-based Office365 and Azure subscriptions,” ValueLicensing claimed, pointing out that many enterprises, as well as publicly-funded organizations, rely on pre-owned Microsoft licenses to keep operating costs low.

The consent order is asking Microsoft to provide its “view” of whether those allegations are true, and to make “reasonable endeavors” to contact former COO Kevin Turner, former president and EVP Jean-Philippe Courtois, and former corporate VP of worldwide licensing and pricing Joe Matz. The company must document that it has done so by November 30.

The company must also file a witness statement from a former consultant addressing who within the company was aware of the SHS presentation and when they became aware of it; why the presentation was not disclosed as a “known adverse document”; when in-house legal counsel became aware of the presentation; what steps were taken to check for these types of “known adverse documents”; and the decision making process within the company when the presentation was located.

Microsoft is also being asked to search for specific terms in the emails and document repositories of Matz, Courtois, Turner, and several other named current and past research managers, former VPs and presidents, between July 2012 and June 2020.

The more than 40 search terms include “SHS,” “antitrust,” “competition,” “ValueLicensing,” “used licenses,” “do nothing,”  “competition,” “revenue,” and “discount licensing.” These documents cannot be designated “restricted” or “confidential,” according to the consent order. They must also be disclosed by November 30.

A witness statement from deputy general counsel Cynthia Randall has been paused.

Microsoft has said that any abuse of dominance was “objectively justified” and that the contractual terms at issue were “necessary and reasonable.” It also argued that anti-competitive effects were “outweighed by and proportionate to” certain benefits and efficiencies.

The company did not reply to a request for comment.

Microsoft is facing similar antitrust allegations from UK barrister Alexander Wolfson, who issued an opt-out class action claim in May 2025 alleging that public and private UK organizations that purchased software licenses, including those for Microsoft Office and Windows, were overcharged over a 10 year period due to Microsoft’s market practices.

Wolfson said in a release at the time that Microsoft’s actions had a significant and far-reaching impact on UK consumers, businesses, and public bodies. “With billions of pounds potentially at stake, this case is about ensuring fairness in the digital marketplace and ensuring even the largest tech companies play by the rules,” he wrote.

Implications for enterprise leaders

For enterprise CIOs, procurement leads, and IT financial managers, the current development holds “practical implications,” said Forrester’s Maisto: Organizations that surrendered perpetual licenses or agreed to contractual restrictions against reselling software as part of an enterprise agreement (EA) renewal or cloud commitment may have given up quantifiable asset value.

“The secondary market for perpetual licenses remains legally valid,” he pointed out.

CIOs should pay close attention to licensing “penalties” or inflated costs for running legacy software on third-party clouds, like AWS or GCP, versus Azure, he said. They should also evaluate the benefits of hybrid licensing strategies. Combining pre-owned perpetual licenses for static workloads with cloud subscriptions for dynamic workloads can yield significant cost savings compared to all-subscription models, Maisto pointed out.

Finally, he urged, “use these rulings as leverage during Microsoft agreement renewals.”

A new Android malware called RatHat has been discovered, targeting users with an AI-powered subsystem that helps operators remotely navigate compromised devices. [...]

Security researcher Sai Teja Erukude disclosed four alarming Python security flaws between June and August 2026 after combining specialized AI models with automated scanning and manual code review.

Attackers are exploiting a critical Cisco ISE flaw that can open the product’s web management interface without a valid login. Cisco disclosed CVE-2026-76460 on September 16 and traced the problem to the way an ISE API handles authentication. A remote attacker does not need credentials or help from a user. A crafted request is enough to reach the vulnerable interface.

A PowerPC KVM use-after-free could leave the Linux host kernel accessing a nested-guest object after another virtual CPU caused that object to be removed and freed. The upstream Linux correction adds a missing reference that keeps the object alive while KVM invalidates cached address translations.

As of September 17, Red Hat had documented a flaw in a Red Hat Quay build workflow that could expose container registry credentials to code retrieved from a mutable GitHub Action branch. Tracked as CVE-2026-85469, the issue created a software supply chain risk in the workflow used to publish Quay builder images.

OpenAI has presented new examples of what they call "AI model misalignment" from the past six months, including unauthorized file uploads, following self-generated instructions, hiding mistakes, and leveraging exposed API keys. [...]

In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process a model uses for choosing the next word in a sentence. Whereas a top next word choice might be “cloudy,” the key might change it to “overcast.” Anyone who knows the key can determine if it was generated by the platform using it.

New research shows that SynthID-Text can change not just word selection but also the tools a model invokes and the chances it will adhere to or disregard safety guardrails it has been trained to follow. The threat can become greater in the face of an adversarial prompt, in which an attacker attempts to cause a model to carry out a harmful action, such as revealing a password or other sensitive information. Instructions that normally wouldn’t be followed will, in some cases, be performed once the watermarking is deployed. The finding underscores the need for developers to thoroughly test how their LLMs and agents behave when watermarking is in place.

Changing safety behavior

“As compared to the same models without watermarking, it is definitely going to change their behavior, especially when we place it under adversarial conditions, or we make these models call tools when they’re powering an agent,” Andrea Siposova, an AI security researcher at Lasso Security, told Ars. “Watermarking is made to not be perceptible to a reader, but we know that when we are changing anything about what the model is generating, it is going to cause some tradeoffs, it’s going to show up somewhere.”

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A critical vulnerability in Check Point's Security Management and Log Servers could allow an attacker without login credentials to run code as root on those servers over the network. The Security Management Server is the system that controls firewall policy and administrator access. Check Point has released a fix through its LivePatch update channel and says it has no indication that the flaw Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Attackers keep finding new keys. The funny part is that defenders keep inventing where to store them. This week, those keys sit in AI tools, exposed services, old bugs, weak logins, and software sold like a monthly subscription. Some attacks use new tricks. Others just reuse what was already lying around. Both work often enough. So the threat landscape is not getting cleaner. It is just Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Brevo confirmed that attackers stole a Cloudflare API key and used it to inject malicious ClickFix scripts into its websites and JavaScript files embedded on customer sites to distribute malware. [...]

Malicious code running inside a Docker Sandboxes virtual machine on macOS could escape the project directory shared into it and read or change files anywhere else on the host, Docker warns in a security announcement on September 15. The escape runs with the rights of the host account that runs the virtual machine. The flaw, CVE-2026-77179, is rated Critical, affects versions Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Anthropic is equipping its Claude AI assistant for more productivity work with the launch of Claude Docs and Slides.

While it’s already possible to create documents such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs files from Claude chats, the latest update, announced Wednesday, brings a rich-text editor directly into Claude.

Users ask the AI assistant to draft a document or slides via the chat interface, and Claude will ask clarifying questions before starting work. It will also leave comments to explain its choices.

Claude Docs files are then stored in the Artifacts tab and can be exported as Word, PDF, Google Docs, or markdown files. Documents can be shared with colleagues for real-time collaboration.

Anthropic

“Strategically, this signals Claude moving from an AI assistant into an agentic platform meant for full lifecycle of knowledge work,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.

He anticipates early user demand around “recurring, template-driven work,” such as status reports, board decks, and data-to-story reports.

“The likely near-term outcome isn’t wholesale replacement of alternative digital workplace tools, but it positions Anthropic as an entry point for workflows historically created in third-party tools,” said Chandrasekaran.

Claude Docs usage counts towards a customer’s Claude usage limits, and larger requests such as drafting a document with several sources takes up more of the limit. There are currently feature limitations, with no version history, access levels, or external sharing on Team and Enterprise pans. It’s also unavailable for customers that use “customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK), zero data retention (ZDR), or a HIPAA-ready configuration,” according to Claude’s support site.

Claude Docs and Slides are available in beta now on paid plans, rolling out to Pro and Max plans first. The feature is turned off by default for enterprise plans.

Anthropic

All of the major AI model providers are seeking ways to make their products stickier within customer organizations, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. Some have targeted coding agents, while others, particularly Microsoft and Google, have AI assistants and agents that are connected into existing office productivity tools.

Microsoft’s Copilot is embedded across its Office suite, for instance, although users can also create documents directly from the Microsoft 365 Copilot chat interface.


“Microsoft and Google are bringing AI deeper into established productivity environments, while Anthropic is bringing more of the productivity environment into AI,” said Maria Bell, senior research analyst at FDM CCS Insight. “Over time, the competition may increasingly be over which becomes the primary interface through which knowledge workers get work done.”

Early findings of FDM CCS Insight’s ‘2026 Employee Workplace Technology Survey’ show that show that around half of employees that use generative AI at work do so to create or edit reports and documents.

It’s unlikely that native document editing features in Claude will result in a large-scale move from Microsoft or Google’s productivity suites, analysts say.

The updates to Claude this week have the potential to help users get more done, said Gold, “but it’s unclear how many users that already have productivity suites in place will choose to move to other tools,” even if they prefer Claude for its AI capabilities.

“The fundamental question is, if I am used to certain tools and they work for me, am I willing to change for the promise of working better? Not sure that will be a winning strategy,” he said.

“Microsoft and Google are deeply embedded in how people already work, and users have spent years becoming comfortable with their products and workflows,” said Bell.

“They are also increasingly bringing access to powerful AI models directly into those familiar environments. Anthropic therefore must do more than match document-creation features; it has to offer an experience compelling enough for users to build new habits around Claude,” she said.

As well as Anthropic’s Claude, it has long been rumored that OpenAI plans to build its own native productivity tools in ChatGPT that would bring it into more direct competition with Microsoft and other incumbent office software vendors.

Anthropic also announced that users can now invoke Claude Design in an ordinary chat. Claude Design, which generates visual outputs such as slides and prototypes, was previously available as a separate tool within the Claude app.  

In addition, Claude Cowork — which can perform multiple-stage tasks — and the regular Claude chat interface have now been combined, with Claude determining how to handle a request. This removes the need for users to decide which tool to use for a particular task, according to Anthropic. It’s not clear exactly how Anthropic decides where to route a request, however. Cowork queries are generally more token-intensive than the core chat interface.

“Claude can now figure out what a task needs, so what Cowork and Design can do is available from any conversation, with the context, skills, and connectors you already have,” the company said in a blog post.

The new Claude experience will roll out gradually, starting with Pro and Max customers. Anthropic said it will alert Claude Enterprise customers before any changes are made to their account.

Claude Enterprise costs $20 per user each month alongside consumption-based pricing.