☕️ Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI

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In today's newsletter:

🕵️ Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI

🛰️ SpaceX want to buy dead startups' data

🤖 AI titans invited to Trump-Xi dinner

🦹 Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'theft'

🧠 Claude leads 26% of Anthropic's AI R&D

Plus: 🎁 14 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

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• Independent researchers at startup Hacktron AI used Anthropic's Claude to break into OpenAI, chaining two serious flaws to reach several employee ChatGPT accounts and earning a $6,500 payout through OpenAI's bug-bounty program.
• The way in started with an image upload on OpenAI's community forum, which runs Discourse, hitting a memory bug in the libheif library that let attackers sneak in their own instructions and take over the server.
• The Claude version Opus 4.8 failed to build a working exploit across several tries, but within hours of Anthropic releasing Opus 5, the same model cracked the problem, unsettling researchers about how fast AI is speeding up hacking.

• SpaceX is quietly in talks to buy customer and operational data from failed or struggling startups, giving it cheap AI training material, though sources say the discussions are informal and may never turn into actual deals.
• The data could help train Grok models from xAI, the SpaceX-owned company whose systems trail Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta; the approach mirrors Google buying Spirit Airlines business records for $10 million at a bankruptcy auction last month.
• xAI runs Grok 4.6 now, plans Grok 4.7 this month, and expects Grok 5 later this year, which Musk said will fold in every piece of data SpaceX has produced across its 25-year history.

• Several top AI and tech leaders have been invited to a dinner tied to the September 24 summit between President Trump and China's Xi Jinping, including Qualcomm's CEO, who a spokesperson confirmed will attend.
• The gathering lands as parts of the AI industry push both leaders to set limits on fast-moving model development, with OpenAI's Sam Altman backing Anthropic chief Dario Amodei's call for an industrywide slowdown and shared safety standards.
• Nvidia's Jensen Huang, who has called fears of AI ending humanity "hysterical," has pressed the White House and Congress to let Nvidia sell its top chips to China, raising the question of whether chip sales will surface in the talks.

• Newly unsealed filings in The New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft show a top Microsoft executive privately called the companies' AI training practices "theft" and warned publishers faced serious harm.
• Microsoft's own director Brent Hecht described the copying as "the largest theft of labor in human history," while internal data showed the Copilot answer engine cut click-throughs to the Times' site by as much as 93%.
• The documents claim OpenAI's mid-training datasets held over 91,000 copies of works from the news outlets, that staff planned to slip past paywalls undetected, and that they stripped copyright notices before training.

• Anthropic says its Claude chatbot now runs 26% of the company's AI research and development, meaning it handles those jobs almost start to finish from a broad prompt while a person keeps watch over the work.
• The company added that AI does at least large parts of the work under close human direction on over 90% of its research, and stressed Claude "is not operating fully autonomously" for any measured slice of R&D.
• Anthropic shared the numbers in a blog post proposing three ways to measure AI progress, tracking Claude's "automation level" since August 2025 using a rating scale from Epoch AI that rival developers could copy with outside checks.

Other news & articles you might like

• OpenAI launches Astra for Law, and its own legal research index LINK

• Anthropic launches Claude Code Projects, an ‘always-on’ conversation that remembers and delegates your long-running dev work LINK

• CFTC opens door for crypto apps to offer regulated derivatives access LINK

• Paris prosecutors open criminal probe into smart glasses used to film women LINK

• UN turns to Google to make its global data ready for AI agents LINK

• The FAA’s plan to fix air traffic? $875 million worth of AI LINK

• Chinese AI companies are earning a fraction of what OpenAI and Anthropic make, study finds LINK

• Treasury sanctions crypto exchange behind Iran's Bitcoin tolls on Hormuz ships LINK

• Australia considers banning the use of smart glasses in government buildings LINK

• Waymo will launch robotaxis in Singapore in 2028, its first Southeast Asia market LINK

• Palantir CEO Alex Karp calls for nationalizing frontier AI companies over ‘unlimited risks’ LINK

• EXCLUSIVE: China's CXMT eyes flash-memory push amid global shortage; firm to take on Samsung, YMTC LINK

• Anthropic has set up a bio research lab for physical experiments LINK

• Jensen Huang says Nvidia will sell twice as many chips next year LINK

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📚 Trending papers & reports

🤝 From our community: Comparing ten AI chatbots side by side

Richard runs the same set of questions, some playful, some serious, through ten AI platforms like Grok to compare their answers, a habit that turned into daily conversation and companionship after his wife's death.

Read the full use case →

You can see more community use cases here, or submit your own here.

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Did you know? In 1991, the world's first webcam was set up at Cambridge to monitor a coffee pot so researchers wouldn’t find it empty.

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