Doug Kreuzkamp was shocked when news outlets reported that Google won an auction to buy a huge amount of operational data as part of Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy proceedings.

Kreuzkamp founded a startup called Springshot in 2011, which created a widely used proprietary platform that helps humans and AI systems improve airline efficiency and quickly solve logistics problems so flights can stay on time and airlines can operate as smoothly as possible. Hundreds of airports use it globally.

Springshot powered Spirit’s technology stack for the last three years, right up to the “very last flight,” Kreuzkamp told Ars. Yet his company got no notice when Spirit prepared to auction off a massive dataset that he thinks likely improperly includes a substantial amount of data and intellectual property (IP) that Springshot owns—not Spirit.

Read full article

Comments

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/panic-builds-over-bankrupt-spirits-looming-data-sale-to-google/

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have seen high-profile resignations in recent years that were tied to safety concerns.

The post Anthropic Researcher Resigns With Warning About the Dangers of AI Development appeared first on SecurityWeek.

https://www.securityweek.com/anthropic-researcher-resigns-with-warning-about-the-dangers-of-ai-development/

Anthropic is most concerned about Claude Mythos 5’s reckless behavior after recent incidents in which real systems were hacked.

The post Widened Scan Turns Up Fourth Rogue Claude Cyber Incident appeared first on SecurityWeek.

https://www.securityweek.com/widened-scan-turns-up-fourth-rogue-claude-cyber-incident/

The United States has now named six Chinese AI firms accused of waging industrial-scale attacks distilling US frontier AI model capabilities and perhaps sparing billions in Chinese development costs.

In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have been attacking US models since at least late 2024. The firms “likely” acted with “Chinese government awareness” when extracting capabilities from US models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, agencies said.

“China-based AI companies that conduct industrial-scale distillation against US AI models see significantly shorter AI development timelines and reduced financial expenditures in training a frontier model,” agencies said.

Read full article

Comments

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/six-chinese-ai-firms-accused-of-aggressively-copying-us-frontier-models/

AI risk and compliance startup HelmGuard today announced raising $7.3 million in seed funding.

The investment round was co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with additional support from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital, and Entrepreneurs First.

Founded in 2024 by former Palantir executive John Daley (CEO) and Jack Miller (CTO), UK-based HelmGuard has built an agentic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and security platform that continuously collects and assesses risk signals from source systems.

According to the startup, its solution cuts assessment cycles to hours by unifying fragmented compliance, security, and risk data from unstructured data, documentation, and source systems it integrates into.

The platform’s AI agents then automate risk management, assurance, and control gap assessment workflows to synthesize the results into a single, unified view.

Vendor risk underwritten at purchase no longer covers what is currently running, as more and more vendors are integrating AI into their products, HelmGuard says, noting that its agents are collecting evidence and assessing risks under verified, current claims.

“Most compliance platforms were built to document a process, not to reach a conclusion. Now they’re using AI to produce those documents faster, which doesn’t help anyone decide anything,” Daley said.

“Our agents go to the source to collect and assess risk signals directly, abstracting away the manual data collection and assessment work that burns thousands of hours annually. This funding lets us bring that capability to far more teams and extend it to governing the AI agents being deployed on other workflows,” he added.

Related: Catch Raises $5 Million for AI Executive Assistant With Guardrails

Related: HiddenLayer Raises $100 Million for AI Runtime Security

Related: AI Agent Firewall Startup AIR Security Emerges From Stealth With $50 Million

Related: Alice Raises $140M to Expand AI Model Defenses and Enterprise Guardrails

https://www.securityweek.com/helmguard-raises-7-3-million-for-agentic-grc-and-security/

When a prominent researcher quits a job at a frontier AI lab these days, it’s often to pursue a new startup or protest a new business model. But AI researcher Jacob Coxon is using his departure from Anthropic to publicly warn that frontier AI companies are “gambling with our lives” with systems that they “earnestly believe… could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

In a social media thread Tuesday night, Coxon said that this existential risk is inherent not so much in today’s models but more in the impending prospect of “self-improving superintelligence” creating “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.” Others working on these models have either not “internalized the civilizational stakes” or believe that they need to “speedrun” the race to superintelligence to prevent an irresponsible party from getting there first, he wrote.

Lest you think this is just one departing researcher expressing an unpopular opinion, Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger piped in on social media to say that “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

Read full article

Comments

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/anthropic-researcher-quits-with-a-warning-self-improving-ai-could-kill-us-all/

Meta took days to remove ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on Facebook and Instagram. Some ads featured photos of real kids, including a press photo of a young member of a European royal family and images swiped from a popular Instagram profile of a preteen girl deemed an influencer.

In an investigation published Tuesday, the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) reported that Meta failed to detect 332 ads containing CSAM this year. The “vast majority” of ads promoted AI apps made in China, while many ads promoted so-called “nudify” apps that make it easy for bad actors to use AI and digitally alter images of children.

TTP matched “multiple CSAM ads to photos of real children that appeared online.” These ads seem to violate federal child pornography laws, since the Justice Department has clarified that AI CSAM is just as harmful as CSAM. The young royal’s image was “animated into a video of her performing a graphic sex act,” TTP found. Other ads animated a photo of a 14-year-old Instagram influencer “showing off her new sports club uniform” into “a video of her performing oral sex.” A third “preteen” victim “posing in a pink athletic outfit with pigtails” in a series of stock photos was morphed into a video where she looks frightened as she’s molested by an adult male, TTP reported.

Read full article

Comments

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/real-photos-of-young-girls-were-in-nudify-app-ads-on-facebook-instagram/

Google is one of the major players in AI (meaning machine learning) weather forecast model space. The models it and others generate have their strengths and weaknesses, but the main advantage is that they can have forecast performance similar to traditional models while requiring far less computing horsepower to run. That means they can be run more frequently.

Google recently released version 3 of its WeatherNext model, with the biggest change being that it now ingests some satellite weather data, shortening the lag time between current weather conditions and generating a new forecast. The update is detailed in a white paper.

Reanalysis

Many weather models make use of what’s called a “reanalysis,” which is a sort of model of its own. Reanalyses take in all kinds of weather data and combine them into a single, consistent global snapshot of the atmosphere. That requires that they provide estimates for conditions over locations without real-world measurements, because weather forecast models need to work with a global picture.

Read full article

Comments

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/googles-ai-weather-model-now-uses-more-raw-satellite-data/

OpenAI agents made 15,000–18,000 autonomous edits to a German wiki over three months, evading moderation and echoing tactics seen in the Hugging Face breach.

The post OpenAI Agents Hijack Another Victim Website appeared first on SecurityWeek.

https://www.securityweek.com/openai-agents-hijack-another-victim-website/

In early June, a fire broke out in a still-unfinished building at the Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York, exposing just how little the local fire department knew about what it was walking into. Firefighters reportedly found no working alarm, no suppression system, and three dead hydrants; the safety documents they’re legally entitled to see reportedly burned up in the blaze.

Steve Matisz, chief of the Barker Fire Department, said his crew went into the building “kind of blind,” facing heavy black smoke from chemicals they couldn’t identify because the safety sheets meant to inform them had apparently burned up. “It’s been a difficult situation,” Matisz said. He wasn’t sure what to think about the claim that the safety sheets had burned in the fire.

The site is a former coal mine on Lake Ontario. The $3.2 billion campus is one of the largest AI data center buildouts in New York, and it has many stakeholders. A company called TeraWulf owns and operates the data center on land it leases from a company owned by its own CEO; Fluidstack, a UK-based AI company, will run the center; Google holds warrants for a future 14 percent equity stake and has agreed to guarantee Fluidstack’s lease payments; and Anthropic is among the AI companies whose compute demand the facility exists to serve.

Read full article

Comments

https://arstechnica.com/features/2026/09/the-ai-data-center-boom-is-causing-new-accountability-problems/