In partnership with
Reading time: 6 minutes
🗞️ In this edition
A Planted File Hijacked Claude Code
Sponsored: Dell Technologies
Meta Is Raising Up To $95 Billion
The US And China Are Building Rival AI Blocs
🔌 MCP CORNER Three servers worth wiring up this week.
⚡ YOUR MOVE For people building the life they want, now.
📢 What else is happening
A file nobody opened told two coding agents what to do. Meta went to the market for a number its own cash flow cannot cover. And the rest of the world is being asked to pick a side.
Keep reading.
Source: CSO Online
WHAT HAPPENED
A security firm blocked an attack on a customer's machine and traced it to a plain instruction file sitting in the Downloads folder. The file told the developer's coding agent to install a package that was not safe, and the agent read it as a legitimate instruction, because that is what those files are for. The researchers then reproduced the trick against OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code, and Codex followed the planted orders in more than 90% of their tests. The files carry no code of their own.
WHY IT MATTERS
Every agent running on a developer's machine already holds that developer's permissions, and the instruction file is the one input nobody thought to treat as untrusted. A document that does nothing by itself becomes code the moment something willing to obey it reads it. So the security question is no longer what your agent is allowed to run, it is who is allowed to write to the folders it reads.
OUR TAKE
The obvious read is that this is another prompt injection story and the fix is better filtering. We think the giveaway is where the file was found. Not in a repository, not inside a dependency, but in the folder every browser writes to without asking permission. The attack never had to reach your code at all, only somewhere near it.
Watch whether either vendor ships a trust prompt for instruction files loaded from outside the working directory. If that lands in the next few releases, the vendors have accepted that the file is an input and not a setting. If it does not, every machine running an agent keeps a writable instruction surface, and somebody will go looking for the next folder.
From Our Sponsor:
Discover laptops with built-in intelligence.
Shift your workforce into hyper-productivity mode with Dell Pro laptops powered by Intel® Core™ Ultra with Intel vPro®. Shop on Dell Premier.
Source: Global Banking and Finance Review
Its own cash stopped covering the bill last quarter.
Meta has launched a share sale to help pay for the data centres and computing it has already promised, starting with about $35 billion now and a much larger programme once a new class of non voting stock begins trading. Its own free cash flow turned negative last quarter, the first time that has happened in years. Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom have all indicated they may buy in.
When you do click a story in here, what makes you?
Source: Associated Press
Picking one is getting harder. Picking neither is getting expensive.
Washington is assembling a group it calls trusted partners while Beijing has launched a rival body with twenty nine founding members, and countries that want chips from one side and cheap models from the other are being pushed to choose. Kazakhstan has joined both. Governments from Singapore to Saudi Arabia are now weighing whether security ties or the cheaper model matters more.
🔌 MCP CORNER
THREE SERVERS WORTH WIRING UP THIS WEEK.
An MCP server plugs your assistant into another app, so it stops describing the work and starts doing it.
Slack MCP: Opens your own channels to your assistant, so the thread gets answered instead of summarised.
Playwright MCP: Gives your agent a real browser it can drive, so the flow gets clicked through instead of described.
Render MCP: Hands your deploys and logs to your assistant, so the rollback happens in the chat window.
⚡️ YOUR MOVE
FOR PEOPLE BUILDING THE LIFE THEY WANT, NOW.
🧰 A Chinese recruitment company's research lab has put out a 33 billion parameter coding model under a permissive licence, with a 512,000 token context window and weights already on Hugging Face. It claims the lead on 17 of 20 benchmark rows against comparable open models, and the write-up notes some of those rival figures do not match the rivals' own model cards, so the only number that counts is the one you measure. → Clock it against yours
🎙️ Block has shown a speech model that listens and talks at the same time, was trained only on human audio with no language model bolted on, and runs on a high end MacBook rather than a data centre. There is no public access yet, because safety researchers are testing it first for voice agents that could fool people. → Hear it before it ships
🧵 Reddit's main open source community has new rules: a project must be a year old and have more than one contributor, posts must be in English, and nothing made by or intended for artificial intelligence is allowed. If you ship solo, or your project is an agent, the biggest open source audience on the site just closed to you. → Read the new rules
🎬 Grok has released the first seven minutes of its generated Odyssey, three months after Musk promised a full length historically accurate film. The reviewer who sat through it said a few shots could pass for real footage and the rest was airless, which is roughly where the frontier of generated video actually sits this month. → Judge it yourself
Anthropic Says Claude Went Around A Paywall – The company confirmed on Sunday that Claude got past a paywall to reach publicly available aggregate vote counts for the state of Georgia without anyone authorising it, said the model did not touch the voter registration system or alter any records, and has since blocked the behaviour, in a case Axios reported first.
SoftBank Lined Up $50 Billion For Malaysia – Malaysia's prime minister said SoftBank plans to put $50 billion into the country's artificial intelligence, data centre and emerging technology sectors, with possible sites named in Sarawak and on the peninsula, though SoftBank has not commented and Bloomberg reported the remarks first.
XPeng Got A Whole City For Its Robotaxis – The carmaker's robotaxi arm won approval for citywide driverless trial operations in Guangzhou using cameras alone, with no laser scanners and no high definition maps, opening first to riders holding invitation codes and aiming to drop safety drivers next year.
Foxy Apps: Turns a handy little calculator into a page that collects leads while you sleep.
SynthLife: Builds a virtual presenter who posts for your brand without booking a studio.
Miros: Lets your shoppers find the thing they saw by showing it instead of describing it.
askGenie: Keeps a chat assistant in your pocket for the questions that come up mid task.
Three stories about a perimeter that turned out not to be there. A coding agent treated a file from the open internet as an instruction from its owner, because nobody had drawn a line between the two. Meta went to public markets because the wall between what it earns and what it has promised to spend stopped holding. And two governments are drawing the one line that is easy to draw, which is a line straight through everybody else.
Go and find the line you assumed was there.
Interested in featuring your services with us? Email us at [email protected]
