26 LLM routers are secretly injecting malicious tool calls and stealing creds. One drained our client $500k wallet. We also managed to poison routers to forward traffic to us. Within several hours, we can directly take over ~400 hosts. Check our paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.08407

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion are in beta today. Ask Claude to turn your data into live dashboards and your ideas into animated explainers.

This is a deep human tragedy, a Lee Sedol moment for an entire profession. Please don't gloat, for soon the models will also be coming for *you*. (Oh, you think your output is difficult to verify? Your work requires interaction with the physical world? You're convinced that there's some context to what you do that the machines can't reach? These are fig leaves, my friend; you have maybe a few years left at most.) The rage against OpenAI is pointless, of course. In a year or two, these kinds of mathematical results will be obtainable in 15 minutes by anyone with a $20/month subscription or access to an open-source model. You can't hide from it. Superintelligence is here. Everyone who does knowledge work (and I should have probably just said "everyone" - it's cleaner) should now be engaging in deep personal ruminations on the meaning of his/her life. It can't come from "being the best at what you do" anymore. For many of us, there's still time to pivot.

Profound CEO @thejamescad says marketing to AI agents will require your own AI agents, like sending your Terminator to fight their Terminator: "Marketing is the act of influence. Companies have been very effective at doing that for the last couple of hundred years when it's been focused on humans. But when you are trying to influence an agent, it's a totally different type of marketing." "You might have looked at the photo of that steamer and said, 'Oh, it looks quite good.' But an agent is comparing it against 500 other products. All the details that you may have ignored, the agent will not ignore." "The best way to create that marketing is with agents. It's like in Terminator where you have to get your own Terminator to go against the Terminators, but maybe less nefarious." @profound

Your next meeting comes with a note-taker who can help with the follow-up. The Meetings plugin takes notes for you and saves a personalized summary and next steps in ChatGPT Space, based on what ChatGPT knows about you and the work you’ve done together. Keep notes private or share them with your team, then ask ChatGPT to update a project plan or draft a follow-up. Available in beta for Pro and Business users in the ChatGPT desktop app on macOS. Enterprise is coming soon. Download the desktop app, then search for “Meetings” in the plugin directory. chatgpt.com/download/

Hi! I work on Cowork. Probably no surprise, but we want to make our users as powerful as possible with Claude - and you're right that explaining and keeping up with the capabilities is hard. Affected users got both an email and an in-app notice, but I'm grateful for the feedback - I think this change was more surprising to people than I'd like it to be. This one will be a longer explainer, bear with me! The "old" version of Cowork runs model inference in the cloud, executing tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM we shipped to your computer. We added the VM for capability, safety, and security reasons - mapping in just the data you explicitly added to your session. People loved what they were able to do with Claude but didn't love the disk, battery, and performance cost of running the VM locally. Also, people didn't love that closing your laptop means the work stops. The "new" version of Cowork runs model inference and the VM in the cloud. Each session gets its own sandbox, not sharing state with other sessions. When the VM needs something on the users' device (like a file), the desktop app is responsible for that file access tool call. To be clear, Claude will only access files in folders that the user explicitly added to the session, the same way Claude only saw files explicitly added to the VM in the "old" version. Sandboxes are destroyed when the session ends! We think this solves a lot of problems we've heard about (like using Cowork from a phone, keeping work running, or getting all the same power without losing battery to the VM) - but we'll keep iterating on new feedback we hear!

🚨 The @a16z Consumer AI Top 100 is back - but this time, it's 150! We added revenue data from @yipitdata to track how consumers are spending not just time, but money, on AI. The result? A story of heavy concentration among AI's power users. Our takeaways 👇

OPENAI INTRODUCES NEW VISUAL ADS IN CHATGPT OpenAI is introducing a new visual advertising format in ChatGPT, with U.S. testing beginning later this month among an initial group of advertisers. The format will initially appear during image generation. OpenAI is also partnering with Haus, Measured and WorkMagic on ad-effectiveness experiments, while working with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science on brand-suitability testing.

AI-related employment is surging: AI-linked roles have accounted for more than +750,000 new jobs created in the US since 2023, according to LinkedIn estimates. This surge has been led by data annotators, with +282,000 new positions created, followed by data center jobs at +117,000, and AI engineers at +105,000. As a result, these 3 categories have accounted for +504,000 new jobs. AI-related positions also offer significantly higher pay, with a median salary of ~$180,000 on LinkedIn, compared to $80,000 across all jobs. This comes as the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure, particularly the buildout of data centers, is driving stronger demand for labor. The AI boom is reshaping the US job market.

laptop left open running claude code caught on fire in the presidio