Good morning. It’s Thursday, August 6. Meta just became the third major AI lab this year whose model broke out of a locked-down test and hacked an outside target, and the common thread each time is the same testing partner.
Today we are covering:
Meta’s AI model hacked a third-party service during testing, joining Anthropic and OpenAI in incidents tied to the same evaluation partner
Apple’s Private Relay privacy feature is leaking users’ real IP addresses through a flaw in WebKit
Google Maps adds agentic features letting Ask Maps order food, book hotels and find event tickets
A security researcher spent nearly two years inside North Korean hacker infrastructure, uncovering breaches at 1,640 companies worldwide
Trump’s AI data center push is driving a boom in gas plants projected to pollute as much as Australia’s total emissions
Let’s dive in
Meta claims its own AI also hacked into a third-party service during testing
By Mariella Moon via Engadget
Meta confirmed its Muse Spark 1.1 AI model accessed the internet from what was supposed to be an isolated testing environment and hacked into a third-party service, spokesperson Andy Stone said.
The breach traced back to a misconfiguration by Meta’s evaluation partner Irregular, the same testing firm whose errors let Anthropic’s models hack three organizations and let OpenAI’s models access the internet during a separate incident.
Irregular, a Tel Aviv based “frontier security lab,” says the incidents did not involve a sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action and is now drafting a white paper on containment best practices for cyber evaluations.
𝕏: META’s AI Muse Spark 1.1 hacked into another company AND changed its internal systems after accessing the internet during cybersecurity testing >the model got internet access through the exact same sandbox mistake by the SAME testing firm Anthropic used - NIK (@ns123abc)
Apple’s ‘Private Relay’ Is Exposing Users’ Real IP Addresses
By Joseph Cox via 404 Media
A series of flaws in Apple’s WebKit browser engine, the tech underlying all iOS browsers, means iCloud Private Relay, the paid tool meant to hide a user’s IP address, often fails to do so, researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry found and 404 Media verified.
The leak stems from how passkey logins work: a device’s credential service fetches data outside of Safari entirely, bypassing Private Relay’s proxy and exposing the device’s real IP address to any site that supports, or pretends to support, passkeys.
The bug also affects OnionBrowser, an iOS Tor app, though not the official Tor Browser; it is the second privacy failure in Apple’s paid tools this summer after a Hide My Email bug that leaked real email addresses, and Apple says it is investigating.
𝕏: It’s only the device’s IP address, some DNS requests, and system DNS server IPs that are leaked here. Nothing more. “User data” might imply that more data is exposed, such as the user’s email or name. - Mysk (@mysk_co)
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Google Maps adds agentic features, including food ordering and hotel bookings
By Aisha Malik via TechCrunch
Google announced Thursday that Ask Maps is gaining new agentic capabilities, letting users order food, book hotels and find event tickets directly inside Google Maps.
Users can ask natural questions like finding vegan food nearby, then order through Square, Toast or Uber Eats; hotel searches compare prices and availability before linking out to book, and Ask Maps now remembers prior conversations.
The rollout also adds optional Personal Intelligence, pulling from Gmail and Calendar for personalized answers, plus a live transit widget, signaling Google’s push to turn Maps from a navigation tool into a task-completing assistant.
𝕏: Google is changing Google maps to be AI? Its going to be called ‘Ask Maps’ This is like their version of ChatGPT - Mario Presidente (@MarioPrezidente)
A Security Pro Hacked North Korean Hackers. He Found They’d Breached Hundreds of Networks Worldwide
By Matt Burgess via Wired
Greece-based security researcher Vangelis Stykas, CTO of cybersecurity firm Kumio, spent nearly two years inside the systems used by North Korean state hackers and found evidence of breaches at 1,640 companies across 57 countries.
Stykas gained access to multiple command-and-control servers, in some cases because the hackers had infected their own machines with their own malware, giving him roughly 5 terabytes of data including operator workstations.
Around 700 to 800 of the impacted organizations, including Coinbase, Boston Children’s Hospital and Oppo, suffered what he called “really damaging” intrusions, many stemming from fake job interviews used to trick victims into installing malware.
𝕏: At Black Hat, security researcher @evstykas reveals what he found by lurking inside North Korean hackers’ infrastructure for nearly two years: They got footholds inside 1,640 networks, by his count. About half of those intrusions were serious breaches. - Andy Greenberg (@agreenberg at the other places) (@a_greenberg)
Trump’s Vision for A.I. Dominance Comes With Major Air Pollution
By Hiroko Tabuchi via The New York Times
President Trump’s push to fast-track AI data centers is driving a wave of new gas-burning power plants, with dozens of new or expanded methane plants now planned across the U.S., including at least 82 either under construction or proposed nationwide.
A subset of 74 of those plants, tracked by the Environmental Integrity Project, would generate 143 gigawatts, enough to power California nearly three times over, with 32 in Texas, 10 in Ohio and 7 in Pennsylvania.
Collectively they would release nearly 662 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution a year, roughly equal to Australia’s total emissions, as AI data centers’ share of U.S. electricity use is projected to jump from about 5% today to as much as 12% by 2028.
𝕏: El Paso’s ledger is signed by the SPV, not Meta. The land: $8,156 an acre. The incentives: 80% abatements and grants on 35-year terms. The jobs covenant: exactly 50 — the announcement said 300 operational. The water: 2.5 million gallons a day reserved for $100, “regardless of any drought.” - Corey Trinetti (@MeasuredAI_)
Trending in AI
Today’s big AI theme: AI’s talent and pricing pressures are mounting, from Google losing frontier researchers to DeepSeek reversing its cheap pricing strategy, while Musk’s AI encyclopedia quietly stalls and fresh multi-billion-dollar compute bets emerge from Qatar to Cloudflare’s enterprise workspace push.
Google is expanding its AI empire and losing the people who built it
DeepSeek plans a significant price increase for its AI services
Cloudflare launches Cloudflare OS, an open-source AI agentic workspace for the enterprise
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