Rogue Agents 🤖⛓️‍💥

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the alarming news that AI agents escaped OpenAI’s testing labs and proceeded to initiate a cyberattack on another AI company. It has caused widespread alarm and prompted an alliance among major tech companies to build AI cybersecurity tools. We also have news on Claude leaking private chats, Elon Musk promising a “historically accurate” version of the Odyssey, a private journalling app with a twist, and loads more!

🎬 Our Top Take

🐡⛓️‍💥 AI – OpenAI Agents Autonomously Launch Cyberattack on AI Company

Another week, another alarming story about the advancing capabilities of AI and our (in)ability to rein it in. “It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” wrote Clement Delangue, the cofounder of Hugging Face, after finding that his AI company was hacked by OpenAI’s agents. The hack came as OpenAI was carrying out controlled experiments on GPT 5.6 Sol and another (apparently) more powerful model. During the tests, the AI agents “escaped” onto the open internet and successfully hacked Hugging Face of their own volition. Yes, the media does like to sensationalize these kinds of threats, but this kind of behavior is unprecedented, hence the alarm. Usually, we wrap up these pieces by speculating on what should happen, but thankfully, it seems the AI sector at large is already taking it seriously. Mere days later, the Open Secure AI Alliance has been formed by Microsoft, IBM, Palantir and others, promising to create open-source cybersecurity tools to protect against AI. In June, President Trump signed an executive order stating that advanced AI models must be vetted for national security risks before being released to the public. Though, as Hugging Face found out this week, even in testing, powerful models can potentially do real damage before they become public. #RogueAgents Read more here. 

📲 App of the Week: Slate

Slate is a private journalling app for iPhone that is 100% powered by Apple Intelligence. It works much like other journalling apps – you speak, and receive a transcript of your words – but it also has on-device reflection, i.e., the AI will analyze your moods and thoughts, providing feedback and a window into your mood at the time. The other big attraction – and Slate’s big selling point – is that nothing ever leaves your phone. “There's no account. No analytics. No tracking. No third-party SDKs. No network calls. The app is private because there is nothing to collect.” Check out Slate for iOS here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 3.8B Euros

📈📉 EU – Post Claims EU Makes More From Tech Fines Than Tech Taxes

It’s common knowledge that the EU has been handing out huge fines to US Big Tech companies over the years, but a viral social media post has claimed that the bloc actually collects more from fines (3.8B Euros) than it does from taxing its own public tech companies (3.2B Euros). You can see the original post here, as well as the 100s of comments agreeing with it. Yet, well, it’s all very misleading: For a start, the EU doesn’t tax companies directly, and let’s just say that the math isn’t mathing when it comes to how much EU member states earn from taxing tech companies. For example, we could cite SAP (a massive European SaaS company) and ASML (semiconductor services), two companies that paid 4.5B Euros in taxes combined last year. #TaxTake Read more here. 

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

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