Just as attackers are adding new capabilities into their toolkits with AI, they are consciously trying to evade the novel AI capabilities levied on them by defenders. In Cisco Talos’ findings with CAIRN, we classify this archetype of malware as “A3: AI-Analysis Evasion” — that is, malware that embeds natural-language instructions to influence automated analysis. In line with the CAIRN philosophy, we treat this embedded language as a signal and actively seek it out to track and measure the progression of adversary techniques on this front.
Over the past 18 months we have seen a variety of anti-analysis techniques, including the propagation of known methods across malware families, and the progression of simple techniques into more advanced implementations. This post traces these techniques across four confirmed A3 malware families: FRUITSHELL, PLOTSAFE, HOLLOWCLAD, and MANTLEMAZE, representing 84 distinct samples collected from January 2025 through July 2026. — Read More
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The State of AI Report 2026
9th annual State of AI Report
For nearly a decade, this report has been a labor of love. My interest in AI began with my PhD in cancer research and computational biology in the early 2010s. Since 2013, I’ve invested in companies building and applying AI to accelerate technological progress. The report is my way of sharing what I’m learning and helping more people understand the research shaping our world.
Every day brings new papers, model releases, and developments in industry and politics. Much of the work goes into deciding what deserves your attention, checking what the evidence supports, debating it with researchers and builders, and explaining why it matters. — Read More
Reflection debuts Beam, an open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost
Reflection AI is officially unveiling Beam, its first frontier, open-weight AI model. The two-year-old, Brooklyn-based startup claims Beam matches the performance of leading Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks at dramatically lower costs, a claim that could heat up the race to build a Western answer to DeepSeek, Qwen, and Z.ai.
Reflection’s announcement confirms reporting from Axios over the weekend that the startup was close to a launch. The company shared new details in a lengthy blog post Monday, which described Beam as a text-only mixture-of-experts model trained on high-compute reinforcement learning to be effective at reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks at “a fraction of the token cost and inference time compute” of rivals. — Read More
Context is the New Code
Context is code. Who believes that is true? There’s two ways that I’ve seen this manifest. One is the like very vibe coding, Andrej Karpathy who says, we’re just giving it prompts. We’re giving it context. It’s writing the code for us. Definitely context is code there. The second piece is something we experienced in our own company. We were writing a piece about onboarding people to our tool. You cannot imagine the discussions we had and then the number of pieces of code we had to write for all the edge cases of doing the onboarding. Then in the end, we said, let’s write a skill in natural language, give it to the agent, it will cater to whatever the person in front of it needs to have, all the scenarios. So much code compressed to a couple of words. That’s also code. It’s not just building it, it’s like a piece of the product as well.
I personally love to think in parallels, and in 2009, I was thinking like, what if ops would be more like dev? We had DevOps. This talk is about what if context is like code. That’s the mindset. The Software Development Life Cycle is the Context Development Life Cycle. I’m not talking about context engineering within your coding agent, but think of it as context. How do we deploy? How do we manage that across our whole setup? We remember the infinity loop, nothing new there. I’ve put a few different words on that. We’re generating context. We’re evaluating whether that context is good. We’re distributing that to team members, the organization to agents, and then we’ll observe whether that actually is working, yes or no, and based on the feedback we get, we improve or generate and come back. Simple loop, same as we try to do with coding. I’m going to walk you through it in the parallels between those four things, and in the end, we’ll have a bonus, the context flywheel. — Read More
I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch. Now I’m joining a parade of former colleagues—at OpenAI and the industry’s other leaders—who have decided that the current path is unacceptable.
I agree with other recently departed staff that the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough. But I believe that we need to look deeper than specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture. — Read More
48% thought Tavus’s AI was human
Okay, so the AI company Tavus introduced an AI video model today that 26 of 54 people thought was a real human after a one-minute face-to-face call.
It’s called Griffin. And instead of the usual AI stack where speech, an LLM, voice, and avatar animation take turns, Griffin watches your video and listens while it’s talking. — Read More
Trump, tech bosses sign voluntary pact pledging ‘robust’ AI safeguards
United States President Donald Trump and top tech executives have signed an accord promising greater safeguards for artificial intelligence amid growing concerns that the frontier technology is exposing humanity to catastrophic risks.
Trump announced the voluntary accord on Tuesday after gathering AI leaders at the White House for a luncheon event that reaffirmed his administration’s scepticism of government regulation of the rapidly advancing technology. — Read More
Gemini 4 Argon: frontier intelligence
Gemini 4 Argon delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense.
[W]e’re announcing our new frontier model, Gemini 4 Argon, which is rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through our Fairwind Program. Built to sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows, Argon is fundamentally changing the way we work and build at Google. It delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense. — Read More
Introducing dots
Dots are remarkably capable, always-on agents built to handle everything. They’re a whole new way to work with AI—one that gets to know what matters to you, is always working on your behalf, and takes important work off your plate so you get more of your time and attention back. — Read More
Nvidia’s scale-in play: Controlling agents is the next infrastructure priority
Nvidia Corp. is extending the data processing unit from infrastructure offload to a broader security role across the artificial intelligence factory. The opportunity is to make agentic AI safer to operate at scale.
…Having built out its scale-up, scale-out and scale-across network architecture, the company is introducing another category it is calling scale-in. Its purpose is to connect more of the AI factory’s resources while extending security controls across the infrastructure. In Nvidia positioning, the DPU extends beyond a device that secures access to a server and becomes a separate place to monitor and control activity across the factory. — Read More
