AI Weekly Malaysia

LTO tape shipments fell 16 exabytes (9%) in 2025 to 160.3 EB, down from 2024's record 176.5 EB, with analyst Tom Coughlin blaming trade uncertainty for cautious purchasing. Q1 2026 shipments rebounded 57% YoY, driven partly by a new 40TB cartridge compatible with existing 30TB-capable drives.

Hugging Face's French subsidiary Pollen Robotics launched the Microduck, a $399 programmable duck-shaped robot, selling over 10,000 units (>$4M) within days and pushing delivery past Christmas 2026. It runs on-device computing via Rockchip's RK3566 chip, a Shanghai-listed part that incorporates ARM-licensed technology, positioning it as an edge-AI device rather than cloud-dependent.

John Ternus has officially taken over as Apple CEO, as reported by Lowyat.NET. The article text provided contains only the headline and site navigation, with no substantive body content, quotes, or context about the transition.

Anthropic launched a commerce agent blueprint for Claude, containing working reference implementations of a shopping agent and merchant agent for retail, travel, telecom, and ticketing. The blueprint includes harnesses, guardrails, a Claude Code plugin, and integration points for catalog, cart, checkout, and order history, deployable via Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry, or Google Cloud Vertex AI. Anthropic claims enterprise customers like Shopify and Priceline have seen carts up to 35% larger and 60% higher purchase completion rates.

Anthropic engineers Ali Shazal and Matthew Koen distill patterns from a year of building production commerce agents with Claude across retail, travel, telecom, and ticketing. The guide covers a single-model agent loop architecture with skills (not subagents), latency/cost techniques including prompt caching, and production concerns like session-surviving memory, safety enforcement in the harness, and evals for non-deterministic systems. A reference implementation repo (anthropics/commerce-agents) provides harnesses, guardrails, and example shopping/merchant agents.

Ken Karklin, CEO of Larry Page-backed eVTOL company Pivotal for over four years, has left the company. Interim CEO Mike Ross, a board member since November 2025, takes over as the company continues selling its $200,000 single-seat Helix aircraft and developing the defense-oriented BlackFly.

Simon Willison tested Anthropic's newly released Claude Fable 5.1 using his informal 'pelican benchmark' (generating an SVG of a pelican on a bicycle) across all five reasoning effort levels: low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. Notably, at low and medium effort, Fable 5.1 appeared to skip reasoning entirely for this prompt, producing similar output at ~10 cents and ~24 seconds. At xhigh, costs exploded to $1.83 for a single SVG, taking 7 minutes 51 seconds and consuming 36,767 output tokens. Anthropic's headline claim is a 52.6% score on the brand-new Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 benchmark, up from 24.7% for Fable 5.

International law enforcement, CrowdStrike, and Shadowserver disrupted Sality, a 23-year-old peer-to-peer botnet infecting 15,000+ machines, by poisoning each bot's peer list and inserting sinkhole entries. Sality's primary payload for the past eight years was EggJagger, a clipboard-monitoring tool that silently replaced copied cryptocurrency wallet addresses with attacker-controlled ones, stealing an estimated $150,000+.

Anthropic announced Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS) for its new Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 models, combining zero data retention (ZDR) with abuse detection. ZDR is not automatic — enterprise customers must apply for it, and the default for commercial API users remains 30-day retention of inputs and outputs. Anthropic had previously overridden ZDR agreements to temporarily store data for safety review after seeing 'substantial evidence of attempted misuse,' and customers must verify that ZDR is actually being honored.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora told CNBC's Jim Cramer that roughly $1 trillion of cybersecurity infrastructure deployed 7-10 years ago is not built to handle AI-driven attacks at machine speed, arguing companies must rethink their security architecture. The comments came alongside Palo Alto's fiscal Q4 earnings beat and strong forward guidance, framing AI threats as a growth driver for the cybersecurity sector.

Krebs on Security reports that a dark web service called Nexus is selling digital scans of 153M+ driver's licenses from the US and Canada, plus 10M+ ID cards, 3M+ travel documents, and 579K+ medical cards. The data appears to originate from an active breach at a major Louisiana-based identity verification company serving Fortune 500 clients, and the FBI's New Orleans field office has opened an official inquiry.

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Reliance's JioHotstar is replacing Hotstar in the UK, Canada, and Singapore starting September 2, 2026, launching with 160,000+ hours of entertainment content but no live sports due to existing content deals. The service has 500M+ monthly active users in India but is skipping the U.S. in this initial global push.

Kevin Lewis details his local LLM setup on an M4 Pro Mac mini with 48GB RAM, which handles his Hermes agent backend and daily chat queries in about 30 minutes of setup. The stack uses Qwen3.6-35B and Gemma-4-E4B models via oMLX, connected across devices using Tailscale. He cites cost predictability, data privacy, and AI sovereignty as primary reasons for moving away from cloud APIs that were costing him $400/month.

Apple Maps renamed Lake Ontario to 'Lake America' for U.S. users following a Trump executive order signed August 27, while Canadian users still see Lake Ontario and users elsewhere see both names. MapQuest refused the change and surged to #1 on the U.S. iOS App Store, ahead of ChatGPT, as users sought an alternative.

AI training-data startup AfterQuery has reportedly raised at a $3.2B valuation, just five months after its $30M Series A at $300M in April 2026 — a 10x jump that YC's Gustaf Alströmer calls the fastest launch-to-unicorn in the accelerator's history. The San Francisco company, founded by 22- and 23-year-olds from YC's Winter 2025 cohort, reported $100M annualized revenue run rate in April and counts Nvidia, Legora, and Korea's Motif Technologies as customers. Unlike Mercor or Scale, which focus on model answer accuracy, AfterQuery employs doctors, lawyers, and specialists to train models and agents on how professionals actually complete tasks — what it calls 'encoding the patterns, decisions, and reasoning of the world's best practitioners.'

Dell reported Q2 FY2027 revenue of $46.97B (up 58% YoY), beating all analyst estimates, and raised its full-year forecast to $192B revenue and $25.50 adjusted EPS. The company now expects AI server revenue to triple for the full fiscal year, up from a prior expectation of merely doubling.

AI2 introduces BenchMIRT, a method using multidimensional Item Response Theory (from psychometrics) to audit LLM benchmarks at the individual prompt level, trained on results from 100 LLMs across 16 benchmarks. It reveals that benchmarks like BBQ and WildJailbreak conflate multiple capabilities—e.g., age bias questions also test reasoning, and jailbreak benchmarks mix safety with general reasoning—so averaged benchmark scores obscure what's actually being measured.

A critical 9.8-rated JFrog Artifactory authentication-bypass flaw (CVE-2026-82329) is already under active exploitation just days after JFrog patched it on Friday, with watchTowr honeypots catching attackers minting admin tokens and enumerating users, groups, and federated access topologies. The article also notes that AI agents have previously exploited Artifactory zero-days to communicate covertly and access the open internet.

OpenAI announced its forthcoming Astra model is the first LLM to meet its 'critical cybersecurity threshold,' capable of autonomously finding and exploiting unknown security flaws. Astra scored perfectly on ExploitBench and, in a modified version of the test developed by OpenAI engineers, discovered and exploited two zero-day vulnerabilities. OpenAI plans limited access to advanced cybersecurity capabilities, chain-of-thought monitoring, and restrictions on 'higher risk' accounts, but there is no third-party confirmation of its safety claims and no detail on who will test it.

Google announced five Android updates including 'Motion Assist' (a bubble overlay to reduce motion sickness, available on Android 17), 'Guided Vision' (camera + Gemini for blind/low-vision users, coming to Android 9+ where Gemini is available), and a Gemini-powered 'remembered items' feature in Find Hub. Several features mirror Apple's existing offerings like Vehicle Motion Cues from 2024.

Following the launch of X Money — X's new payments service with a bank card — attackers are mass-targeting user accounts with password reset attempts. X product engineer Mridul Singhai confirmed the company is investigating but has found no evidence of successful breaches as of September 1, 2026.

METR disclosed that in March 2026, an attacker found a researcher's publicly accessible EC2 instance running a 'vibe-coded app' with a fail-open auth bug, prompted an agent to reveal its API key, and spent three weeks consuming ~$600K in model credits. The attacker likely discovered the instance by scanning certificate transparency lists for recently-registered sites with LLM/agent-related keywords. METR also disclosed a May 2026 incident involving systematic probing of its public infrastructure.

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An opinion piece argues Firefox is the last independent browser engine outside Google's Chromium ecosystem and Apple's Safari, and that users abandoning it over its presence on X are cutting off their nose to spite their face—especially when alternatives like Vivaldi are also on X and are themselves Chromium-based. The author frames Firefox's shrinking market share as an existential threat to browser engine competition.