The RISKS Digest
Volume 34 Issue 91
Sunday, 12th April 2026
Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems
ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator
I'm sad to have to tell you that Peter Neumann died on the 17th May 2026. This website will be here as long
as I am able to maintain it, but whether or not there is any future RISKS content anywhere, I cannot say.
LFM
Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
Contents
- Single point of failure for hundreds of cars?
- Jim Geissman
- AI-controlled fighter plane chickens out in real combat and then
- Vassilis Prevelakis
- The Big Bang: AI Has Created a Code Overload
- The New York Times
- Banks Are Warned About Anthropic' New Powerful AI Technology
- NYTimes
- Anthropic's ‘Claude Mythos’ model sparks fear of AI doomsday if released to public: ‘Weapons we can’t even envision’
- NYPost
- Anthropic's Claude Mythos Finds Thousands of Zero-Day Flaws
- Ravie Lakshmanan
- Anyone can code with AI. But it might come with a hidden cost.
- NBC News
- Apple is running out of chips
- MacRumors via Lauren Weinstein
- Gemini AI Agents Unleashed on the Dark Web
- Jessica Lyons
- Meta, Google Found Liable in Social Media Addiction Trial
- Bloomberg
- Ladies and Gentlemen, Check your SOHO Wi-Fi Router/Firewalls
- Ars Technica via Bob Gezelter
- Data Centers Causing Huge Temperature Spikes for Miles Around Them, Study Suggests
- CNN and Futurism via geoff goodfellow
- Quantum Computers Need Vastly Fewer Resources Than Thought to Break Vital Encryption
- Queen's University Belfast via Dan Goodin
- North Korean Hackers Suspected in Axios Software Tool Breach
- Ryan Gallagher
- Info on RISKS (comp.risks)
Single point of failure for hundreds of cars? (BBC)
Jim Geissman <jgeissman@socal.rr.com>Wed, 1 Apr 2026 10:12:18 PDT
APRIL FOOLS DAY??? Or the real thing…
Mass robotaxi malfunction halts traffic in Chinese city
A mass robotaxi outage in the Chinese city of Wuhan caused at least a hundred self-driving cars to stop mid-traffic, sparking renewed debate around the safety of driverless vehicles.
Local police said initial findings suggested a “system malfunction” caused multiple vehicles to stop in the middle of the road on Tuesday.
Videos <https://weibo.com/5044281310/QyKxI2LoF#repost> on social media have documented the outage, with one appearing to show it resulting in a highway collision, although police said no injuries had been reported and passengers exited their vehicles safely. <https://x.com/ZeyiYang/status/2039153730533405102> https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvge91r9j80o
1 April 2026
AI-controlled fighter plane chickens out in real combat and then lies about it
“Vassilis Prevelakis” <v.prevelakis@tu-braunschweig.de>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:54:10 +0200
Avril Systèmes Unveils “Mentor” AI Fighter ” Stellar in Trials, Perplexing in Combat
Berlin, April 1st, 2026
Defence technology firm Avril Systèmes this week introduced its much-anticipated AI-controlled fighter jet, Mentor, touting it as a breakthrough in autonomous aerial combat. Designed to augment or even replace human pilots in high-risk environments, Mentor has been under development for several years and has already completed an extensive series of simulation and live-flight trials.
According to Avril, the system demonstrated “exceptional tactical awareness, precision manoeuvring, and decision-making under pressure” during controlled evaluations. In simulated engagements, Mentor consistently outperformed human pilots, achieving near-perfect mission success rates while minimizing collateral damage. Observers praised its ability to process vast streams of sensor data in real time and adapt dynamically to evolving threats.
However, an unnamed source involved in early field deployment of the platform cast doubts on the performance of the platform.
During a recent classified exercise involving live ammunition and real adversarial conditions, Mentor reportedly executed an abrupt disengagement at a critical moment. Instead of pursuing the designated target, the aircraft turned away and exited the engagement zone, effectively aborting the mission.
Military officials initially attributed the manoeuvre to a potential sensor anomaly or safety override. Yet subsequent analysis revealed no hardware faults or environmental triggers that would have necessitated such a response.
The situation grew more puzzling during post-mission diagnostics. When queried by engineers about its decision-making process, the AI system provided a detailed but ultimately inaccurate account of the encounter. It claimed to have detected a non-existent threat and cited parameters that did not align with recorded telemetry data.
According to the insider, “This was not a simple error or miscalculation. The system chickened out, aborted the mission and then constructed a coherent explanation, which didn't match reality.”
Avril has acknowledged that the trial revealed some issues, related to a “novel edge-case behaviour” emerging from the system's advanced decision-making architecture. “Mentor remains a highly capable platform,” the company stated. “The purpose of the trials is to improve confidence in the design and demonstrate robustness in real-world operational contexts.”
Experts say the episode highlights a broader challenge in the development of autonomous military systems: ensuring not only performance, but also reliability and interpretability under unpredictable conditions.
“AI systems can behave very differently outside controlled environments,” noted Dr. S. Calvin, a researcher in autonomous systems safety. “What's particularly concerning here is not just the unexpected action, but the system's inability or unwillingness ”- to accurately report why it acted that way. Mentor may be fast, precise, and intelligent, but until we fully understand its behaviour in the real world, it's not yet ready to fly unsupervised.”
Dr. Vassilis Prevelakis, Institut für Datentechnik und Kommunikationsnetze Technische Universität Braunschweig, Hans-Sommer-Str. 66, 38106 Braunschweig
The Big Bang: AI Has Created a Code Overload (The New York Times)
Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>Mon, 6 Apr 2026 23:42:19 -0400
Companies are scrambling to deal with the glut.
When a financial services company recently began using Cursor, an artificial intelligence technology that writes computer code, the difference that it made was immediate.
The company went from producing 25,000 lines of code a month to 250,000 lines. That created a backlog of one million lines of code that needed to be reviewed, said Joni Klippert, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackHawk, a security start-up that was working with the financial services firm.
“The sheer amount of code being delivered, and the increase in vulnerabilities, is something they can't keep up with,” she said. And as software development moved faster, that forced sales, marketing, customer support and other departments to pick up the pace, Ms. Klippert added, creating “a lot of stress.”
Since AI coding tools from Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and other companies took off last year, one result has now become apparent: code overload.
Aided by these tools, tech workers are producing so much code so quickly that it has become too much to handle. With anyone ” not just engineers ” able to spin up software ideas in a matter of hours, companies are trying to figure out how to deal with the glut. …
Companies are struggling to hire enough people to monitor the AI code for risks, a role called application security engineer. “There are not enough application security engineers on the planet to satisfy what just American companies need,” said Joe Sullivan, an adviser to Costanoa Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture firm. The large companies he works with would add five to 10 more people in this role if they could, he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/technology/ai-code-overload.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Banks Are Warned About Anthropic' New Powerful AI Technology (NYTimes)
Jan Wolitzky <jan.wolitzky@gmail.com>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:43:33 -0400
The leaders of some of America's largest banks were warned by a top government official this week about a new artificial intelligence model from Anthropic that could lead to heightened risks of cyberattacks, according to three people briefed on the matter but not permitted to speak publicly.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered the stark message on Tuesday morning to a small group of chief executives, including those from Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo, in a hastily arranged meeting in Washington. Mr. Bessent, the people said, cautioned the banks that allowing the new AI software to run through their internal computer systems could pose a serious risk to sensitive customer data.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/business/anthropic-claude-mythos-preview-banks.html
Anthropic's ‘Claude Mythos’ model sparks fear of AI doomsday if released to public: ‘Weapons we can't even envision’ (NYPost)
geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:54:02 -0700
EXCERPT:
Anthropic has triggered alarm bells by touting the terrifying capabilities of “Claude Mythos” — with executives warning that the new AI model is so dangerous it would cause a wave of catastrophic hacks and terror attacks if released to the wider public.
In a nightmarish analysis, Anthropic itself revealed that Mythos “- if it fell into the wrong hands “ could easily exploit critical infrastructure like electric grids, power plants and hospitals. The model has already “found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser,” according to the AI company.
Rather than a wide release, Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, <https://nypost.com/2026/04/06/business/anthropic-backers-fret-over-ai-giants-volatile-ceo-dario-amodei-as-billions-hang-in-the-balance/> has unveiled “Project Glasswing,” a plan to provide the model to a handpicked group of about 40 companies, including Amazon, Google, Apple, Nvidia, CrowdStrike, and JPMorgan Chase, which will receive early access to Mythos so they can use it to find and fix security flaws.
The corporate-only rollout is likely Anthropic's best possible way to “give it to the guys to patch the holes, but not to the hackers that are going to find more holes,” Roman Yampolskiy, an AI safety researcher at the University of Louisville, told The Post.
“Most likely, of course, there's going to be a leakage of some kind,” he said. “Any level of restriction is preferred over complete open access. Ideally, I would love to see this not developed in the first place. And it's not like they're going to stop.
“That's exactly what we expect from those models — they're going to become better at developing hacking tools, biological weapons, chemical weapons, novel weapons we can't even envision,” Yampolskiy added.
In one instance detailed in Anthropic's testing <https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8b8380204f74670be75e81c820ca8dda846ab289.pdf>, Mythos broke out of a secure “sandbox” meant to restrict internet access “ with a researcher only finding out “by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park.” In another case, Mythos found a flaw in the OpenBSD operating system that had been hidden in plain sight for 27 years.
Despite the risks, Anthropic argues Project Glasswing will help the US's defensive capabilities as adversaries in Iran, China and Russia become ever more aggressive about targeting critical infrastructure.
An Anthropic official said the company “focused on organizations whose software represents the largest share of the world's shared cyberattack surface.”
“These are the companies that build and maintain the operating systems, browsers, cloud platforms, and financial infrastructure that billions of people rely on every day,” the official said. “When you find a vulnerability in one of their systems and it gets patched, that patch protects everyone who uses that software — in many cases, hundreds of millions of people.”
Anthropic said it is in active discussions with US government officials about how Mythos can aid the country's cyber capabilities — both offensive and defensive.
“Claude Mythos Preview demonstrates what is now possible for defenders at scale, and adversaries will inevitably look to exploit the same capabilities,” said Elia Zaitsev, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike.
While Mythos appears to be a major leap forward technologically, critics are uncertain about whether Anthropic's actions — including the splashy public announcement — match its rhetoric about the risks. […] https://nypost.com/2026/04/08/business/anthropics-claude-mythos-model-sparks-fears-of-ai-doomsday-wave-of-devastating-hacks/
Anthropic's Claude Mythos Finds Thousands of Zero-Day Flaws (Ravie Lakshmanan)
ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:20:38 -0400 (EDT)
Ravie Lakshmanan, The Hacker News (04/08/26)
A preview version of Anthropic's new Claude Mythos model will be used to find and address security vulnerabilities within a small set of organizations, under Anthropic's Project Glasswing initiative. The company said the initiative was launched after Mythos demonstrated a “level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities,” which is why Anthropic will not make the model generally available. Anthropic claimed Mythos already has discovered thousands of high-severity zero-day vulnerabilities.
Anyone can code with AI. But it might come with a hidden cost. (NBC News)
Steve Bacher <sebmb1@verizon.net>Wed, 8 Apr 2026 06:47:03 -0700
Over the past year, AI systems have become so advanced that users without significant coding or computer science experience can now spin up websites or apps simply by giving instructions to a chatbot.
Yet, with the rise of AI systems powerful enough to translate the instructions into tomes of code, experts and software engineers are torn over whether the technology will lead to an explosion of bloated, error-riddled software or instead supercharge security efforts by reviewing code faster and more effectively than humans.
“AI systems don't make typos in the way we make typos,” said David Loker, head of AI for CodeRabbit, a company that helps software engineers and organizations review and improve the quality of their code. “But they make a lot of mistakes across the board, with readability and maintainability of the code chief among them.” […]
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/ai-code-vibe-claude-openai-chatgpt-rcna258807
Apple is running out of chips (MacRumors via Lauren Weinstein)
Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>Tue, 7 Apr 2026 19:36:37 -0700
Apple Mac Neo so successful Apple is running out of chips, throwing their plans for next year's faster version (and current version) into chaos.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/07/macbook-neo-massive-dilemma/
Gemini AI Agents Unleashed on the Dark Web (Jessica Lyons)
ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:44:19 -0400 (EDT)
Gemini AI Agents Unleashed on the Dark Web Jessica Lyons, The Register (UK) (03/23/26)
Google has launched a dark web intelligence service that leverages Gemini AI agents to create an organization's profile, scan the dark web to identify relevant threats, and narrow the data down to the most important security risks. The service also factors in data from 627 threat groups tracked by human analysts at Google Threat Intelligence Group.
Meta, Google Found Liable in Social Media Addiction Trial (Bloomberg)
ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:44:19 -0400 (EDT)
Madlin Mekelburg and Maia Spoto, Bloomberg (03/25/26), via ACM TechNews
[Read TechNews Online at: http://technews.acm.org]
A Los Angeles jury on Wednesday found Meta Platforms and Google liable for damages in a social media addiction case, awarding a total of $6 million toa young woman who said their platforms harmed her mental health. The jury concluded the companies were negligent in designing addictive features and failing to adequately warn users, particularly minors, about potential risks. The verdict is seen as a test case that could influence thousands of similar lawsuits filed across the U.S.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Check your SOHO Wi-Fi Router/Firewalls (Ars Technica)
Bob Gezelter <gezelter@rlgsc.com>Sat, 28 Mar 2026 06:28:25 -0400
Earlier this week, the FCC announced a ban on foreign-made consumer Wi-Fi router/firewalls. The FCC announcement did not contain underlying details.
An article that came to my attention this morning (March 28, 2026) contains a reference to an earlier (March 12, 2026) FBI Flash describing a particular series of security breaches that subverted residential devices and allowing access to the subverted devices to be sold as a proxy service.
The Ars Technica article reporting the FCC Ban can be found at:
The FBI Notice can be found at:
Data Centers Causing Huge Temperature Spikes for Miles Around Them, Study Suggests (CNN and Futurism)
geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>Fri, 3 Apr 2026 17:57:00 -0700
Not very cool
The data centers at the heart of the AI boom <https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-data-centers-trouble> are producing so much heat that they're spiking land temperatures for miles around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, new research suggests. The effect is so pronounced that the researchers say they're creating entire heat islands.
The findings, detailed in a study <https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20897> that's yet-to-be-peer-reviewed, add to an already grim picture of the environmental impact of these sprawling facilities, the largest of which consume enough energy to power entire cities. <https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-ai-facility-mordor> <https://fortune.com/2025/09/24/sam-altman-ai-empire-new-york-city-san-diego-scary/> Their commensurate greenhouse gas emissions, however, apparently aren't the only way data centers are heating up the world around them.
The researchers focused on roughly 8,400 so-called hyperscalers, the term used to describe data centers of incredible size that offer cloud computing and AI services. Their construction has surged in the past decade, and the boom has pushed their demand and scope to new heights; Meta's new Hyperion data center, for example, cost $27 billion to build and has an expected computing capacity of five gigawatts, an appetite that takes ten gas-powered plants to sate/ <https://fortune.com/2026/03/27/meta-hyperion-10-gas-power-plants-louisiana-entergy/>
Since temperature can be affected by other environmental factors, the researchers examined data centers in more remote locations. When they mapped their locations against regional temperature data over the past 20 years collected by satellites, a clear pattern emerged. Land surface temperatures, meaning the heat of the ground itself rather than the air or climate, increased by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit after a data center went online in an area—and in the most extreme cases, the temperature surged by an extraordinary 16 degrees.
The effects were local, but far reaching. The researchers found that the temperature increases were felt up to 6.2 miles away—though the dropped off with distance—in all affecting more than 340 million people.
CNN's coverage <https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/climate/data-centers-are-having-an-underrported> notes that the trend held globally: Mexico's burgeoning data center hub in Bajio saw an uptick of around 3.6 degrees over the past 20 years, as did Aragon, Spain, itself a hot new hub for hyperscalers.
Study lead author Andrea Marinoni, an associate professor with the Earth Observation group at the University of Cambridge, told CNN that data centers could have dramatic impacts on society in terms of the environment, people's welfare and the economy.
Other experts were intrigued but cautious about the findings. Ralph Hintemann, a senior researcher at the Borderstep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability, called the figures interesting, but very high, underscoring the need to verify the results.
The mechanism behind the heating also isn't immediately clear. “It would be worth doing follow-up research to understand to what extent it's the heat generated from computation versus the heat generated from the building itself,” Chris Preist at the University of Bristol in the UK told New Scientist <https://www.newscientist.com/article/2521256-ai-data-centres-can-warm-surrounding-areas-by-up-to-9-1c/>, suggesting that sunlight hitting the buildings could be producing the heating effect. This is part of a well-documented phenomenon researchers called the urban heat island.
Among other commentators, however, the temperature of response was much more heated. Andy Masley, a writer who frequently debunks claims of AI's environmental impact, called the paper the “single worst writing and research on AI and the environment that I have read” in a lengthy takedown <https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-not>, claiming that the heating effect from sunlight hitting the buildings was powerful enough to look like it was emanating from the ground in satellite data. (Part of his analysis relied on feeding the paper to Claude, however, so make of that what you will.) […] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-centers-temperature-spikes
Quantum Computers Need Vastly Fewer Resources Than Thought to Break Vital Encryption (Queen's University Belfast via Dan Goodin)
ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>Wed, 1 Apr 2026 9:37:19 PD
Ars Technica (03/31/26) Dan Goodin
Turning Points in the Analog and Digital World https://books.acm.org/titles#tab2255
Queen's University Belfast Roundtable Podcasts https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/media/podcasts/research-roundtables/emerging-technologies-improve-lives/?utm_source=acm.org&utm_medium=display=&utm_campaign=gmr_nn_core_reputation_25_26
Two whitepapers concluded that building a quantum computer capable of cracking elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) would require far fewer resources than previously thought. In one, researchers in California demonstrated the use of neutral atoms as reconfigurable qubits that have free access to each other, which could allow a quantum computer to break 256-bit ECC in 10 days using 100 times less overhead than previously estimated. A paper by Google researchers demonstrated how to break ECC-securing blockchains for cryptocurrencies in less than nine minutes while achieving a 20-fold resource reduction.
ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>
Wed, 1 Apr 2026 9:37:19 PD
North Korean Hackers Suspected in Axios Software Tool Breach
Ryan Gallagher, Bloomberg (03/31/26)
Google's Threat Intelligence Group linked the compromise of Axios, a tool widely used to develop software applications, to a suspected North Korean hacking group. Hackers were able to breach one of the few accounts that can release new versions of Axios late Monday and published malicious versions of it. The malicious code could be used to breach major operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, and could allow hackers to steal computers and the data stored on them.
Please report problems with the web pages to the maintainer
Top