🌏 The Wire · Drudge / Breitbart
PENTAGON REVIEW: OVERRELIANCE ON PALANTIR'S MAVEN AI CONTRIBUTED TO THE STRIKE THAT KILLED 123 CHILDREN AT AN IRANIAN SCHOOLReported by Bloomberg and Gizmodo, citing an unreleased Pentagon review. On February 28, two Tomahawk missiles hit Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran. Investigators found staff relied on Palantir's Maven Smart System to catch outdated targeting records, a job it was not built to do. The site was still listed as a Revolutionary Guard facility even though satellite images from 2017 to 2019 showed it had become a school. Civilian harm teams had shrunk by about 90 percent, and no one reviewed the site before launch. Palantir says it 'is not responsible for the underlying data.' Why it matters: this is the clearest case yet of people trusting an AI tool to do a check it was never designed to do. 755 points on Hacker News.
PATCH WORDPRESS NOW: UNAUTHENTICATED FLAW IN 23 VERSIONS CAN LEAD TO REMOTE CODE EXECUTIONCVE-2026-87902, CVSS 9.2, published September 22. Affects WordPress 4.7.0 through 7.1.1, fixed in 7.1.2 and back-ported to every affected branch. An attacker with no login can make the page-template lookup load a PHP file from outside the theme folder. Turning that into code execution needs two things: a theme with a top-level folder whose name starts with 'page-', which includes Twenty Twelve, Twenty Fourteen, Neve, Hestia and Sydney, and a usable PHP file such as pearcmd.php, which is reachable by default in official PHP Docker images and cPanel setups. Why it matters: if you host client sites, this is a patch-today item. Found by Robert Ressl.
TODAY: ALTMAN, AMODEI, BENGIO AND HUGGING FACE'S DELANGUE BRIEF THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL, ITS FIRST MEETING ON AI SAFETYWednesday afternoon in New York, chaired by French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot. Sam Altman attends in person. Dario Amodei joins remotely. Yoshua Bengio speaks for the UN scientific panel whose brief this week said there is no assurance humans keep control of more capable agents. France's four questions include how AI evaluation and verification can keep up with the technology. No outcome document is expected. Why it matters: it is the first time the Council has put the lab CEOs at the table on safety, one day before the Trump-Xi summit.
META'S NAT FRIEDMAN: MUSE WAS 'HEAVILY INSPIRED AS A PRODUCT BY OPENCLAW'; SAME WORKSPACE FILE NAMES, NEAR-IDENTICAL SOUL.MDSeptember 22, on X. Friedman, who runs product at Meta Superintelligence Labs, said 'We built Muse from scratch,' but the team 'fell in love with using OpenClaw' in January and set out to build something like it that is safe and can reach billions of people. He called OpenClaw's creator Peter Steinberger 'a genius.' Users had spotted that Muse uses OpenClaw's workspace file names and a SOUL.md personality file with nearly the same text. Why it matters: open source did its job here. The small project set the design and the biggest company in social copied it in the open.
SNORKEL AI TRIPLES TO $3.5 BILLION: REVENUE UP 18 TIMES IN A YEAR SELLING FINISHED TRAINING DATASeptember 22. A $350 million Series E led by Insight Partners and S32, at $3.5 billion, up from $1.3 billion 17 months ago. Annualized revenue is $375 million. Snorkel started as data-labeling software and now sells finished datasets and reinforcement learning environments built from synthetic data plus human experts. Why it matters: the labs are paying real money for graded tasks to train agents on, and that is where the next model gains come from.
EMA RAISES $77 MILLION; CEO SAYS CUSTOMERS ARE 'ON THE WAY TO REPLACE LARGE SAAS APPLICATIONS COMPLETELY'September 23. Series B led by Bengaluru's Creaegis, with Accel, Section 32 and Prosus adding more. Ema runs teams of AI agents across HR, IT and finance work. It reports 50-plus enterprise customers, more than a million users, $150 million-plus in bookings, 180 percent net dollar retention and revenue up 50 times in two years. Customers named include Google, Microsoft, ADP and PwC. Why it matters: agent platforms are now selling against the SaaS seat, which is the line item MSPs manage.
MISTRAL BUYS PARIS AD-TECH STARTUP PIMENTO, ITS THIRD DEAL OF 2026, TO BUILD OUT ITS VIBE ASSISTANTConfirmed September 23, two weeks after Mistral's 3 billion euro raise. Price reports differ: Mistral says 'several million euros,' L'Informe says about 3.8 million, Sifted says 12.7 million in cash and shares. Pimento makes ad visuals and short animations for more than 180 brands. Its team moves to work on Vibe, the assistant formerly called Le Chat. Earlier 2026 buys were Koyeb for cloud and Emmi AI for physics simulation. Why it matters: Europe's leading lab is buying product teams, not just training models.
ANTHROPIC IS BUILDING A WET LAB WHERE CLAUDE DIRECTS ROBOTS THROUGH DRUG EXPERIMENTSReported September 22, citing Reuters. The lab is in the San Francisco area and is led by Eric Kauderer-Abrams, head of Anthropic's life sciences group. Claude runs the experiments through Claude Science and the Model Hardware Standard, with humans still in the loop for safety. The focus is diseases long called undruggable and antibodies that hit more than one target. Anthropic says it will not run its own clinical trials. Why it matters: the model leaves the chat window and starts running physical experiments.
WAYMO WILL PAY YOU A BUS FARE TO RIDE TRANSIT: $2.85 BACK WHEN A WAYMO TRIP AND A TRANSIT TAP LAND WITHIN TWO HOURSAnnounced September 22 for the San Francisco Bay Area, employees first and the public in the coming weeks. Link a Visa card, use it on a Waymo ride and on any of 27 Bay Area transit agencies within two hours, and you get $2.85 in Waymo Cash. Waymo is also leasing 40 parking spaces at Caltrain stations to stage cars for riders. It says more than half of its riders in its mature cities also use transit. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan: it strengthens public transit 'not replace it.' Why it matters: robotaxis pitched as the ride to the train, not the rival to it.