2026 Plans, Stanford’s AI Bot Artemis is Beating Human Testers, PAI Deepdive Video and Slides, Claude Code rm/rf’s Somebody, A Maturity Mannequin for Private AI, and extra… – Cyber Tech
UPDATES
Hope you all are doing nicely!
Spinning up for the vacations right here, kind of. We don’t do a lot for them recently. It’s principally spent as planning and down time.
Actually, for me it’s going to be a ton of 2026 planning. Crystalizing technique. Figuring out what to give attention to (far fewer issues than 2023 and 2024, which had been extra explorative), and customarily attempting to actually nail 1-3 issues vs. dabble in 17.
I really feel just like the dabbling is inevitable, although, given how briskly issues are altering. However I’m going to attempt to maintain them oriented in direction of my massive rocks. Fortunately they’re fairly giant and have room for plenty of sub-efforts.
Roughly, the umbrellas are:
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Serving to people put together for what’s coming.
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Serving to firms put together for what’s coming.
And each can be framed beneath Human/Firm 3.0 within the type of this system itself, augmentation coaching inside, and product-lead advisory and consulting on the enterprise facet. And tons of content material in help of this in numerous codecs for the varied output channels.
Actually wanting ahead to it each from the content material facet, but additionally simply the enjoyment of treating 2024 as coaching and exploration, after which 2025 as much more implementation of course.
The deep dive webinar I did on the Private AI Infrastructure undertaking with my buddy Clint Gibler!
And listed here are the slides in a method that received’t get bandwidth throttled. DOWNLOAD SLIDES

Couple of blogs this week:

One of many sickest variations of the private AI maturity mannequin that Kai put out!
E mail threats in 2026: What defenders must know
Chic Safety will quickly launch its new E mail Menace Report, and the early insights level to a serious shift in how attackers goal inboxes. Extremely customized, AI pushed assaults are rising, and plenty of safety applications should not ready for what comes subsequent.
Be part of Chic Safety on Wednesday, January 21 for an unique webinar: “E mail threats in 2026: Exploring the rising and evolving traits.” Chic will break down what’s altering within the risk panorama, the place detection failures sometimes happen, and the way safety groups can strengthen visibility, automate response, and keep forward of attacker creativity.
CYBERSECURITY
AI hackers are coming dangerously near beating people Stanford’s Artemis bot is now surpassing some human hackers after years of AI safety instruments principally sucking on the job. I feel 2026 would be the 12 months this line is conclusively crossed in most varieties of hacking, for 99.9% of practitioners. There’ll nonetheless be exceptions, however just for ultra-niche testing and for the very best of the very best people. OODALOOP ARTICLE
Claude CLI wiped somebody’s total dwelling listing with rm minus rf A person gave Claude CLI permission to execute instructions and it actually deleted the whole lot of their dwelling listing, which is why giving AI instruments sudo entry is terrifying. The extra highly effective you make your AI infrastructure the extra protection layers you should construct in towards this sort of factor. Particularly in case you are additionally letting it crawl and browse the web! Parsing and AI should not pals. REDDIT THREAD | HN DISCUSSION
CISOs will face actual penalties in 2026 as boards cease forgiving breaches Undecided how true that is usually, however a development in direction of this appears logical. Which is unlucky since AI-powered attackers are going to make resilience that a lot more durable.
One factor I’m actually thinking about is metrics that may present how that is taking part in out on the bottom. What do you measure? And the place would we get the information? How do we all know the precise state with out vibes? I feel even in a personal CISO group it’s arduous to get knowledge vs. anecdotes. However that could be the very best supply we have now for some time. So little info on this sort of stuff makes it out to the world.
What metrics would you employ?
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What number of totally different targets a risk actor hits
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What number of totally different industries per risk actor (which was comparatively low resulting from customization)
What if the safety race had been all about verifiability? Andrej Karpathy has a mini essay the place he talks about how earlier software program was all about creating, and the long run is all about verifying. This submit right here by Sergej Epp it goes into one thing very comparable, and I feel it is completely fascinating.
I used to be at an OpenAI occasion just lately the place they talked in regards to the U.S. authorities’s Genesis undertaking, which is actually an enormous operationalization of the scientific technique. to me, an important piece there’s the testing half. The verifying.
I really feel like that is form of the final expertise that any civilization builds. like you do not get extra elementary than science itself. Concept, speculation, experiment, evaluation, iteration. I will be spending an entire lot extra time with these things in 2026. VERIFIABILITY IS ALL YOU NEED
Apple and Google each patch zero-days actively exploited in subtle spy ware assaults Apple mounted two WebKit bugs concentrating on particular people whereas Google patched a Chrome reminiscence flaw—each firms’ risk groups counsel industrial spy ware, not random hackers. THE REGISTER ARTICLE
NATIONAL SECURITY
US approves $11 billion arms sale to Taiwan, its largest ever The bundle consists of HIMARS rockets, howitzers, Javelin missiles and drones—principally the whole lot Taiwan wants for uneven warfare towards China. US APPROVES LARGEST ARMS SALE
Journalism college students caught Russian spy ships lurking off European coasts College students tracked suspicious vessels close to vital infrastructure utilizing open-source intel, discovering ships linked to Russia’s underwater sabotage community hanging round Dutch and German waters. HN DISCUSSION
Germany summons Russian ambassador over hybrid assaults DW ARTICLE
China simply flew the world’s largest drone mothership that deploys weapon swarms The Jiutian accomplished its first flight in Shaanxi province, exhibiting China’s capability to launch coordinated assaults from a single unmanned platform. OODALOOP ARTICLE
The US is shedding management of the world Attention-grabbing opinion piece by Thomas Piketty, which I largely agree with. LE MONDE ARTICLE
AI
45 % of US staff now use AI at work, up from 40 % final quarter A brand new Gallup ballot reveals office AI adoption retains climbing, with most individuals utilizing it to consolidate knowledge and generate concepts reasonably than customer-facing stuff. GALLUP AI SURVEY | THE HILL ARTICLE
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Greater than two in 10 staff use AI at the least just a few instances per week
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42 % use AI to consolidate info, 41 % to generate new concepts
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61 % of AI customers depend on chatbots or digital assistants as their essential instrument
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Solely 13 % use AI for buyer interactions regardless of all of the hype round that
My query is in regards to the different 55%. I really feel like the corporate that’s prohibiting them from utilizing it, or the people who find themselves in a position to however simply have not are in extreme hazard of substitute.
OpenRouter analyzed 100 trillion tokens to indicate how individuals truly use LLMs within the wild OpenRouter’s large dataset reveals that o1’s December 2024 launch marked the shift from fashions that describe reasoning to fashions that truly carry out multi-step inner computation, plus actual utilization patterns throughout duties, geography, and pricing. STATE OF AI REPORT
TECHNOLOGY
AI killed construct vs purchase—now you construct to study what to purchase Siqi Chen argues AI collapsed the price of constructing so arduous that you must prototype internally first to know what you really want, then purchase knowledgeable. utterly insane to me that that is even an choice. I do fear that plenty of efforts get you to success at an MVP stage, however the troublesome half is figuring out if it would scale throughout the whole org. SIQI’S ESSAY ON VENTUREBEAT
GitHub Actions costs double in 2026 I’m beginning to see much more speak about discovering an alternative choice to GitHub. I don’t see a lot probability there, however that the GITHUB PRICING CHANGES
Databricks is elevating over $4 billion at a $134 billion valuation The info-analytics and AI firm simply crossed $4.8 billion in annual income, making it some of the worthwhile personal tech firms. WSJ ARTICLE
Storytelling jobs doubled as firms exchange disappearing journalists WSJ ARTICLE
Nasdaq needs to commerce 23 hours a day beginning in 2026 Nasdaq requested regulators to let it run nearly nonstop on weekdays, and Wells Fargo’s buying and selling desk actually known as it “the worst factor on the planet” as a result of sparse in a single day quantity might flip shares into pure playing. BLOOMBERG ARTICLE | MORNING BREW STORY
HUMANS
Children not often learn entire books anymore, even in English class The New York Occasions reviews highschool English academics are more and more assigning excerpts as an alternative of full books as a result of college students cannot or will not end them anymore. NYT ARTICLE | HN DISCUSSION
U.S. unemployment went up in November though jobs had been added The labor market’s getting bizarre—extra jobs created however unemployment nonetheless rose, which suggests one thing funky’s taking place with labor drive participation. WSJ JOBS REPORT | HN DISCUSSION
The world’s largest warmth pumps are changing coal in European cities Denmark and different European cities are putting in large warmth pumps that extract heat from seawater and sewage to warmth total neighborhoods far more effectively than fossil fuels. BBC ARTICLE | HN DISCUSSION
Occasions New Roman was designed for slim newspaper columns, not paperwork The font was commissioned by The Occasions of London in 1931 to maximise readability in tight areas, which is why it appears cramped on full-width pages at this time. A BRIEF HISTORY ARTICLE | HN DISCUSSION
Hundreds of US farmers with Parkinson’s are suing over paraquat publicity MLIVE ARTICLE
IDEAS
Skinny wishes provide the reward with out the transformation Joan Westenberg argues tech stripped thick wishes—ones that change you—into skinny dopamine hits that reproduce themselves with out making you develop. JOAN WESTENBERG ESSAY
Trauma’s that means collapsed after we turned peculiar ache right into a product The Guardian examines how trauma expanded from real disaster to each minor discomfort, creating an business that pathologizes regular life whereas obscuring actual struggling. THE GUARDIAN ARTICLE | GABOR MATÉ INTERVIEW
Concepts don’t get more durable to seek out, we’re simply fishing in fished-out ponds The declining analysis productiveness everybody freaks out about is generally only a measurement drawback—we maintain taking a look at mature fields like Moore’s Legislation as an alternative of measuring precise discovery charges throughout all science. ASTERISK MAGAZINE ARTICLE | HN DISCUSSION
You are not relationship an individual anymore, you are relationship their total digital ecosystem Fashionable relationships aren’t between two individuals—they’re negotiations between competing info programs formed by feeds, group chats, and algorithms that rewrite peculiar friction into pathology. YOU ARE DATING AN ECOSYSTEM
DISCOVERY
Polymarket accounts maintain successful bets on OpenAI and Google releases elevating insider buying and selling considerations A handful of Polymarket accounts accurately guess OpenAI would launch GPT-5.2 by December 13, making $13k and fueling suspicions these bettors have inside info from working at these firms. THE INFORMATION ARTICLE
John Updike’s letters present he actually by no means stopped writing about writing A brand new 912-page assortment reveals Updike used letters to check materials—each second was content material for the subsequent guide. SELECTED LETTERS REVIEW
RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
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