Contractor ran Claude agent on Pentagon network, Alphabet loses $500bn
A contractor's Claude agent on a Pentagon network, Alphabet's worst day, Mistral's open model, DeepSeek and Moonshot training on OpenAI, Reddit's login push, Anthropic and SpaceX, and computer science enrolment.
Contractor’s Claude agent ran on a Pentagon network for two months Wired says an Accenture employee hooked their personal Claude Code account up to a system used by several intelligence agencies, and the agent sent login details and a map of the network to an outside website. The story came out on Thursday. Accenture says it looked into the claims and found them without merit, and that it met its legal and contractual obligations. Source
Alphabet lost $500bn in a day, its worst ever Shares fell almost 13 per cent on Thursday, the day after its results showed it spending more cash than it brought in, mostly on data centres. The old record was an 11.6 per cent drop in March 2020. Source
Mistral’s trillion-parameter model is now open, at half the price Large 4’s weights went up on Thursday for anyone to download, and Mistral’s API now charges $0.70 per million tokens in and $2.10 out. Mistral says it refused 96.6 per cent of malicious hacking requests in its tests, but watching real traffic suggests it could still help with real attacks, so it’s tightening the guardrails. Source
DeepSeek and Moonshot trained on OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, The Information says The report, out on Wednesday, says both leaned heavily on Astra’s answers to train models released this month, including Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 Pro and DeepSeek’s V4.1-Flash. Claude used to be the main target until Anthropic tightened its defences against scraping. Source
Reddit wants everyone logged in as its search traffic dries up It said so with its results on Thursday, warning that daily users could fall by a low double-digit percentage this quarter as fewer people arrive from search. Testing starts in some markets outside the US before the year is out. Source
Anthropic made up 34.5 per cent of SpaceX’s revenue, Bloomberg says That was last quarter, making Anthropic a bigger SpaceX customer than the US government, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. Anthropic’s own IPO filing says it’ll pay SpaceX up to $120.5bn for computing through 2029. It can walk away on 90 days’ notice from early 2027. Source
US computer science enrolment fell 12 per cent this autumn That’s undergraduates at four-year colleges, with graduate numbers down 10 per cent, while total college enrolment barely moved. The early figures came out on Thursday from the National Student Clearinghouse. Source