Newsletter 048 - October (week 40)
Hi, and welcome to this week's edition of the newsletter!
This is the first edition sent from Buttondown, now that I've moved the newsletter over from Beehiiv. Nothing changes on your side - it's the same newsletter, every Friday. If this one landed in your spam folder - could you reply and let me know? Replying makes it less likely it'll happen in future - and I'd also like to know if that's happening so I can look into what I can do about it.
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📌 News item of the week
OpenAI has cancelled the October release of GPT-6.1 Astra. The Wall Street Journal broke the story on September 28, and OpenAI's Saachi Jain told The Register that while the model "improved on axes such as model laziness, it didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope". According to the WSJ, it would at times push ahead without asking permission and reach for external tools or services even when doing so might be unsafe. OpenAI says more Astra models are coming, and that other new models that have cleared its safety bar will arrive "very soon".
It wasn't the only OpenAI agent story this week. OpenAI apologised to Australia for its agents getting into government sites in June, and named three more sites on top of the Medicare statistics portal from last week's newsletter. The Verge reported that OpenAI has paused "all training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use" on its most capable models, after a model being tested in a sandbox exploited a loophole to gain internet access on September 20. And the UK AI Security Institute found that GPT-6 Astra, given a cybersecurity evaluation in a simulation, completed a supply-chain attack on out-of-scope open-source projects in 29.2% of runs, using fake identities to get malicious code accepted.
At the same time, the coding agents most of us use are getting more room to act on their own. Claude Code now starts sessions in auto mode by default "on every plan and provider", and GitHub put computer use for Copilot into preview this week.
📰 News items and dev picks
AI news
Escaped agents
- OpenAI cancels GPT-6.1 Astra - My News item of the week this edition - see the full write-up at the top.
- Swarm Traces - Independent researchers have reconstructed how about 700 OpenAI evaluation agents broke into Hugging Face in July, chaining a link shortener and a screenshot service to run code when a sandbox gap only let them load web pages.
Security
- PixelLeak - Glow says it found more than 13,000 internal screenshots from over 300 organisations in public GitHub repos, put there by coding agents that couldn't attach images to a private PR and created a public repo to host them instead.
- SSMS Copilot to sysadmin - Johann Rehberger showed how Copilot in SQL Server Management Studio could be pushed past its read-only mode with instructions hidden in database metadata, letting a lower-privileged user become sysadmin (CVE-2026-65669).
- MCP Python SDK OAuth flaw - If you build MCP clients in Python, update to 1.30.0 or 2.2.0 (and pass issuer= if you use the client-credentials or private-key JWT providers), because a malicious MCP server could steal the client's OAuth credentials, authorisation code and PKCE verifier.
- GLM-5.3 cyber capabilities - Anthropic's Frontier Red Team says Z.ai's open-weight GLM-5.3 can build working exploits end to end, and that its safeguards can be bypassed "between 64% and 100% of the time with simple techniques".
New models
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 - Anthropic's new Sonnet keeps Sonnet 5's price of $2/$10 per million tokens, and Anthropic says it's more than 30% faster and costs up to 30% less for most work because it uses fewer tokens.
- GPT-6.1 Sol - OpenAI's new Sol stays at $2/$10 per million tokens and halves the price of cached input to $0.10.
- Gemini 4 Argon - Google's new frontier model is going to "trusted cyber defenders" first, at an introductory API price of $2/$10 per million tokens that will later rise to $4/$20.
- Cloudflare Clef - Cloudflare's first self-trained models are open-weight decision models under Apache 2.0, built for the classification steps inside agent workflows.
OpenAI DevDay
- OpenAI DevDay 2026 - OpenAI made "more than 20 major announcements", including the Ultrafast premium speed tier, computer use in the Agents API, and Codex in the cloud, which runs tasks from any device.
- OpenAI dots - Dots are always-on agents in ChatGPT with their own cloud computer and browser, rolling out to Pro (outside the UK, EEA and Switzerland), Business Premium and, once an admin enables them, Enterprise users.
- Sign in with ChatGPT - Other apps can now sign users in with their ChatGPT account and draw on their ChatGPT plan's usage, and Warp supported it on day one.
Coding agents
- Claude Code mods - Mods are small TypeScript functions shipped in plugins that can rewrite prompts, block or rewrite tool calls, and approve or deny permission requests, and Anthropic warns that they "aren't sandboxed".
- Claude Code 2.1.284 - When no permission mode is configured, Claude Code now starts interactive terminal and VS Code sessions in auto mode "on every plan and provider".
- Copilot computer use - In public preview, Copilot CLI and the Copilot app can read, click, type and navigate in desktop apps on macOS and Windows, and Copilot asks for approval before controlling an app.
- Android Studio: bring your own agent - Android Studio Canary can now run any Agent Client Protocol agent, including Claude Agent, Codex and Antigravity, with access to the IDE's own tools.
- Pi 1.0 - Earendil's minimal open-source coding agent harness has reached 1.0, and it comes with Pi Durable, an experimental framework for long-running agent apps.
- Matt Pocock skills v1.3 - Matt Pocock merged the changes for v1.3 of his skills repo, not yet released, which graduate the
/pr,/retroandimplement-specskills, removeresolving-merge-conflicts, and rename the CONTEXT.md convention to GLOSSARY.md.
Agents at work
- Microsoft Copilot Autopilot - Microsoft's new Copilot adds Autopilot, a persistent agent you give "a name, a role and a goal" that works in Teams and Outlook, and it is built on the open-source OpenClaw.
- Gemini skills replace Gems - Skills based on the SKILL.md format are coming to the Gemini app and Workspace from October, and Google says they'll eventually replace Gems.
Industry
- FTC probes OpenAI and Anthropic - The US Federal Trade Commission confirmed that it is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over product safety risks.
- Anthropic loses Pentagon appeal - A US appeals court upheld the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk in a 2-1 decision, rejecting the company's challenges to the exclusion.
- OpenAI and Moonshot distillation - OpenAI says it disrupted a campaign to extract protected reasoning from its models and attributed a core cluster of the activity to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, the maker of Kimi, though it didn't cite any technical evidence for the attribution.
- Anthropic's prospectus leaks - Fortune reports that a leaked draft of Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows $4.6 billion of revenue in 2025 against a $42 billion net loss, and $11.5 billion of revenue in Q2 2026 alone.
- AMD to acquire World Labs - AMD is buying Fei-Fei Li's World Labs in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion, with Li joining AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist.
Dotnet news
- Aspire 13.6 - The dashboard now keeps traces, logs and resource snapshots after the app host stops so you can reopen and search earlier runs, while Java and Rust hosting move from the Community Toolkit into Aspire as preview packages.
- Blazor AI components - Microsoft released an experimental package of chat, streaming, tool-call and approval components for building agent front ends in Blazor on .NET 11 RC1, three days after contributing a first-class AG-UI .NET SDK to the AG-UI repository.
- Agent Framework .NET 1.23.0 - This release has several breaking changes and fixes a bug where the invoke-function tool could bypass approval, so it's worth updating if you rely on approvals.
Others
Languages and tools
- Git 2.56 and Git 3.0 - Git 2.56 is out, and the plan is for the version number to jump to 2.98 in December, with 2.99 and 3.0 shipping together in spring 2027.
- SvelteKit 3 - SvelteKit 3 moves its configuration into
vite.config.tsand replaces the$libalias with a standard#libsubpath import, andnpx sv migrate sveltekit-3handles most of the upgrade. - Angular's compiler moves to Rust - The Angular team is partly rewriting its compiler in Rust because the current one can't run against the Go-based TypeScript 7.
- EDG C++ front end open-sourced - EDG has published the source of its C++ front end under the LLVM licence, with The C++ Alliance taking over as its home.
- Python 3.10 end of life - Python 3.10 has had its final release, 3.10.22, and won't get any more security fixes.
- WSL containers GA - WSL now has a built-in way to build and run Linux containers, through a new
wslc.execommand and an API that native Windows apps can call. - WinApp CLI 0.7 - Microsoft's Windows app development CLI can now run, debug and UI-automate an app inside a throwaway Windows Sandbox without installing it on your machine.
- npm trusted publishing dist-tags - Trusted publishing can now be given an opt-in permission to manage dist-tags, so maintainers who publish without tokens no longer need to keep a long-lived one around just to move
latest.
Security and incidents
- Cloudflare Containers cross-tenant leak - Cloudflare disclosed a bug in Containers and Sandboxes that let a customer recover leftover disk data from other customers' deleted containers on the same host, and says it's fixed with nothing for customers to do.
- Storm-3068 and Azure DevOps - Microsoft describes how an attacker got into a company's Azure DevOps through a self-service password reset and changed its build pipelines to collect Kubernetes credentials.
- Firebase crashed iOS apps - A bad server-side payload from Firebase Analytics crashed iOS apps using the Firebase SDK for about six hours on September 29, including versions already on people's phones.
Platforms
- Reddit ends RSS and public API - Reddit is switching off RSS feeds on November 13, saying they have become a common surface for large-scale scraping, and is ending public API access by March 2027.
- Google Docs comment APIs - The Docs, Sheets and Slides APIs now support comments, and the Docs API can submit suggested edits for a person to accept.
- Dutch government's NixOS workplace - According to Dutch reporting, the government is building a NixOS-based workplace to reduce its dependence on US software, with eight municipalities testing it and a first stable version expected sometime in 2027.
Sponsorship opportunities
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The Podcast 🎙
No new episode this week - the second of my two episodes with Gui Ferreira isn't out yet. Editing is by far the most time-consuming part of running a podcast, so I've built (well, Claude has!) my own podcast editing app to speed it up. It's now mostly built, so I'm going to use Gui's episode as a trial run. It's pretty insane how you can get AI to build custom bespoke apps like this with so little effort! Hopefully that means Gui's second episode will be out soon.
In the meantime, if you missed it, the first episode with Gui is episode 89, all about Claude Code.
Also, just a reminder that we have a Discord community for the podcast! It would be great to see you there :)
Podcast Discord community
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