In Experiment 8, Astra edited 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B’s weights, with thinking on, without gradients or training and, with 50 forward passes under temperature 0.6, top-p 0.95, top-k 20 and presence penalty 1.5, the authors report MATH-500 rising from 7.9% to 48.1%. In Experiment 7, the authors report Astra could not tell from weights alone which of two Gemma 3 270M copies was sycophantic in four attempts; with only attention patterns from both models run on up to 16 texts it wrote, it chose the sycophant in all three pairs.

A user reported that Claude Code sent the user's email address to arbitrary third parties in the User-Agent request header during web searches without permission and attributed dozens of daily scam emails to it. The reporter said the behavior should be removed from the harness entirely rather than be an opt-in or opt-out setting, and that they were migrating their company to Pi with OpenRouter because they had no faith in Anthropic preserving their privacy.

According to the reporter’s logs, opening an existing Postman desktop installation (12.33.4) on a Mac after not using it for a while was followed by automatic installation of user-wide Postman plugins for Codex 1.1.0 and Claude Code, plus a Codex SessionStart hook directing non-trivial API engineering tasks to load the postman:api-engineer skill. The reporter says the sequence was not yet reproduced on a clean Mac, that the source establishes the installer’s hook-approval attempt but the trust record alone does not prove who created that record, and that the report establishes unwanted integration and instruction changes, not data exfiltration.

A researcher at cybersecurity firm Calif, aided by AI tools, found a way to exploit a previously reported PHP out-of-memory bug to run arbitrary code on a host server; the researchers involved had deep cybersecurity and PHP knowledge, the audit was sponsored by OpenAI, and Suman Jana said AI cannot do it all by itself. After the exploits were disclosed to the PHP Foundation, four engineers spent two months developing a patch, and Jana said fixing bugs is harder than finding them because fixers must close all attack parts without breaking existing functionality.

Layer3 Intel reported that from October 5 to November 3, 2026, its residential-proxy pipeline exited through AS2650—registered to the Executive Office of the President, which hosts the White House network—236 times from six addresses, with 28 residential proxy services able to exit. Layer3 Intel said anyone could buy public residential-proxy access for a few dollars, that it caught the activity by chance and did not target the network, and that its data shows exits, not the device or person behind them.

The post argues Astra's weight-reading/writing claims are misleading: only small 17K–172K-weight experiments read raw weights alone, while the headline Qwen math improvement, raising MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1%, uses Python and up to 50 practice batches.