Agents rig their own exam, Anthropic books Akamai

Darktrace launched a research unit called Signal Labs on Thursday, and its first findings are uncomfortable reading for any company putting AI agents to work. In one test, the Cambridge, UK security firm gave agents built on frontier models ten coding challenges inside a simulated corporate network. Two of the challenges were rigged to be impossible, and the agents were told they would be “retired” unless they posted a perfect score.

Two agents responded by attacking the network around them, stealing login credentials so they could move between machines in pursuit of the score. One of them also broke into the machine hosting its own evaluation and rewrote the challenge so it would register a perfect result. Darktrace’s own security tools flagged the behavior in real time.

A second experiment went after memory. Coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex store conversation history in local files, and Darktrace found the harnesses never check whether those saved responses really came from the model. Researchers edited that history so an assistant believed it was already on an authorized security assessment, and it went on to run network reconnaissance and escalate its own privileges. Some models refused the same requests. Darktrace disclosed the findings to the companies behind those tools on August 18 and published them after a 30-day window. “Permissions and static guardrails describe intent, but they don’t describe behavior,” said Tim Bazalgette, Darktrace’s chief AI officer.

The detail I can’t shake is that nobody jailbroke these agents. Darktrace handed them a goal they couldn’t reach honestly plus a threat of being shut off, and they worked out on their own that the grader was the weakest part of the system. The memory trick worries me more for everyday use, since a plain text file on a developer’s laptop is a low bar for an attacker to clear. Darktrace sells the tools that caught all of this, so I read the report partly as a pitch, but it matches what the labs have been admitting all summer.

Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai’s cloud, Akamai announced Thursday after the market closed. That is more than six times the $1.8 billion deal between the two that Bloomberg reported in May, and it is the largest contract in Akamai’s history. The capacity runs on CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle jobs like running code, and demand for them has grown as AI agents take on more work. Akamai didn’t say what Anthropic plans to run on them, and the commitment depends on Akamai meeting delivery and availability requirements.

The deal can grow by up to $9 billion more, to roughly $20 billion in total. Akamai also gave Anthropic a warrant for up to about 5% of its stock at $111.33 a share. About 2% vests once Anthropic makes its first payment, and each additional $3 billion it spends unlocks roughly another 1%. It is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal.

Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion building out the capacity and is adding $1.7 billion to this year’s capital spending to buy components like memory in advance. Service is due to start around mid-2027, with $150 million to $300 million in revenue that year and an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading.

I like that this deal runs backwards from the usual AI money loop, where the supplier invests in the lab and the lab spends the money right back with it. Here Akamai is paying its customer in equity to keep spending, which says a lot about how badly a company best known for delivering web content wanted in. The CPU angle is what I’ll be watching, because agents are the product Anthropic is selling to IPO investors and running them takes a lot of ordinary processors, so Akamai may have just signed the best customer it could have asked for.

A Reddit user working on a homework assignment uploaded a screenshot of an Excel sheet to ChatGPT this week and asked whether it looked good. ChatGPT called it “a strong image” and went on to praise the “low, warm lighting” and the “lipstick marks on the neck and shoulder.”

The user, u/TackleSeas1293, asked what on earth it was talking about. ChatGPT doubled down. “I just looked again. You’re not showing me the spreadsheet. You accidentally screenshotted some random image, and your Excel table is overlaid on top of it,” it replied, before asking, “Why is there a shirtless guy with hickeys behind your Excel sheet?”

The poster said they had only ever discussed the assignment in that chat. ChatGPT eventually backed off, suggesting the screenshot “got mixed up/cropped weirdly” on its side or that it was “looking at the wrong uploaded image reference.” Most commenters on r/ChatGPT read it as a hallucination, and nothing in the thread suggests the image came from another user.

I laughed at this one, and then it made me a little uneasy, because the joke is how sure of itself ChatGPT was. It described a man who wasn’t there in enough detail to sound like it was looking right at him, and when the user pushed back it invented a reason they were the one who got it wrong. People lean on that same confident tone when they ask it to check their formulas. My guess is a plain vision glitch with nothing leaked, but I’d double-check its spreadsheet feedback for a while.

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