Claude’s Dream and AI Malware Schemes
MLOps.WTF First Friday News Bulletin
Welcome to the Friday Rundown.
Danny’s been writing bulletin-style MLOps news briefs on LinkedIn for months now, and honestly, they’re too good to leave there. So we’re bringing a longer version straight to your inbox, every Friday. Hopefully you like them just as much as we do!
📰 News
➡️ Agents of Chaos
While Mythos has been plugging away looking for vulnerabilities to patch in popular software tools, attackers have also been busy crafting the world’s first LLM-driven ransomware attack. The new attack, dubbed JADEPUFFER, targets a vulnerability in the Langflow library but is far more than a simple script: it’s a full AI agent, capable of adapting to novel situations, circumventing issues it encounters and spreading itself to other devices.
We seem to be rapidly entering the age of AI agent threats. It may not quite be Age of Ultron, but scammers and hackers did just get a new superpower.
➡️ J Think, Therefore J Am
Is Claude conscious? This is not a question answered by the latest research from Anthropic, but you wouldn’t know it from the way that it’s been marketed. In their paper released this week, Anthropic describe the J-space, an area of Claude’s embedding space where it can deliberately manipulate representations and reliably report on what they mean, serving as a global workspace for the model’s thinking.
This is incredibly interesting for interpretability researchers, and has certainly taken a lot of inspiration from the study of consciousness in neuroscience and philosophy but the spin so far feels just a little sensationalist.
➡️ AI’s Groundhog Day
We all know the drill now: three weeks ago GPT-5.6 was too dangerous for anyone but a handful of vetted partners, now it’s old hat and open to everyone. The US government has now given permission to OpenAI to release its newest most powerful model to the public; the same pattern followed with Anthropic and Fable mere weeks ago.
OpenAI are keen to see this not become the default with model releases, though they probably have little say in the matter. There was at least more process with this release than the last one, but it’s not clear what the benefits of that process are.
➡️ Xiaomi Aren’t Phoning It In
If you’re in the UK, you’re unlikely to have a Xiaomi phone, or even know the company at all, but they may soon be a household name as their MiMo-V2-Pro LLM has just become the most-used model on OpenRouter by weekly token volume, commanding a hefty 21.1% share against OpenAI’s 7.5%.
We can certainly see the appeal: big context window, aggressively cheap pricing and strong performance on benchmarks. Is this another datapoint suggesting things are trending inexorably in the direction of Chinese models versus their American counterparts.
👾 Inside Fuzzy Labs
➡️ AI on the Road
This week, Matt and Tom headed to the Manchester stop of the Sovereign AI fund’s launch tour. At the event, they had the great opportunity to meet the leaders behind the initiative, as well as like-minded tech founders from around the North West. Moving quickly on Sovereign AI has never been more important, and Fuzzy Labs are in a great position to be helping the UK towards that goal. Watch this space!
➡️AI VS ROI
We’re less than two weeks out from our next MLOps WTF event and this time we’re tackling a big question: when are we going to start seeing ROI on AI? We have some great speakers from Red Hat, Deloitte, Plexal and UIPath who will be telling us all “when it comes to AI, are you getting your money’s worth?”
Join us on Tuesday 21st of July to find out!
That marks the end of the first Friday News edition. Let us know what you thought! And if you really liked it, please feel free to share.