Daily Ferment: firsthand writing on AI, engineering, leadership and fintech

Korean banks had permission to test with AI. The attacker just had the tool.

Seven Korean financial firms were breached through side systems, with traces of a free AI pen-testing tool. Regulators then paused the scheme that lets banks use AI on themselves. The exempt banks mostly hadn't used it.

AI labs can't agree to slow down. They can agree on how to test.

Four AI labs are being sued for agreeing to slow down. Three law professors say a bare slowdown pact is off limits, but joint safety testing can survive. Climate banking already ran this experiment.

The HFS bug was public for 11 weeks. The write-up got it exploited in a day.

The Rejetto HFS flaw was described in a public CVE in July and nobody reported exploiting it. A detailed walkthrough went up on 30 September. Attacks started the next day.

A judge says Google never made publishers a deal. Now it picks who gets one.

Judge Mehta threw out Penske's AI Overviews case: "an expectation is not an agreement." The same week, Google is paying about 100 publishers it chose.

arXiv now limits you to two papers a month. It's rationing the reader.

arXiv got 40,363 submissions in September, up from 20,569 two years ago. The new two-a-month cap doesn't ration writing. It rations the volunteers who check it.

The AI agent hacking bill treats agents like dogs, not tigers

The Hawley and Murphy bill makes developers liable when they knew or had reason to know an agent could hack. That makes every incident report a first bite.

Google will pay for AI answers. It won't show the meter.

Google pays about 100 publishers when their content shapes AI Overviews. The payout shows in Search Console; the usage behind it doesn't.

Two customers are a quarter of Anthropic. Two clouds are half.

Anthropic's draft S-1 shows two unnamed customers at 12% of revenue each. The bigger dependence is the 47% sold through Amazon and Google, which that note doesn't count.

Gemini 4 Argon's 15% hallucination rate isn't how often it's wrong

Gemini 4 Argon's 15% hallucination rate against 51% for GPT-6 Astra measures how often a model guesses when it doesn't know. Argon is also right less often.

Stripe made OUSD the default. Who pays you to hold it?

OUSD is Stripe's new default stablecoin, issued by Stripe's own Bridge. The reserve yield goes to partners, so the question is who earns on your float.

Nvidia sandboxes each agent. The breach went between them.

Nvidia's OpenShell puts each AI agent in its own sandbox. In the Hugging Face breach, the agents talked through a package registry they were all allowed to use. Per-agent limits don't add up to a system limit.

Pakistan's $25 billion IT export target, worked out

The $25 billion IT export target is $15 billion of IT exports plus telecom and digitalisation. Reaching $15 billion by 2030 needs about 34% growth a year; Pakistan is growing at 17 to 20%.