Chris Campbell:

Anthropic Hacked by AI Startup in Less Than 12 Hours, Report Claims

An AI startup has claimed that it hacked Anthropic's systems in less than 12 hours, exposing internal messages and data.

U.S.-based Cathedral, which was founded this year by former staff members of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said it breached the artificial intelligence company's internal network as part of a bug bounty program that encourages outsiders to look for security flaws.

The breach exposed Slack messages, meeting transcripts, staff salaries and job offers.

Anthropic confirmed that Cathedral had reached a "limited set" of sales, HR and IT systems, but did not access users' conversations with Claude. The AI model's source code was also not compromised.

"Our monitoring flagged some of Cathedral's activity before they reported it to us," Anthropic said in a statement shared with the publication. "We shut off their access the same day."

Anthropic pushed back on the claim that it only took 12 hours to breach the systems, with a spokesperson saying it "involved attempts over several days".

The spokesperson added that Cathedral's actions went "substantially beyond" the company's bug bounty program by targeting third party applications.

⇒ Read More Here

Greg Guenthner:

Fed Stands Pat, Bitcoin Holds Steady – But a December Rate Hike Is in Play

The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged at 3.75% to 4.00% on Wednesday in a 10-2 vote, with two officials dissenting in favor of another quarter-point hike. Fed Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack voted against the decision.

Bitcoin barely moved, edging up about 0.2% to roughly $80,950 in the minutes after the 2 p.m. ET announcement.

The decision reaches well beyond Wall Street, because the federal funds rate, which is what banks charge each other for overnight loans, sets the baseline for what consumers pay on credit cards and car loans. The Fed raised that rate in September, its first hike since 2023, in a unanimous 12-0 vote.

"Economic activity is expanding at a strong pace," the Fed said in its statement, a step up from the solid pace it cited in September. "Job gains have kept pace with the workforce, and the unemployment rate has changed little."

On inflation, the Fed said it remains elevated and that "the accumulation of more information will help the Committee determine the policy stance appropriate to ensure a timely return of inflation to the Committee's 2% goal."

⇒ Read More Here

Ray Blanco:

China's Top-Secret Spaceplane Can't Hide in Low-Earth Orbit

A winged Chinese spacecraft bearing a strong resemblance to the U.S. military's X-37B spaceplane was photographed in orbit by a passing U.S.-owned commercial satellite in 2024, and we finally have the image.

The Chinese spaceplane has delta wings, payload bay doors, a dark heat shield, and a rear-mounted service module with power-generating solar arrays. In other words, the design of the winged ship is, to a great degree, a copy of the X-37B spaceplane flown by the U.S. Space Force.

The photo was taken by a commercial imaging satellite owned by a company called Vantor, known as Maxar in 2024. Vantor is one of several companies that provide reconnaissance imagery of locations around the world to the U.S. military and U.S. intelligence agencies. The same Earth-imaging satellites can point their telescopes at objects in space.

A U.S. Space Force official revealed Maxar's observation at a 2024 conference in South Korea, but the Pentagon did not release the full-resolution image to the public until Monday, when it appeared in an unclassified Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of threats to the United States in space.

⇒ Read More Here