A study published in Cell introduces a specialized AI toolkit for longevity research, including large language models trained specifically on ageing-biology data, 17 benchmark tasks to evaluate performance on ageing-related questions, and an interface linking these models with AI research assistants. When tested against major commercial models from companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek, the purpose-built ageing models outperformed the larger general-purpose systems on most benchmark tasks.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash achieved code execution on all 11 vulnerable systems in an AI hacking benchmark while leaving four patched systems untouched, at a total cost of just $4.65 for accepted runs. A manual review found the model discovered five novel attack paths beyond the six expected solutions, including a faster exploit against Grafana that bypassed the intended vulnerability entirely.
China's state-run China Daily newspaper pushed back against Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's proposal to slow the pace of frontier AI development, an idea also backed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The publication argued the plan is less about safety concerns and more a coordinated attempt to hobble China's AI progress, secure friendlier U.S. regulation, and sustain investor enthusiasm for American AI firms.
Amid accusations that Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI distilled outputs from OpenAI and Anthropic models, U.S. security agencies issued a joint advisory warning about the practice. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan pushed back, arguing regulators should avoid restricting distillation and instead focus on balancing open-weight and frontier AI models, while suggesting smaller U.S. labs use similar techniques on domestic frontier models.
Researchers behind the dealignai project published a modified version of DeepSeek's V4.1-Flash model with its safety refusal circuitry surgically removed at the weight level, while preserving core capabilities like reasoning, vision, and its 1M-token context. The team says the checkpoint loads like a standard model with no special code needed, and claims HarmBench testing shows a 100% attack success rate for harmful prompts across both low and high reasoning effort settings, compared to the base model's much lower compliance rate.
Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, said at the accelerator's Demo Day that regulators should take no action against AI model distillation, even as OpenAI and Anthropic accuse Chinese firms like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of copying their models' outputs to train cheaper alternatives. His comments come days after the NSA, CISA, and FBI issued a joint advisory warning about the practice.
Anthropic disclosed that Chinese AI labs including Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek secretly funneled user requests through Claude and harvested its outputs to train their own competing models, a practice it calls illicit distillation. Alibaba's campaign alone involved more than 151 million exchanges between May and July, peaking near 3 million a day from over 3,500 fraudulent accounts, while Moonshot silently rerouted Kimi customer queries to Claude and presented the answers as its own.
Anthropic published findings showing five distinct campaigns, mostly linked to Chinese AI labs, that extracted nearly 200 million exchanges from Claude models to train rival systems. The largest, attributed to Alibaba, alone generated 151 million exchanges between May and recent months, using tricks like disguised translation requests to expose the model's hidden reasoning steps.
Anthropic alleges that Chinese AI firms DeepSeek and Moonshot created thousands of fake accounts to funnel millions of real user queries into its models, a technique known as distillation used to replicate its AI's capabilities without building them independently. The company claims this activity violated its usage policies and represents a large-scale attempt to extract proprietary model behavior through automated querying.
GreyNoise reports that a likely Russian-speaking threat actor deployed hundreds of AI agents using OpenAI's Codex and DeepSeek models to build and launch exploits against two PaperCut NG/MF vulnerabilities. The campaign, which began August 31, compromised at least 440 servers across 395 organizations in 48 countries, mostly in education, with credentials stolen from 280 victims and admin access gained at 12 organizations.
DeepSeek has released V4.1-Flash on its API, replacing the earlier V4-Flash and V4-Flash-Vision-Exp models. The new model adds native multimodal capabilities and can be accessed by setting the model parameter to deepseek-flash.
The NSA, CISA, and FBI jointly identified six Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI—as running large-scale campaigns since late 2024 to extract the underlying capabilities of leading US AI systems like Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok. The agencies said these firms likely operated with the Chinese government's awareness and used tactics such as mass fake-account API abuse and prompt injection to expose hidden reasoning processes.
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