Models & Labs · United States

Anthropic launches free AI security scans for open-source projects

Credited to The Verge · theverge.com · 48m ago

Photograph · The Verge

The new OSS Scanner service offers vulnerability reports from Anthropic’s “strongest models,” including Mythos.

Anthropic’s offering to help open-source projects track down security vulnerabilities with a new service called OSS Scanner. It says open-source projects that opt-in will get “thorough, periodic security scans by our strongest models at no cost.” That could mean open-source projects get alerted about possible security issues sooner, but the trade-off is that OSS Scanner’s reports don’t come with human review:

The outputs of this opt-in vulnerability scanner will be fully model-generated, without human review or triage. This will enable faster and more frequent scanning, but means that it is possible reports will be incorrect or invalid. These reports will be generated by our strongest models (including Claude Mythos) to give open-source projects the largest defensive advantage.

OSS Scanner is far from the first AI bug hunting helper out there. AI tools have helped find some major security flaws in open-source software over recent months, like the “Copy Fail” bug that impacted nearly every Linux distro in May. At the same time, some open-source projects are struggling to keep up with the sudden onslaught of AI-generated bug reports, including Linus Torvalds and even Google.

Models & LabsUnited States

OpenAI’s Math Advances Spark a Reckoning for Academia

Credited to Bloomberg$ · bloomberg.com1h ago

Useful

A mathematician reflects on how AI is changing his profession

View the article · $Bloomberg

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Models & Labs · United States

There can be only one: Google Cloud casts Gemini as your enterprise AI hero

Credited to The Register · theregister.com · 2h ago

Photograph · The Register

The Chocolate Factory proposes a single universal agent for work

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that Gemini will be "your new single, universal agent for work," a declaration as unassailable as Google's history of consistency, customer service, and long-term product support.

Long-term here means a median lifespan of about 4.1 years and a mean lifespan of about 5.4 years across 308 discontinued products and services. That doesn't include enduring successes like Gmail and Search. Perhaps Gemini is destined for that level of longevity.

In a blog post adapted from the prepared remarks he spoke at the Gemini at Work 2026 event – and what could be more appropriate for Google than to herald Gemini with a derivative work? – Kurian laid out his vision for an AI service known as Bard only two years ago.

Gemini, he said, has your business context – which is to say, data – and thus can be used for various tasks like question answering, content creation, and coding.

"It plans the work, uses skills and tools, connects to your systems, and brings back something finished — inside the documents, the inbox, and the developer environments you already work in," Kurian said. "It chooses the best model for the job, has built-in cost controls, and most importantly, has the security, administration, and governance required by your company."

Kurian's actual remarks at the event were more succinct. "Today, Gemini became an agent," he said. "You give it objectives, not just instructions. It plans the work, uses custom skills and tools, connects to your systems and brings back something finished."

You might wonder what role you play in all this as a Google Enterprise customer, when Gemini is planning, executing, and delivering. There's always Minesweeper and hunting for a job that involves physical labor and human dignity.

Sundai Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, opened the Google Cloud event with the Recitation of Self-Reported Statistics, a common ritual in the technocratic liturgy.

"Enterprise adoption is moving faster than most people realize," he said. "Nearly 80 percent of Google Cloud customers are using our AI products. And they are not just using it, they're using it intensely. Nearly 500 enterprise customers have each processed over 1 trillion tokens on our platform in the last year."

Pichai took time to praise Google's latest model, Gemini 4 Argon, noting that it outperforms rival models Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1, and GPT-6 Astra on the DeepSWE v1.1 coding benchmark with a score of 77.9 percent. And within Google, he said, Gemini 4 Argon has reduced post-submit code rollbacks by 30 percent while increasing agentic code submissions from employees by 35 percent.

Kurian then continued the customer success report by citing various claimed productivity gains from Google Cloud customers. Japanese telecom biz NTT Docomo, he said, has saved 450,000 hours annually using data agents. Your mileage may vary.

But Kurian's emphasis on the solipsism of Gemini isn't entirely accurate. Gemini is unified in theory. It works within Gmail, Dive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat, and Calendar as a single surface. It can be accessed across iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac desktops, not to mention third-party applications where enabled or during headless operations. It resides in Google Cloud so it retains contextual info.

But no agent is an island. Just like the stellar twins for which it's named, Gemini has more than one moving part. "It can dynamically create a roster of sub-agents — temporary, job-specific agents, each with their own identity — to tackle multi-step tasks," said Kurian, perhaps overestimating the appeal of naming spawned processes.

And the Gemini agent is distinct from the various models it may call upon, even if one of those might be Gemini 4 Argon. "It runs each job on the model that fits best — orchestrating across our Gemini family of models and Claude models from Anthropic today, and other leading private and open models in the future — to deliver optimal quality and lower your costs," Kurian explained.

During the event, Kurian highlighted how Gemini inherits existing enterprise controls. "Every Gemini agent has an identity of its own, separate from your identity," he said. "Your policies reach it the very same way they reach your people: set the policies once, apply them everywhere rather than agency by agent. You set its budget before it starts and that budget covers the whole cost of the work."

That's the promise, but of course the very existence of enterprise cost control mechanisms suggests costs can get out of hand. It was only two months ago that Google introduced flexible billing and cost controls for agents. Managing AI spending, however, remains an unsolved problem. As noted by the Wall Street Journal recently, "Spending on AI Is Becoming Almost Impossible for Businesses to Budget."

Back in July, AI cost management company Coworker AI observed there were two Gemini Enterprise products that could easily be confused. Now we're told there's just one. Enjoy it while it lasts. ®