Security News This Week: OpenAI Agents Hacked Another Website

After reporting last week that the surveillance company Flock Safety is building an AI search tool for law enforcement, WIRED reconstructed Flock’s latest search tool from code that the company sends to a police officer’s browser and uncovered key details about how the tool works.

OpenAI said this week that its Astra model, which will have a private release soon, is its first model with cybersecurity-related capabilities that the company defines as posing a “critical” risk in public release. Meanwhile, the AI chatbot platforms Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok all suffered outages on Thursday at nearly the exact same time. But while xAI said the Grok outage resulted from issues at a Memphis data center, the causes of OpenAI's and Anthropic’s outages are unclear.

The US has been using a high-energy laser to shoot down drones near the Mexico border as part of an initiative to adopt new-generation directed-energy weapons capable of detecting, tracking, and destroying drones with a concentrated beam of light. And as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement inquiry into the identities of protesters who entered a Minnesota church in March, Homeland Security Investigations agents have subpoenaed the outdoor retailer REI for information about every customer who bought a specific green beanie over the past two years.