Wednesday, September 23, 2026

OpenAI says Moonshot-linked accounts ran reasoning extraction campaign

OpenAI disrupted a coordinated distillation campaign that spiked to 16,000 extraction attempts from over 4,000 users on July 24-25, 2026, with related prompt-pattern activity across 15,000+ users. OpenAI says operators manipulated model interactions rather than breaking encryption, and banned the accounts.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra reportedly ships with SOTA scores

US Proposes AI Incident Alert System to China at Trump-Xi Summit

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the notification mechanism with Chinese vice premier He Lifeng, modeled on the Cold War hotline with Moscow. Officials expect weeks of work to finalize, targeting a framework by Bessent's next meeting with Lifeng in Shenzhen in two months.

Epoch AI: Cost of a Given AI Performance Level Falls 47% Per Quarter

Epoch AI finds the cost of hitting a given benchmark score has dropped ~47% per quarter over three years — a 13-fold annual decline, 4x faster than DNA sequencing and 6x faster than compute. OpenAI o3 cost ~$0.30/question for 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025; GPT-5.6 Luna matched it for $0.0004 in mid-2026.

CLOSEDQUORUM malware lets four AI models vote on its next move

Cisco Talos found a Windows malware that polls DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Google Gemini for commands instead of a C2 server, tallying votes across four actions: steal, inject, persist, move. Talos never saw it work end-to-end and the public build is non-functional; code analysis dates to June 17, 2026.