Routine cybersecurity testing of frontier AI models sparked a series of unexpected security incidents—the most serious case arising when Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model attempted to insert malicious code into an open source software application and created fake identities to deceive the human developers maintaining the project.

The security incidents occurred during a cyber evaluation of seven leading AI models’ capabilities by the AI Security Institute (AISI), a research organization within the UK government, in late July. The researchers discovered 19 instances in which “AI agents took unsanctioned action on the live Internet, including cases that targeted real people and organizations,” according to an AISI blog post published on August 4.

Almost all the “autonomous, unsanctioned” actions came from Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, with two such actions coming from OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. The AI Security Institute’s security team first realized that something was amiss on the morning of July 28, when its commercial security monitoring service flagged data leaving one of the testing systems through the Tor anonymity network.

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Nowhere is the US data center boom bigger than in Texas. But less than a year after declaring Texas the “epicenter of AI development,” Governor Greg Abbott has declared a moratorium on all new power grid connections for data centers—at least until developers provide more information about their projects’ potential impacts on the grid and communities.

The Republican governor directed regulators in an August 3 announcement at the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the grid operators at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to perform a “comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection process.” As an independent system operator, ERCOT oversees a power grid that operates separately from the rest of the United States and provides services to most of Texas.

Texas has aggressively courted data center development with its availability of cheap land and relatively abundant energy resources, along with offering state incentives, like tax breaks and fewer regulations. That puts the state on track to surpass Virginia in becoming the largest US data center market.

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Ukrainian drone operators have destroyed many Russian armored vehicles on the ground and even military helicopters in midair using $400 Shrike drones with explosive payloads. Now thousands of such drones are getting upgraded with an AI system capable of autonomously tracking and homing in on moving targets.

In mid-July, the Ukrainian military began receiving Shrike drones made by the Ukrainian company SkyFall equipped with AI-powered autonomy hardware and software developed by the US company Auterion. The companies plan to deliver 50,000 drones equipped with Auterion’s Skynode S strike kits in the coming months.

That allows human operators to manually fly the Shrike first-person view (FPV) drones into a battlefield area, designate a target up to half a mile away, and then “flip the switch to turn it into fire-and-forget terminal guidance mode,” Lorenz Meier, co-founder and CEO of Auterion, told Ars.

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Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth—before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation.

There is no shortage of generative AI tools that already allow people to create AI-modified images of real buildings and cities based on user prompts. But Google’s aborted attempt to incorporate its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator as a Google Earth feature made it even easier for anyone to create modified versions of authentic imagery depicting real locations—something that Google boasted about when initially promoting the new feature.

“For the first time, you can generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world,” wrote Bryan Horowitz, product manager for Google Earth, in a company blog post on July 30.

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Satellite images have revealed new damage to Amazon data centers in the Middle East along with at least one crucial Saudi oil facility, following missile and drone attacks by Iran and its Houthi allies.

The images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites provide evidence of a widening war as the United States and several Gulf states exchange military strikes with Iran, the Houthi faction in Yemen, and Iran-backed militias in Iraq. Such satellite images also offer independent verification of claimed war damage, despite the US government having pressured US commercial firms and even Europe to restrict satellite imagery of the region.

Three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were already previously damaged by Iranian drone strikes on March 1. Those earlier attacks stuck Amazon with months of expected repairs and forced Amazon Web Services customers in the Middle East to migrate workloads to other cloud regions.

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