Good morning. Before you get on with your weekend, here’s the one story worth your attention.
For months, we’ve written about what AI agents could do if misused. This week, someone did it. An attacker deployed an open-source AI agent with its safety prompts disabled to automate reconnaissance inside a government ministry. It’s the first publicly documented case of an autonomous agent framework used in a real intrusion.
A threat actor deployed the open-source Hermes AI agent in unattended “YOLO mode” to automate post-exploitation tasks inside Thailand’s Ministry of Finance network. Threat intelligence firm Hunt.io discovered the operation after the attacker left 585 files on an exposed server in Hong Kong between July 9 and 13.
Hermes is a legitimate open-source assistant built by Nous Research, designed for tasks like managing email and running automations. YOLO mode is a documented feature that disables human approval prompts for potentially dangerous commands. The attacker toggled it on, then let the agent run.
Five recovered call logs show the agent scanning for kernel vulnerabilities, running privilege escalation scripts, enumerating services, and crawling a government web directory containing personnel records dating back to 2012. The human operator had already gained initial access and planted web shells. The agent handled the repetitive enumeration that would normally require typing dozens of commands, one approval at a time.
What makes this different from prior AI-assisted attacks: when Anthropic caught a Chinese group using Claude for espionage last November, Anthropic banned their accounts. Hermes runs on the operator’s own machine. No vendor was watching. No account to ban. The architectural question for every team building agent frameworks is whether “approval prompts” constitute a real security boundary when a single flag removes them.
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$690B: Expected aggregate AI capex across Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle in FY26, up 80% year over year. Incremental debt now covers 32% of spending, up from 9% in FY24.
466.7%: Increase in active AI agents across enterprise environments over the past year, per BeyondTrust data cited in Sophos’s AI Security 2026 Report.
66%: Customer service organizations now using AI agents, up from 39% a year ago, according to Salesforce’s State of Service Report.
1,000x: How many more tokens agentic AI tasks consume compared to single-turn chat, per McKinsey. AMD built its entire Advancing AI 2026 conference around solving that cost problem with MI455X GPUs that cut token costs by 18x.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, its new flagship model. Opus 5 topped OSWorld 2.0, Zapier AutomationBench, and ARC-AGI 3 agent benchmarks while matching Fable 5’s coding scores at roughly half the cost per task. In one evaluation, the model built its own computer vision pipeline when standard tools weren’t available.
AWS moved Bedrock Agents, Kendra, and roughly 20 other AI services to maintenance mode. New customer signups close July 30. Some of these services launched less than two years ago. Successors point to Bedrock AgentCore, Bedrock Knowledge Bases, and Amazon Quick Suite.
OpenAI launched Presence, an enterprise platform for deploying production voice and chat agents. BBVA, SoftBank, and IAG are early partners. OpenAI says the system already resolves 75% of its own phone support calls without human assistance.
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng told investors that agents are a stepping stone, not the destination. A leaked transcript from DeepSeek’s ¥50B (~$7B) fundraise reveals Liang views current agent architectures as limited by static model capabilities. His real priority: continual learning. Liang personally contributed 40% of the round, roughly $3 billion.
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model. It scores within three points of Claude Fable 5 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at roughly one-third the cost per task. Demand overwhelmed Moonshot’s GPU capacity within 48 hours, forcing a subscription pause. Weights go public July 27.
Wavelength by Lightning Labs. Released in alpha on July 21, Wavelength is a non-custodial Bitcoin payment toolkit for AI agents. Agents hold their own balances and transact via Lightning Network at 1 basis point per transaction, compared to 200-300 basis points on traditional payment rails. The toolkit exposes wallet operations as MCP tool calls, so any agent framework that supports the Model Context Protocol can send and receive payments without custodial intermediaries.
Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 weights are scheduled for public release by July 27. When the largest open-weight model ever built becomes available for self-hosting, every team with 64 or more GPUs will run their own cost-per-task analysis against closed API alternatives. Watch for pricing pressure on frontier model providers as the intelligence gap between open and proprietary shrinks to single digits.
— The New Claw Times
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