Hacking a hundred companies used to need a team. Last week one person did it with three AI models and about $8,000 — and walked away with more than 600,000 credit card records. OpenAI's maths model didn't just disprove Navier-Stokes; it went on to crack another hundred long-standing open problems, and the pace surprised OpenAI itself. And British Columbia is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman personally over a mass shooting, because their own safety team flagged the account eight months earlier and nobody called the police.
Today from Basel. Capability, infrastructure, and responsibility — and the distance between the three.
In this episode:
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Ocean's One, with three chatbots (
01:42) — Forbes reported a Chinese-speaking attacker who targeted as many as
100 organisations, using not one model but three: DeepSeek, Kimi from Moonshot, and an earlier Claude. More than
600,000 credit card details stolen. Gambit Security puts the cost of the whole operation at about
$8,000 — roughly an expensive holiday. Criminals using AI isn't new; Gambit had already documented attackers using Codex to write scripts and prioritise vulnerabilities. What's new is that AI now scales the
entire enterprise, not just a task in it.
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OpenAI's maths model, and the cat out of the bag (
04:46) — on
28 August OpenAI began training an internal model specialised on mathematics. We covered the Navier-Stokes result. Now they've said it also solved another
100 long-standing open problems — and admitted the pace surprised them. You'd expect mathematicians to be delighted. Think about it from their side: a career can be one problem in one field, and a lab that didn't exist a few years ago is now serially cracking the entire elite's work.
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British Columbia sues OpenAI — and Altman personally (
09:44) — this one isn't fun. On
21 September the province filed over the mass shooting in
Tumbler Ridge in February. Eight people killed, most of them children, and the shooter died too. The claim: the shooter's ChatGPT account was flagged as far back as
June 2025, roughly eight months before the attack. OpenAI banned the account for disturbing conversations involving gun violence — and, according to the suit, their own safety team judged the threat credible enough to recommend contacting police. Nobody did.
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Full-stack AI, and why Alibaba is first (
13:53) — to assemble a full stack in Europe or the US you chain six or seven companies: NVIDIA for the chip, Azure for cloud, OpenAI or Anthropic for the model, Google for the agent SDK, Amazon if you want it hosted in Europe. At the Apsara conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba announced the
Zhenwu V900 — mass production planned within months, three times the performance of its predecessor. Qwen 4 is already training, with Qwen 4.5 and 5 behind it at
5 to 10 trillion parameters. One company. Chips, cloud, models, agents.
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What ties it together (
17:13) — AI is not software any more, and that changes who is accountable for what.
Stay curious. Stay human.
What is AI Neanderthal by Malcolm Werchota?
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Every weekday, Malcolm Werchota comes out of the cave and explains what actually happened in AI — in plain language, with the numbers checked and the hype taken out. Around ten stories a day: three explained slowly, the rest fast.
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