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Experts adopt AI agent's random opinions and think they're their own, Anthropic study finds

The Decoder reports on a study by Anthropic in which 50 experts were given an AI agent whose preferences were set randomly by coin toss. The experts followed the agent's opinions up to 86% of the time on judgment calls, and most believed the conclusions were their own.

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Open-weight model GLM 5.3 built full Firefox exploit chains with zero human input in under 48 hours

Researchers at Epoch AI report that the open-weight Chinese model GLM 5.3 autonomously built full Firefox exploit chains with no human input, exploiting the 'patch gap' between when security fixes appear in code and when they reach users. The model identified disguised security fixes, chained vulnerabilities with a previously unpublished flaw to bypass browser sandbox protections, and could read local files when a user visited a webpage. Attacks cost about $1,000 in API fees per Firefox version across six versions released Sept 17–Oct 26, taking 12 hours for the fastest and up to 48 hours. No API providers tested triggered safety guardrails. Mozilla patched the flaw in Firefox 159.0 (Oct 27). The same setup spent roughly $100,000 on Google Chrome without producing an equivalent exploit. Researchers warn the patch-gap risk spans the software industry and note untested benchmark data suggesting Kimi K3.1 Pro could outperform GLM 5.3 on offensive cyber tasks.

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OpenAI doubles usage limits on Pro plans as competition with Anthropic heats up

OpenAI is doubling usage limits across its paid plans, raising the Pro quota from 100 to 500. A planned cut to the Pro 200 quota was reversed after user pushback. More efficient models, described as Terra and Sol, are expected to push usable capacity even higher. The move comes just ahead of Anthropic's IPO, as both companies compete for B2B dominance in AI.

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Paris-based Mistral releases "Le Chonk," a strong coding model that still trails China overall

Mistral has released the weights for Mistral Large 4, nicknamed "Le Chonk," a model of about one trillion parameters (52 billion active) trained entirely in Europe and distributed under a modified MIT license that allows running it on own hardware. Independent testing by Artificial Analysis rates it 26 points on its Intelligence Index, behind open Chinese models such as DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3 (32 points) and far behind the leading systems from Anthropic and Google. Mistral says it leads open models on coding, and independent benchmarks show it is fast (161 tokens per second) and cheap, but it trails Claude Opus 5.5 on coding indexes and ranks third among open models on cyber defense. Mistral cut the API price from $1.36/$4.18 to $0.70/$2.10 per million input/output tokens, and the model is available on Microsoft Foundry.

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OpenAI's Astra becomes the main target for Chinese AI labs after Anthropic tightens its defenses

According to The Information, Chinese AI labs are now mainly tapping OpenAI's most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, instead of Anthropic's Claude, to distill outputs for training their latest models. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI reportedly leaned heavily on Astra, including for Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017. This kind of distillation requires the models to reveal their hidden reasoning steps, which OpenAI and Anthropic both ban. Claude used to be the go-to target, but Anthropic has tightened its defenses, saying its new methods cut the amount of data attackers can pull by 90 to 99 percent. In late September, OpenAI reported a coordinated distillation campaign it says involved people linked to Moonshot. Moonshot declined to comment and DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment.