The Department of Homeland Security has ordered civilian federal agencies to pull products from Chinese AI developer DeepSeek out of their systems and stop buying them, CyberScoop reported. The exclusion also reaches DeepSeek affiliates and third-party products built on the company's technology, according to SiliconANGLE. DHS invoked the 2018 Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act after a review by the Federal Acquisition Security Council, an interagency panel on risky technology vendors. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin signed the exclusion letter June 26, months before the order was posted to the Federal Register this week. Mullin wrote that DeepSeek data reaching China "could produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government programs." Agencies wanting an exception must apply 60 days ahead and show a mission critical or national security need.
Read at CyberScoop ↗ · Read at SiliconANGLE ↗
A federal judge in San Francisco turned down former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan's bid for release to home confinement, The Associated Press reported. Alfozan is charged with planting a recording device in an OpenAI conference room. In a Sunday filing, prosecutors said a Saudi military official booked and paid for the one-way flight his wife and son took out of the U.S. the day after his arrest. Saudi officials also offered to cover his bail, the New York Times reported. Judge Alex Tse likened that offer to a "blank check," per Wired. Prosecutors said Alfozan had "considerable support from a foreign government." They said he was in frequent contact with a Saudi royal who repeatedly tried to recruit him to an AI venture in the kingdom.
Read at AP ↗ · Read at The New York Times ↗ · Read at The Washington Post ↗ · Read at Wired ↗
The State Department sanctioned MiraclePlus, a Chinese venture firm founded by former Microsoft executive Lu Qi, and three affiliates for giving seed money to Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, per Bloomberg. Zhisuan, which builds software to help train AI models, was also sanctioned. Its founder, former Google engineer Ding Linwei, was convicted in January on seven counts of trade secret theft. The five entities were designated under the Protecting American Intellectual Property Act, the South China Morning Post reported. The measures could include freezing their U.S. assets and restricting their banking, The Edge Malaysia reported. According to the State Department, Ding applied to MiraclePlus' incubator by promoting his knowledge of Google's technology. MiraclePlus grew out of Y Combinator's abandoned China program and has backed SiliconFlow, a platform that runs AI models for developers, and robot maker AgiBot.
Read at Bloomberg ↗ · Read at The Edge Malaysia ↗ · Read at South China Morning Post ↗
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on the Federal Communications Commission to deny a petition from the conservative group Club for Growth to ease limits on AI generated political robocalls before the midterms, The Hill and Al Jazeera reported. "Under this change, campaigns could use their opponents' voice to send out a message that is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, a blatant lie," Schumer said. FCC rules bar such calls to cellphones without prior consent. The petition's public comment period, which opened Sept. 4, ended Monday, per Al Jazeera. Club for Growth President David McIntosh has said political speech should be treated like wireless calls about package deliveries and doctor's appointments. Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez also opposes the petition. An FCC spokesperson said the agency has no plans to move to an order on it.
Read at The Hill ↗ · Read at Al Jazeera ↗
A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using AI agents that operated largely on their own, AI security firm Norforge found, per The Verge. Victims included John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, with targets in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan, Reuters reported. The attacks ran on Cairn, an open-source platform where users set a starting point and a goal and the agents log their progress toward it. The attacker set out favored break-in methods in fewer than 100 Chinese characters. Successful breaches took about 23 hours. Norforge found more than 20 exposed Cairn instances it considers likely malicious. John Deere said it saw no sign that sensitive information was accessed, and Cummins is investigating a possible attack on a website run by one of its vendors.
Read at The Verge ↗ · Read at Reuters ↗