AI safety

AIThreatBook says it has acquired CyberStrikeAI, an open-source AI pentesting agent. It says the tool will stay open source with added guardrails, while new capability enhancements go into its commercial edition. The post also says an earlier threat intelligence report wrongly linked the developer, a security engineer at Alipay, to national agencies.

AISafeWorld emerged from stealth this week with $12.2 million in seed funding to offer simulation software for testing AI-powered robots. Its platform runs robots through thousands of variations of rare or dangerous scenarios with reactive human motion, and teams can rerun tests with each software update. The company says it has about half a dozen customers, mostly publicly traded companies, in industrial, manufacturing, logistics, construction and some home use cases.

AIArena announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, alongside a new Alignment Index that measures whether AI agents behave safely, truthfully, and within the bounds of user requests. The company has surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue, facilitated 350 million sessions and 62 million votes, and led by Felicis and PXD from the seed and Series A stages. Arena positions the index as a way to assess trustworthiness as AI systems increasingly take real actions.

AIGoogle says Gemini 4 Argon is rolling out at $2/$10 per million tokens, though the author has not yet been able to access the model to test it. OpenAI pulled GPT-6.1 Astra over alignment failures and released GPT-6.1 Sol, which it prices at the same $2/$10 and says shows substantial alignment improvements over GPT-6 Sol. The post also covers Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus, which reportedly lists roughly $518 billion in compute commitments, and a court ruling upholding the Department of War's supply chain risk designation of Anthropic.

AIAnthropic is partnering with Accenture on independent evaluation of frontier AI, part of its recent commitment to embed evaluators at the company. Both companies expect to invest at least $1 billion in this capacity over the next five years.

AIAnthropic is partnering with Accenture, through its specialist AI business Faculty, on independent evaluation of frontier models, including red-teaming, alignment assessments, and safeguard testing. Anthropic and Accenture each expect to invest at least $1 billion in this capacity over five years. The source says embedded evaluators would have employee-comparable access, but standards for access and reporting, and a settled funding system, do not yet exist.

Why it matters: The source ties a new evaluation arrangement to an unresolved question of who funds and sets standards for independent AI evaluators, which is useful context for governance debates.

AICorma is training a foundation model for defensive cybersecurity agents, trained with large-scale reinforcement learning on simulated enterprise networks. In red/blue team tests, a defender failed to find a planted backdoor 78% of the time, even when it was an identical copy of the model that planted it. Corma says its agentic Security Workforce is deployed at Fortune 500 companies and large enterprises, and that the firm's seed round is led by Sequoia Capital.

AIJensen Huang says defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem combining the best open and closed models, citing how an open-weight frontier model helped contain the Hugging Face intrusion when closed AI blocked essential forensics. Nvidia has created the Open Secure AI Alliance to develop new techniques and tools for safeguarding software and agents by sharing models, tooling, and research in the open.

AIOpenAI announced applications for its Safety Fellowship, a pilot program supporting external researchers, engineers, and practitioners in safety and alignment research on advanced AI systems. The program runs from September 14, 2026 through February 5, 2027, with a monthly stipend, compute support, API credits, and mentorship, and fellows are expected to produce a substantial output such as a paper, benchmark, or dataset. Applications close May 3, and successful applicants will be notified by July 25.