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Pichai opens Cloud Next 2026 with $240B backlog, 750M Gemini users, and a plan to turn Search into an agent manager

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Summary: Sundar Pichai opened Cloud Next 2026 with Google Cloud at $70 billion in annual revenue, 48% growth, a $240 billion backlog that doubled in a year, and $175-185 billion in planned capital expenditure. The Gemini app has 750 million monthly users, AI Overviews reach two billion, and the Gemini API processed 85 billion requests in January alone. Pichai framed the conference around Search evolving from a retrieval engine into an “agent manager” and announced the Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify, Target, and Walmart, while positioning Google’s full-stack integration from custom silicon to consumer distribution as the advantage competitors cannot replicate.

Sundar Pichai opened Google Cloud Next 2026 on Tuesday with a set of numbers that reframe the competitive dynamics of enterprise AI. Google Cloud is now generating more than $70 billion in annual revenue, growing at 48% year on year, with a backlog of $240 billion, up 55% and more than double the roughly $155 billion of a year ago. The number of billion-dollar deals Google Cloud signed in 2025 exceeded the combined total of the three previous years. Existing customers are outpacing their own commitments by 30%, spending faster than they contracted. Google has committed $175 billion to $185 billion in capital expenditure for 2026, nearly doubling the $91.4 billion it spent last year. Pichai described the moment as “a fundamental rewiring of technology and an accelerant of human ingenuity.” The money suggests he may not be exaggerating.

The keynote, titled “The Agentic Cloud,” was less a product launch than a thesis statement. Google is positioning itself not as a cloud provider that offers AI but as the operating system for what it calls the agentic enterprise: a model in which AI agents handle routine business operations autonomously, communicate with each other across platforms, and interact with the physical world through commerce, search, and real-time data. The pitch is that Google is the only company that controls every layer of that stack, from the custom silicon that runs inference, to the frontier models that power reasoning, to the cloud platform that hosts the agents, to the productivity suite and search engine through which three billion users interact with them.

The scale of the machine

The Gemini app has reached 750 million monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of 2025, up 100 million from the previous quarter. AI Overviews, Google’s AI-generated search summaries, reach two billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and drive 10% more search queries globally. AI Overviews now trigger on approximately 48% of all tracked queries, up from 31% in February 2025, a 58% increase in a year. The Gemini API processed 85 billion requests in January 2026, a 142% increase from 35 billion in March 2025. Eight million paid Gemini Enterprise seats are deployed across 2,800 companies. Thirteen million developers are building with Google’s generative models. Gemini 3 Pro has had, in Pichai’s words, “the fastest adoption of any model in our history.”

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These are not cloud metrics. They are platform metrics. Google is arguing that its advantage over AWS, Azure, OpenAI, and Anthropic lies not in any single product but in the fact that it reaches more users, processes more queries, and touches more surfaces than any competitor. Search alone handles more than a billion shopping interactions per day. Workspace has more than three billion users. Android runs on billions of devices. The thesis is that when AI agents become the primary interface for work and commerce, the company with the largest existing surface area wins, because the agents need somewhere to run, something to connect to, and someone to serve.

Search becomes the agent manager

Pichai’s most consequential framing may have come in a podcast appearance earlier this month: “A lot of what are just information-seeking queries will be agentic in Search. You’ll be completing tasks. You’ll have many threads running.” He described Search evolving from a retrieval engine into an “agent manager,” an orchestration layer that dispatches AI agents to complete tasks on a user’s behalf rather than returning a list of links.

The infrastructure for this is already being built. Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF in January, an open-source standard for agentic commerce co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart. More than 20 partners have endorsed it, including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s, Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, and Zalando. UCP is built on REST and JSON-RPC transports with the Agent2Agent protocol, Model Context Protocol, and a new Agent Payments Protocol built in. It lets AI agents treat any participating store as a programmable service, with the merchant remaining the merchant of record. Pichai, who described himself as “an indecisive shopper,” said he is “looking forward to the day when agents can help me get from discovery to purchase.”

The implications for the advertising industry are significant. If Search shifts from showing links that users click to dispatching agents that complete purchases, the entire cost-per-click model that funds Google’s advertising business, and by extension the businesses of every company that advertises on Google, changes. Retailers are already deploying AI-powered shopping through Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot. The question is whether agentic commerce cannibalises Google’s own advertising revenue or whether Google can capture a larger share of the transaction itself. UCP suggests Google is betting on the latter.

The full-stack argument

The competitive positioning at Cloud Next was unusually direct. Thomas Kurian said competitors are “handing you the pieces, not the platform,” leaving enterprise teams to integrate components themselves. The claim rests on Google’s vertical integration: Ironwood TPUs and the forthcoming eighth-generation split into Broadcom-designed training chips and MediaTek-designed inference chips provide the silicon. Gemini 3 Pro, 3 Flash, and 3.1 Pro provide the models. The Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, formerly Vertex AI, provides the developer tools and runtime. Workspace Studio provides the no-code agent builder. Search and Android provide the consumer distribution. No other company assembles all of these under one roof.

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The argument has a specific target: Microsoft Copilot, which despite being embedded in virtually every Fortune 500 company has struggled with adoption. Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users with Copilot access actually pay for it, and its accuracy net promoter score deteriorated to negative 24.1 by September 2025. Google’s eight million paid Gemini Enterprise seats in roughly four months represents a faster trajectory, though from a much smaller base. GitHub has frozen new Copilot sign-ups because agentic coding sessions consume more compute than users pay for, illustrating why owning the silicon layer, as Google does, is not just a technical advantage but an economic one.

The capital question

The $175 billion to $185 billion in planned capital expenditure is the number that makes the rest of the strategy credible or alarming, depending on how the next two years unfold. Roughly 60% goes to servers and 40% to data centres and networking equipment. Combined with Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, total big tech AI infrastructure spending is approaching $700 billion this year, a figure large enough to reshape energy markets and strain power grids. Pichai acknowledged on the fourth-quarter earnings call that the “top question is definitely around compute capacity and all the constraints, be it power, land, supply chain,” and expects Google to remain supply-constrained through 2026.

The backlog provides the justification. At $240 billion, it represents more than three years of current revenue contracted but not yet delivered. Thirteen product lines each generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The ServiceNow deal alone was worth $1.2 billion over five years. If the demand is real, and the backlog suggests it is, then the capital expenditure is not a gamble but an obligation: the cost of building the infrastructure to fulfil commitments already made.

Google Cloud holds roughly 11% of the cloud infrastructure market, behind AWS at 31% and Azure at 25%. The gap has narrowed: Google grew at 48% in the fourth quarter of 2025, the fastest of the three, and achieved sustained profitability for the first time. But the gap remains. What Pichai presented at Cloud Next is not a plan to close that gap through incremental cloud sales. It is a plan to redefine what the cloud is, from a place where companies store data and run workloads to a platform where AI agents perform work, make decisions, complete purchases, and coordinate with each other across organisational boundaries. If that transition happens, the company that built the agents, the models, the chips, the protocols, and the distribution channels stands to capture a share of the value that the current market share numbers do not reflect. That is the bet. Cloud Next 2026 is the moment Google made it explicit.

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How Roku’s 55″ Select Series Smart TV Delivers Everyday Wins That Keep You Coming Back

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55" Roku Select Smart Series Smart TV
Roku Select Smart TV screen sizes range from 43 to 85 inches, which is large enough to fit almost any living room or apartment without requiring a compromise. When it’s on sale, like today, you can get the 55-inch model for roughly $250 (was $350), and it arrives ready to use without the need to plug in any additional devices. Everything is plugged in and set up right out of the box using the familiar Roku system, which quickly launches the apps and remains out of the way.



The picture on the 4K panel is stunning, especially when HDR10 is enabled for movies and shows. The Roku Smart Picture setting does its job by adjusting the image on the fly to provide the most natural look for your environment. With a 60-hertz refresh rate and a game mode that reduces lag for console gaming, as well as no blur on sports or action scenes, this TV has a lot going for it. However, while it can handle casual daytime viewing just fine, direct sunlight does wash out the picture slightly.

Using the remote feels silky smooth from the first press, as you can drag and arrange the apps on the home screen to keep your favorites front and center. Voice search is also very effective; you may quickly find the station or show you’re looking for. There are also shortcuts on the remote that take you directly to Netflix or live news with a single click. Even if you misplace the remote, the built-in finder will alert you to its location like an AirTag.

55" Roku Select Smart Series Smart TV
The calibrated speakers and Dolby Audio processing ensure that dialogue-heavy shows and movies sound crystal clear. Volume reaches acceptable levels for normal rooms without being distorted. If you want to listen secretly while the rest of the household goes about its business, simply put on your Bluetooth headphones. For larger rooms or if you simply want a little extra oomph, there is an HDMI port that allows you to connect a soundbar in under two seconds.

55" Roku Select Smart Series Smart TV
Setting up the TV takes only a few minutes, as it scans for Wi-Fi, downloads the most recent software, and only asks for accounts when necessary. Apple AirPlay makes it simple to share photographs or movies from your phone, and you can even use voice commands with Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to change the channel or turn up the volume. You get over 500 free live channels that provide live news, sports highlights, and the occasional movie, all without having to pay for a subscription, and the TV will even auto-update with new apps and features over time.

55" Roku Select Smart Series Smart TV
The connections include three HDMI inputs for all your consoles and other devices, an Ethernet port for connected connectivity, and a USB slot for loading media on the move. The frameless design is very sleek and lays flat against the wall or on a stand, as it is one of those things that attracts your attention to the image rather than the edges. At only a few pounds, you can mount the TV on your own.

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Microsoft issues emergency update for macOS and Linux ASP.NET threat

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Microsoft released an emergency patch for its ASP.NET Core to fix a high-severity vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on devices that use the Web development framework to run Linux or macOS apps.

The software maker said Tuesday evening that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372, affects versions 10.0.0 through 10.0.6 of the Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection NuGet, a package that’s part of the framework. The critical flaw stems from a faulty verification of cryptographic signatures. It can be exploited to allow unauthenticated attackers to forge authentication payloads during the HMAC validation process, which is used to verify the integrity and authenticity of data exchanged between a client and a server.

Beware: Forged credentials survive patching

During the time users ran a vulnerable version of the package, they were left open to an attack that would allow unauthenticated people to gain sensitive SYSTEM privileges that would allow full compromise of the underlying machine. Even after the vulnerability is patched, devices may still be compromised if authentication credentials created by a threat actor aren’t purged.

“If an attacker used forged payloads to authenticate as a privileged user during the vulnerable window, they may have induced the application to issue legitimately-signed tokens (session refresh, API key, password reset link, etc.) to themselves,” Microsoft said. “Those tokens remain valid after upgrading to 10.0.7 unless the DataProtection key ring is rotated.”

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Microsoft describes ASP.NET Core as a “high-performance” web development framework for writing .Net apps that run on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Docker. The open-source package is “designed to allow runtime components, APIs, compilers, and languages [to] evolve quickly, while still providing a stable and supported platform to keep apps running.”

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This smart pillow ensures you never sleep through an emergency alarm, or even a phone call

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Sleeping through a phone call is annoying. Sleeping through a fire alarm is a whole different level of bad. So this new smart pillow idea feels a lot more useful than gimmicky. Researchers at Nottingham Trent University have developed a smart pillow sleeve designed to help deaf users wake up to important nighttime alerts.

Unlike a typical smart pillow, the team developed a smart sleeve that is designed to fit over a standard pillow. It slips inside a normal pillowcase, and vibrates when connected alarms or calls come through.

What problem does it solve?

The project came out of feedback from members of the Deaf community, who told the researchers that existing under-pillow alert devices are often too bulky and uncomfortable to sleep on. In response, the team built a much thinner electronic textile sleeve with four tiny haptic actuators embedded into a yarn-like structure.

Each actuator measures just 3.4mm by 12.7mm, and the electronics are small enough that users are not supposed to feel them while seeping. So the safety product is both handy and comfortable to use.

How it can even save lives

The sleeve connects to a smartphone through a microcontroller, and that setup can then link wirelessly to household alarms. When something goes off, the pillow vibrates intensely enough to wake the user, with distinct patterns used to signal different kinds of alerts. This means a user with a hearing impairment can be alerted of a fire alarm, a burglar alarm, or even an incoming phone call.

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This extra layer basically makes the feature thoughtful. The goal here is to wake up someone and also give them enough information to know why they are being woken up in the first place.

The researchers say the yarn used in the sleeve has already passed durability testing, including multiple washing cycles, which suggests they are treating this as a real product concept rather than a lab-only demo. The work was presented at the ACM CHI conference in Barcelona, and the team is now looking for an industrial partner to help bring it to market. Tech Xplore also quotes supervisor Theo Hughes-Riley calling it a significant step toward more inclusive emergency alert systems for deaf and deaf-blind individuals.

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Android finally gets a fitting answer to the iPad mini, and it looks stunning

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Apple has owned the compact premium tablet segment for years, but there’s a new contender in the market that runs on Android and takes on the iPad mini for everything it stands for. 

Unveiled alongside the Find X9 Ultra, the Oppo Pad Mini comes with an 8.8-inch 2.5K OLED panel (2520 x 1680 pixels) in a 3:2 aspect ratio. This is the same, near-square aspect ratio that makes the iPad mini ideal for reading, note-taking, consuming content, and other productive workflows.  

What makes the Oppo Pad Mini worth comparing to the iPad mini?

The tablet’s bezels are remarkably thin at 2.99 mm, and the screen can achieve up to 1,600 nits of peak brightness with a variable refresh rate between 60 and 144 Hz. There’s an optional matte version of the tablet that mimics a paper-like surface, something that the iPad mini doesn’t offer.

Where Apple puts an A17 Pro inside its mini, the Oppo Pad Mini comes with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 (3nm) chipset paired with up to 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.1 storage, which, in my opinion, is a capable combination. 

For those wondering, the Snapdragon chip provides better multi-core performance, but its single-core performance matches that of the A17 Pro. In addition, the type of memory and storage should make the Oppo tablet feel more responsive and snappy. 

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How does it hold up in terms of portability and battery?

At just 5.39mm thick and weighing 279 grams, the Oppo Pad Mini is designed for portability, to the extent that it can fit in relatively larger pockets and small bags. The iPad mini, by comparison, weighs 293 grams and measures 6.3mm. 

The 8,000 mAh battery supports 67W wired charging (full charge in around an hour), something that the iPad mini lacks. Pricing starts at CNY 3,199, which is around $470 for the baseline variant with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, rising to around $590 for the variant with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. 

While the sales for the iPad mini alternative commence on April 24, 2026, it won’t be available in the United States, at least for now. To me, Oppo’s entry into the premium small-screen tablet segment signals that Android OEMs are taking the category seriously. 

For now, the Oppo Pad Mini isn’t a direct competitor to the iPad mini, primarily because it isn’t available in the United States. However, if and when the product arrives in the region, it could easily take up a good chunk of iPad mini’s sales, providing Android users with a top-notch experience in a smaller form factor without paying a hefty price.

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Notification bug that let FBI access messages patched with iOS 26.4.2

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People being investigated by the FBI deleted Signal, but some messages were still retrievable from the iPhone’s notification database. The latest iOS update patches this vulnerability.

Close-up of an iPhone lock screen showing a locked padlock and large Face ID smiley icon on a dark display, against a purple gradient background.
iPhones may be secure, but they aren’t invulnerable to bugs

Users should reasonably expect that deleting an app from their iPhone will remove all associated data. However, a recent case involving the FBI showed that some notification data was being retained by mistake.
The iOS 26.4.2, iPadOS 26.4.2, iOS 18.7.8, and iPadOS 18.7.8 updates released on Wednesday address the notification database issue directly. The notes simply say that “a logging issue was addressed with improved data redaction.”
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Tesla Plaid Owner Learns The Hard Way It Can’t Keep Up With A Corvette

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Car enthusiasts love comparing vehicle performance, especially when you can see it play out on a drag strip. A YouTube video recently went viral of a very unlikely matchup: a Tesla Model S Plaid versus a Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X. In the video shared by DragTimes, the ZR1X took on three Model S Plaids in the quarter mile at the TX2K event at Texas Motorplex in Ennis, Texas. 

The first Tesla Model S Plaid driver wasn’t sure if he’d beat the ZR1X, but he felt it would be really close. However, it was clear from the launch that it wasn’t close at all — the ZR1X left the Plaid far behind. The ZR1X was able to get up to 60 miles per hour in 1.95 seconds, beating the Plaid’s 2.26 seconds. The ZR1X finished the quarter mile in 8.92 seconds, hitting nearly 154 miles per hour. The Plaid finished in 9.65 seconds, with a top speed of 140 mph. It was a similar story with the other two Plaids. 

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Why is the Corvette ZR1X better than the Model S Plaid on the drag strip?



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The Corvette ZR1X and the Model S Plaid that raced that day were both stock with all-season tires, meaning the quarter mile race was a true indicator of the vehicles’ performance without enhancements. To be fair to the Model S Plaid, it beat the Corvette ZR1 in a previous video due to its incredible speed, which is why Brooks Weisblat took out the ZR1X, which pairs the twin-turbo 5.5L LT7 V8 engine with a front-axle electric motor for 1,250 horsepower. That’s more than the Plaid’s tri-motor setup, which produces 1,020 hp. The Plaid is also 4,802 pounds (about 1,000 more than the ZR1X).

With more horsepower and a lighter weight, it’s no surprise that the ZR1X had a faster launch. The Plaid still impressed since it had 70,000 miles on it and 85% battery. EVs slightly slow down over time. 

The Tesla Model S Plaid has a top speed of 163 mph without the added $20,000 Track Package while the ZR1X can reach 225 mph. With the ZR1X already ahead, it’s no surprise that it was able to remain far ahead of the Plaid as they raced down the track. While the Plaid is so fast that it was previously banned from NHRA races, the Plaid was no match for what Corvette considers a track-focused “hypercar.” 

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Anthropic’s Mythos Model Is Being Accessed by Unauthorized Users

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Bloomberg reports that a small group of unauthorized users gained access to Anthropic’s restricted Mythos model through a mix of contractor-linked access and online sleuthing. Anthropic says it is investigating and has no evidence the access extended beyond a third-party vendor environment or affected its own systems. From the report: The users relied on a mix of tactics to get into Mythos. These included using access the person had as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic and trying commonly used internet sleuthing tools often employed by cybersecurity researchers, the person said. The users are part of a private Discord channel that focuses on hunting for information about unreleased models, including by using bots to scour for details that Anthropic and others have posted on unsecured websites such as GitHub. […] To access Mythos, the group of users made an educated guess about the model’s online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models, the person said, adding that such details were revealed in a recent data breach from Mercor, an AI training startup that works with a number of top developers.

Crucially, the person also has permission to access Anthropic models and software related to evaluating the technology for the startup. They gained this access from a company for which they have performed contract work evaluating Anthropic’s AI models. Bloomberg is not naming the company for security reasons. The group is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them, the person said. The group has not run cybersecurity-related prompts on the Mythos model, the person said, preferring instead to try tasks like building simple websites in an attempt to avoid detection by Anthropic. The person said the group also has access to a slew of other unreleased Anthropic AI models.

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Intel’s upcoming gaming CPU specs have leaked

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Pointing squarely at AMD’s Ryzen range, Intel’s next-generation desktop CPU lineup has leaked, with the Nova Lake-S architecture set to arrive with up to 288MB of L3 cache across a range expected to carry the Core Ultra 400 branding.

That cache figure dwarfs the 36MB found in Intel’s current flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, and comfortably exceeds the 96MB and 192MB L3 totals found in AMD’s Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D, respectively.

The leak originates from X user Jaykihn, an established source of CPU specification information, who confirmed that the flagship Nova Lake-S chip will carry 16 P-Cores, 32 E-Cores, and four LPE-Cores alongside the 288MB L3 cache figure, with LPE-Cores representing a new low-power efficiency core tier introduced specifically with this architecture.

That core configuration marks a substantial step up from the Core Ultra 9 285K’s eight P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, with the addition of LPE-Cores extending the architectural complexity beyond what Intel’s current Arrow Lake desktop lineup offers at any price point.

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Cache capacity matters in gaming because processors can access it far faster than system RAM, reducing latency during gameplay in scenarios where data retrieval speed determines frame time consistency, which explains why AMD’s X3D chips have maintained a performance lead in gaming workloads despite competitive core counts from Intel.

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Two unnamed chips sitting above the Core Ultra 9 designation in the leaked table carry 52 and 44 total cores respectively, suggesting Intel plans a tiered flagship structure that extends beyond its current naming scheme for the Nova Lake-S generation.

Intel has not confirmed any specifications for the Nova Lake-S lineup, though Computex in early June represents a credible window for an official announcement, with AMD also expected to reveal details of its next-generation Zen 6 architecture at the same event.

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Mozilla fixes 271 Firefox vulnerabilities found by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos in a single evaluation pass

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Summary: Mozilla released Firefox 150 with fixes for 271 security vulnerabilities identified by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased frontier AI model distributed under the restricted Project Glasswing programme. The collaboration began with Claude Opus 4.6 finding 22 bugs in Firefox 148 earlier this year; Mythos produced more than twelve times as many. Firefox CTO Bobby Holley said the defects are “finite” and that defenders can “finally find them all,” while the UK AI Security Institute confirmed Mythos can also execute autonomous multi-stage network attacks, making the dual-use tension the central policy question.

Mozilla released Firefox 150 on Monday with fixes for 271 security vulnerabilities identified by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased frontier AI model restricted to a handful of organisations under Project Glasswing. The number is striking not because the bugs were exotic but because they were not. “We haven’t seen any bugs that couldn’t have been found by an elite human researcher,” Mozilla said in a blog post titled “The zero-days are numbered.” The point is that no human team could have found 271 of them this fast.

The collaboration between Mozilla and Anthropic began earlier this year with a more modest effort. Starting in February, Firefox’s security team used Claude Opus 4.6 to scan nearly 6,000 C++ files across the browser’s codebase. That pass produced 112 unique reports, of which 22 were confirmed as security-sensitive bugs and shipped as fixes in Firefox 148. Fourteen were classified as high severity, representing almost a fifth of all high-severity Firefox vulnerabilities remediated in 2025. The Mythos evaluation, which followed as part of the continued partnership, produced more than twelve times as many confirmed vulnerabilities. Bobby Holley, Firefox’s chief technology officer, described the experience as giving the team “vertigo.”

What Mythos is, and who gets to use it

Claude Mythos Preview is the model at the centre of Anthropic’s restricted Mythos model programme, Project Glasswing, announced on 7 April. It is a general-purpose frontier model, not a security-specific tool, but its coding capabilities have crossed a threshold that Anthropic considers significant enough to warrant controlled distribution. The UK’s AI Security Institute evaluated the model and found it capable of executing multi-stage network attacks autonomously, completing a 32-step corporate network attack simulation called “The Last Ones” in three out of ten attempts. It can chain multiple small vulnerabilities into a single devastating attack, reconstruct source code from deployed software to find exploitable weaknesses, and build custom tools for lateral movement and data extraction once inside a network.

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Access is restricted to 12 named launch partners, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks, with roughly 40 additional organisations granted access for defensive security work. Anthropic committed up to $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organisations, including $2.5 million to Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF through the Linux Foundation and $1.5 million to the Apache Software Foundation. The model is available to Glasswing participants at $25 per million input tokens and $125 per million output tokens through the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry.

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The restricted rollout has already been tested. On the same day Anthropic announced Glasswing, a group of unauthorised users gained access to Mythos Preview by guessing the model’s URL through a third-party vendor environment, an incident Anthropic said it is investigating.

The defender’s argument

Holley framed the 271 vulnerabilities not as an indictment of Firefox’s code quality but as evidence that the security landscape is shifting in favour of defenders for the first time. “A gap between machine-discoverable and human-discoverable bugs favors the attacker, who can concentrate many months of costly human effort to find a single bug,” he wrote. “Closing this gap erodes the attacker’s long-term advantage by making all discoveries cheap.”

The logic is straightforward. A zero-day vulnerability is valuable to an attacker precisely because it is unknown. If a defender can find and patch the same bug before an attacker discovers it, the bug has no offensive value. The cost asymmetry has historically favoured attackers: a browser like Firefox has millions of lines of code, and a single undiscovered flaw in any of them is enough for exploitation. An elite human security researcher might spend weeks or months finding one such flaw. A model like Mythos can scan the entire codebase in a fraction of that time. Mozilla’s thesis is that this changes the economics permanently. “Software like Firefox is designed in a modular way for humans to be able to reason about its correctness,” the blog post stated. “It is complex, but not arbitrarily complex. The defects are finite, and we are entering a world where we can finally find them all.”

The claim is bold and deliberately so. Mozilla is arguing that the age of zero-day vulnerabilities in well-structured software has an expiration date, not because attackers will stop looking, but because defenders will get there first.

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The numbers in context

The 271 figure requires some unpacking. Mozilla’s official security advisory for Firefox 150, MFSA 2026-30, lists 41 CVE entries, three of which are standard memory-safety roll-ups that aggregate multiple individual bugs under a single identifier. The 271 number represents the total count of discrete code defects identified by Mythos during its evaluation, many of which were grouped into those CVE bundles. The distinction matters because the headline number and the formal advisory number measure different things: one measures what the AI found, the other measures how much AI-generated code actually ships through the industry’s standard vulnerability disclosure process.

The most dangerous flaws include use-after-free vulnerabilities in the DOM and WebRTC components, the kinds of memory safety bugs that have been the bread and butter of browser exploitation for two decades. These are not novel attack surfaces. They are the same categories of bugs that Google’s Project Zero has been finding across browsers since 2014. Google’s own AI vulnerability research programme, Big Sleep, a collaboration between Project Zero and DeepMind, found a zero-day in SQLite in October 2024 and has since expanded to discover multiple flaws in widely used software. The difference with Mozilla’s effort is scale: 271 bugs in a single evaluation pass, patched before release, across a codebase that has accumulated technical debt over more than two decades.

The dual-use problem

The UK AI Security Institute’s evaluation of Mythos Preview confirmed what the Mozilla results imply from the other direction: the same capabilities that make the model effective at finding vulnerabilities make it effective at exploiting them. The model became the first AI to complete “The Last Ones,” a benchmark designed to simulate a full corporate network compromise. It succeeded in three out of ten attempts, averaging 22 of 32 steps across all runs. Independent testing confirmed that Mythos cannot reliably execute autonomous attacks against organisations with well-hardened defences, but the trajectory is clear. Each generation of frontier model has performed better on offensive security benchmarks than the last.

This is the tension that Project Glasswing is designed to manage. By restricting Mythos to vetted organisations with defensive mandates, Anthropic is attempting to give defenders a structural head start, a window in which the good actors can scan and patch before the capabilities proliferate. The strategy depends on the restriction holding. The vendor breach on launch day suggests that containment is harder than access control. Anthropic has also identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and every major web browser using Mythos, findings it is disclosing to the affected vendors through Glasswing.

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Anthropic’s expanding enterprise footprint, from legal contract review in Microsoft Word to cybersecurity through Glasswing, reflects a company that is monetising Claude across every professional vertical where accuracy matters. The Mozilla partnership is the most dramatic demonstration yet, not because the model did something no human could do, but because it did what only a handful of humans can do, and did it 271 times in a single pass.

Holley’s conclusion captures both the promise and the vertigo: “Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.” Whether that future arrives depends on whether the models that find the bugs remain in the hands of the people who fix them, or whether the capabilities leak faster than the patches ship. For now, Firefox 150 has 271 fewer ways to be broken. That is not a small thing. The question is how long that advantage lasts when the tool that found them is commanding extraordinary valuations precisely because of what it can do.

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The 'Missing-Scientist' Story Is Unbelievably Dumb

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Longtime Slashdot reader mmarlett writes: The Atlantic has a long article on the story of missing scientists recently featured here on Slashdot. In short, it is an incoherent conspiracy theory that spreads wide and far, not paying any attention to boundaries of time, space, or area of expertise. “Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media,” writes the Atlantic’s Daniel Engber. “To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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