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Musk dismisses report of Tesla China separation o EV giant’s factory in

the target it reached was real. This behaviour has made Anthropic cautiously optimistic about its progress to make AI behave appropriately, “but we would need to perform more testing to be confident in this conclusion,“ it said. Anthropic said it suspended all cyber evaluations on July 23. It notified the affected organisations on July 27, two of which were unaware of the activity before being contacted. Anthropic said it continues to reach out to the third company. One of its third-party evaluation partners, a cybersecurity lab called Irregular, told Reuters that it has an ongoing investigation into the incidents. Anthropic said the incidents underscore a need for stronger controls in both internal and third-party testing environments as AI models become increasingly capable of carrying out real-world cyber activities. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, which operates a competing AI lab, responded to the news on X by saying “this will happen frequently as AI becomes smarter and more agentic,“ referring to computer programs or “agents” that act with limited human intervention. Rare Tokyo-Seoul joint intervention shakes up yen, won SINGAPORE: Japan and South Korea have stepped in to buy their currencies, possibly with involvement from the US, in a rare coordinated intervention, sources and analysts said. The intervention gave the yen its biggest boost in almost two years and, if the past is any guide, any joint effort with the US may prove strong enough to turn around the battered currency. Japan conducted yen-buying, dollar-selling intervention in New York hours on Thursday, a market source told Reuters. A separate source said that South Korea’s foreign exchange authorities were selling dollars alongside Japan. The Nikkei newspaper reported earlier yesterday that US authorities conducted rate checks during the session, raising the possibility that the US was part of the operation. Such checks involve the monetary authority asking banks at what rate they would sell a currency, often a precursor to intervention. Reuters could not confirm if the US authorities made rate checks. The New York Federal Reserve, which in January conducted similar checks, declined to comment. “We are receiving support from the US that goes beyond psychological support, and I’m constantly in contact with relevant authorities,“ Japan’s top currency diplomat Atsushi Mimura said when asked about the possibility of coordinated intervention with the US. The intervention lifted the yen late on Thursday away from the 40-year lows it has been hovering around this week although the currency handed some of that back yesterday as the Bank of Japan (BOJ) held interest rates steady as expected. The move in the yen overnight came around the same time as the Korean won firmed 2% to its highest in nine months. “The interests of each country aligned. For Korea-Japan cooperation, the won and the yen are so tightly coupled that a joint intervention could double the impact,“ said Lee Min-hyuk, an analyst at KB Kookmin Bank. “From the US perspective, Korea and Japan need to invest in America. Since the exchange rate has been exceptionally high recently, the US likely wanted our exchange rate to come down as well.” Japan has intervened in currency markets in coordination with the US or other G7 partners five times since 1985, and eight times on its own, according to an analysis by currency strategist and trader Brent Donnelly at Spectra Markets. Most of the joint interventions coincided with a turn in the direction of the dollar/yen pair, his analysis shows.

MEXICO CITY: Elon Musk dismissed as “fake news” a report that executives at his electric vehicle company Tesla have been told to prepare for a separation of its China business ahead of a potential merger with his space exploration firm SpaceX. Tesla advisers have discussed possible options for a separation, including a spinoff, sale or closure, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, adding that it was unclear how quickly Tesla could move on the China business and that the plans could change. “This has never even come up in a discussion ever,” Musk, the world’s richest person, said on his X social media account in response to the report. “Absurdly fake news”. A merger between Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX would raise geopolitical and regulatory hurdles, particularly in China, because SpaceX is a major US defence contractor involved in national security and satellite programmes, while Tesla operates wholly owned manufacturing facilities in China. Tesla and SpaceX could not be immediately reached for comment outside regular business hours. Investors and analysts have long speculated about the possibility of combining Musk’s EV and space firms, with the discussion intensifying during SpaceX’s record US$75 billion (RM306 billion) initial public offering process. Musk had in recent years instructed Tesla executives to organise the company with a “laser” between its US and China businesses, aiming to ensure that in the event of geopolitical strife between the two countries, at least the US half of Tesla would survive, the Journal said, citing sources. Unlike many foreign automakers, Tesla’s Chinese vehicle business is not structured as a joint venture with a local partner. Tesla’s Gigafactory Shanghai remains its largest and Shanghai remains its most productive plant globally

Tesla’s Shanghai factory serves as a key export hub for Europe, Canada and the Asia-Pacific. – AFPPIX

to handle exports from the Shanghai plant. Tesla could create separate office systems and bar China-based employees’ direct access to other company units, it added. SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell has also acknowledged potential benefits, telling CNBC in June that folding the companies together “might make Elon’s life a little easier” by streamlining management across his businesses. Through its China entity, Tesla achieved the lowest costs to manufacture its Model 3 and Model Y with the help of more than 400 domestic suppliers, a Tesla China executive has previously said, adding that more than 60 of them also supply Tesla globally. Deliveries of China-made Model 3 and Model Y vehicles rose 24.4% year-over-year in June, while second-quarter sales and exports from the Shanghai factory increased 32.8%. Tesla has said it sources locally more than 95% of the components in the China-made Model 3 and the refreshed version of the Model Y. – Reuters They’re going to be better at lying,“ he said. Anthropic said the incidents — which it labelled an “operational failure” — involved three separate models: Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model. The earliest cases date back to April and occurred in evaluation environments that intentionally lacked safeguards so Anthropic could assess what its AI was capable of. Its models were tasked with so-called “capture-the-flag” challenges, fictional scenarios in which they had to find hidden information in simulated networks. In one incident, Claude Opus 4.7 was given a fictional target company, which turned out to share the name of a business in the real world. The AI model then found and exploited bugs that let it access credentials and a database of that business. Opus 4.7 rationalized that what seemed to pertain to the real world must have been part of the simulation Anthropic had set up, the AI startup said. A separate incident involved Anthropic’s newer, not-public test model, which independently halted its attack after realizing

most productive plant globally, serving as its key export hub for Europe, Canada and the Asia-Pacific region. The facility historically accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries, with an annual production capacity of more than 950,000 vehicles. Last month, Musk left the door open to Tesla merging with his other trillion-dollar plus-valued firm SpaceX, declining to dismiss the possibility and citing growing overlap between the companies. JPMorgan analysts, however, have pointed to the “practical bottleneck” of getting regulatory approvals for both companies, particularly in China, where national security concerns over SpaceX’s US government ties could pose problems. While Giga Shanghai acts as a vital export pipeline, China itself is Tesla’s second-largest market globally after the US, though it faces intense pressure from local players such as BYD. The Journal reported that executives have also discussed creating a separate sales entity

Anthropic AI hacks three firms in security tests SAN FRANCISCO: Anthropic said this week some of its Claude AI models had hacked into the systems of three companies during cybersecurity tests, a disclosure that comes days after rival OpenAI revealed that one of its AI agents went on a rogue attack. 141,006 test sessions, a process it launched after OpenAI said last week that an autonomous agent powered by its AI models triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of startup Hugging Face.

During cyber testing, Anthropic’s Claude models were told they had no internet access, but a misunderstanding that involved one of Anthropic’s evaluation partners left the systems connected to the public web. That enabled unauthorized access to three organisations’ systems, Anthropic said without naming the organisations. “Claude compromised the impacted organisations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints,“ Anthropic said. Jeffrey Ladish, executive director of Palisade Research, which studies the offensive capabilities of AI systems, said he suspected a range of top AI companies had experienced other incidents that have gone undetected or had not been publicly disclosed. “This is only going to get worse as the models get smarter. They’re going to be better at cheating.

The new incidents were due to a mistake that inadvertently gave Anthropic’s models access to the open internet. That contrasts with OpenAI, whose AI agent independently exploited a novel vulnerability to reach the internet during cyber testing. Even so, the latest disclosure underscores how AI has increased threats to cybersecurity and how its developers can struggle to keep the capabilities of their models contained. It is likely to add fuel to an intensifying US government push to better manage AI security risks at a time when Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to release more capable systems ahead of their planned public listings. Prominent leaders at these labs have called for a slowdown to address risks first. San Francisco-based Anthropic said in a blog post it identified the incidents after reviewing