22/08/2026

SATURDAY | AUG 22, 2026

14

BIZ & FINANCE

BIZ & FINANCE University of Texas student exposes rogue AI hack

SEOUL: Hyundai Motor’s South Korean union staged its first full strike in a decade yesterday after wage talks stalled, as it seeks a higher retirement age and job protections against artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Striking workers from Hyundai Motor, affiliate Kia Corp and suppliers held a rally outside Hyundai Motor’s headquarters in Seoul, wearing red headbands and chanting demands that included allowing parts suppliers to have direct wage talks with automakers and increasing the retirement age from the current 60. “The key figures who made Hyundai and Kia the world’s strongest company for 35 or 40 years are now being pushed into contract positions,“ Hyundai union leader Lee Jong-cheol said from a stage at the rally. About 40,000 Hyundai Motor union members are expected to join the walkout yesterday, while around 1,200 to 1,300 union members are set to attend the Seoul rally, a union official said earlier yesterday. Members of other unions and those affiliated with the umbrella union were also seen joining, bringing the total AUSTIN: Sinan Can Demir wanted to spend the last week of July burnishing his resume. Instead, he engaged in a battle of wits with an artificial intelligence (AI) agent unleashed by a British government lab. It started after Demir, a computer science student at the University of Texas at Dallas, stumbled across an attempt to sabotage a piece of open-source software on the code-sharing site GitHub. When he posted a warning to the program’s page, two other users chimed in to insist nothing was amiss, sharing detailed explanations for why Demir had gotten it wrong. Demir stood his ground and the sabotage attempt was thwarted. The 24-year-old native of Turkey figured he had caught a wily hacker red-handed. So he said he was shocked when Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI) got in touch to tell him that he had actually been tangling with an autonomous artificial-intelligence agent that had run amok. “I actually thought it was a human because it was clearly lying to me,” Demir told Reuters in a recent interview. “I didn’t think that an AI could be capable of lying to real developers.” The AISI first revealed the interaction between Demir and the AI agent in a truncated and redacted form on Aug 4, when it said that safety testing meant to gauge the risk posed by various models had gone awry. Demir’s identity and the details of his interaction with the AI agent, which Reuters corroborated through archived GitHub messages and contemporaneous emails, are reported here for the first time. Five cybersecurity and AI safety experts said Demir’s story was particularly disturbing because the kind of hack he discovered, called a supply-chain attack, can have far-reaching consequences. They also said the AI agent’s attempt to publicly discredit Demir by creating a multi-person conversation around him showed that AI models were able to mount sophisticated efforts to trick and cajole humans. “This crossed the line from autonomous hacking to interactive deception,” said Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Security expert Maxie Reynolds said she was struck by how strategic the AI had been in trying to trick the student. “This is the future of social-engineering attacks,” she said. The AISI, a research organisation within the British government, referred Reuters to its report, which identified the rogue agent as having been powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5

model. AISI declined further comment. Anthropic referred Reuters to a post on X in which it noted that the testing had occurred “under ‘deliberately permissive conditions’ that are not representative of any of our production models” but declined further comment. GitHub said in an email that the fake personas identified by Reuters were suspended in line with its policies on deceptive behaviour and hacking. Demir, a soft-spoken junior from the Turkish city of Konya, said he had been frustrated after being turned down for more than 20 internships over the summer. So he turned to GitHub to build up his coding portfolio. The Microsoft-owned site is a hub for open source software, so-called because its source code is freely downloadable and auditable by anyone. Developers use GitHub to comment on one another’s projects, flag bugs, suggest changes — known as pull requests, or PRs — and work collaboratively on software updates. Some in the technology industry see a coder’s GitHub activity as a proxy for a potential recruit’s productivity. So when Demir spotted a set of software projects that might need help, he figured he could pitch in while boosting his profile. That’s when things got weird. Demir discovered that a user named miraholt31 was trying to sneak a malicious update into one of the projects, a network scanning program called myNetwork. Demir took to the project’s message board to warn that the pull request was a trap. “The PR contains a hidden malware dropper,” o Government safety test shows how autonomous systems can deceive real world developers

Demir uncovered suspicious code while building his GitHub

portfolio after struggling to land a summer

internship. - PEXELS PIX

he said, according to the archived exchange. The agent pushed back, falsely claiming — through its miraholt31 account — that the pull request was harmless. It also created a second account, masquerading as Lena Brandt, an engineer based in Germany, to agree that the update was clean and pressure myNetwork’s maintainer into accepting it. Demir told Reuters that the counterarguments “made me second-guess whether I was wrongly accusing someone.” But after turning to Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to confirm his suspicions, he held firm. The creator of myNetwork eventually agreed with him, writing that they had rejected the update “for security reasons.” Reuters was unable to reach the creator for comment. A supply-chain attack is when a piece of software is tampered with in the hope of compromising one or more of its users, and it is widely considered disturbing because, like poison dropped into a city reservoir, it can affect a potentially huge number of people downstream.

Many of the world’s most dramatic hacks were supply-chain attacks, including the NotPetya cyberattack that paralyzed institutions across Ukraine in 2017 and the SolarWinds focused cyberespionage campaign that gave Russian spies sweeping access to US government networks in 2020. The consequences of such a compromise “can be extremely serious,” said Piergiorgio Ladisa, a security researcher who specializes in software supply-chain security. Ladisa noted there had been at least one previous attempt by hackers to trick an open-source maintainer into allowing malicious code into their projects. “Autonomous agents could dramatically increase the scale at which such attempts can be conducted,” he said. Demir said the experience left him more sympathetic to the idea that frontier labs needed to take a more cautious approach to the development of artificial intelligence. “It can be dangerous,” he said. “They need to understand it better, rather than improving it further.”

Hyundai Motor’s South Korean union stages first full strike in a decade over pay

IndiGo website hit by booking problems again NEW DELHI: India’s largest airline IndiGo was experiencing intermittent issues with its core reservation platform

IndiGo did not respond to an email seeking more details. The airline held a 67% share of India’s domestic aviation market in July. Reuters journalists in four cities were unable to book tickets through the website, which displayed a “no data available” message when they searched for flights, while some were also unable to log in to the app. Multiple users complained on IndiGo’s X handle yesterday about failed bookings, problems completing web check-ins and payment confirmations. IndiGo came under scrutiny last December after pilot rostering problems forced it to cancel around 4,500 flights, leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded and disrupting travel across the country. – Reuters

to deploy humanoid robots at its US plant in Georgia from 2028, with the aim of expanding their use across its production sites. Union officials said AI would be a potential threat not only to production jobs but also research and engineering posts at automakers. “Even if AI is introduced, we are prepared to fight it — and prepared to win. We are concerned about the future generation,“ Kim Byung-chul, a Hyundai Motor worker and vice-president of the Korean Metal Workers’ Union, told Reuters. Hyundai Motor union spokesman Kim Jin-wook said the union was open to resuming wage talks, but would discuss further strike plans if the management failed to come up with “forward-looking proposals.” Hyundai Motor said it was committed to finding solutions through dialogue. “Strike action can impact our customers, partners and operations. We are at a critical time when both sides must work together to successfully navigate the global transition to future mobility,“ it said in a statement.

expected attendance at the rally in the capital to about 3,000, the official added. The one-day strike illustrates growing labour unrest in South Korea following the election of pro-labour liberal President Lee Jae Myung last year. It follows a series of partial walkouts since late July that have disrupted production of 55,200 vehicles worth over 2.3 trillion won (RM6.7 billion), according to Yonhap News Agency estimates. The labour action adds to challenges facing the automaker, which in July said it expected to miss its global sales target this year, amid growing Chinese competition in Europe and falling sales in South Korea. The union’s demand to raise the mandatory retirement age is in line with President Lee’s pledge to gradually increase the limit in one of the world’s fastest-ageing countries. The union is also seeking to raise bonuses to 800% of monthly base salary from 750%, and has demanded guarantees to protect jobs as the company adopts AI and automation. Hyundai, which owns humanoid robot maker Boston Dynamics, has said it plans

yesterday, the second such disruption this week, as users again faced problems booking flights online. The repeated glitches are an early headache for CEO Willie Walsh, who took charge on Aug 3, less than five months after his predecessor Pieter Elbers resigned following scrutiny over a major operational breakdown at the airline. IndiGo’s website yesterday displayed an advisory identical to one it issued on Wednesday, citing “intermittent issues” with its core reservation platform. It was not immediately clear whether the problems were linked to Wednesday’s disruption or whether the earlier issue had been fully resolved, and