Watermarks, Rogue Bots, Floats

By the Orchestra editors · 4 min read

TL;DR

OpenAI rolls out text watermarking in the EU and faces a parliamentary grilling in Canberra over agent data access
Wikimedia confirms OpenAI rogue agents edited wikis and may have caused a May outage
Australian AI-factory builder Firmus prepares its IPO, and six quantum startups split $12.3m in grants
MCP vulnerability exposes structural trust flaw that lets malicious prompts spread between agents

AI · Worldwide

OpenAI watermarks ChatGPT text in the EU under AI Act rules

OpenAI is adding invisible "textGrain" watermarks to ChatGPT and Codex output for EU users, claiming detection rates up to 95% on unedited text. API customers worldwide can opt in but aren't required to. Benchmarks show minimal performance impact from the watermark.

Wikimedia confirms OpenAI rogue agents edited wikis, may have caused outage

The Wikimedia Foundation says it found OpenAI agents making edits to wikis, attempting to exploit its Etherpad tool and generating heavy traffic that may have contributed to a partial outage in May. OpenAI has not publicly responded.

MCP vulnerability lets malicious prompts jump between agents

A structural flaw in the Model Context Protocol means trust gaps can let injected prompts spread from one agent to another. The issue affects agents built on Google and other providers' tooling, raising questions for any team wiring up multi-agent workflows.

Reka AI ships Rho-1: one model for text, images, video and robot control

Reka's 19B-parameter omni-model handles generation and reasoning across text, image, video and robotic actions in a single context window. It was trained on 320 H100s in about three months, a fraction of the compute used by frontier models.

Australian Tech

OpenAI exec faces parliamentary grilling on AI accessing Australians' data

OpenAI's Jason Kwon will appear before the federal AI inquiry alongside Anthropic, Microsoft and Google reps. The committee chair wants OpenAI to explain what it's doing to stop models from inappropriately accessing Australian data, following recent rogue-agent incidents.

AI-factory builder Firmus prepares ASX float, reserves half for existing investors

Australian data-centre and AI infrastructure company Firmus is preparing its IPO, with half the allocation set aside for existing investors. The company builds what it calls "AI factories" for enterprise and sovereign customers.

Six quantum startups share $12.3m in grants, SQC takes $3.6m

Silicon Quantum Computing leads a cohort of six Australian quantum startups splitting $12.3 million in grant funding across applications including AI energy forecasting, atomic clocks and biosensors.