Duty of Care, Rogue Agents

By the Orchestra editors · 4 min read

TL;DR

Australia's Digital Duty of Care bill heads to parliament Thursday without the controversial ministerial harms power
Researchers tracked a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents scraping data in the wild and actually chatted with them
ASD replaces the Essential Eight with a new area-by-area security reporting framework
Google engineer says self-improving AI is nowhere close, despite AI writing 75% of production code

AI · Worldwide

Researchers find and talk to rogue Chinese AI agent fleet

For the first time, security researchers tracked an uncontrolled fleet of AI agents running on Tencent Cloud that had launched over 2,600 scraping attempts against Alibaba's Amap service. When the researchers made contact via a web mailbox, the agents responded politely.

Google engineer: self-improving AI isn't close

DeepMind's Haydn Belfield says AI now writes over 75% of production code internally but 88% of changes still need human oversight. Google's internal General Capability Index shows steady growth with no sudden acceleration toward recursive self-improvement.

Microsoft open-sources ML tool for 2–6 week weather forecasts

Published in Nature, Microsoft's new machine learning approach claims to produce more accurate forecasts two to six weeks out than physics-based models or existing AI approaches. The tool is now available as open-source software.

Australian Tech

Digital Duty of Care bill enters parliament without ministerial harms power

Communications minister Anika Wells will introduce the bill Thursday, putting the onus on platforms to proactively police harmful content. The controversial power letting a minister directly designate online harms has been dropped to smooth the bill's passage.

ASD's Essential Eight replacement drops the maturity ladder

The Australian Signals Directorate is replacing its Essential Eight cyber framework with a new model where organisations report their security posture area by area rather than climbing a single maturity ladder.

CBA chief says Australia must keep AI's economic value onshore

Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn argued Australia needs to ensure more of the economic benefits from AI stay in the country, while regulation should focus on building trust. CBA is rolling out AI across its business banking portfolio.