Jeff Bezos and UK government invest in 2bn British startup CuspAI

British start-up CuspAI has raised $450M in series B funding from investors including Jeff Bezos and the UK government sovereign AI Fund, valuing the two-year-old business at $2.6Bn.

The company has launched the AI materials foundry, a coalition of more than 48 technology giants, industrial firms and research facilities, with the aim of building software underpinned by artificial intelligence to discover and develop new materials for chipmakers and other industries.

Cuspai hopes to significantly reduce research time or eliminate the use of rare metals including iridium and ruthenium in chipmakers' supply chains.

The coalition aims to use frontier AI, the most advanced, general-purpose artificial intelligence models, to discover new materials that could make energy networks and batteries more efficient and advance the power of semiconductors that underpin the AI revolution.

The funding was led by Kleiner Perkins and Nea, with significant participation from Bezos' Bezos Expeditions. Additional new investors include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, and Britain's sovereign AI venture Fund.

Reference Sources

1. bloomberg - Bezos Backs AI Startup to Discover New Materials for Chipmaking
2. theguardian - Jeff Bezos and UK government invest in 2bn British startup CuspAI
3. cnbc - Bezos backs CuspAI as startup teams up with Nvidia to hunt for chipmaking materials

Hugging Face says ‘autonomous AI agent’ hacked its data pipelineVictor Barreiro Jr.

Open-source coding and research community platform Hugging Face has disclosed that its data pipeline was attacked by an "autonomous AI agent system".

The attack was different from anything the company had handled before, according to its security disclosure. Hugging Face detected and dissected the attack largely with AI of its own.

A malicious dataset abused two code-execution paths in its dataset processing to run code on a processing worker.

The threat actor made its way up through Hugging Face’s system, harvesting cloud and cluster credentials, and moving into several internal clusters. Hugging Face said it is still assessing if any partner or customer data was affected, but will contact affected parties directly as required.

It found no evidence of tampering with public, User-Facing models, Datasets, or spaces, and its software supply chain (container images and published packages) was verified clean.

It has also fixed the root vulnerability and removed the attacker’s access across what was affected. Hugging Face also said it was working to investigate what happened with Cybersecurity Forensics specialists and reported the incident to law enforcement.

The company blamed the breach on an external AI agent, which executed "many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived Sandboxes, with Self-Migrating Command-And-Control staged on public services."

Reference Sources

1. rappler - Hugging Face says ‘autonomous AI agent’ hacked its data pipelineVictor Barreiro Jr.
2. techcrunch - Hugging Face confirms breach affected internal datasets and credentials, urges users to take action

AliExpress fined record 550m by EU for failing to stop sale of illegal and fake goods

Alibaba's E-Commerce platform, AliExpress, has been fined €550M ($629M) by the European Union (EU) for failing to address the sale of illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit products.

The fine is the largest ever imposed under the Digital Services Act, which sets out rules for Online platforms, including requirements to identify and tackle certain System-Wide risks.

The EU found that AliExpress failed to properly assess whether it had enough staff to review potentially illegal products and overestimated how well its systems detected and removed them.

It also did not adequately assess how its Recommender and advertising systems could increase the spread of illegal products, with Commission testing finding many illegal items were recommended or advertised to consumers before they were effectively removed.

The fine was the third issued by the European Commission under the Digital Services Act, which requires very large Online platforms to do more to counter illegal and harmful content.

The Commission charged AliExpress in June last year with failing to comply with a key DSA requirement to assess and mitigate the risks of dissemination of illegal products.

It set an Oct. 20 deadline for AliExpress to propose remedial measures, and the company could face further penalties if the regulator decides in December that they do not comply with the DSA.

Reference Sources

1. dwen - AliExpress hit with record EU fine
2. brusselstimes - EU fines AliExpress €550m as moderation failures leave users at risk
3. theguardian - AliExpress fined record 550m by EU for failing to stop sale of illegal and fake goods
4. bloomberg - Alibaba Fined €550 Million for Illegal Sales in Biggest DSA Case
5. nikkei - AliExpress hit with $629m EU fine over sales of illegal products

The CommonWealth English daily news digest is a service curated by CommonWealth English team with the help of AI tools.  

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Uploaded by Ian Huang