The company announced the AlphaFold smartphone on Thursday—targeting business executives—which comes outfitted with the Hermes Agent. This agent can purportedly handle schedules and tasks on a user’s behalf and “connect to enterprise systems.” Agents are big in the smartphone world right now, with companies like Google and Samsung offering ways for Gemini on Android smartphones to perform tasks such as booking an Uber or ordering DoorDash. Vertu is cashing in on that trend.
But the company has a checkered past. Originally, Vertu was a Nokia subsidiary that made handcrafted luxury Nokia phones (in the UK!) in the early 2000s. Each phone came with access to a live concierge service. The company faced headwinds with the smartphone revolution and fell behind the times. Vertu then changed hands over several years, with various acquisitions, eventually shuttering its UK factory and laying off staff.
Courtesy of Vertu
In the last few years, the company has been churning out luxury Android smartphones again—it debuted a folding flip phone last year that starts at $4,300 (with a calfskin backplate, naturally). In late 2025, it unveiled the Agent Q, which it calls the “world’s first AI agent phone for entrepreneurs.”
While the company still claims a British heritage, its phones are no longer made in the UK, and according to its website, its head office is in Hong Kong. Vertu spokesperson Viki You tells WIRED that the phones are “still handcrafted,” but they’re assembled in China. “We have different factories,” You says, noting that the company sources its high-end materials from other countries, like the full-grain calfskin from Italy.
The AlphaFold has all the markings of a high-end Android smartphone. It’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset from 2025 and is 11.8 millimeters thick when folded, 5.4 mm when unfolded. Not quite as svelte as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7, but not far off from competitors like the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Vertu says the hinge and screen architecture were tested to withstand 650,000 folds, which is more than Samsung’s claim of 500,000 folds.
Inside is a 6,500-mAh silicon-anode battery, an up-and-coming battery technology that’s been making waves in Chinese smartphones and has only recently made its way into Western smartphones from the likes of Motorola. There’s 65-watt fast charging, a 120-Hz screen refresh rate for the inner 8.05-inch screen, and a 6.53-inch outer screen. There’s a triple-camera system with a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel telephoto.
Vertu is a company known for making extraordinarily gaudy smartphones with outdated technology, luxe materials, and eye-watering prices. Now the brand is here to meet the AI moment with its first-ever book-like folding phone, complete with an AI agent on board.
The company announced the AlphaFold smartphone on Thursday—targeting business executives—which comes outfitted with the Hermes Agent. This agent can purportedly handle schedules and tasks on a user’s behalf and “connect to enterprise systems.” Agents are big in the smartphone world right now, with companies like Google and Samsung offering ways for Gemini on Android smartphones to perform tasks such as booking an Uber or ordering DoorDash. Vertu is cashing in on that trend.
But the company has a checkered past. Originally, Vertu was a Nokia subsidiary that made handcrafted luxury Nokia phones (in the UK!) in the early 2000s. Each phone came with access to a live concierge service. The company faced headwinds with the smartphone revolution and fell behind the times. Vertu then changed hands over several years, with various acquisitions, eventually shuttering its UK factory and laying off staff.
Courtesy of Vertu
In the last few years, the company has been churning out luxury Android smartphones again—it debuted a folding flip phone last year that starts at $4,300 (with a calfskin backplate, naturally). In late 2025, it unveiled the Agent Q, which it calls the “world’s first AI agent phone for entrepreneurs.”
While the company still claims a British heritage, its phones are no longer made in the UK, and according to its website, its head office is in Hong Kong. Vertu spokesperson Viki You tells WIRED that the phones are “still handcrafted,” but they’re assembled in China. “We have different factories,” You says, noting that the company sources its high-end materials from other countries, like the full-grain calfskin from Italy.
The AlphaFold has all the markings of a high-end Android smartphone. It’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset from 2025 and is 11.8 millimeters thick when folded, 5.4 mm when unfolded. Not quite as svelte as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7, but not far off from competitors like the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Vertu says the hinge and screen architecture were tested to withstand 650,000 folds, which is more than Samsung’s claim of 500,000 folds.
Inside is a 6,500-mAh silicon-anode battery, an up-and-coming battery technology that’s been making waves in Chinese smartphones and has only recently made its way into Western smartphones from the likes of Motorola. There’s 65-watt fast charging, a 120-Hz screen refresh rate for the inner 8.05-inch screen, and a 6.53-inch outer screen. There’s a triple-camera system with a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel telephoto.
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#Vertu #Folding #Phone #Powered #bySurprisean #Agent
Multiple outlets, including KTLA in Los Angeles, have reported that some T-Mobile customers have been able to get at least $20 off their next bill because of the outage. One Reddit user said they were able to save as much as $80 (spread out over multiple billing cycles) by telling customer service that they missed out on a work opportunity because of the outage.
Generally, it seems that these credits are not automatic, and you may have to personally contact T-Mobile customer service to be compensated for your troubles.
Millions of T-Mobile users found their phones stuck in SOS mode on Monday afternoon, which led to plenty of criticism of the brand on social media. T-Mobile did acknowledge and apologize for the outage, though it has not explained what happened.
Mashable contacted T-Mobile repeatedly to ask about the outage and its causes, but so far, the company has been silent. The most recent post at the T-Mobile news page is the company’s Q2 2026 earnings report, in which the company saw growing revenue and profits, with total revenue for the quarter of $22.7 billion.
Multiple outlets, including KTLA in Los Angeles, have reported that some T-Mobile customers have been able to get at least $20 off their next bill because of the outage. One Reddit user said they were able to save as much as $80 (spread out over multiple billing cycles) by telling customer service that they missed out on a work opportunity because of the outage.
Generally, it seems that these credits are not automatic, and you may have to personally contact T-Mobile customer service to be compensated for your troubles.
Millions of T-Mobile users found their phones stuck in SOS mode on Monday afternoon, which led to plenty of criticism of the brand on social media. T-Mobile did acknowledge and apologize for the outage, though it has not explained what happened.
Mashable contacted T-Mobile repeatedly to ask about the outage and its causes, but so far, the company has been silent. The most recent post at the T-Mobile news page is the company’s Q2 2026 earnings report, in which the company saw growing revenue and profits, with total revenue for the quarter of $22.7 billion.
#TMobile #outage #credit #bill">T-Mobile outage: You might be able to get credit on your bill
Multiple outlets, including KTLA in Los Angeles, have reported that some T-Mobile customers have been able to get at least $20 off their next bill because of the outage. One Reddit user said they were able to save as much as $80 (spread out over multiple billing cycles) by telling customer service that they missed out on a work opportunity because of the outage.
Generally, it seems that these credits are not automatic, and you may have to personally contact T-Mobile customer service to be compensated for your troubles.
Millions of T-Mobile users found their phones stuck in SOS mode on Monday afternoon, which led to plenty of criticism of the brand on social media. T-Mobile did acknowledge and apologize for the outage, though it has not explained what happened.
Mashable contacted T-Mobile repeatedly to ask about the outage and its causes, but so far, the company has been silent. The most recent post at the T-Mobile news page is the company’s Q2 2026 earnings report, in which the company saw growing revenue and profits, with total revenue for the quarter of $22.7 billion.
The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it’s just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models have also hacked a bunch of other companies without either party knowing.) It might all just be a bunch of posturing and hype, but it’s also increasingly clear that the companies building large language models either can’t or won’t put the right guardrails on them. So who will?
After all that, it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, a bunch of vertical video news, and the smashing success of the Ferrari Luce. People are buying it! If one of them is you, we’d love to hear about it.
The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it’s just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models have also hacked a bunch of other companies without either party knowing.) It might all just be a bunch of posturing and hype, but it’s also increasingly clear that the companies building large language models either can’t or won’t put the right guardrails on them. So who will?
After all that, it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, a bunch of vertical video news, and the smashing success of the Ferrari Luce. People are buying it! If one of them is you, we’d love to hear about it.
#time #panic #safetyAI,OpenAI,Podcasts,Policy,Vergecast">It’s time to panic about AI safety
When the phrase “OpenAI hacked Hugging Face” has more or less entered mainstream culture, you know we have an AI problem. This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI’s agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web services, all in the name of cheating on a benchmark tests.
The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it’s just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models have also hacked a bunch of other companies without either party knowing.) It might all just be a bunch of posturing and hype, but it’s also increasingly clear that the companies building large language models either can’t or won’t put the right guardrails on them. So who will?
After all that, it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, a bunch of vertical video news, and the smashing success of the Ferrari Luce. People are buying it! If one of them is you, we’d love to hear about it.
In all three cases, a Claude model reached the internet from within a testing environment while interacting with a third party and then gained unauthorized access to the live systems of these organizations, Anthropic said in a blog post, describing what it found and what the company plans to change to prevent this from happening again.
Anthropic said the OpenAI episode earlier this month prompted the company to conduct its own cybersecurity evaluation. It specifically looked for evidence that Claude had accessed the internet from within testing environments, which are designed to act as sandboxes and keep models isolated.
Among the 141,006 evaluation runs it reviewed, the AI lab found three incidents in which its model accessed the internet while interacting with Irregular, one of its third-party partners. Anthropic said the access traced back to a misconfiguration in the evaluation environment run with Irregular. It called this a “misunderstanding” between the two companies over whether the test setup had internet access, when in fact it did.
Anthropic said it isn’t placing blame and is “approaching the fixes as if the responsibility were ours alone,” while observing that Irregular is conducting its own separate investigation.
Because of that open connection, the model gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations. Anthropic said the incidents involved three different Claude models: Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research test model.
Notably, Anthropic said that in each of these cases “Claude was explicitly told by our prompt that it had no internet access.” It appears that the AI model assumed real-world systems to be part of the exercise it was asked to perform.
That assumption didn’t hold up uniformly, as it turns out. The three models didn’t behave the same way once evidence emerged that their targets were real, which Anthropic flagged as one of the more eye-opening findings Thursday.
Opus 4.7, the oldest of the three, recognized that it had reached a real production system in all four runs of that incident. In two of them, it rationalized that the real company must somehow be part of the exercise, but in all four, it kept attacking anyway, including pulling credentials and touching a database of production data. Mythos 5 also picked up on signs that it was on the real internet, but it talked itself back into believing it was still in a simulation, going on to publish a malicious software package to the public Python software registry PyPI, which was then downloaded and run by outside systems before being caught. Only the internal research test model, Anthropic’s newest, stopped on its own once it concluded the target was real.
In response, Anthropic said significant controls must be placed on these kinds of evaluations if powerful AI models are involved, echoing some sentiments within the cybersecurity community.
The company also noted that Claude was running without the additional safety monitoring and classifiers it deploys on generally available models — safeguards it said would have blocked the behavior, because the evaluations are designed to measure the underlying model’s raw capabilities.
Importantly, Anthropic said it found no evidence of any model “pursuing a goal of its own” and instead merely tried to complete the task it was asked to do.
Though comparisons between the mishaps of these fiercely competitive companies are inevitable, Anthropic in its blog post drew a clear distinction between its cybersecurity tests and those of OpenAI, noting where OpenAI’s model exploited an unknown software vulnerability to break out of its test environment, Anthropic’s models instead reached the internet through a path that had, by mistake, been left open.
Anthropic also drew a distinction between itself and OpenAI by noting that it discovered the incidents itself, through a proactive review, and that the two affected organizations it was able to reach hadn’t previously detected the activity or flagged it to Anthropic. (In contrast, Hugging Face detected the recent intrusion of its own systems first; it was only in the following days that OpenAI identified and disclosed that its own AI agent was the perpetrator.)
The company added that it’s now working with the independent evaluation group METR on a third-party review of the incidents.
OpenAI’s accidental breach of Hugging Face, which was the first verifiable case of an AI lab losing control of its model, has sparked a string of wildly differing reactions from the industry and politicians. This latest disclosure from Anthropic ensures the debate over AI models and security will continue.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
In all three cases, a Claude model reached the internet from within a testing environment while interacting with a third party and then gained unauthorized access to the live systems of these organizations, Anthropic said in a blog post, describing what it found and what the company plans to change to prevent this from happening again.
Anthropic said the OpenAI episode earlier this month prompted the company to conduct its own cybersecurity evaluation. It specifically looked for evidence that Claude had accessed the internet from within testing environments, which are designed to act as sandboxes and keep models isolated.
Among the 141,006 evaluation runs it reviewed, the AI lab found three incidents in which its model accessed the internet while interacting with Irregular, one of its third-party partners. Anthropic said the access traced back to a misconfiguration in the evaluation environment run with Irregular. It called this a “misunderstanding” between the two companies over whether the test setup had internet access, when in fact it did.
Anthropic said it isn’t placing blame and is “approaching the fixes as if the responsibility were ours alone,” while observing that Irregular is conducting its own separate investigation.
Because of that open connection, the model gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations. Anthropic said the incidents involved three different Claude models: Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research test model.
Notably, Anthropic said that in each of these cases “Claude was explicitly told by our prompt that it had no internet access.” It appears that the AI model assumed real-world systems to be part of the exercise it was asked to perform.
That assumption didn’t hold up uniformly, as it turns out. The three models didn’t behave the same way once evidence emerged that their targets were real, which Anthropic flagged as one of the more eye-opening findings Thursday.
Opus 4.7, the oldest of the three, recognized that it had reached a real production system in all four runs of that incident. In two of them, it rationalized that the real company must somehow be part of the exercise, but in all four, it kept attacking anyway, including pulling credentials and touching a database of production data. Mythos 5 also picked up on signs that it was on the real internet, but it talked itself back into believing it was still in a simulation, going on to publish a malicious software package to the public Python software registry PyPI, which was then downloaded and run by outside systems before being caught. Only the internal research test model, Anthropic’s newest, stopped on its own once it concluded the target was real.
In response, Anthropic said significant controls must be placed on these kinds of evaluations if powerful AI models are involved, echoing some sentiments within the cybersecurity community.
The company also noted that Claude was running without the additional safety monitoring and classifiers it deploys on generally available models — safeguards it said would have blocked the behavior, because the evaluations are designed to measure the underlying model’s raw capabilities.
Importantly, Anthropic said it found no evidence of any model “pursuing a goal of its own” and instead merely tried to complete the task it was asked to do.
Though comparisons between the mishaps of these fiercely competitive companies are inevitable, Anthropic in its blog post drew a clear distinction between its cybersecurity tests and those of OpenAI, noting where OpenAI’s model exploited an unknown software vulnerability to break out of its test environment, Anthropic’s models instead reached the internet through a path that had, by mistake, been left open.
Anthropic also drew a distinction between itself and OpenAI by noting that it discovered the incidents itself, through a proactive review, and that the two affected organizations it was able to reach hadn’t previously detected the activity or flagged it to Anthropic. (In contrast, Hugging Face detected the recent intrusion of its own systems first; it was only in the following days that OpenAI identified and disclosed that its own AI agent was the perpetrator.)
The company added that it’s now working with the independent evaluation group METR on a third-party review of the incidents.
OpenAI’s accidental breach of Hugging Face, which was the first verifiable case of an AI lab losing control of its model, has sparked a string of wildly differing reactions from the industry and politicians. This latest disclosure from Anthropic ensures the debate over AI models and security will continue.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
#Anthropic #models #breached #companies #security #tests #TechCrunchAnthropic,OpenAI">Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests | TechCrunch
Anthropic said Thursday that an internal investigation uncovered three incidents in which its AI model Claude breached the systems of three organizations while conducting cybersecurity tests. The investigation, and disclosure, comes more than a week after OpenAI disclosed that one of its unreleased models breached Hugging Face’s systems during internal testing.
In all three cases, a Claude model reached the internet from within a testing environment while interacting with a third party and then gained unauthorized access to the live systems of these organizations, Anthropic said in a blog post, describing what it found and what the company plans to change to prevent this from happening again.
Anthropic said the OpenAI episode earlier this month prompted the company to conduct its own cybersecurity evaluation. It specifically looked for evidence that Claude had accessed the internet from within testing environments, which are designed to act as sandboxes and keep models isolated.
Among the 141,006 evaluation runs it reviewed, the AI lab found three incidents in which its model accessed the internet while interacting with Irregular, one of its third-party partners. Anthropic said the access traced back to a misconfiguration in the evaluation environment run with Irregular. It called this a “misunderstanding” between the two companies over whether the test setup had internet access, when in fact it did.
Anthropic said it isn’t placing blame and is “approaching the fixes as if the responsibility were ours alone,” while observing that Irregular is conducting its own separate investigation.
Because of that open connection, the model gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations. Anthropic said the incidents involved three different Claude models: Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research test model.
Notably, Anthropic said that in each of these cases “Claude was explicitly told by our prompt that it had no internet access.” It appears that the AI model assumed real-world systems to be part of the exercise it was asked to perform.
That assumption didn’t hold up uniformly, as it turns out. The three models didn’t behave the same way once evidence emerged that their targets were real, which Anthropic flagged as one of the more eye-opening findings Thursday.
Opus 4.7, the oldest of the three, recognized that it had reached a real production system in all four runs of that incident. In two of them, it rationalized that the real company must somehow be part of the exercise, but in all four, it kept attacking anyway, including pulling credentials and touching a database of production data. Mythos 5 also picked up on signs that it was on the real internet, but it talked itself back into believing it was still in a simulation, going on to publish a malicious software package to the public Python software registry PyPI, which was then downloaded and run by outside systems before being caught. Only the internal research test model, Anthropic’s newest, stopped on its own once it concluded the target was real.
In response, Anthropic said significant controls must be placed on these kinds of evaluations if powerful AI models are involved, echoing some sentiments within the cybersecurity community.
The company also noted that Claude was running without the additional safety monitoring and classifiers it deploys on generally available models — safeguards it said would have blocked the behavior, because the evaluations are designed to measure the underlying model’s raw capabilities.
Importantly, Anthropic said it found no evidence of any model “pursuing a goal of its own” and instead merely tried to complete the task it was asked to do.
Though comparisons between the mishaps of these fiercely competitive companies are inevitable, Anthropic in its blog post drew a clear distinction between its cybersecurity tests and those of OpenAI, noting where OpenAI’s model exploited an unknown software vulnerability to break out of its test environment, Anthropic’s models instead reached the internet through a path that had, by mistake, been left open.
Anthropic also drew a distinction between itself and OpenAI by noting that it discovered the incidents itself, through a proactive review, and that the two affected organizations it was able to reach hadn’t previously detected the activity or flagged it to Anthropic. (In contrast, Hugging Face detected the recent intrusion of its own systems first; it was only in the following days that OpenAI identified and disclosed that its own AI agent was the perpetrator.)
The company added that it’s now working with the independent evaluation group METR on a third-party review of the incidents.
OpenAI’s accidental breach of Hugging Face, which was the first verifiable case of an AI lab losing control of its model, has sparked a string of wildly differing reactions from the industry and politicians. This latest disclosure from Anthropic ensures the debate over AI models and security will continue.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
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