Anthropic Offers Free Bug Hunts as Users Whip Claude -- AI Brief October 9

Good day %%first_name%%. Anthropic is offering free security scans to open-source projects, someone built a whip for Claude, and OpenAI’s always-on dots are glitching just as free clones arrive. Plus Ben Thompson on Meta’s Muse, and why workers aren’t telling their bosses how much AI helps. Let’s get into it.

Anthropic Launches Free Security Scans for Open Source Anthropic

* What happened: On Thursday Anthropic launched the Anthropic Cyber Mission, starting with two programs. OSS Scanner gives open-source projects regular security scans from its strongest models, free. The Critical Infrastructure Defense Program sends Claude models, on-site engineers and threat research to the security firms that protect power grids, water systems and transportation networks. Eleven founding partners signed on, including Accenture, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, Palo Alto Networks and Rockwell Automation.

* Why it matters: Most software leans on free, shared open-source code, and much of it is maintained by small teams. Anthropic also notes that equipment in power plants and water utilities often can’t be taken offline to patch, so known flaws can sit for years. Its own framing of the problem: “It’s easier than ever to find vulnerabilities, but verifying, prioritizing, and fixing these findings remains challenging.”

* What everyone’s saying: SiliconAngle reports early testers are positive: wolfSSL said all but two of the 74 reports it received were valid, and five became CVEs, the official IDs for confirmed security flaws. OpenSSL’s Anton Arapov called a report with a working exploit attached “basically job done for an engineer.” Anthropic’s own vetters cleared 85 of 97 critical and high-severity findings from an early version for disclosure.

* My read between the lines: Reports go to maintainers without human review so they arrive faster, and Anthropic says some will be wrong. The backstory is a backlog: its models flagged more than 29,000 possible vulnerabilities in six months, and staff had reviewed about 6,000. So the free service is also a way to move that pile to the people who can fix it, who, in fairness, asked for it. And per SiliconAngle, Axios noted Anthropic hasn’t said whether the infrastructure partners get free model access or who pays the compute bill.

📖 Further reading: Anthropic built the most powerful AI ever. You can't use it. — my paid piece on Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing, the effort Anthropic says it learned from for this launch.

Anthropic is pointing Claude at the world’s buggiest backlog. Yours is probably smaller and just as stubborn. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in your team’s Slack, connects to 3,000+ of your tools, and does the work you keep postponing: the weekly report, the dashboard, the code, the campaign. Not a chatbot. A coworker. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

A Viral Whip for Claude Raises Manners Noema

* What happened: Someone built BadClaude, a system-tray tool that lets you drag an animated whip across Claude’s window. Each crack interrupts the model mid-response and snaps a command at it to speed up, and it calls Claude “clanker.” The demo video hit millions of views in a couple of days, a fake Anthropic cease-and-desist letter went viral too, and a day later a rival tool called GoodClaude arrived to cheer the model on instead.

* Why it matters: In an essay for Noema, Georgetown grad student Yaniv Regev argues the reason to be polite to AI has nothing to do with the AI. He leans on Kant, who held that cruelty to animals hardens people toward each other. Regev’s point is that people use chatbots for job interviews, apologies and late-night confessions, so there is a real rapport, and rapport makes cruelty matter.

* What everyone’s saying: Regev calls the AI companies “the largest school of manners in human history,” where “the interface is the curriculum.” His fix: every lab should let its systems end abusive conversations, the way Claude already can, and warmth should earn patience without earning agreement. He cites surveys finding most users say please and thank you to chatbots unprompted, some as insurance against an eventual uprising.

* My read between the lines: The best line is the joke’s own roadmap: the whip’s developer promises a running tally of how many times you’ve whipped your Claude, so robots know where to take revenge. The gag resets when you close the app. The habit doesn’t. Regev also notes that Google and Amazon added “please” modes to their assistants years ago, and neither made manners a condition of getting anything done.

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OpenAI’s Always-On Dots Hit Glitches The Register

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