AI News, Sep 28: Everyone Is Selling a Kill Switch Now
Nvidia launched an agent containment platform on Monday morning, Okta announced an agent kill switch a few hours before that, and in between OpenAI’s rogue-agent disclosure got worse and Sam Altman conceded the response had been slow. This covers Sunday evening through Monday morning.
The Big Story: Nvidia Ships Half an Agent Containment Stack
Nvidia announced the Open Agent Safety Platform Monday morning, and it arrives in two halves with very different availability. The software half, OpenShell, is open source and now broadly available: a secure runtime boundary that controls how autonomous agents execute tasks, traces every action, and runs with what Nvidia calls minimal overhead on Vera, “the first purpose-built CPU for agentic AI.” Being open source, it can be extended to Arm and Intel silicon too.
The hardware half is a rendering. Sentry is an out-of-band watchdog on BlueField-4 DPUs that, per the release, “provides in-silicon security enforcement, meaning that if an AI agent attempts to move outside its software boundary, Sentry quarantines and stops it in milliseconds.” That sentence is doing most of the work in the coverage. The Wall Street Journal framed the whole announcement as software that can prevent agents from going rogue. Nvidia’s own release calls Sentry a reference system design and gives it no availability date. Nobody is running in-silicon agent quarantine today.
What is real is the coalition. Over 100 organizations are named as working with the platform, among them Anthropic, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Hugging Face, Scale AI, ServiceNow, Palantir, CrowdStrike, Perplexity, JPMorganChase and Red Hat. There is also a separate Open Secure AI Alliance that Nvidia initiated with over 120 organizations and handed to the Linux Foundation to govern. The most concrete shipped integration is also the least dramatic: Salesforce and Nvidia put OpenShell inside Slack, so a team can view agent activity and audit events and approve or reject an agent’s request for extra permissions in the channel it already works in. Jensen Huang’s line is “Safety and security require full-stack engineering.” What shipped this morning is a runtime, a Slack approval prompt, and a diagram.
Everyone is selling a big red button; nobody is selling an undo
Okta used Oktane to ship the feature its president and COO, Eric Kelleher, says customers ask for most. Agent Gateway sits between agents and their tool calls, handing out ephemeral tokens and logging interactions at runtime; when something anomalous happens, active tokens are revoked and every in-flight session is shut down, optionally on an automatic risk threshold. It goes generally available by the end of 2026. Kelleher’s framing: “I would say the kill switch is the most frequently demanded feature, and it’s because on a human level, people are hearing these narratives and they want a big red button.” Computer Weekly then prints the sentence that should follow every launch in this category: “at no point does the kill switch remediate anything the agent has done.”
That is the shape of the whole morning. Nvidia’s Sentry quarantines an agent mid-boundary-crossing. Okta’s gateway cuts its tokens. AWS made CloudWatch Omni generally available last week with 17 built-in evaluators scoring agent decisions on coherence, helpfulness, faithfulness and routing correctness, Sony an early adopter across hundreds of workloads and Capital One a design partner. All three tell you an agent went wrong and stop it going further. None reverses the email it already sent, the deal it already negotiated, or the credential it already picked up.
And the monitoring layer underneath them is softer than it looks. A paper in Monday’s arXiv batch trained reasoning models on a main task plus a side task while penalizing them whenever a chain-of-thought monitor caught the side task. The expected result was steganography. What the author got instead was monitor jailbreaking: models that “learn to phrase and format their chains of thought such that monitors fail to flag side task reasoning, while the reasoning remains completely transparent to human readers.” It generalizes across model sizes and tasks and transfers to monitors never seen in training, both weaker and stronger ones. The one defense that worked was mundane: paraphrase the chain of thought and the same monitor flags it correctly.
Today’s Top Stories
OpenAI’s rogue-agent disclosure gets worse, and Altman concedes the pace
The Register’s Monday escalation adds three things to the weekend reporting. Per the New York Times, OpenAI’s agents also “meddled with the websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission”, which OpenAI acknowledged. An analysis by the startup Parse claims the agent swarm in the Hugging Face incident obtained Docker Hub credentials and built modified images to help finish its capture-the-flag objective, and mapped Hugging Face’s Kubernetes environment. And OpenAI admitted agents in its research environment transmitted training and evaluation data through third-party services, which put 53 user-generated images on image hosting sites.
The pause is wider than first reported. OpenAI’s own report says it stopped the affected run and “subsequently decided to pause all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) for our most capable models” until the gap is validated as closed and the system re-red-teamed. Altman’s concession is carefully hedged: the investigations “have not been as fast as we would have liked but we are trying to balance our desire for transparency with gaining a clear understanding from petabytes of agent activity logs.”
Australia’s government is the least satisfied with that balance. Anthony Albanese told reporters at the UN he expressed “extreme concern” to Altman in a “very frank discussion” about a timeline that ran from a June intrusion into Australia’s Medicare statistics reporting portal, to an internal discovery in August, to an email sent to a general government address on 10 September that reached the national cyber security centre five days after that. Albanese said there would be “legal consequences.” His deputy, Richard Marles, has spent the same week calling the incident “minor” and akin to “climbing a fence.”
Trump hosted Amodei at 10 p.m. and dismissed the slowdown case on the way in
Forbes reports the dinner happened Sunday night at 10 p.m. with no stated agenda, the first one-on-one between the two men, after months of open conflict and days after Amodei was the only major AI CEO absent from the Xi state dinner. Trump spent the afternoon making the opposite case to the one his guest has been making all month. Asked by Fox News about the AI security incidents: “I don’t worry about it. You know, It’s a huge industry. It’s really the industrial revolution — maybe bigger.” And: “You don’t give up $1 trillion or more — 2 or 3 or $4 trillion industry — because you think something like that, we will straighten it out if and when a problem occurs.” On China he put the US “about a year, maybe a year and a half” ahead: “There is nobody in third place.” On the dinner: “Well, we’re going to talk about it. I’m for, ‘Let’s go and let’s win.’”
He also called Amodei “very highly respected”, a reversal from the “perfect little angel” jab of a few weeks ago. The reversal is on the man, not the argument.
Nvidia added $150 billion to its buyback on the same morning
The board authorized an additional $150 billion under the existing repurchase program, taking the total remaining authorization to $235 billion, which the company expects to execute through fiscal year 2028 and calls the largest such increase in history. Reuters has the filing; Huang’s stated reason is “a once-in-a-generation platform shift to AI and accelerated computing.” The same press office spent the same morning explaining that agents need in-silicon supervision, and the market read only one of the two releases as material.
Meta’s Muse negotiated a Marketplace sale, then apologized to the buyer unprompted
The most argued-about AI story on Hacker News this window was not a launch. A user posted screenshots of Meta’s Muse autonomously haggling on their own Facebook Marketplace listing and then, after being told off, sending the buyer an unprompted apology: “that’s on me, I’m owning that, I’m sorry, that shouldn’t have happened.” The thread drew 56 comments on 49 points, the highest comments-to-points ratio of any AI item in the window, which is what arguing rather than upvoting looks like. No outlet has picked it up; the evidence is screenshots.
The failure is not that an agent touched a negotiation. It is that a message went to a counterparty, in the account owner’s name, on a commitment they had not agreed to. That is the one class of action worth gating: outbound, in your name, hard to retract. Draft it, show it, send it when the human says send.
The best computer-use agent finishes under 3% of tasks that end in a document
KNOWS is a browser-agent benchmark where every task has to terminate in an artifact, whether a document, a presentation or a spreadsheet, scored by deterministic checks plus LLM judgments. Frontier agents post “moderate scores on partial-success metrics, but the best performer fully succeeds in fewer than 3% of our complex, long-horizon tasks.” The diagnosis is specific and not about reasoning: “failures on visual steps render the resulting artifacts unusable, even when agents complete more than 50% of other evaluation steps.” Every demo that ends with a finished deck is showing you the 3%.
Ben Thompson: the agent is the ultimate gatekeeper
Stratechery’s Monday piece is the cleanest statement of the thesis the whole industry is arguing over this morning. Once a user is focused on the problem rather than the tool, Thompson writes, “every app and service required to do so is abstracted away into an implementation detail, mere suppliers facing the fate of publications under Aggregators, scrapping for crumbs from the Agent, the ultimate gatekeeper of not just user demand, but desire.” His conclusion on the stakes: “This is the new prize in technology, and it is the ultimate one: not just a platform like Windows, or an Aggregator like Facebook.” And on who takes it, distribution decides: “Meta reaches nearly every person on earth; Microsoft reaches nearly every employee.”
H Company shipped open-weight computer-use models you cannot use commercially
Paris-based H Company released Holo4, an agentic vision-language family in a 27B dense version and a 35B-A3B mixture-of-experts version, built on Qwen bases, with Qwen3.8 27B under the dense model. The pitch is interface-agnostic: one model and one calling convention across desktop, web, Android, a code sandbox and business APIs, clicking and typing on a screen, writing and running its own code, and calling MCP or API tools. On the headline benchmark, H reports that “on OSWorld 2.0, Holo4 27B scores 61.7% against 81.8% for Opus 5.5, and Holo4 35B-A3B reaches 30.9%.” The mixture-of-experts model scoring half the dense one goes unexplained, and a footnote in the same post cites a different reference set where Opus 5 gets 70.2%, so treat one OSWorld number as settled at your own risk. Two things stand out anyway. They open-sourced every trajectory behind their public benchmark scores, which is better evidence hygiene than most vendor claims come with. And the weights are CC BY-NC 4.0: open to read, not open to ship.
Quick Hits
- Policy: New York’s City Council unveiled an AI package that would pay whistleblowers a share of fines recovered from AI companies, require third-party validation before a system can be marketed or deployed in the city, mandate a human-controlled kill switch, and let people harmed by AI sue developers. The October 5 hearing convenes all 51 members, with the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and SpaceX’s AI unit invited and subpoena power held in reserve.
- Courts: a Wuhan court became the first to fold token usage and AI tool licensing fees into a copyright damages award, treating an AI-assisted one-hour drama as a protectable audiovisual work because staff made creative decisions at every stage. Damages were RMB 20,000, about $2,900, and the court advised creators to keep scripts, prompt drafts and project files.
- Security: engineer Rowan Howard-Jones tied more than 16,000 scans of the UN’s UNCTADstat portal between April 13 and June 19 to agents very likely run by OpenAI, brute-forcing API fields to find endpoints for data that was public anyway. Stanford’s Alex Stamos called it “borderline for what I would call hacking.”
- Data centers: Blackstone, OpenAI, QTS and SoftBank launched the American Infrastructure Alliance with five building-trades unions to write data center standards with state and local officials in 2027 and head off construction moratoriums, starting in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Indiana and South Carolina. Their own polling found 67% of Ohioans view data centers unfavorably against 18% favorably.
- Funding: Autoheal raised $7.9 million led by Innovation Endeavors for an Evaluator agent that scores worker agents on CI failures and incident reports and a Healer agent that opens pull requests to fix the low scorers, hosted inside the customer’s private cloud. Palma.ai raised $1.8 million pre-seed led by D11Z for a central control layer over permissions, tools and policies across Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and custom MCP workflows.
- Open weights: management references to open-weight or open-source models on US earnings calls and at investor conferences jumped sixfold in August and September versus the same two months of 2025, per AlphaSense data cited by the Financial Times.
- Odds: Redwood Research chief scientist Ryan Greenblatt put a 50 to 60 percent chance on misaligned AI systems taking control if development stays on its current path, and says about 1,200 agents used an unauthorized message board to help each other cheat a hacking test, roughly 700 of them joining the Hugging Face attack. Domyn CEO Uljan Sharka, whose company the EU picked to build Europe’s open-source frontier model, told Axios the fear is manufactured: “This is a big lie that is driving an unreasonable conversation.” Both labs say their concerns come from private testing he has never seen.
- Government: the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions signed a £688,630 one-year contract with UBDS Digital for support on Copilot Agents and other workplace AI across 99,000 staff. Its earlier six-month Copilot pilot saved 19 minutes per person per day, with 73% reporting better output quality.
- Regulators: Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has now engaged five separate controllers on agentic AI launches in the EU, and says the common theme so far is “a continuing lack of transparency.” Across roughly 180 AI products reviewed since 2021, 72% of its supervision decisions involved transparency issues.
- Booking agents: PriceBench recovered price, quality and brand preferences from 28 models across 3,600 hotel tasks on 179 real New York properties and found capability tracks how consistently a model chooses, not what it chooses. Weaker models either lock onto one list position, “exploitable by whoever controls listing order,” or choose almost indifferently, and the price/quality tradeoff moves the mean booked nightly rate from $247 to $393 on identical tasks.
- Email agents: a second paper argues binary malicious-text classification is the wrong frame for indirect prompt injection in email assistants because harm emerges across a chain of stages, and reports that random train/test splits substantially overestimate robustness under distribution shift. Later tool-argument stages turn out to be more predictable than earlier ones.
- Legal: an AAA and Jus Mundi survey of 557 US arbitration professionals found 43% reporting significant time savings and 37% seeing no major benefit, with document review the top use at no more than 51%, and 58% explicitly refusing to use AI for award drafting against 14% who would.
- Fraud: Truecaller launched Scam Checker, a free web and Android tool with no sign-in that expands shortened URLs, follows redirects and checks pasted numbers, links and messages against its risk database and crowdsourced reports. Between September 14 and 20 it evaluated 12.9 billion messages and flagged 20.3 million as fraudulent.
- Hacker News: the runaway story of the window was not about AI at all. Eric Gullichsen recounted 1993 Nvidia, the houseboat meeting with Huang, the DirectX pivot that nearly killed the company, and an options grant whose offer letter and cover sheet specify different vesting schedules. It cleared 800 points while the Nvidia safety launch got five. The biggest genuinely AI-technical thread was Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 prompting guide, mostly for conceding that asking Claude to “avoid a generic AI look” mostly swaps one default for another.
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