LastPass says hackers stole customers' personal information, support case records, and sales data by breaching market research partner Klue. The password manager told TechCrunch that its own systems and password vaults were unaffected. However, the hackers used their access to obtain "reams of data about LastPass customers," the report says. From the report: In a blog post that shared information about the incident, LastPass said the hackers took customers' names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as customer support case data and sales-related data. It's not yet known what was in the contents of customer support tickets, although they likely contain fragments of potentially private or sensitive information. Customers typically contact customer service when they are having a billing issue or need assistance in gaining access to their accounts. Past incidents involving customer support tickets have included credentials and government-issued identity documents. The last data breach LastPass reported was in 2022, when hackers stole the company's entire store of customer password vaults.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic's leading model following Mythos' release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on "AI and the American Dream." In the letter, Anthropic shared "new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities we have ever measured."

The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when "operators afliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba's AI lab" allegedly generated "more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts," Anthropic said. Violating Claude's terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign "targeted some of Claude's most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks." According to Anthropic, Alibaba evaded detection by "using obfuscation techniques and proxy networks." As Chinese demand for reliable obfuscation techniques increases, Anthropic warned there's already "a growing circumvention economy" to fuel an ever-expanding web of future distillation attacks. [...]

"Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom has any military affiliation," Alibaba said. "Its products and services are built for retail, logistics, and enterprise information technology -- not weapons, defense, or intelligence." Anthropic appears unconvinced, however, that Alibaba isn't working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without stronger interventions, these distillation attacks will "help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner."

To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws must be updated to allow AI firms to share information about evolving Chinese tactics to deter more threats. Second, the US needs more export controls on chips to hamstring Chinese access to advanced compute so that they simply can't train on US model outputs. That could make conducting distillation attacks pointless, Anthropic suggested. Finally, Congress should pass laws penalizing Chinese labs' "bad behavior" so that it's "more difficult and costly" to rely on distillation attacks to advance Chinese models. Penalties could include limiting Chinese firms from accessing US models or advanced US chips or from relying on data centers outside of China, Anthropic suggested.

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After Ford's automated quality-control systems and AI tools fell short, the automaker hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to mentor younger staff and reprogram the underperforming technology. "Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on a call Wednesday. "Over prior years, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles." Bloomberg reports: Those engineers were "at the heart" of Ford's efforts to turn around quality problems, said Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer. They now run mandatory meetings that rigorously troubleshoot quality problems and they have reprogrammed AI tools to head off glitches before they happen. "We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems" and not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. "We brought back technical specialists" and "they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor."

The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom -- and fear -- that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn't replace experience. "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," Poon said. But "we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals."

As a result of the efforts of the old hands, Ford vaulted above quality stalwarts such as Toyota and Honda on JD Power's bellwether survey that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership. Only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis topped Ford this year.

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F1.com’s Lawrence Barretto delves into the key talking points on Thursday at the Austrian Grand Prix.

After Lewis Hamilton's return to victory last time out in Barcelona, George Russell thinks that his former team mate is a clear threat in the title fight.

Red Bull are set to run an upgrade package at their home event in Austria, with Max Verstappen hopeful that this will bring "more performance to the car".

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc is hopeful that the upgrade will contribute to a clean weekend at the Austrian Grand Prix.

Kimi Antonelli admits that claiming this year's Formula 1 title is "not going to be a walk in the park" and has explained Mercedes' new intra-team orders ahead of this weekend's Austrian Grand Prix.

A company can learn a lot about the market by looking at its own employees. OpenAI says that its team members are switching from chatbots to agents as their primary form of AI interaction, a trend also detected (though less pronounced) among external organizations and users. Instead of one-off ChatGPT prompts, workers are asking Codex agents to tackle multi-step tasks that take long periods of time. And those doing so are increasingly non-developers. OpenAI insists that its findings have implications for other companies, labor researchers, and policymakers, not the least of which would be a brighter revenue picture for OpenAI. Longer running tasks consume more tokens, and to the extent those can be billed, that should help diminish hundreds of billions in debt obligations. "We find that agentic AI usage is growing rapidly: the number of active users has grown more than fivefold in the first half of 2026, with the most rapid increase occurring outside the initial audience of software developers," said company researchers and academics in a paper [PDF] titled, "The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex." OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request to clarify whether it incentivizes or encourages employees to use its AI tools – through internal communiques, token allocations, token use leaderboards, or tying tool usage to performance metrics. But we'll take it on faith that when there's enough Kool-Aid on-premises, employees may just develop a taste for it regardless of whether their jobs depend on Kool-Aid consumption. "Through August 2025, the average OpenAI worker spent less than 10 percent of their tokens on Codex," the biz explained in a blog post accompanying its paper (that suggests employee token allocations). "Now, every department, including non-technical departments such as Legal and Recruiting, uses Codex as their primary AI tool for work." Within OpenAI, 97.9 percent of employees are now using Codex, up from around 40 percent in August 2025. External organizations have also seen a usage uptick, to 17.3 percent presently. With individuals, Codex isn't much to speak of – about 0.7 percent. The thing about Codex is that, as an agent, it can operate for long periods of time. "Since the start of the year, the share of individual Codex users who submit at least one request for a task estimated to require more than eight hours for an experienced human to complete has increased nearly tenfold," the paper says. We note that comparing the time a human might take for a task (as estimated by an LLM-as-judge) to the time an AI model takes is only part of the picture if the workflow isn't entirely automated. Generating code at, say, 10x the rate a person might manage may expand the time required for code verification and deployment. OpenAI also points out that, since August 2025, non-developer usage of Codex has risen 137x for individuals, 189x for organizational users, and 12x within OpenAI. The company concedes that technical usage remains the dominant mode, but insists that adoption by non-devs shows how a broader set of knowledge workers can take on coding or technical tasks, such as automation, data transformation, and data analysis. "In June 2026, the median OpenAI employee in a legal role generated 13 times more monthly output tokens across Codex and ChatGPT than they did in November 2025," the paper says. Given that the number of US federal lawsuits filed against OpenAI and associated entities only grew about 11 percent (35 to 39) between the last six months of 2025 and the first six months of 2026, it looks like OpenAI's legal team, with its 13x token surge, is making the company's case for the productivity benefits of AI tools. ®

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

• Former boxing world champion to appear in court in July

• Cordina’s WBO bout against Abdullah Mason called off

The former boxing world champion Joe Cordina has been charged with “assault and threatening a person with an offensive weapon” following an incident at a petrol station in a Cardiff suburb in February.

The 34-year-old, a two-time IBF super-featherweight champion who was due to face Abdullah Mason for the WBO lightweight title next month, is set to appear at Cardiff magistrates court on 7 July.

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No 10 refused demand to immediately remove immigration minister over breach of ministerial code

Shabana Mahmood is locked in an extraordinary standoff with Keir Starmer after Downing Street refused to immediately sack her junior minister for breaching the ministerial code.

The home secretary has demanded that Mike Tapp, the immigration minister, should be sacked for writing an unauthorised article calling for overseas care workers to be exempt from hardline immigration reforms.

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ANTIBES (ANP/AFP) - Italië en Frankrijk willen na het aflopen van de VN-vredesmissie UNIFIL een nieuwe vredesmacht opzetten in Libanon, melden de landen na afloop van een ontmoeting in het Franse Antibes. Ze zeggen te willen voorkomen dat er een machtsvacuüm ontstaat als het mandaat van UNIFIL eind dit jaar na lange tijd afloopt.

UNIFIL telt op dit moment nog zo'n 7500 blauwhelmen uit bijna vijftig landen. Honderden van hen komen uit Italië en Frankrijk.

De Franse president Emmanuel Macron zei te willen voorkomen dat Libanon een "bruggenhoofd voor regionale escalatie" wordt. Volgens de Italiaanse premier Meloni kunnen Italië en Frankrijk daar absoluut een rol in spelen.

Ook tijdens de Libanese burgeroorlog in de jaren tachtig waren de twee landen onderdeel van een internationale coalitie in Libanon, samen met de Verenigde Staten. Die missie werd stopgezet vanwege aanvallen op de internationale troepen en omdat die er niet in slaagden de oorlog te stoppen.

Emily C. Hughes (Defector, 06/25/2026), "Diabolical Motherhood": "On June 25, 1976, three and a half years after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S., The Omen hit theaters ... In 2022, a few short months after the Dobbs decision, as stories were starting to filter out in the press about people dying and suffering after being denied abortions, production began on The First Omen. Arkasha Stevenson's prequel, released in 2024, is shockingly good." See also: Eleanor Johnson's brief video based on her interpretation of The Omen in Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism, 1968-1980. Trailers for The Omen (1976) and The First Omen (2024) may be unsettling. Also out this week, Monstrum's latest issue: "The Omen @ 50" with relevant essays on both films. Emily C. Hughes previously. Monstrum previously.

“Although fleeting, [sports] have the enduring power to inspire. For a few moments or a few days, divisions crumble, replaced by the beauty of kinship.”

@roelgroeneveld
Et... Courage !