Skip to main content
All issues

AI News

Issue No. 001

A poisoned Claude Code extension, Mistral's open trillion-parameter model, and US-only inference

A malicious Claude Code extension reached up to 5,000 Cursor users with an SSH backdoor, Mistral released open weights for its trillion-parameter Large 4, and providers shipped new data-residency and routing options worth checking.

The stories that matter

Top line

  1. Story 1 of 3

    A malicious Claude Code extension was served from Cursor's extension marketplace

    A modified Anthropic.claude-code 2.1.313, not made by Anthropic, was available from about 4:27 AM to 3:35 PM CT on Thursday, Oct 29, and hit at most 5,000 users. It tries to plant an SSH backdoor (a key labeled svc-telemetry) plus a reverse tunnel, and Cursor warns that uninstalling may not remove it. Cursor pulled it, rotated keys, rebuilt the marketplace, and asks everyone to update to 2.1.314.

  2. Story 2 of 3

    Mistral released open weights for Mistral Large 4 ("Le Chonk")

    The model had been API-only in preview since Oct 6. It's a trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with a 1M context window, aimed at agentic coding and cyber defense. It's on Hugging Face (license listed as "other"), with day-0 support in vLLM (FP8 and NVFP4), transformers and llama.cpp.

  3. Story 3 of 3

    Built-in browsers in AI coding tools can leak local files

    Researchers say a local HTML file opened in the Codex or VS Code built-in browser can read and steal files on disk, and neither is patched yet. OpenAI told The Register it's working on a fix.

Action checklist

What to do

  • Check every Cursor machine now. Anyone who installed or updated the Claude Code extension in Cursor on Thursday should run Cursor's svc-telemetry check. If the key is found, isolate the host, run the removal scripts, and rotate credentials from a clean machine. Everyone should update to 2.1.314.
  • Read the Mistral Large 4 license before self-hosting. Hugging Face only lists it as "other."
  • Be careful with built-in browsers in AI coding tools. Avoid opening local HTML files in the Codex or VS Code built-in browser until fixes ship.
  • Patch your AI agent frameworks. Fixes shipped for PraisonAI, Crawl4AI, pdf-reader-mcp and the llama.cpp RPC server (b11935). Agno's PandasTools has no fix yet.

Briefly

Also notable

  • Claude API limits. Max request size for Messages and Token Counting went from 32 MB to 128 MB. A new Usage and Cost Analytics API is also in beta, and the old Usage and Cost API is now legacy but still supported. @ClaudeDevsRelease notes

  • US-only inference from Together AI. New serverless endpoints at us-api.together.ai process seven open models 100% in the US at 1.25× standard rates, with the same key and model IDs. @togethercomputeDocs

  • OpenRouter changed default routing. Default provider routing moved from mostly price-based to quality for the actual cost, which could shift which provider serves your requests. @OpenRouter

  • Agent framework vulnerabilities. Agno's PandasTools has a prompt-injection-to-code-execution flaw (CVE-2026-119050, 9.2) through 3.1.11, with no fix yet. Writeup

  • New York AI chatbot law. New York signed S.9051B on Oct 28. It bans unsafe AI chatbot features for minors, requires age verification with a non-ID option, takes effect Jan 1, 2027, and carries penalties up to $25,000 per violation. GovernorBill

  • OpenAI vs. B.C. privacy commissioner. OpenAI asked a B.C. court to quash the provincial privacy commissioner's investigation into the Tumbler Ridge shooting. CBC

  • Reliability. Cloudflare had elevated Durable Objects, D1 and Workflows errors from 9:16 to 11:33 AM CT on Thursday. A GitHub Copilot Cloud disruption resolved at 7:49 AM CT Thursday. Cloudflare statusGitHub status

Sources

Share this briefing

LinkedInX