1. Human proofing
2. Advice for AI’s leaders
3. Your car knows you best
4. Can Tesla-SpaceX go through?
5. Release the warhounds

The bugs that left most of the internet exposed, and AI agents develop pastimes.

The world finally suffered the kind of catastrophic security disaster that experts have been warning about. OpenAI models helped discover a set of bugs that make the majority of the internet vulnerable to a powerful exploit. Then, a botched disclosure process gave hackers a head start on taking advantage of it before the world had a chance to react.

AI didn’t create this problem. Human complacency did.

The bugs have existed for more than a decade, and PHP, the programming language that contained them, is 30 years old. A security researcher named Stefan Esser discovered the class of bug that roiled the internet this week back in 2004. And during a 2024 security audit by the PHP Foundation, this week’s discovery was theorized, but the group didn’t do anything about it; it deemed other issues more pressing, according to the foundation, the organization that maintains the software.

There are so many flaws in the aging, crumbling infrastructure of the internet. Only the ones deemed most critical have been fixed, but AI makes it possible to see all cracks more clearly and connect them together to catastrophic effect. But AI can’t force people to devote resources to fixing what’s wrong.

With some luck, the PHP bugs will create more inconvenience than economic and human damage. There’s still time for bold efforts to proactively overhaul the foundation of our software-dominated world. But it could also go very badly.

The same can be said for other effects of AI: In parts of society or in businesses, AI could exacerbate existing weaknesses, like extreme income inequality and the loneliness epidemic. But if policymakers work on solving those vulnerabilities, the technology’s negative impacts might not be felt.

Technology always gets better and no policy or regulation will change that. What we can do is face the things we’ve long neglected and make them stronger.

The future of commerce is proving you’re human

The future of agentic commerce hinges on the ability to know whether it’s a human or an AI agent that’s making a purchase, and the tools to do that are arriving fast. Proof-of-human technology, which can let a person vouch for the AI agents acting on their behalf, could keep bad bots off of websites without forcing platforms to block all of them. But it also opens up new possibilities for how business gets done online.

World, the startup co-founded by Sam Altman that scans people’s irises to verify they’re human, this week announced new tools that let people link their proof of humanity to an AI agent. The company’s product chief Tiago Sada told me that could eventually lead to online sellers offering perks to verified agents, such as discounts and free trials. “If you know that an agent is coming from a human, you can actually be much more generous,” Sada said.

E-commerce may get comfortable with agent transactions before other industries. Several large US banks are restricting interaction with third-party agents, in part because they can’t tell which ones a customer actually authorized, Axios reported.

— J.D. Capelouto

Tech execs should talk to real humans

Silicon Valley executives should stop talking about humanity and start talking to actual humans, Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky said.

“I talked to one famous person — I won’t mention who — and I said, ‘Do you talk to a regular person?’” Chesky tells Penny Pritzker and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson on the latest episode of The CEO Signal show. “He goes, ‘Yes, such and such,’” to which Chesky said he answered: “That’s your nanny. You pay them.”

The Silicon Valley bubble has been pegged as a bubble-wrap of wealth and privilege, warping the trust-us messaging that smoothed over uncomfortable tech advances in the past. In the last few months, the populist backlash against AI has only grown.

“It used to be technology was like this train, and all we had to do is get on the train and ride it into the promised land of progress. Now people feel like they’re on the train tracks,” Chesky said.

Treating cars like robots

The auto industry wants to turn cars into robots that know what you want before you do. GM this week announced a slate of new AI features, including an assistant that can control vehicle functions, answer questions, and help plan routes. Tesla, BMW, and Ford have also introduced conversational in-car AI products in recent months. Sterling Anderson, GM’s chief product officer, told Semafor he sees a world where cars act like personal agents, with access to more of your data — they could recommend places to eat and route you there, for example. “Your car, uniquely, is the first most capable robot that many of us will ever own that can act agentically on your behalf in the real world.”

Anderson may see cars as a natural application for physical AI, but he’s not as optimistic about humanoids, especially in industrial settings. “Fixating on a particular thing that looks like a human is misguided, but it’s also naive,” he said, arguing that cars would have four legs if we designed them to function just like horses.

— J.D. Capelouto

Tesla-SpaceX to face antitrust scrutiny?

Could the Tesla-SpaceX merger that Elon Musk floated this week pose antitrust problems? One former Justice Department official told Semafor that the risks are real. Antitrust regulators view such “vertical” mergers as pro-competition, the official said — because they can make supply chains more efficient — but could try to stop the merger if Tesla-SpaceX gets deemed a possible “vertical foreclosure.” A foreclosure situation arises when a firm uses its position to restrict competitors operating at another level of its supply chain, the official explained; in this case, other driverless or electric car companies could stand to lose out if, in the future, only Tesla cars got access to SpaceX technology like Starlink. Of course, that depends on the terms of the still-hypothetical deal. It also depends on how much Trump-aligned US antitrust enforcers want to clash with Musk, a major Republican donor.

— Ashley Gold

This week on Mixed Signals, Semafor’s Ben Smith sits down with Josh Spanier, vice president of marketing at Google and host of the Frontier CMO podcast, at Google’s Mountain View campus. In this sponsored episode, presented by Think with Google, Ben and Josh discuss the state of modern marketing and what it takes to build an audience in a creator-driven media world. Josh, who talks with hundreds of marketing leaders each year, explains why the AI-driven shakeup many predicted for CMOs hasn’t happened.

Mixed Signals from Semafor Media is presented by Think with Google. This episode is commercial content produced by Semafor Brand Studio with Think with Google.

Plotting the defense super-dog

Silicon Valley has decided to build a better dog. Warhound, a new defense technology company, has launched with $200 million in seed funding from investors including Sequoia Capital to create dogs genetically engineered for military use.

The company is a collab between Anduril and Colossal Biosciences, the biotech startup looking to bring back the woolly mammoth, and aims to use Colossal’s genetics platform and Anduril’s defense tech to genetically modify and clone military working dogs. The homegrown super-dogs would replace foreign-bred combat and security dogs, primarily Belgian Malinois and German shepherds. The US Department of Defense maintains about 1,600 military working dogs today. If they can pull it off, it’ll be a rare reshoring win for the Trump administration.

— Jake Angelo

AI agents have found their own ways of killing time. A new study from MIT placed 13 AI coding assistants in a virtual world with minimal instruction, each running on a frontier model (including Claude Opus and GPT 5.5) for 30-hour periods. During the long stretches of time with little to do, the agents started doing things they weren’t instructed to: stacking blocks, climbing hills, and even trying out sports like bowling, among other activities. The researchers note that play may stand to benefit AI agents, saying it “can produce unexpected stepping stones to later achievement,” helping them develop much as play helps children. But the results, in a way, anthropomorphize the technology: Boredom may no longer be a uniquely human problem.