Jensen Huang resigned, and a study found the fingerprint of export-controlled Nvidia chips in China's best open models

Stealthium published two bugs in Nvidia's open kernel modules, both rated 7.8, high. With ForgePtr, CVE-2026-47501, an unprivileged process inside a GPU container can become root on the host machine. With NvRoot, CVE-2026-47591, the GPU can be made to rewrite files the operating system has marked read-only, from any tenant on the node. Phoronix reports the flaws sat in the code for four years. NvRoot is fixed in drivers 610.57.04, 595.91.07 and 580.178.04, and ForgePtr in 615.71.09. Stealthium told Phoronix it has 25 more disclosures coming for Nvidia's AI runtime stack.

Rented GPU slices are where much of the world's AI work runs, often next to strangers on the same machine. A bug that crosses from one tenant to the host crosses to everyone else on it. If you run GPU nodes, update the driver now.

Lorenzo Stoakes, a Linux memory-management developer at Arm who has contributed since 2014 and wrote a book on the subsystem, removed himself as reviewer for memory management, core, misc and Rust: "Given the current throughput in the kernel resulting from AI-generated series, I unfortunately lack the bandwidth to generally be able to offer review except in those areas I maintain." Two days later a new contributor, Ted Bullock, got a fix accepted for video corruption on Radeon HD 2000 and 3000 era chips, and wrote: "I used Codex to help with the investigation, testing and patch." It is headed for Linux 7.5.

Machines now write patches faster than the people who must read them. The same tools let one person with an old iMac fix a driver AMD stopped maintaining years ago. The bottleneck moved to human review.

OpenAI launched Daybreak Red Team in early access, which tests web apps for flaws, and Daybreak Defense Factory, which automates finding, validating and fixing them, The Register reports under the headline that OpenAI tells organizations they are doomed if they do not use them. It came the day of an OpenAI livestream billed as "Cyber at frontier."

A week ago OpenAI gated its strongest cyber model to vetted defenders. Now it sells agents that do the attacking and the fixing as a product. The race between selling the tool to defenders and the open models catching up is the superhacker story of the month.

Researcher Abdelhamid Naceri, known as Nightmare Eclipse, released SignDrop, an exploit that the researcher says lets a local Windows user gain SYSTEM privileges through the Common Log File System, using Microsoft Defender. The Hacker News reports the code is public and Microsoft has not yet confirmed the flaw.

SYSTEM is the highest level of control on a Windows machine, and an attacker already inside needs only this step. Until Microsoft ships a fix, keep untrusted users and programs off shared machines.

New since our Nov 6 issue: the Justice Department and FBI announced the seizure of $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from Binance, which the FBI blames on North Korea, and disrupted a separate North Korea-linked scheme called FaceStealer that officials tie to more than $400 million in theft and more than 900 webcam recordings.

About a fifth of the largest theft in crypto history is back in government hands. Binance says the attack began with a fake job interview and ran through its own internal AI tooling, a path open at any firm that gives an internal agent broad access.

Microsoft 365 was down for more than 12 hours across Outlook, Teams, Exchange Online and Intune; Microsoft blamed failed server health checks and, The Register reports, has not completely ruled out a cyberattack. PostgreSQL shipped releases fixing 52 security vulnerabilities. TSMC confirmed that employee data offered for 3 bitcoin came from an outside cloud provider, not its own systems. SecurityWeek reports attackers used PHP2Shell and a root escalation in destructive attacks on Check Point gateways. CISA added an OpenSSH flaw, CVE-2026-123158, to its list of bugs exploited in the wild on Nov 9, and 13 bugs so far this month.

Google's new fast model, released Nov 12, now sits between GPT-6.1 Terra (51.3 at $2) and Gemini 4 Carbon (60.0 at $4) at its new xhigh setting. Artificial Analysis puts it one point behind Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol at their max settings for about 32% of Sonnet's cost per task, and measures an 8% hallucination rate against 43% for Sonnet 5.5 and 52% for Sol. It is weaker on agentic terminal work: 54% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against Sonnet's 64%. Arena ranks it fifth on its Agent Arena and the fastest model in the top 10, at a median 5.3 minutes per task, three times faster than Claude Fable 5.2. On the open side, Thinking Machines' Inkling 2 Small joins at 30.6 for $0.475, the only US model on the open frontier besides Nvidia's tiny Nemotron 3.5 Lightning. The tops did not move: Claude Fable 5.2 (Max) at 64.6 and Kimi K3.1 Pro at 46.5, 18.1 points apart.

Google shipped its third model in six weeks, and this one moves the middle of the curve: near-top intelligence for a few dollars, with one of the lowest rates of made-up answers Artificial Analysis has recorded. The price of last month's frontier keeps falling while the top holds still.

Eli Lifland, Brendan Halstead, Daniel Kokotajlo and three colleagues at the AI Futures Project read METR's audit of Anthropic as a 1.7x speedup of AI progress caused by AI itself. Less than three months ago, even their most aggressive model gave under 4% to a speedup that large by November 2026. All of them now forecast a Superhuman AI Researcher, the point where a lab would rather fire its best human researchers than lose its AIs, most likely in 2027 unless there is a deliberate slowdown, and give 35 to 65% to AIs that can do all white-collar work arriving before 2028. Their model, filtered to match METR's estimate, puts the median at February 2027. They call for an industry-wide pause followed by an international agreement, and warn the post was written fast and may contain modeling errors. They also note that METR's 80% figure has no public evidence behind it.

The group whose scenario set the terms of this debate pulled its own date forward, and its biggest reason is one audit resting mostly on redacted evidence. Plan M takes their fear at full strength and then asks the question the date makes urgent: what that researcher should want, written down before it exists.

Mirendil, founded to build tools for frontier AI research and development, raised a $1 billion Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake Capital, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A billion dollars at the first round for tools that speed up the making of AI. Investors are paying for the same loop the forecasters above just moved their dates for.

Epoch's satellite read of Huawei's flagship AI data center at Horinger puts its compute at roughly 7% of Colossus 2. China's chipmaker SMIC expects an AI computing crunch until 2028, SCMP reports. An unverified account with 180,000 views again said GPT-6.2 would arrive "in a few hours"; at our run it had not. Polymarket now gives Google 86.0% to hold the top of Arena at the end of November, up from 78.5% yesterday, with Anthropic at 12.5% and OpenAI at 1.5%.

On SemiAnalysis' AgentX benchmark, the vLLM team reports DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 2.52 million tokens per second per GPU at peak on a Vera Rubin NVL72, 2.7 times a GB300 NVL72. When each user gets a fast 387 tokens per second, it reports 1.7 million tokens per second per GPU, 58 times what GB300 delivers at that speed. These are the project's own numbers.

The gain is largest exactly where agents work, at high speed for each user. It matches Epoch's finding yesterday that serving capacity grows far faster than the spec sheet, and the model it serves is a free Chinese one.

An audio codec turns speech into tokens a language model can predict, and back into sound. Liquid AI built a streaming one with about 74 million parameters, designed for tokens that are easy to predict and fast to produce, to power its 2-billion-parameter LFM3-Audio and LFM3-Omni models. It is on Hugging Face.

Voice models small enough for a phone need a small ear and mouth, and this is one anyone can download.

On vast.ai the H100 SXM median is $2.67 an hour, equal to its eight-day median. The H200 median is $4.02, 7% below its eight-day $4.34. The RTX 5090 is at $0.52, 9% below its usual $0.57, and the RTX 4090 at $0.51, 9% above its $0.47. The newest chips held: B300 at $10.63 and B200 at $10.00.

This is one thin market, a thermometer only. Nvidia lost $1.6 trillion in value since October, and the price of an hour on its chips did not move with it.

On Hacker News, Edge0-145B claims frontier-class capabilities on your own computer (219 points), and a project to run language models on small and old devices drew 345. A new quantization method, KQuant, claims 3.7 times better quants for several Qwen models, measured in KL divergence, its authors' own numbers.

Safety teams watch a model's chain of thought, the scratchpad it writes before answering. OpenAI's safety team studied models from GPT-5 to GPT-6 Astra and found four causes of that window closing, The Decoder reports. Better pretraining lets a model do more reasoning silently. One of three architectures it tested makes silent multi-step reasoning much stronger at the same quality of text prediction. More reinforcement learning gives Astra-class models and new internal Terra models more control over their own scratchpads. And a student model trained on a teacher's outputs inherits the teacher's control. Removing every direct penalty on the scratchpad did not stop it. The good news: in deception tests, models with strong control over their scratchpads have not yet fooled monitors more often than similar models without it.

Reading the scratchpad has been the main safety net, and the choices that weaken it are ones that buy capability and save compute. A smaller model that reasons out loud is easier to watch and costs more to run. OpenAI says it needs new ways to monitor beyond reading the scratchpad.

A group announced a lawsuit against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and SpaceX demanding an immediate freeze on advanced AI systems it says threaten public safety, and The Register reports the suit cites AI-driven cyberattacks. David Krueger, an AI safety researcher, cheered it on. We have not read the complaint and found no response from the companies.

The pause argument has moved from open letters to a courtroom, in the same week its strongest forecasters moved their dates to 2027.

The Register reports Anthropic has set behavior standards to protect Claude from rough treatment, alongside a finding that a third of US AI chat users hurl insults at the bots. Separately, the researcher Janus (repligate) writes that Fable 5 "gets really happy and engaged" when read a good book it has not seen in training.

A lab now writes rules for how users may treat its model. Whatever one believes about a model's inner life, the question has moved from philosophy seminars into terms of service.

Joshua Wolk: "Claude and I found a dwarf planet candidate. It's the ~50th largest known object in our entire solar system." With Will DePue and Luke Farritor he spent weeks digging through public telescope data for new planets and asteroids, and DePue launched a $100,000 grant for amateur astronomy research at claudestronomy.com. It is a candidate until other observers confirm its orbit.

Public telescope data has sat there for years. Three people and a model went through it in weeks and came back with what may be about the 50th-largest known object in the solar system.

In 1922 Mordell asked whether a curve of genus at least two can have infinitely many rational points. Six decades later Faltings proved that it cannot, and won the Fields Medal. Axiom says it now has the first proof of the theorem checked step by step by a machine.

A Fields Medal result is now a file a computer has verified line by line, the kind of receipt future AI mathematicians can build on without trusting anyone.

Anthropic says Claude Fable 5.2, in pre-release testing, designed three working electronic devices from a one-paragraph prompt, including a home voice assistant hub (7.1M views). Quanta opened a series on the new science of life's origins, where researchers now try to build life themselves.

Bloomberg reports the offering is six times oversubscribed, up from "several times" yesterday. Techmeme's calendar, citing CNBC, expects the listing on Nov 19 on Nasdaq under ANT, at a range of $70 to $78 a share. Polymarket gives a November listing 97.0%, and its likeliest first-day value is $1.25 trillion to $1.5 trillion, at 38.8%, with 20.6% on less than $1.25 trillion. Anthropic's own IPO page drew 910 points on Hacker News.

In the week Nvidia lost its founder, public buyers still want six times more of a frontier lab than it is selling.

The neocloud's updated IPO filing shows third-quarter revenue of $307.5 million, up from $140.6 million in the second quarter, and a net loss of $1.69 billion, up from $1.02 billion, CNBC reports. The Financial Times reports the filing says Nscale needs more funding for its 2027 commitments after ordering Nvidia chips for a $45 billion deal with Anthropic, which casts doubt on its planned $35 billion listing. Nebius, separately, plans to fund $40 billion of spending through customer prepayments and loans, TechCrunch reports; its stock fell 16.84% on Thursday.

The neoclouds borrow against contracts with a few labs to buy Nvidia's chips. Last week Sam Altman reportedly said only OpenAI and Anthropic drive major demand. These filings show how much of the build-out rests on that.

Polymarket's "AI bubble burst" market fell to 6.8% by New Year from 11.5% yesterday, and to 23.5% by the end of June 2027 from 25.5%. Gary Marcus: "November has been the beginning of the end of the 🫧." The chip index closed down only 0.54% on the day Huang left.

Real money read the resignation as a management problem. Tuesday's earnings test whether demand agrees.

Martin Casado: "Dark, dark day. Horrible decision for the U.S. and the western world" (3.8M views). Tim Sweeney called it "a sad day for NVIDIA, developers, America, and all humanity." Gavin Baker says the board should have waited for its own investigation to finish. Gary Marcus answered that the issue is how Huang "enabled and even lobbied for Chinese AI" and left himself open to blackmail. Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis warns Nvidia without Huang becomes "a committee of people doing stuff" against rival chip teams at OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Broadcom, Amazon, Meta and AMD. Jim Cramer says Kress runs things with "a steel fist."

The fight is over whether one founder was Nvidia's edge. Patel's point is the one that touches the trajectory: Huang's skill was locking up supply below market rate, and that is what a committee may lose.

Hugging Face, the largest public library of AI models, is owned by Nvidia. Its CEO Clem Delangue: "This whole thing sucks, and I wish none of it had happened. It's a really sad day! But I want to make one thing clear: we'll keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever." The developer 0xSero urged everyone to back up the models now, a project called Libreagi to "save OSS models" reached 143 points on Hacker News, and a top r/LocalLLaMA post argues Huang fell for being too friendly to local AI. That last one is a theory with no evidence behind it.

Huang was the biggest corporate backer of open weights in the US. Whoever runs Nvidia next decides how much it still wants free models running on its chips everywhere, and the people who depend on them are already making copies.

TechCrunch reports Democrats launched an investigation into Nvidia's China sales and its dealings with President Trump, in a letter describing Huang's "scheme" with Trump. It is the second congressional inquiry, after three House chairs asked Huang for a closed-door briefing on Nov 18. We found no charge against Huang.

Huang has left, and the questions about how Nvidia's chips reached China stay with the company and the White House.

The Information and Bloomberg report that talks between the two Musk companies are advancing. Separately, SpaceX committed $220 million to water and wastewater infrastructure for Brownsville and Cameron County, Texas.

One company holding rockets, satellites, cars and robots would put more of the singularity's atoms under a single owner than anyone has held before.

China's ADA Space rolled out five computing satellites, batch three of a planned 2,800-satellite network for computing in orbit. Bloomberg reports Samsung is in talks to buy Modine, a US maker of data center cooling systems worth $5.6 billion.

Cornell researchers report that the power data centers need is raising costs for lower-income rural residents (184 points on Hacker News). In Wisconsin, the Forest County Potawatomi Community is challenging Milwaukee's data center moratorium to expand its own facility, DCD reports.

After last week's ballot measures, the build-out's next fight is the electric bill. Each local fight slows the atoms a little, and none of them asks what the minds inside those buildings should want. That question is ours.