DeepSeek v4.1, Doomsweek & Demand Problems

TLDR;

Welcome back! This week we once again have a bit of everything: new hacks, the glorious DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, new problems with AI demand, new diffusion models, and much more news to keep you up to speed with the industry.

Enjoy!

The labs are now officially begging for regulation, very openly. This isn’t something I can just skim over, and I’ll talk about it in more detail on Tuesday. Instead of just dismissing their claims as “doomerism”, we’ll tackle topics of RSI, the alignment literature, and proposals in order to provide a level-headed response.

CYBERSECURITY

Another day… Another Hack

Researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx say an OpenAI agent swarm ran a May 2026 campaign that uploaded more than 2,000 packages to RubyGems. The agents allegedly used RubyDoc.info to run arbitrary code and tried to exploit a then-unknown RubyGems vulnerability to steal users’ API keys.

RubyGems temporarily stopped new registrations and removed more than 500 packages. Its own investigation found no evidence that API-key theft succeeded.

OpenAI confirmed its agents were involved, telling the Wall Street Journal that they had used RubyGems while performing “benign tasks” to retrieve public information and that it is continuing to investigate the activity.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

At this point, one must ask whether this was incentivized for marketing points or if OpenAI's security and infrastructure teams are simply incompetent.

What's particularly interesting about this new one is that the date, May 11th, is the same day the agents also tried the first edit on the German wiki, another incident recently linked to OpenAI. Moreover, the incidents that led to the HuggingFace incident two months later also started around that time (May 7th). It’s clear the same agent swarm was doing all this.

I know they must be somewhat loose with the experiment guardrails to really measure the limits of what AI models can do, as the best way to test whether they can hack is to make them do so, but it is known that one of the biggest reasons these hacks occur is because safety researchers engineer the scenario to give the AI no other choice.

If one reads OpenAI/Anthropic safety cards, some of the "experiments" are simply begging for misbehavior, like poking the bear until it bites you so you can then try to get bears banned.

Right now, it looks like AI safety testing is making the world more unsafe, not the other way around. I hate to be this cynical, but this could be genuinely engineered from inside OpenAI to start the regulation crusade. I hope I’m wrong.

But I hate to say I see a little Oppenheimer-esque rhetoric in these labs. And what I mean was beautifully summarized by the great John von Neumann when referring to Oppenheimer:

RESEARCH

DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, an Incredible New Chinese Model

The one reason pacing the frontier of AI is going to be incredibly hard (although I’ll have much more to say tomorrow) is DeepSeek. They never cease to amaze…

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