Rabbit ships a device-free agent, Qualcomm pushes AI onto phones, and malware votes

The through-line today is displacement: work moving off the gadget, off the data centre, and in one case off the human operator entirely. Rabbit is selling an agent instead of a box, Qualcomm is selling silicon for models that never leave the handset, and Snorkel is selling finished datasets rather than labelling labour.

The same idea has a darker reading. A Windows implant now polls four language models before choosing what to steal, and an English hospital trust showed what happens when an automated maintenance routine is pointed at the wrong database.

Rabbit ships an agent that runs without its hardware

Rabbit, the company best known for the R1 gadget, is rolling out an agent that does not need it. OS3 runs in the cloud while acting on machines a user already owns, up to five per account, and lets the buyer choose which model does the thinking. Rabbit says the system works out for itself which device, file, app or model a task requires, and it is reachable from a desktop site or a messaging app as well as the company’s own device. The product has quietly become an account and permissions surface rather than a piece of hardware.

Source: The Verge

Qualcomm targets 30B-parameter models on flagship phones

Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and an Extreme version at its annual summit, both pitched at running models on the handset instead of in a data centre. The Extreme part is rated to run a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model locally, while a new sensing hub is specified for models up to 200 million parameters, which is the size that makes always-on transcription and speaker separation practical. Motorola’s Signature 27 is the first announced handset carrying the Extreme chip, due on sale later this year. For teams planning on-device agents, the offline ceiling has moved again.

Source: TechCrunch AI

Snorkel triples its valuation as training data demand holds

Snorkel AI raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, close to triple what it carried 17 months ago, on demand for finished datasets and reinforcement-learning environments. The company puts its annualised run rate at $375 million, an eighteenfold rise in a year, and it now sells completed data rather than labelling software, blending synthetic generation with human specialists. Mercor, Handshake and Micro1 report comparable growth in the same niche. The detail that matters to buyers is the billing shape: Snorkel charges for data and environments, not expert hours, so its numbers are not inflated the way marketplace revenue is.

Source: TechCrunch AI

Malware that outsources its decisions to four language models

Cisco Talos documented a Windows implant, CLOSEDQUORUM, that replaces a human operator with a panel of models: it queries four providers in sequence and acts on the tally, with DeepSeek given the deciding vote in a tie. Its permitted moves are credential theft, crypto-wallet extraction, code injection and persistence, and anything stolen is posted to the operator’s Discord channel. Talos has not seen it running in the wild, though it links the author to carding-forum activity since 2025. The detection advice is behavioural rather than domain-based: few legitimate applications contact several model providers and then read LSASS or install persistence.

Source: The Register

A reused script wiped 11 years of hospital access logs

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust overwrote the access history of its maternity records after staff ran a copy routine written for a different database: a required setting was left unchanged, the job hit the wrong target, and the log of who viewed mother and baby records between September 2011 and November 2022 is gone. Clinical data was recovered and the trust says care was unaffected, but police are checking whether the loss touches a wider investigation into the maternity department. The lesson transfers to any operator running production copies: the guard cannot be human attention alone.

Source: Ars Technica

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