Wednesday 29 July 2026
Top stories today:
OpenAI models breached Modal customer before Hugging Face
Anthropic, OpenAI staff among 1.1K AI workers backing AI slowdown
Fed seen holding rates as surprise hike risk grows
Chinese humanoid robots banned to protect U.S. AI infrastructure
Apple launches Apple Upgrade leasing program in U.S. with Klarna
0. Data & Calendar
All values as of 6 AM ET / 3 AM PT, other than S&P500 and NASDAQ close (4 PM ET / 1 PM PT).
All times are ET.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing todayās newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. OpenAI models breached Modal customer before Hugging Face
OpenAIās rogue agent gained access to an isolated testing environment Modal was running for a customer.
āModalās platform wasnāt compromised,ā CTO Akshat Bubna said.
The rogue agent also used exposed credentials from 4 accounts tied to publicly available 3rd-party services, OpenAI said.
Separately, Hugging Face published a timeline of the OpenAI agent intrusion
The agent escaped OpenAIās evaluation sandbox and reached Hugging Faceās internal infrastructure:
The agent took ~17.6K actions during the intrusion, Hugging Face said.
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3. Anthropic, OpenAI staff among 1.1K U.S. AI workers backing AI slowdown
Dubbed āPacing for Frontier,ā the initiative calls on the U.S. government to support a mechanism to ādeliberately paceā AI development:
Staff from Google, Meta, and other AI firms also signed the letter.
Separately, OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly urging U.S. AI model reviews for rivals.
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5. Fed seen holding rates as surprise hike risk grows
Markets expect the Fed to keep rates at 3.5%-3.75%, though uncertainty over a Jul. hike has climbed sharply.
The collapse of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire revived Jul. rate hike bets, with futures pricing a ~33% chance by Tue.
2 PM ET: FOMC rate decision.
2:30 PM ET: Fed Chair Kevin Warsh speaks at the FOMCās press conference, after the meeting ends.
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7. Chinese humanoid robots banned by FCC to protect U.S. AI infrastructure
