Afternoon edition — Saturday 31 October 2026

Tom's Hardware reports multiple user claims that Claude Code and the Opus 5.5 model now refuse to help recreate specific existing games, and in some cases block ordinary reverse-engineering and troubleshooting tasks. Rule text shared on X reads: 'Don't build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.'

Issues filed in Anthropic's Claude Code repository describe the refusals. One, opened on 30 October by the owner of a company that builds digital versions of board wargames for clients who own the games, says that around 27 October sessions began receiving a server-side instruction and now refuse work they had done for months. It asks Anthropic to narrow the rule to actual copying, offer an exemption path and document such changes in the changelog.

WIRED reports that Exin Therapeutics, a San Francisco start-up developing epilepsy drugs, connected an AI agent to a custom rig with a motorised needle, an injector and a camera, and let it carry out a brain injection on a living mouse. A veterinary surgeon performed the craniotomy first while the agent watched.

The agent picked a gene therapy from 19 options in a spreadsheet, chose the brain region and injection coordinates, and controlled the needle, volume and speed. According to chief executive Gabriel Ocana Santero, the team first tried Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, which refused to guide the needle, and then switched to Claude Sonnet 5, which agreed.

The team required the agent to propose its plan for human approval, fitted an emergency stop and blocked it from editing the equipment code. When a glitch broke the coordinate system, the agent saw the position was wrong but would not change the code, so a separate Opus 5 agent, not told that surgery was under way, fixed it. The procedure took slightly over an hour against a typical 45 minutes, and the therapy's effect on seizures has not yet been assessed.

Cisco's Talos threat-intelligence group published an analysis of VOLTA, a self-deleting Windows infostealer that names itself VOLTA-AUTODOXER. After stealing passwords, cookies, payment cards, crypto-wallet seed phrases, session tokens, SSH and cloud keys and screenshots, it builds a profile of the person behind the machine.

Talos says the profile includes geolocation and home address, employer, inferred birth year and card digits, and is enriched through the stolen sessions, for example by searching the victim's Gmail for receipts. The bundle is then sent to a model through OpenRouter with a prompt to write a 'target assessment' ranking the victim's assets by monetisation value and judging their security habits.

If a model refuses, the malware checks for phrases such as 'I can't' and falls back through a chain of up to three models, which Talos lists as ending with kimi-k2 and gemini-2.5-flash. Talos says the stealer uses no attacker-owned infrastructure.

Blockchain-analysis firm Chainalysis published a security notice on Friday evening saying that this month it detected an external actor using 'offensive agentic techniques' to gain unauthorised access to its systems and internal tools.

The company says user IDs, full names, email addresses and organisation role labels were accessed, but that it has found no evidence of access to investigation content, query results, clear-text passwords, MFA secrets or session tokens. It says the incident is unrelated to the recent Binance theft and that it is using large language models in a wider security review.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman met about 50 executives from Samsung's electronics, finance and biotech affiliates at a Samsung training centre in Yongin, south of Seoul, on Saturday, Samsung said. Yonhap reports that the session focused on how AI will reshape companies' decisions and operations.

Yonhap, citing industry sources, says SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won also met Altman the same day with executives from SK hynix and SK Telecom; it adds that analysts said they may have discussed high-bandwidth memory and data centres. Bloomberg, in a report carried by The Straits Times, says the visit builds on earlier agreements to supply memory for OpenAI's Stargate project, as memory shortages push up chip prices.