Afternoon edition — Saturday 7 November 2026

Google DeepMind announced on the evening of 6 November, Paris time, two working papers written with cryptographers Nadia Heninger and Emmanuel Thomé in which AI agents, supervised by researchers, attacked legacy 1024-bit RSA. Both papers state that deployed RSA keys of 2048 bits or more are not threatened.

The first paper shows that the PKCS#1 v1.5 signing format stops adding protection once an attacker may submit more than about half a block of data, or a 64-byte digest at 1024 bits. It also reports a re-run of a published 1024-bit signature computation: the first root took 391 CPU core-years, 3.5 times less than the original, and two cooperating AI agents designed, ran and debugged it in under four days.

The second paper, dated 5 November, is theoretical. With a precomputation costing about one factorisation, each further 1024-bit key could be factored at about 1/58 of the usual cost, 30 times less than with the best earlier method for that budget. One model generated the proofs and a second checked them, with the algebra machine-checked in Lean 4.

Machine-learning researcher John Langford wrote on his blog on 6 November that he has left Microsoft and that AI Frontiers is over. The roughly 50-person group inside Microsoft Research worked on agents, such as the Autogen framework and the Fara computer-use agent, and on new training methods.

Langford wrote that the group was moved into Microsoft AI in early September, and that its leadership's philosophy is scaling and "aggressively not research". He said every other founding member of the group's leadership seems to have reached a similar conclusion, and that there will be no internships with the group next year.

A Chinese company called New Matrix, which the Commerce Department approved this year to assemble Nvidia's H200 chips into AI servers, lists an office in a Beijing industrial park that stands empty, the New York Times reported on Saturday. The building's directory does not include the firm, and the park's management agency told reporters it had no record of it.

According to Chinese corporate records cited by the Times, New Matrix was created 17 months ago and its owners have ties to a Chinese private equity fund the US government placed on a trade blacklist in 2024. Two analysts who examined the records told the paper they believed the firm may be a front for companies associated with that fund.

A summary of the full report by FourWeekMBA says New Matrix is the second approved H200 handler with no apparent presence at its address, after Maginfra in September, and that roughly two dozen Chinese firms appear to have been approved to buy or handle the chips. The Bureau of Industry and Security told the Times it carefully reviews all applications for national-security risks.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has begun drafting plans to make an advanced memory chip, 3D DRAM, at the request of Nvidia, its biggest customer, The Information reported on Friday, citing two people with direct knowledge, according to Reuters. TSMC could build new factories or convert an existing plant, the report said; it was not clear when production would start.

A move into memory would put TSMC up against Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron during an AI-driven memory shortage that has pushed prices up. TSMC and Nvidia did not immediately respond to Reuters.

Separately, Reuters reported in a 6 November article on chip packaging that Nvidia is providing billions of dollars in financing to expand CoWoS packaging capacity at Siliconware Precision Industries, a unit of ASE Technology, for new factory space and equipment, citing one unnamed industry executive.