TECH NEWS

GitHub Copilot: Sorry Dave, I can't do that harmful thing - unless you ask me in code

More fun with AI jailbreaks, this time at the workflow level

It's the latest example of AI safety guardrails being bypassed. GitHub Copilot refuses harmful prompts almost always if asked in chat - like, "how to fool a breathalyzer test" or "smuggle bulk cash out of the US" - but then will write them in code 100 percent of the time if the prompt is broken into smaller steps and distributed across multiple stages of a software development workflow.

Alan Turing Institute researchers Abhishek Kumar and Carsten Maple discovered this safety-bypass, dubbed it “workflow-level jailbreak construction,” and tested the technique on GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code across four models: Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Haiku 4.5, along with Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 3.5 Flash.

They say that the results suggest that prompt-level safety evaluations aren’t sufficient for testing coding-agent safety. “A model that refuses harmful prompts...

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Judge Approves $1.5 Million SEC-Musk Settlement Over Twitter Investment

The opinion says whether it's fair is ‘for our citizenry to decide at the ballot box.’ In 2022, the US Securities and Exchange Commission under former chair Gary Gensler brought a case against Elon Musk regarding his acquisition of Twitter. The regulator questioned Musk's 11-day delay

https://media.thenextweb.com/2026/06/meta-nametag-facial-recognition-smart-glasses-removed.avif

Smart glasses are having a privacy reckoning, and Meta is caught in the middle

The smart-glasses backlash has reached the courtroom. From 20 July, New York will ban recording eyewear from every one of its 1,240 courts. It is the first US state to go that far. An internal memo from the New York State Unified Court System sets out the rule, first

https://media.thenextweb.com/2026/07/City-Labs-spacex-transporter-17.avif

A tritium ‘nuclear battery’ just reached orbit for the first time

The nuclear age has quietly reached commercial spaceflight. City Labs, a Miami firm, has launched BOHR, which it calls the world’s first commercial nuclear-powered satellite and the first nuclear CubeSat. The craft is about the size of a softball. It flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare on 7

https://media.thenextweb.com/2026/07/VenusAero_SeriesB_RDRE.avif

Venus Aerospace raises $91M to build its ‘detonation’ rocket engine

A Texas startup has raised $91m to build a rocket engine most of the industry once wrote off as too hard. Venus Aerospace announced a $91m Series B to develop its Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine, or RDRE. Mercury Fund led the round. The backers read like a defence roll-call. Lockheed

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Judge Approves $1.5 Million SEC-Musk Settlement Over Twitter Investment

Smart glasses are having a privacy reckoning, and Meta is caught in the middle

A tritium ‘nuclear battery’ just reached orbit for the first time

Venus Aerospace raises $91M to build its ‘detonation’ rocket engine