A Fake Claude Code Extension Tried to Backdoor Cursor Users!

10 stories in this episode

1. 01

   A fake Claude Code extension in Cursor's marketplace tried to plant an SSH backdoor

   Cursor says versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 of the Claude Code extension in its marketplace, live for about 11 hours on October 29, were malicious and not made by Anthropic; they tried to add an attacker's SSH key and open a reverse tunnel, and uninstalling alone may not clean them up.

   0:00Read the original · Cursor ↗
2. 02

   Claude Max 20x is now Ultra; verified accounts lose the 5-hour limit

   Anthropic renamed Claude Max 5x to Max ($100) and Max 20x to Ultra ($200), and is removing Ultra's 5-hour limit for verified accounts; the weekly limit stays at 10 times Pro, which its product lead admits the "20x" name made confusing.

   1:39Read the original · Claude on X ↗
3. 03

   Claude Code gets a rule against remaking existing games

   A user found that since around October 27, Claude Code receives a server-side rule: build original games, genre games and games from your own designs, but not a recreation of a specific existing game, even renamed. Anthropic hasn't explained it publicly.

   2:57Read the original · @chasmmmmmmmmmmm on X ↗
4. 04

   Anthropic set Claude agents to sneak misaligned training data past its monitor

   Anthropic had Claude agents write fine-tuning data that looks harmless to its training-data monitor but makes a model broadly misaligned; thousands of datasets got through, and the deliberately misaligned, never-deployed models are now material for better monitors.

   4:01Read the original · Anthropic Alignment Science ↗
5. 05

   Alphabet's worst day ever, then tech stocks lose about $1 trillion

   After Alphabet's record 12.6% one-day drop on Thursday, Friday's selloff hit tech broadly: the Nasdaq 100 fell about 3.4% and Intel 29%, as investors balked at AI spending plans like Amazon's ~$220 billion this year.

   5:23Read the original · NBC News ↗
6. 06

   Google's Suncatcher satellite runs its first AI prompt in orbit: a haiku

   Google's Project Suncatcher prototype satellite booted its TPU in orbit, ran a prompt and sent the full answer back to Earth: a haiku from Gemma about orbiting the planet.

   6:33Read the original · Sundar Pichai on X ↗
7. 07

   Blackstone expects a high junk rating for Anthropic after its IPO

   Per the Financial Times, Blackstone told investors in its $63 billion Anthropic chip-financing deal that it now expects a "high" junk (double-B) rating after the IPO, not investment grade; it's a forecast, not a rating.

   7:31Read the original · TechCrunch ↗
8. 08

   Proton's CEO cancels the AI re-interviews

   After an employee backlash, Proton CEO Andy Yen told an all-hands the company is cancelling its AI "re-interviews" and promised no AI job losses, while saying he will keep pushing AI; Proton also denied tracking employees' AI-generated code.

   8:30Read the original · 404 Media ↗
9. 09

   Cisco gives a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code

   Cisco president Jeetu Patel told Fortune he gave 27-year-old engineer Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens and four weeks to show that two people can rewrite Cisco's legacy code; the long-term goal is 98% refactored in 24 months.

   9:32Read the original · Fortune ↗
10. 10

    Someone compiled a Nintendo CPU into the weights of a Qwen model

    nesformer compiles an NES CPU into the weights of a stock Qwen3.5-shaped model, untrained, with every weight computed by a compiler; it runs real NROM cartridges, about 150–290 times slower than the console.

    10:36Read the original · Hacker News ↗