Daily Tech News 17 February 2026

• After all the fuss, OpenClaw, fomerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot until Anthropic made rumbling noises, isn't all that. (Tech Crunch)
  
  What it does achieve is making it the easy things easy and the bad things also easy. Some people who really should know better jumped into the cheerleading:

  "What's currently going on at [Moltbook] is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently," Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and previous AI director at Tesla, wrote on X at the time.

  I have no face and I must palm.

  Before long, it became clear we did not have an AI agent uprising on our hands. These expressions of AI angst were likely written by humans, or at least prompted with human guidance, researchers have discovered.
  
  "Every credential that was in [Moltbook's] Supabase was unsecured for some time," Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, explained to TechCrunch. "For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there, because it was all public and available."

  There were in fact a hundred times as many accounts on Moltbook as there were Moltbots.
  
  Moltbook was a hopelessly insecure social network for Moltbots, which is... Also hopelessly insecure.

  Ahl's security tests of OpenClaw and Moltbook help illustrate Sorokin's point. Ahl created an AI agent of his own named Rufio and quickly discovered it was vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. This occurs when bad actors get an AI agent to respond to something - perhaps a post on Moltbook, or a line in an email - that tricks it into doing something it shouldn't do, like giving out account credentials or credit card information.

  Don't give AI your credit card number.
  
  Do not.
  
  
  
• Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The first thing you do when you've captured lightning in a bottle is take a job in a cubicle farm.
  
  

• MSI's new RTX 5090 Lightning Z has a 2500W BIOS option. (WCCFTech)
  
  For overclocking with liquid helium.
  
  Very briefly, before it all boils off and you asphyxiate.
  
  
  
• Looking forward to Intel's Nova Lake, the company's new CPU range with up to 52 cores? Temper your expectations. Or move to Greenland. (Hot Hardware)
  
  The top-end model running at full speed is rumoured to use 700W of power.
  
  That's... A lot.
  
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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