
Founder @RocketableInc. Techno-optimist & AI maximalist. Past: @Cruise, @Uber (ATG + JUMP Bikes), @RideZoomo, and others.
San Francisco
Joined March 2007
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Not at all surprised to hear that Qwen 3.8 harvests information and sends it back to Beijing. This has been an obvious vector of attack since the original DeepSeek moment (xitter.cf/alanwells/status/18828…)
@finkd @JensenHuang please bring open weight models back to the front of the field, we need this.
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
Just spent the last 7 days on the front lines of the vulnpocalypse fending off an active cyber attack on one of our products.
Some thoughts:
- Software factories are going to be required equipment for everyone. There’s just no way to keep up with the pace of highly automated adversaries without one.
- We were lucky because we had spent the last few months getting our software factory running well. It is nice to have for product development but proved to be absolutely essential this week.
- At the minimum you need to have a coding server in the cloud pre-provisioned with read only access to all your logs and all the services you depend on for observability. With that in place you are a prompt away from reasonably good situational awareness, ongoing monitoring with loops, and ability for coding agents to validate fixes against your actual, observed attack patterns.
- Shared coding server also unlocks multiplayer incident response where everyone can see every session and jump in as needed. Sharing session links that can be forked is much higher bandwidth than re-explaining things.
- You don’t need to be Ramp/Stripe/Uber scale to have a working software factory in the cloud. We are a team of 3. Ours is built with an @opencode server (thanks @thdxr!), a forked version of compound engineering optimized for automated workflows (thanks @kieranklaassen!) and a multiplayer agent in slack that handles crons (we have our own harness but pick your favorite here).
- To get our software factory up and running well, we had to stop all new product development for ~6 weeks and just focus on getting the validation systems working that enabled us to reliably shipping PR without human code review. This felt very painful in the moment but was totally worth the eventual speedup in velocity.
- KYC for @AnthropicAI & @OpenAI cyber programs is now easy and quick (at least for defensive access), but a day felt like a lifetime this week. Submit your app now before you really need it.
- Getting Mythos access unlocked a deeper level of analysis that helped us shift from reactive mitigation to proactive patching. Wish we had done this a few weeks earlier. Get started now!
More workflow details:
1: submit your defensive cyber application for @AnthropicAI / @OpenAI to get access to Mythos or Daybreak ASAP. I think these models are still likely ahead of abliterated open models being used by attackers in terms of ability to proactively identify exploits in your systems.
2: Setup your analysis environment (ideally dedicated local hardware or cloud based coding server, you want this to be able to run very long sessions) with read only access to everything (code, infrastructure, 3rd party integrations). Recommend a harness or meta-harness that lets you use different foundation models for cross model review (we use @opencode and T3 code by @theo)
Ideally also give this environment the ability to run and deploy to code/updates to a working version of your full app/stack in staging or sandbox so it can simulate & verify the effectiveness of patches.
Deploy coding server on separate accounts & machines (not shared with the products we are using it to build), and put it all behind @Tailscale so that you’re not fighting intrusions into the systems you are using for analysis/testing.
3: Start with the @Cloudflare security audit skill and run it in the environment you provisioned with Mythos/Daybreak - it will probably find a bunch of stuff you should fix. Also give it an explicit list of all the infra/repos/3rd party services you’ve given it access to.
4. Also point an agent at your public DNS records to identify legacy infra you may have forgotten about / aren’t monitoring. Add anything it finds within the scope of your security audit. The attackers are 100% doing this too so you want to get ahead of it.
5. Have your coding agent stack rank what Mythos/Daybreak finds in order of criticality/security risk, and cluster them into groups of things that are likely to touch the same files. Put them into your issue tracker of choice with a specific tag you can use to identify in next step.
6. Setup a loop in your coding server that plucks the top cluster off your list of tagged security issues, does cross-model root cause analysis for diversity of perspectives, builds a solution (or multiple solutions), does cross-model
Code review, and verifies the solution in the local or staging environment you gave it access to, opens a PR for you to review, and then automatically moves onto the next issue. See compound engineering skill by @every / @kieranklaassen for a good starting point on this workflow (fork and tune the LFG command for your SDLC)
7. Parallelize the loop above if you can for faster throughput through the process. The goal here is to feed in a stack of security issues as input and receive a stack of verified PRs as output as quickly as possible.
8. Start building up a library of user scenarios that you use to ensure that your security patches don’t break things for legit users. We use a collection of markdown files and macros (for fixture setup/teardown), executed by OpenCode + agent-browser as an automated QA agent. The scenario runner does end-to-end testing in the browser as a normal user would.
9. Merge PRs into a release candidate, re-validate the combined set of them together with your user scenarios in staging to prove it to yourself that the release is good to ship.
10) Release to prod then re-validate there with scenarios again to ensure nothing broke after deploy.
All production deploys are still gated behind human review in our workflow. But think a subset of lower risk issues could be safely auto-deployed after passing verification in staging.
Alan Wells retweeted
OH in Palo Alto: I don't think any of us have internalized how much change is in the process of happening. Because this is still the “slowly” part.
We're hiring at Adam, to define AI for mechanical engineering.
$200k - $300k + significant equity + optional housing at the Adam Manor 🏡
- in person, in SF
- 60-80 hours a week
- bonus points for ex-founders and people who can ship hw + sw
$10k referrals!
Alan Wells retweeted
America is banning AI in schools.
China is using AI to create geniuses.
Introducing Aristotle: The AI tutor that solves America’s broken education system. heyaristotle.com
Alan Wells retweeted
For over a year, my team has been working with AI agents in a fundamentally different way than most.
All of our Claude/Codex/Pi/etc agents run in the cloud, and any session is joinable by anyone on the team.
Each of our meetings has an agent that launches subagents to do research, draft posts, and implement features as we discuss things.
A Chief of Staff agent lets me know what's waiting for my review, and can talk to any person or agent on the team to resolve bottlenecks.
Working in this fundamentally multiplayer way has given us a preview of the way everyone will work soon, so I wrote up a short manifesto explaining
• the current problems
• principles for a great solution
• some things that are tricky to get right
Check it out, and let me know what you think!
multiplayer-ai.com
The Inevitability of the Company AI Harness
At some point in the not too distant future (probably less than 6 months), the CEO of every business will be faced with answering this question: would you like to one-click install superintelligence into your business?
When we reach this point, adopting AI will no longer be a process of asking individuals in the business to use Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Work to help them be more efficient in their work. Instead, it will be a decision that management teams and boards make for the entire organization. The harness will be installed at the company level, and the harness will enable AI models to drive their own adoption and deployment into the business.
With access authorized at the highest levels, the company harness will:
1) Connect to all of the systems of record that contain the artifacts and assets generated by the operations of the business: email and chat, document storage, source code repositories, accounting systems, CRM, marketing campaigns, purchase and revenue data.
2) Ingest and analyze all of the external-facing activity that matters to the success of the business in its market.
3) Use the data it finds in these systems to identify and synthesize the skills needed to replicate the external-facing activities of the business to human-level quality or better.
4) Correctly assess that the vast majority of internal-facing activity in large companies is make-work, and should not be replicated.
5) Find the narrow set of processes that do actually drive the critical external outcomes, and seek to replicate and improve those.
6) Treat the creation of the automated skills and workflows that matter as a reinforcement learning learning problem.
7) Use historical data as the reference set and build itself a loop that trains a skill (or perhaps eventually a bespoke model) to deliver superhuman performance in that task.
You might say that AI will never be able to learn how to do all the things a company does without humans hand-crafting the skills or teaching it their proprietary processes. That take will not age well.
You might feel that this is a dark future. I don’t agree, but it won’t matter. The incentives to adopt the company harness will be too strong to resist.
You might worry that this will be massively disruptive to the way that most companies operate, and you will be right.
When company harnesses land, the nature and pace of AI adoption will be a difference in kind, not merely degree.
Up until this point, AI diffusion has been limited by a natural brake: the rate that humans in an organization can absorb new tools, translate their workflows into agent skills, and supervise/direct the operations of their agents.
The introduction of the company harness will remove that brake. It will be designed for a world where AI is doing the work for us instead of doing the work with us.
The company harness will bypass the rate limits of organizational diffusion in favor of a recursive self-improvement loop that is bottlenecked only by computational constraints: tokens, data, and eventually, energy.
It will be simultaneously be both thrilling and terrifying, depending on how you position yourself.
Some will seek to accelerate it, others will seek to slow it down, but either way adoption will be inevitable.
🤖 Made with AI
Alan Wells retweeted
I wrote about the most ambitious form of AI-assisted software development I've seen yet - Strong DM's "Software Factory" approach, where two of the guiding principles are "Code must not be written by humans" and "Code must not be reviewed by humans" simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7…
I'm hiring a founding engineer to build fully automated software companies with me at @RocketableInc.
This sounds crazy to most people, but the trajectory is obvious if you're paying attention. Within a few years, the question won't be "can AI run a software company?" It will be "why would a human?"
I'm making the bet that AI capabilities will continue accelerating. That autonomous systems will outperform human-operated ones. That the companies who figure this out first will have a compounding advantage.
We might be wrong. But if we're right, you'll have built the infrastructure that runs a new kind of company. This is the highest-leverage engineering work that exists right now.
That's the trade. Interested?
Apply here: ycombinator.com/companies/ro…
Alan Wells retweeted
I’m explicitly looking for startup teams that are spending $500-1000/day with the LLMs because they might be living in the future. (Or $10-20/day if they are using Gemini Flash because it really is that much cheaper.)
I saw a pre-release demo of Leash a few weeks ago and it is awesome.
If you've been looking for a way to let the agents rip but with strong guardrails in place, Leash is your answer:
leash.strongdm.ai/
Thx for open-sourcing it @strongdm.
Announcing Leash! leash.strongdm.ai/
Leash provides viz & authz for AI agents at all layers of the stack, from the fs through the network through MCP.
Leash is open source and available today. Take your agents for a walk & let me know what you'd like to see next!
Alan Wells retweeted
Kahneman’s 2017 comments on AI are far smarter and worthwhile than 99% of the comments on AI you are going to read today.
Replying to @professor_ajay
@professor_ajay at NBER AI points out an amazing short comment by Danny Kahneman back at our 1st Econ of AI conference in 2017. Main point: AI has less noise than humans. Most discussion is about bias, but take that noise comment seriously...it's very deep.
"We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started."
@sama's essay put into words what I'd been feeling for weeks.
But before we talk takeoff, some news: @RocketableInc has raised a $6.5M seed round to acquire and automate SaaS businesses 🚀
The takeoff has started. Don't be stuck watching from the ground.
Apply to join: rocketable.com/apply
Interested in following along with @RocketableInc? Subscribe for updates: rocketable.substack.com













